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Microsoft Announces Web-Based Office365
suraj.sun writes "Aiming to bolster its hosted software for businesses, Microsoft announced today that it is adding Web-based versions of Office to its collection of hosted software for business, Office365. It will also offer traditional Office as a subscription-based service. Microsoft is pricing the service as low as $6 per user per month, though that version includes only the Web-based versions of Office."
It isn't mentioned in the article, but does anyone know if Office365 "works best" with IE or is it browser-agnostic? For example, Microsoft's Outlook Web Access is quite decent when accessed with IE but with Firefox or Safari it's not nearly as nice.
Trolling is a art,
That is the low price?
So for a company of 500, a medium size business, you are looking at $36k/year and no real reduction in onsite costs other than adding office to the images and the cost of office.
Seems to expensive for small businesses and too low value for the big ones.
http://office365.microsoft.com/
No, it just means that it doesn't work on leap years.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I'm buying this to run on my Windows phone!
I was hoping for a pay version of Google Docs. Kidding aside. I am truly hoping they have some good offerings since it looks like they will allow for online video editting. That would be very awesome
The world is how you make it
I assume the next version will be Office 366. How long have I been asleep?
Guess that covers Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Access. So what's the rest, then ? Visio ? Exchange ?
Well, it is really a bad name per my understanding.
To keep up with the trend, they should try "iOffice", "FaceOffice",
^(oo)^pig~
I'm surprised it's taken this long to get this kind of offering and price point out -- it's seemed clear for a while that Microsoft would like to grow a presence in the "software as a service" space.
I'll install OpenOffice 500 times and you can pay me the $36k. Deal?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I misread the title as "Office386", and was thinking, "Boy, Microsoft really is falling behind the curve".
Table-ized A.I.
With even a few thousand people running this, I predict it will suck up more bandwidth than P2P ever did, and it will blue screen the 'net at least a few times per day.
Gates: "365 days a year otta be enough for anybody."
Table-ized A.I.
While that may or may not be true, I don't need to post as an Anonymous Coward to tell you that Office alone is overpriced for what it does, especially when there is a viable alternative for free, let alone this 'subscription' crap.
No, it just means that it doesn't work on leap years.
Sort of like the PS3?
Yeah.... Slashdot has become the moaning geek. Everybody yells and complains about MS and other non-open companies. There are people who works hardly in software like office... why to attack them? Don't like the price, don't buy it. Stop moaning please
In case you're not really an idiot, I'll spell it out for you:
We're the ones who get stuck supporting users of these apps.
We're the ones who get stuck building/maintaining apps/infrastructure written against them.
We're generally NOT the ones who get to decide what the team's/division's/firm's platform and standard apps will be.
NOW do you get it?
Otherwise, I don't think this thing is worth the money.
There are a few types of programs I would expect to lose functionality when I lose internet access. MMO games, an internet browser, email.
There are some I would expect to always be functional regardless of internet connection. Media players, single-player games, and office suites are some examples.
Hotmail is controlled by MS. IIRC, about a year ago they started displaying PPS (and maybe DOC) attachments in-browser. They did so while promoting the "works best with Silverlight... install" here.
So they have gathered enough statistics on Silverlight and any failures in display that always come from end-user feedback. Now, they are ready to entice corporations. The corps will have to approve Silverlight for their outdated browsers, or be faced with the same "degraded" fallback interfaces that result in reduced productivity that you already noted with Outlook's non-native execution.
You raise a good point. Is there any chance that there will be VBA support in this web-based version of Office?
Yeah.... Anonymous Coward has become the moaning geek. Everybody yells and complains about people who complain about MS and other non-open companies. There are people who think little about sentence structure... why to attack them? Did they set you up the bomb? Don't like the post, don't comment on it. Stop moaning please.
Wow, does this ever show that M$ missed the boat when OpenOffice came out with web based document management system, and they are now stumbling to try and bring out a quick recap of what that one does already! No more licenses needed for office when they see everyone moved to openoffice, so now they figure to get back all the lost users by offering office2007 but web based???
Not sure why this is marked troll.
Exchange Online is part of the deal, providing all those services.
This space for rent.
In case you're not really an idiot, I'll spell it out for you:
We're the ones who get stuck supporting users of these apps.
We're the ones who get stuck building/maintaining apps/infrastructure written against them.
We're generally NOT the ones who get to decide what the team's/division's/firm's platform and standard apps will be.
NOW do you get it?
Yes. You're bitter at your station in life and would like to blame someone else for it.
Work hard and move into management or a more valued technical position where you get a real voice in those decisions, or quit your bitching.
It's not a software company's fault that your employer doesn't care what you think.
Ouch. That link is slashdotted or something, so all we got is that error.
Which was great, decent reminder that MS hosting all your office documents on the cloud reduces your company's effective ownership of the files. One day IT blocks the domain inadvertently, or it gets DDoS'd by anonymous, or the local spyware kills it in your hostfile, or all the phones and internet go down at the company because of a cut cable... so then what do the managers do to access their files?
Cloud indeed.
Oddly enough I don't know anyone who uses VBA.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
We can safely expect 8 hours of downtime every year.
Yeah I don't get it.
Open Office is fine for some stuff but when it chokes on VBA most business aren't going to adopt it.
Our company (despite the objections of many) tried and it was a nightmare. Lots of excel docs for reports all had to be redone, sometimes finding a replacement functionality was difficult or time consuming. Later the company realized that many of our partners continued to use MS Office w/ xlsm files. Ooops. We had to start saying "please send it without VBA macros". Some did, most didn't. No way to read those except w/ Office. So the company bought a few licenses. After 18 months of pretending it would work they ended up purchasing new licenses for Office.
Still some people will go "LALALALALA Open Office is just as good". The zealots don't realize that sticker price isn't everything. If it was then there would only be one car in the US and it would be Hyundai Accent ($10,760 retail). The $500 the company "saved" by not purchasing Office likely wasted as much as $5,000 in productivity for some employees. I spent hours getting stuff to work in OO when it already worked fine in MS Office.
There is no free lunch. TCO and productivity is what matters and even with a $0 license OO still has cost.
Anyways now it is a 50/50 split between troll and flamebait.
But does the 'viable' alternative come with 25GB mailboxes backed by an SLA? Didn't think so.
This space for rent.
They made fun of Google docs. And now they are doing it.... but not for free....
Does anyone really want to pay for this stuff anymore..... I don't......
Yeah, it's called Open Office. Base does the same thing.
Given that sensitive internal documents would also be authored via office suite products, who in their right mind would give MS their crown jewels? Ultimately any webservice entails the forwarding of the data to the provider for processing, which means that MS might have access to all sorts of sensitive data.
The alternative is to have dual-installs or local installs for people handling sensitive documents but why not just have local installs across the user base anyway then? There might be some benefits in terms of reduction of maintenance of local installs but you're really gambling if you expect people to use different tools for different types of documents
Every 'cloud' server has a SLA. That's like asking if a program has a EULA. Most do. I don't know enough about the 25GB mailbox to comment on that.
Work hard and move into management ....
???
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.....
No, really ....do you actually believe that?
Do you also believe that all you have to do is start a business, work hard, and you too can be rich?
Or how about, "the check's in the mail"?
Or "I won't come in your mouth"?
Or "No new taxes!"?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Imagine the board decision meeting.
... which are alive ... eh lets name it "Live ........
Seattle moderator: Right, we wanna shov... sell our Office sofware [sic.] to the wider public and we need a name. You John?
John: Well, how's about we name it Office %VERSION%++
SM: Very good indeed, John... You Mark?
Mark: It's for the people
(Several hours pass)
SM: (Yelling) Oh for god's sake, we can't name everything 360, can we!
Some nobody: (Very meek voice) 365 maybe? For the year, you know? OK, I'll get my coat.
(Several more hours pass)
SM: (Desperate) OK, 365 it is.
Another nobody: (Very softly) And what about leap years?.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
... will it take to run the spell checker and grammer nazi on my document?
From TFA :"$27 per user per month"
I work for an New Zealand small - medium company. The stacks up thus:
Option 1. 20 seat Office 2010 enterprise license - $13,000 per annum
Option 2. Office 365. 20 x $27/month x $NZ Exchange = $8484 per annum.
Option 3. 20 OEMS with hardware purchase(assume 4 year cycle): $2500 per annum
PS: US readers will think I have these numbers grossly wrong. I havent. The cost of doing business in NZ is expensive. Option 1 could drop in price. I have already had an email stating this could change as they are keen to always "find a best fit for an organisation".
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
No, really ....do you actually believe that?
Do you also believe that all you have to do is start a business, work hard, and you too can be rich?
I believe it's more likely to produce success than anonymous whining on the internet.
Smart people who work hard eventually have a voice in the decisions that affect their jobs. Not always, and not immediately, but that's generally what happens.
If it doesn't for you, you might not be as smart or as valuable as you like to think you are. In that case your options are to find a different job where you're valued more appropriately, or come to terms with being the ultimately replaceable cog in a grander machine that you actually are.
They're going to be so screwed when the service goes down for an entire day every four years. Ah, but then they'll introduce Office365+.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
All you need to do is install this 1.2 GB active x control. Or you can opt for the 1.6 GB active x professional version that includes "web bob" and "clippy".
Got Code?
It's never going to be better.
Seriously.
If Oracle were to put together a team of absolute superstars - I mean real development gurus - and head them up with the best project manager they can find - and give them just one task - "Make OpenOffice import and export seamlessly to Microsoft Office formats, including all scripting and macros", it still wouldn't be better.
For one, Microsoft would suddenly start to find patents they could sue Oracle for infringing.
For another, the next version of Office would change things, drastically. There'd be an Office XML format "version 2", and it'd make version 1 look like a paragon of well-thought out design.
For a third, by the time such a feature made it into the stable version of OpenOffice, the two things I've just listed would have already happened. Twice.
Like it or not, we live in a world where people want to share information digitally, and that sharing has to work. Microsoft's rules say you do this by running an office suite on your PC that saves files to a known format and you collaborate by sharing those files in some form - be it through Sharepoint or, if you're more old-fashioned, by email attachment and storing on a fileserver. Thing is, if you play to those rules you're more or less guaranteed to lose. This is why Google Docs doesn't and it's why Microsoft are frightened of Google. Google are playing to their rules and Microsoft haven't had to compete on someone else's terms in a very long time.
well, not so much, at the end is just 5 degrees, but the number looks impressive.
In other words: If you don't like something, please shut your mouth and don't say anything, particularly in, you know, a website explicitly designed for discussion. Have I got it right?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Yeah, it's called Open Office. Base does the same thing.
Kinda wishing there was a "-1, Completely False" mod right now. OpenOffice Base doesn't even come remotely close to replacing Access.
Breakfast served all day!
Well they would have done it, but they're still trying to fix this.
And I'm sure Gates would say '3 significant figures is enough for anyone,' but I accept no fewer than 5 in which case a year is, more accurately, 364.24 days.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Lucky you.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Really? We use it EXTENSIVELY between SQL Server and Access backends feeding Excel workbooks, gathering data from our production floor and feeding it back to other systems. Reporting, ad-hoc queries for troubleshooting. Just about everyone I know in the industry personally uses VBA for a ton of stuff.
Google Apps Premier, one of the less expensive ($50/employee/yr. vs. $72/employee/year for Microsoft's offering) viable alternatives, does, in fact, come with 25GB mailboxes per user backed by a SLA with a three 9s uptime guarantee and 24/7 technical support.
For people starting with nothing any office product will work. If you already have files from application , it is often better to stay with that application then switch. If you can justify the cost of the switch, then do it. If you cannot, then do not.
I use open office at home, and install it for most people that ask for office. Does it work for them yes. Then again these are not people with hundreds or thousands of files from a different office application. Have I been burned by this? Yes. When docx, xlsx, and pptx arrived it caused some problems. Asking the person to have the sender resend in the 97-2003 file format was a bit harder. Tell them they need to do a save-as not just save. I set the default to 97-2003 for the office 2007 installs I did at work. That worked for most people. Why word has to use the new format for the math equations (with the Green symbols) is beyond me though. Main point is, use what works for you.
My mother works as a translator as she still gets .doc files all the time. Microsoft can introduce all they want, but for better or worse they have to keep compatibility with their previous versions, or nobody would upgrade.
Dilbert RSS feed
On the plus side, this means that some businesses may not be so trapped with Windows due to their reliance on Exchange. This has always been a big sticking point for the use of Linux and other open source platforms in businesses. To have any option of using Exchange on a Linux desktop opens up some interesting possibilities.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
Go google "sunk cost".
Then you will realize why you are spouting nonsense.
Why? Because we use a system that works for us? People that advocate others being put to death tend to not have a solid base with which to make their argument.
The funny thing is that the SLA is what the marketeers *promise*. If they don't actually provide it (more than likely given 'black swan' outages that affect everyone no matter how hard they work) then you really have to work hard to get compensation - meaning you won't get it since it costs more for legal to fight for than the money you'd recover. I outta know, we've just built a very high availability cloud product for a global company, and we know that accidents still happen.
In short, SLAs are indicative only and if you are choosing Office365 over *free* competitors based on the SLA alone then you probably need to stop believing so much marketing and re-evaluate the financials of each product.
No open source program has the ability to completely integrate and replace the abilities of another program to the approval of 100% of the user base.
For what I used Access for, Base is fine. Not too good for converting existing Access files, mind you, but it works quite well for what I use it for, and I'd imagine that a bit of the population has the same situation.
You used it, and it didn't do the things it needed? Great, don't use it. That doesn't mean others can't use it to their satisfaction.
I'd say a good 90% of people who use Office use it for Word documents and basic Excel spreadsheets. For them, OpenOffice would be a viable alternative. Others use Office for very specialized features that cannot or are not yet replicated by a free alternative. OpenOffice would not be a viable alternative for them.
But I see no point in grandma buying Office just to print off cookie recipies.
Do you have an alternative to OneNote? I failed to find anything having the organizing capabilities combined with a capability to mix text and drawings and place them freely on a page.
Just what I want, to be in the office 365 days a year. A successful office should not need to be open EVERY day, unless it directly serves a hospital emergency or operating room, a police or fire station, the USGS, or is the Oval Office. What horrible connotations the name of this product evokes.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Hey - I'm all for people using what works for them. If it works for you, good for you.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
So why are we all still using office? I don't get it. Open office can do just about everything worthwhile that office can do with the exception of Access (open offices DB sucks) but really, for most business's MS Office is a complete waste of money.
Personally no, but this thread may be of assistance to you:
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5745
Sorry I can't help more, but OpenNote isn't something I've used, let alone alternatives.
I didn't say they'd drop compatibility with the old format. Simply that in my theoretical scenario, the default save format for Office would become ".docx2" (or whatever you want to call it).
It's doing this sort of thing has kept people upgrading - nobody minds asking for a document to be re-sent in the older format once or twice, but it starts to get silly after a few times. Shortly after that, people upgrade.
If it doesn't for you, you might not be as smart or as valuable as you like to think you are. In that case your options are to find a different job where you're valued more appropriately, or come to terms with being the ultimately replaceable cog in a grander machine that you actually are.
You have just uttered the thoughts that make most readers of slashdot wake in a cold sweat, desperately clutching their stuffed Tux and whimpering for their mothers. Against all their beliefs to the contrary, they are not special and other people are smarter than they are.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
No, Zune.
Six bucks a month.... and in a year you will have spent $72. When home and student edition costs like $124 for three users.
The gift that takes and takes...
I cannot tell you how many times my girlfriend cusses, sputters and tosses things because the WiFi link took a ClomcastTurn2Xinity.... and dropped the link and had to start over.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.