Microsoft Office 365-A better successor of Business Productivity Online Suite

Microsoft Office 365 is subscription based service which gives the facility to access all the services of Microsoft Office. Which means this is centralized area to get the access of any Microsoft Office service such as Outlook, Excel etc. Office 365 is an enhanced successor of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite.

Microsoft first announced Office 365 in October 2010 with a private beta with various organizations then leaded to public beta in April 2011. Microsoft enhanced Office 365 service with new plans such as: Small business medium. Mid size premium and ProPlus. But as in this growing competitive era where there is competition everywhere Office 365 also has to face competition with Google's service Google Apps.

Different Edition of Microsoft Office 365 is as follows:

1. Office 365 Home premium: Aims at home user of Microsoft Office.
2. Office 365 University: It is a type of Home Premium except it purchased on a discount of four year plan.
3. Office 365 Small Business: Offers access to host Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync services only.
4. Office 365 Small Business Premium: Offers at business with 1-10 employee and limited IT experience.
5. Office 365 ProPlus : Offers application upto 25 users.
6. Office 365 Mid Size Premium: aimed at business with 10- 250 employees.
7. Office 365 Enterprise: Used in enterprise environment.

Features offered:

1. Cloud Service: Business and enterprise based plans for Office 365 offers access to cloud hosted versions of office platform on a software as a service basis including Exchange, Lync service etc.

2. Office application: Some plans for Office 365 also includes access to current versions of the office desktop application for both Window and other operating systems till the time of subscription.

2. Offers proper Security: In May 2012, Microsoft announced that Office 365 was now compliant with the Federal Information Security Management Act compliance with the act would now allow Office 365 to be used by U.S. government agencies.

So now with these features of security monitoring and cloud services it is hoped that Office 365 will be adopted by many organizations.

Hence we can say that Office 365 is a new approach which is liked by many companies because of the idea of turning the wares into services with the ongoing fees. It ensures the user not to buy something once and keep it. With this Office 365 you can get all major apps, 20 GB of Skydrive space, an hour of Skype call each month etc.