Microsoft has recently announced that it is reducing the monthly pricing on subscriptions of its Office 365 (O365) managed cloud service. The price reduction is a consequence of more subscribers on-boarding with the service. In other words, the more people that are signing up, the more Microsoft can afford to bring down the cost of the service.
The most frequently quoted price point is for what is known as the E3 plan. When first introduced, this plan was priced at $24 per month per user. Now, the plan is $20. One of the reasons that this particular plan is so popular is because it includes a subscription to the desktop version of Office Professional Plus 2010. So, rather than pay $400 for a retail copy of Office, a company can sort of “rent” it for $20 per month. However, the Office 365 plan includes much more than just MS Office. For example, e-mail can be hosted on the O365 webserver and powered by MS Exchange. MS Exchange gives Outlook many more capabilities than POP3 or IMAP e-mail does, and extends feature functionality to Contacts and Calendars. Additionally, the plan provides for e-mail archiving capabilities, ‘legal hold,’ and unlimited e-mail storage. And as Microsoft begins to integrate voice into O365, there is hosted voice mail support with auto attendant capabilities, and conferencing using MS Lync.
There are just too many features of O365 to mention in a short newsletter, and many of my SOHOBE clients have already heard me mention many of the ones I think any SOHO business should be interested in. To get an idea of what the O365 service is like firsthand, I encourage my clients to ask me to set up an account on SOHOBE’s O365 demo server. I can also arrange to show what it is like when O365 works with a desktop computer to extend out MS Office’s functionality.
