The new subscription based Office Suite is now available for small businesses including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher, InfoPath, and Lync. The subscriptions are on a per user license system, with Small Business Premium costing $150 user/year and the Midsized Business is $180 user/year for up to 250 employees. Both versions are able to run along side old versions of Office and the Midsized version includes hosted SharePoint and Lync servers as well as Active Directory integration for use with existing infrastructure in addition to the Microsoft hosted Exchange and Cloud storage services. Contrast that to Office 2013 which is purchased on a licensed per machine basis, a non-transferable license at that, making upgrading machines a more expensive undertaking for SMBs. Get more details over at The Register.
"One month after lifting the curtain on the updated version of its Office 365 subscription service for home users, Microsoft has officially launched the equivalent service for business customers with three new offers for small and midsized companies."
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I have been finishing college
I have been finishing college for the past 3 years and have used google docs the entire time. I can think of only one time that I fired up an external editor, and it was libre office so that I could do clean footnoted citation (seriously awesome feature of LO), but other than that I have not missed MS Office at all. The live collaboration feature alone is worth it. Many times my lovely wife has been proofreading my paper at the same time as I am finishing the the paper.
I completely understand that Office does some things miles better, but the average user does not usually need it. The price of this suite still feels too high for most people. Even the formatting problems seem to be mitigated somewhat too now.
I understand the advantages with AD integration and what not, but my question is – for the average user, why do I need MS office?
Honestly, I am curious if there are features that I am not thinking about or that I am missing out on, and need to be using MS office 365, or the offline suite.
^agree with camberry.
^agree with camberry. Unfortunately you would be shocked how many people don’t realize they can can get a very competent open source alternative completely for FREE.
Even when told people still don’t believe that there is no ‘”catch” and end up paying for Office.
Lame.