Microsoft New cloud sevice : office365

later this year, Microsoft will release a new version of its ubiquitous Office suite called Office 365. On 19 April, it was released as a “public beta”, allowing users around the world to give it a spin for free.

A lot of people will. According to Forrester Research, a technology and market research company, 80% of the world’s enterprise customers still use some version of Microsoft Office to get their work done. Even if a growing number of users are moving to free, online services such as Google Docs (Docs.google.com), Office remains the corporate mainstay.

It’s easy then to call Office 365 Microsoft’s answer to Google Docs. In many ways, it is—it features many of the collaborative editing (where many people can work on one document simultaneously) and cloud-based sync (where the latest versions of all your documents are available irrespective of which computer you’re on) features that have made Google’s free online suite quite popular, and integrates them into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

But Office 365 isn’t just a collaborative layer tacked on to traditional Office. It feels like the beginning of a complete change in how Office will work in the future. There is, for instance, the inclusion of a new service called Lync, a sort of Facebook for business.

spoke to Sanjay Manchanda, Bangalore-based director of Microsoft India’s business division, on what’s new in this version of Office, its social features and pricing in India. Edited excerpts from the interview:

From Microsoft’s point of view, is Office 365 the next version of the Office suite (after Office 2010)?

Office 365 and Office 2010 are two completely different offerings, but work together to deliver a solution to meet the full range of an organization’s business productivity needs.

Office 365 is a set of cloud services that delivers cloud-based versions of our communication and collaboration services: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online, combined with the familiar Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), now available as a subscription service.

source:livemint.com