Microsoft announced their new Office 365 cloud service yesterday which combines Microsoft Office 2010, Office Web Apps, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online into a single bundle for small businesses, enterprises, and educational institutions. Digging deeper into the FAQs we’ll notice that two “Live” service that we were familiar with – Office Live Small Business and Live@edu – will be discontinued and transitioned into Office 365 in 2011.
Office Live Small Business will become part of Office 365 for small businesses. Back in early 2009 we’ve heard that the “Office Live” brand is going away, and we saw Office Live Workspaces being migrated to Windows Live SkyDrive with Office Web Apps as part of Wave 4 this year. The other component – Office Live Small Business, which offered free website hosting, design and management tools, email accounts, and a suite of professional online business applications – seemed to be left hanging there. The announcement today had determined the future of Office Live Small Business, and as mentioned in the Office Live Small Business FAQ page, Office Live Small Business will likely to begin transition to Office 365 during the second half of 2011. However, the Office Live Small Business service will continue to run through at least October 2011, and all existing Office Live Small Business customers will be offered 3 months free of the Office 365 service.
Similar to Office Live Small Business, Office 365 for small business will offer a set of easy-to-use website design tools.
Live@edu will become Office 365 for education. Live@edu, which currently offers educational institutions around the world a free set of online services for their students including Outlook Web App (or Outlook Live), Windows Live SkyDrive with Office Web Apps, and Windows Live Messenger, will be transitioned into Office 365 for education. According to the Live@edu FAQ page, Office 365 for education will include everything that Office 365 for enterprises has (meaning it will include Office Web Apps on SharePoint Online instead of Windows Live SkyDrive), plus additional tools specifically designed for educational institutions. Availability and costs have not yet been announced.
Just like Live@edu, Office 365 for education will also offer Outlook Web App – but takes advantage of Exchange Online and Lync Online instead of Windows Live Messenger.
With these two transitions, it means that the two originally free services will now come at a price for small businesses and educational institutions, although with a greatly expanded set of integrated services offered in the new Office 365 suite. For Office Live, Microsoft is actually recommending small business who does not wish to pay and transition to Office 365 to consider Windows Live Essentials and its set of online services like Hotmail, Office Web Apps on SkyDrive, and more. Do you think Windows Live, as it is right now, is sufficient for small business needs? Leave us a comment below!