Microsoft held a 30-minute press conference on October 19 to unveil its strategy for planned upgrades to its Organization Productivity Via the internet Suite (BPOS), its Live@Edu offering and its Workplace Reside Small Organization company. That is what its Workplace 365 announcement was all about. (Much more nitty-gritty Office 365 pricing and licensing particulars can be found here.)The Office 365 announcement wasn't about making a brand new edition of Workplace which will be hosted in/on/via the cloud (contrary to quite a few headlines/reports you might have study claiming this).Microsoft Workplace did figure into the Workplace 365 announcement in a couple of approaches. Microsoft announced that for clients who need to purchase the Workplace Professional Plus edition of Office — which runs locally on PCs,
Microsoft Office 2007 Product Key, not in the cloud — Microsoft will offer it to them on a subscription basis. That means users pay a monthly fee for Workplace, instead of paying for it all at once, up front.(As one of my readers reminded me today, Microsoft volume licensees already can get this same Workplace Pro Plus SKU, though individual who purchase at retail cannot. The Pro Plus SKU is the full Office family of products — Word, Excel,
Microsoft Office 2007, PowerPoint,
Windows 7 Pro, OneNote, SharePoint Workspace, Outlook, Publisher,
Windows 7 Download, Access,
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, InfoPath and the Lync communications client. Microsoft is not allowing Office 365 users to substitute a different Office SKU for it, officials told me yesterday)In addition, because the new versions of BPOS — the modest enterprise and enterprise Workplace 365 offerings — will include SharePoint 2010 functionality, Microsoft will be able to offer Office 365 customers the versions of Office Web Apps that sync with SharePoint 2010. (Office Web Apps are not full Workplace; they are the Webified versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that Microsoft rolled out last year.)Yes, Microsoft;s announcement yesterday had a good deal of moving parts. But no, this wasn't some out-of-the-blue change in Microsoft;s organization model. Microsoft is still pushing Workplace first and foremost as a PC-based software package. And the Office 365 small-business and enterprise offerings (the update to BPOS) remain Microsoft;s answer to Google Apps and other cloud-hosted business-app suites.Speaking of Google Apps, it looks like New York City played its Google card in negotiating its latest software volume invest in with Microsoft. The New York Times says that the City got Microsoft to change the way it licensed them software and will end up saving $50 million more than five years. It sounds from the particulars provided that New York got Microsoft to offer them a combination of Office Web Apps, possibly some BPOS and some on-premises software licenses mixed together.This is definitely the way much more and more of Microsoft;s volume license deals are going to look in the not-so-distant future — and Microsoft;s licensing folks are already plotting what to do to capitalize on that mix.One last Office 365 update: If you were among the lots of individual who were attempting to sign up for the limited beta yesterday to no avail, try again. A Microsoft spokesperson sent the following update, re: beta sign-in problems:“The beta sign-up issues visitors we’re experiencing earlier yesterday happened when they were clicking ;submit; on the beta sign up form. The page was refreshing mistakenly. This should be fixed by now.”The beta is limited to 2,000 but signing up will get you a spot in line when Microsoft expands the Workplace 365 beta program.