Microsoft has introduced a new concept of using the productivity suite such as Microsoft Office, Lync Online, SharePoint Online and Exchange Online through the convenience of the cloud and thereby facilitating the users to work with ease in a similar fashion as to how they use any of those products locally. This new cloud based service is offered in three different plans and are accordingly intended for use by small businesses, enterprises and for education purpose. It is a subscription based service and the organizations or business both small and big have to pay a monthly fee to avail the service but there are also some trial usage available which are subject to the fulfilment of certain criteria. It extends its support to provide great collaboration, syncing and accessibility features which are supposed to help small business and enterprises across the globe in accomplishing their various tasks.

The Microsoft Office 365 is also available as beta version which allows one to have the first hands over the various features and services available so that they can decide as to which would be the right version for them to work with. But the said beta version is limited and may not be accessible to one and all except some selected organizations which would be shortlisted after signing up for the beta entry. There are many key benefits of using the Office 365 such as having access to the latest products and service without essentially requiring to upgrade after regular intervals whenever any new version is released. It also has cross platform compatibility such that it can be used on both the Mac and PCs.

This cloud based edition of the most popular collaboration and communication products from Microsoft offers many other features and benefits so that businesses of all sizes can make use of its productive services and avail various benefits such as geo-redundancy, advanced security, superior up-time, privacy, conferencing and many other utilities which are fundamentally required in various worldwide organizations.


This variant is meant to satisfy all those small business organizations as well as the professionals with many productive tools and services which can all be worked with by the same working experience that they are used to without requiring any special training to handle them. The various features such as web apps for document management, extended mailbox capacities up to 25GB with larger attachment size of maximum 25MB per user, visual and audio conference and many other useful utilities are available under this plan. It also ensures the security concerns while using it by making available some advanced and up-to-date antivirus solution to protect against the harmful virus and other online threats while it also has an anti-spam protection built-in to this system.

Being a cloud based service for small organizations, it is meant to be used for those who have working employees around 25 in number and the same would cost approximately 6USD for each user who needs to have access to this service.


The Enterprise verizon mainly focuses on meeting the requirements of large size as well as any other government or private agencies which thereby ensures a more advanced features and support. It provides the best security measures and almost complete up-time and the best part of this version is its flexible pricing options that allows one to pay only for those services which are opted for and accordingly helps to curb the cost in an efficient manner. Among the many available features, the most featured ones are that of the Active Directory Deployment, Microsoft Office Professional Plus, various WebApps and other conferencing and collaboration tools and solutions.

The monthly subscription fee for the Microsoft Office 365 for Enterprises is fixed at 10USD per user for all the existing BPOS customers and the same comes along with many other benefits and some extended capabilities to fulfill all the requirements at work.


The education version is one of the very affordable and feasible way to be used in educational institutions and facilitate the students to gain access to all the latest and innovative productivity tools through this cloud based service. It is also cost effective as the same will save lots of efforts and money which are otherwise spent on maintaining individual server within an institution. Various common features available under the Office 365 for small businesses and enterprises are also available to the educational institutions such as the 25GB mailbox capacity with larger attachment size up to 25MB per user, cross-platform compatibility, access to the latest version of the popular Office tools and WebApps to name a few of them. In addition, there is also a bonus feature which can facilitate a free access to around 25GB of online storage space being supported by Windows Live SkyDrive.

The subscription cost for the Education version includes four different plans named as A1, A2, A3 and A4. The A1 and A2 plans can be availed free of cost by the students while the A3 and A4 plans would cost around 2USD and 5USD respectively for each student. For the staffs and teachers, the four plans are available at a cost of 6USD, 10USD, 14USD and 17USD respectively.


The cloud based service offered by Microsoft is indeed worth to consider as it effectively has many features to offer in terms of online productivity suite and other collaboration and communication services. Since it is based on the cloud, it is definitely going to bring down the cost and other hassles to maintain the servers and will also facilitate up-to-date technology without any additional cost. Apart from this, it will also be considered as a good solution for various organizations, businesses and agencies to satisfy their IT related task in a more flexible and efficient manner.