Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate Office 365 Sorry,

Microsoft held a 30-minute press conference on October 19 to unveil its technique for planned upgrades to its Company Productivity Online Suite (BPOS),Office 2007 License, its Live@Edu offering and its Office Live Little Company company. Which is what its Workplace 365 announcement was all about. (Extra nitty-gritty Workplace 365 pricing and licensing particulars could be discovered here.)The Workplace 365 announcement was not about making a new edition of Workplace that can be hosted in/on/via the cloud (contrary to quite a few headlines/reports you might have study claiming this).Microsoft Office did figure to the Workplace 365 announcement in a few of approaches. Microsoft introduced that for customers who desire to acquire the Workplace Professional Plus edition of Office — which runs locally on PCs, not in the cloud — Microsoft will offer it to them on a subscription basis. That means users pay a monthly fee for Workplace,Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise, 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 Workplace family of products — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint Workspace, Outlook, Publisher,Microsoft Office Pro Plus, Access,Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate, InfoPath and the Lync communications client. Microsoft is not allowing Workplace 365 users to substitute a different Office SKU for it, officials told me yesterday)In addition, because the new versions of BPOS — the little small business and enterprise Office 365 offerings — will include SharePoint 2010 functionality, Microsoft will likely be able to offer Office 365 consumers the versions of Office Net Apps that sync with SharePoint 2010. (Workplace Internet 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 lot of moving parts. But no, this wasn't some out-of-the-blue change in Microsoft;s organization model. Microsoft is still pushing Office first and foremost as a PC-based software package. And the Workplace 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,Microsoft Office 2007 Key, 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 Net Apps, possibly some BPOS and some on-premises software licenses mixed together.This is definitely the way additional and additional 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 a large number 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; about 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 Office 365 beta program.