Microsoft Office

Microsoft is now providing e-mail, calendaring, and instant-messaging programs for students of the State University of New York.

SUNY's 64 campuses are part of a university-wide Live@edu agreement that covers more than 465,000 students with Microsoft's online productivity suite. Besides the aforementioned tools, this includes things like online storage, video conferencing, and access to Microsoft's Office Web Apps--all of which are offered up free of charge.

In a post yesterday announcing the rollout, Microsoft U.S. Education CTO Cameron Evans said that the deal is saving Monroe Community College--one of the SUNY schools involved with … Read more

In what can be considered a small victory for those who dislike additional security checks after purchasing software, Microsoft has quietly discontinued the use of its Genuine Advantage checker tool for Microsoft Office.

The antipiracy measure, called Office Genuine Advantage (OGA), required that users verify the legitimacy of their Office software before being able to download add-ons and templates from Microsoft, as well as download software updates Microsoft deemed "non-critical."

The OGA program had been put into place in late 2006 as a follow-up to Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage tool, which does similar checks to make sure … Read more

The U.S. Department of Agriculture this morning announced that it has chosen Microsoft to host things like e-mail, instant messaging, and collaboration through the software giant's Business Productivity Online Suite.

As part of the deal, which covers 120,000 employees, the USDA will move from its own on-premises systems to Microsoft's Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Communications Online. That migration will be completed in four weeks, and will put the USDA's cloud hardware in a secured facility that Microsoft says will be in compliance with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

Prior to the move, … Read more

Microsoft's patent fracas with Canadian firm I4i has been given new life, as the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to hear the software giant's appeal.

The case, which went in favor of I4i last year, centered around Microsoft's use of XML technology within its Word software. Following I4i's victory, Microsoft was required to strip the functionality from its software as part of an injunction.

"We are gratified by the court's decision," Microsoft's corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for litigation David Howard said in a statement. "It's a … Read more

Microsoft's Office 365, the next piece of a broader play by Microsoft to bring its suite of Office server tools and collaboration work flows onto the cloud, is expected to launch sometime next year.

The company is already in the stages of testing it with small businesses and has a list of some 60,000 organizations, which are waiting to get access. In the meantime, Microsoft is continuing to fine-tune the product and expand its testing group--both in scale and the size of the companies that are being allowed in.

CNET was lucky enough to get early access to … Read more

As Microsoft's latest internal slogan is quick to point out, the software company is "all in" when it comes to the cloud.

But one of the products that points to such a statement being more of a half-truth is Office, which while in the process of being ported to the cloud and gaining an increasing number of Web interactions, is still a software program--and a very popular one at that.

In fact, Office is one of Microsoft's biggest and fastest selling software franchises next to Windows, as Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer pointed out at the top of the company's annual shareholders meeting this week. While Office may someday be an all-cloud affair, for the foreseeable future, it will continue to be offered as something you can install.

Heading up Microsoft's Office division is Kurt DelBene, who took up the reins just last month. Yesterday his group launched Lync, the successor to Microsoft Office Communicator, which mixes instant messaging, audio and video chat, and a VoIP service. It effectively completes the puzzle of apps that make up the Office suite. Lync, which goes on sale in two weeks, is beginning as a server product companies will be able to deploy on their own hardware, before moving to a hosted cloud service as part of Microsoft's Office365 suite early next year.

DelBene took time out of Lync's launch day to talk to CNET about a variety of topics, including the Lync platform, Microsoft's partnership with Facebook that is making MS Office attachments readable through the company's Office.com site, as well as how Office the software will coexist with Office the cloud service. Below is an edited transcript from that conversation.

Question: Congratulations on your promotion. DelBene: Thank you very much. I'm excited.

Can you talk about what, if any kind of collaboration the Lync team has with the Windows Live Messenger team? Obviously the two are very different products with different markets, and this product came to replace Messenger as part of the Communicator product, but I'd imagine things that come to Lync might one day end up in Messenger one day and vice versa. DelBene: There's actually a very good collaboration across the two teams. And so, if you think about the focus of the Office team and the Lync team as around business users, and think about the Windows Live team, or the Messenger team being around a consumer audience, then neither product really replaces the other. And so the goal is really more around how do you get interoperability between the two products, which is what we demonstrated in the launch event. And so, that's how you can see Chris (Capossela) being onstage being on Messenger, and talking to Gurdeep (Singh Pall) who is on Lync.

The partnership goes beyond that, though, in that the underlying technology is shared across the teams. And so we have some deep experts in audio-video conferencing within the Lync team. And so they actually work with the Messenger team to integrate those capabilities into the messenger client. And so we can share that expertise as opposed to duplicating it.

A lot of business is being done on phones now. Can you talk about some things that he was doing to make some part of the desktop experience carry over to mobile devices, especially with Lync? I know one of the things you guys talked about this morning was transferring an active conversation from one device to another. DelBene: That's one piece of it, because people when they're on the go, they think about wanting to connect, having their desk phone follow them. And so we make it super-easy for you to forward your calls, figure out a schedule onto which you forward your calls. So, it really becomes fairly seamless to think about the mobile phone.

And then you can take that a step further and think about clients that are on the mobile phone themselves, where you're in the presence of various of the people on our buddy list, or anybody from the organization would be present on your phone and you can actually connect to them from the phone originally, as well. And so you can think about starting from the mobile phone and starting from somebody's presence and making a phone call to them directly from the phone. So, in the announcement, I think Gurdeep mentioned connectivity to Windows Phone 7 in 2011, and for the iPhone, as well. So, that would be for actually having a client on the phone.

Was there anything in particular piece of hardware from what Gurdeep referred to as "the wall of fame" during today's Lync presentation that's really been specialized for Lync? Is there a big standout product that is maybe something competitors don't have? DelBene: Well, the first thing I think they don't have is the breadth of products. And so, the key differentiator, I think for Lync, is the focus on open standards and that customers will want choice in terms of what hardware they provide, or that they purchase. And so, I think the wall of fame is most impressive because of the variety of functionality that's there.

I think the second thing is the variety in terms of devices and solutions for the PC as well. And so there are people who are going to embrace Lync by having a PC experience, and there are people who are going to embrace it with a more traditional IP/PBX or IP phone, and we think there should be great solutions across both of those.

I will also say I continue to be excited about the roundtable solution, which is a great innovation of both hardware and software working together, and that's the panorama view that Gurdeep showed of everybody in the meeting. I think that the beauty of great software innovation coupled with great hardware design, that product is a great example of that and shows the kinds of things that you can do when you have hardware partners working with software partners on innovative solutions.

Speaking of which, the Kinect integration you guys showed off this morning is obviously a killer demo, but I'm wondering do you envision people getting home from work and maybe starting to play a game, and they get a call from their boss? Or is this more of an extra solution on top of what Kinect already does? DelBene: I think both. There are a couple of angles there. I think I am excited about that as an endpoint for users, and so the person who is playing a game with their children doesn't have to jump out of context, although their kids might be a little disappointed if they have to pause the game for a second. I'm also excited about the hardware and software innovation that it represents for Microsoft overall. I think that we've gotten some really good feedback from both the press and from customers of how game-changing Kinect is. It's not just about emulating what somebody else does, it's about phenomenal innovation for Microsoft. … Read more

REDMOND, Wash.--After spending the last several months touting itself as "All In" when it comes to cloud computing, Microsoft now plans to spend several hundred million dollars to convince businesses what that actually means.

The software maker is launching its largest-ever ad campaign targeting businesses, touting "Cloud Power" and its benefits over traditional server-based computing. The ads, which include TV, Internet, print, and outdoor ads, feature the line "cloud power" with actors portraying different types of customers and offering various takes on what products like Windows Azure, Office 365 and Windows Server can … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The 365 in Microsoft's new Office 365 may not represent the number of different versions, but there sure are a lot of different options for the new subscription Office suite.

Small businesses, those with 25 or fewer employees, have it simplest, with a $6 per worker per month option that includes Office Web Apps, along with hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint. Larger businesses can choose from products anywhere from $2 to $27 per person per month. At the low-end, businesses get hosted e-mail, while for $4 a month they can also get SharePoint.

A version comparable to the $6 small-business plan will cost larger outfits $16 per month per employee. The options that include the traditional desktop Office suite, in addition to the slimmed down Office Web Apps, start at $24 per worker per month.

For options that include desktop Office, businesses can allow workers to install the suite on up to five machines--including their home PCs. The service will check around every 60 days to make sure a subscription is current; if it isn't, Office will shrink its features to a "limited functionality" that basically includes viewing, but not editing capabilities.

Microsoft is touting the choices as one of its key advantages over rival Google Docs.

"The key to our approach is that we don't think it is a 'one size fit all' (market)," Senior Vice President Chris Capossela said in an interview. Starbucks, for example, he said can offer a low-end version to its store workers that aren't at a PC, while giving the higher end options to those at headquarters.

"We find that by having a variety of offers, we're actually able to give customers the choice they need to pick the right technology for the different workers in their company."

Google, for its part, really has two main options--the free consumer versions of Gmail and Google Docs and a paid version, known as Google Apps, for which it charges $50 per worker per year. Both companies also have options for the education and nonprofit market.

Perhaps the good news is that workers won't really have to worry about the myriad options until next year. The company said that the final version will come sometime next year, but Capossela declined to be more specific. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Aiming to bolster its hosted software for businesses, Microsoft announced today that it is adding Web-based versions of Office to its collection of hosted software for business. The company will also offer traditional Office as a subscription-based service. As expected, the company also rebranded the product.

What once went by the mouthful Business Productivity Online Suite will now be known as Office 365, Microsoft announced at an event at the St. Regis Hotel here. The St. Regis is owned by Starwood hotel chain, one of Microsoft's early customers for its hosted online services.

Newly minted Office unit President … Read more