Speaking to an industry group in Delhi, Ballmer said, "We're pushing hard in the productivity space. We'll launch our Office 365 cloud service, which gives you Lync and Exchange and SharePoint and Office and more as a subscribable service that comes from the cloud. That launches in the month of June."
Microsoft Office 365 is slated to replace the current Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). The new cloud-based 365 will include access to Exchange, SharePoint, the Lync unified communications suite, and both desktop and Web-based versions of Office tools such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Microsoft made Office 365 a public beta available to anyone on 19th April this year.
Microsoft has released the official beta version of Office 365 and we've been playing with it for a while now. Here are 13 cool features of the cloud-based service that combines Office, SharePoint, Lync and Exchange
Powerful Admin page
A simple Admin page lets support staff easily manage users and configure Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online services.
Solve problems before they begin
With the "service status" feature, IT staff can monitor Microsoft Office 365 services to help isolate any potential problems.
Smartphone management tools
With ExchangeOnline ActiveSync, IT managers can create device policies to enforce strong passwords and control some hardware features of smartphones.
Let external users access Sharepoint Online
Administrators may configure SharePoint Online in multiple ways, such as giving Team Site owners the option to invite users from outside your organization.
Team Site extends email
Within SharePoint Online, Team Site stewards can quickly add users with external e-mail addresses.
Rich Outlook functionality
The Outlook Web Application offers much of the rich functionality found in the desktop application, including right-click access to many functions.
Robust calendaring
The Office 365 Outlook Web App includes the same robust calendar and scheduling capabilities available in the desktop client.
Keep tabs on colleagues
Whether using the Outlook desktop or Web App, users can always see the online status of colleagues and immediately invoke Lync Online to start an IM session or a full meeting.
Sophisticated document sharing
Office Plus applications provide several clear options to share documents that reside in a SharePoint Online Team Site.
Powerful document editing
Whether revised in the native application or in different browsers, document viewing and editing functions are robust.
Concurrent authoring
Office 365 does an excellent job of showing who is concurrently authoring a document - and the specific changes each author makes.
Offline-online synchronization
SharePoint Workspace lets users take documents offline and then synchronize changes when a connection to Office 365 is available.
Smartphone access
The Office Hub on Windows Phone 7 devices lets users access Team Sites document libraries and work with documents on the smartphone
