By: Clint Patterson Just one month ago, we introduced Office 365 to the world, and the response has been awesome. We continue to see great press and analyst coverage, fantastic partner support, and amazing customer interest. 5,000 people 'like' Office 365 on Facebook, more than 4,000 follow Office 365 on Twitter, thousands more read this blog every day, and more than 60,000 organizations have signed up for the beta - roughly 2,000 per day. With all the buzz, we've seen lots of questions about the...

Today, we are excited to announce that Office 365 is moving to public beta status! Last fall, we introduced Office 365 to the world, and the response was amazing. More than 100,000 organizations, big and small, signed up for to help us test-drive our latest service. Today, we make the beta available to millions more people in 38 countries and regions in 17 languages. You can secure your spot in the beta at www.office365.com , and if you have already signed up to beta test, hold tight because your...

We have exciting news for Microsoft Online Services customers. We are in the process of updating pricing for Hosted BlackBerry Service for Exchange Online to make this service available free of charge. Starting today, BlackBerry mobile e-mail for new Exchange Online customers is now free through our Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). For existing customers, we expect to be able to provide more information later this month on how you can take advantage of this change. In addition, this free...

Today we are pleased to announce that more students than ever are using Live@edu, the world's leading cloud suite for education. Live@edu is used by more than 15M students worldwide , up from 11M just three months ago. In addition, we are sharing more information about Office 365 for education , our next generation cloud productivity service for schools and universities. Building upon on our success with Live@edu, Office 365 for education now delivers even more capabilities for students, enabling...

By Clint Patterson, Director of Communications, Microsoft Office Division More great questions. More answers that we hope are great too. I saw several questions today on Office desktop apps, so the first five really focus on the options there, including some 'splaining around Microsoft Access. The rest cover ground from domains to voice. I also want to point folks to some great resources for Office 365. The Office 365 website is more than pretty pictures (but it has those too). It includes a detailed...

Audience: Office 365 for enterprises administrators I'm Jon Orton, product manager on the Exchange team here at Microsoft. Welcome to our product insight series on Exchange Online. For our first post, I want to cover two things: an overview of Exchange Online and a look at some of the cool features coming to Exchange Online with Office 365. Quick Overview of Exchange Online You've probably heard of Exchange Server, and with Exchange Online, we've taken the capabilities of Exchange Server and offered...

By Clint Patterson, Director of Communications, Microsoft Office Division This morning, Kurt DelBene and Chris Capossela, the president and vice president of the Microsoft Office Division respectively announced Of fice 365, opened the beta, and shared the stories of some of our amazing customers and partners. Because not everyone could be with us at the event in San Francisco, we invited media to ask questions via Twitter, and ask you did! We promised to answer them on our blog, and here they are...

By Betsy Frost Webb It’s a game changer for Microsoft, and it’s going to be a game changer for businesses of all sizes, government agencies and even for education. Announced just today, Office 365 is the next step in the future of productivity. Is this what’s next for BPOS? Yes. Is this what’s next for Office Live Small Business? Yes. Is this what’s next for Live@edu ? Yes. Will Office desktop software be available as part of a cloud service? Yes. Is this productivity...

It’s been a while since we’ve fired up the Q&A section. We’ve received a bunch of great questions the past few weeks about what features will be available with Microsoft Office 365, and I wanted to share the answers broadly. For those of you with further questions or who want the nitty gritty details, check out our Office 365 Service Descriptions . These documents cover each of the services in Office 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and Office Professional...

I lead the engineering organization responsible for Office 365. My team builds, operates and supports our Office 365 service, and over the last few days, we have not satisfied our customers' needs. On Thursday, November 8 and today, November 13 we experienced two separate service issues that impacted customers served from our data centers in the Americas. All of these issues have been resolved and the service is now running smoothly. These incidents were unique to the Office 365 Exchange Online mail...