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...

Never have we seen such dramatic and tectonic swings in consumer shopping behaviors, preferences and expectations, largely driven by new technologies and form factors. With consumers having increased options for how and when they shop, staying competitive has meant retailers must truly put customers at the heart of their business and seek new ways to create the most value, revenue and loyalty. To adapt, retailers must deliver a modern sales and customer service experience that is personal, seamless and differentiated. And, they must operate with the utmost efficiency.

Read on to find out why retailers are turning to the cloud to tackle these challenges.

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The Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration has selected Office 365 to provide 80,000 of its employees with secure access to email, instant messaging, calendaring and webconferencing tools.  Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) will lead the agency's cloud implementation.

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Microsoft Office 365 has flexible service plans to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes. With our subscription-based model your IT costs will be a predictable monthly expense and your software will always be up to date. Additionally, because it's an online service, Office 365 provides anywhere access to your email, important documents, contacts, and calendars.

Below, we've compiled a list of resources and tools to help you choose the best Office 365 plan for your business.

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Once you've identified the best Office 365 plan for your business and planned your migration , it's time to introduce your staff to the technology and start using it. To help make adoption as smooth as possible, Microsoft has created a welcome kit that includes everything from draft emails for administrators to send announcing the service to training resources. Below is an overview of what the kit includes and links to additional Office 365 resources. The Office 365 Welcome Kit contains: Getting...

In our third and final post about the privacy tenets Microsoft Office 365 was built on - responsibility, transparency, and choice - we'll talk about how our customers have the opportunity to choose whether information will be collected, shared, or made public. There are three categories that fall under choice: administrative access, identity management, and Microsoft partners. Based on the Microsoft whitepaper "Privacy in the Public Cloud: The Office 365 Approach" below we provide more information about each one.

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Microsoft Office 365 was built from the ground up with three privacy tenets at its core: responsibility, transparency, and choice. As part of our three part security and privacy series, today we'll take a close look at transparency and how we strive to make our practices easy to understand. At the heart of our transparency efforts is the Office 365 Trust Center which is designed to tell customers, in plain language, exactly how we handle and use data gathered through their use of our cloud-based service.

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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...

It's been said that "a dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work." We're honored to see all of our sweat, determination, and hard work pay off with the great reviews that the new Office has garnered since Microsoft released Office 365 Home Premium to customers last month. 

Already, Office 365 is racking up the awards. PC Magazine gave Office 365 Home Premium its Editors' Choice award, saying "most of the changes are extremely positive." Likewise, ITProPortal gave Office 365 Home Premium its "Best Buy Award," saying it "trounces the competition from Google Docs."

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The American Auto Association estimates there will be 42.3 million Americans traveling this week for the 4th of July holiday. Whether you're hitting the open road or enjoying a relaxing "staycation," the automatic reply feature in Outlook Web App will help make sure your colleagues know that you're out of the office, when you'll be back, and any other information you want to share.

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