Get ahead in the cloud with Office 365

Office, the way it's meant to be

I love hearing the great stories about people sharing information and collaborating with colleagues, customers, friends and family in new ways with Office 2010.  I'm humbled by the amazing breadth and depth of the great projects our customers drive with Office.

Today, we are announcing Office 365, another significant step forward in the evolution of Office, set to launch in 2011.

Office 365 will bring together the power of Office applications with SharePoint, Exchange and Lync -- delivered as a predictable, monthly subscription service. The beauty of this is that instead of spending valuable time managing and maintaining technologies, people in businesses of all sizes will be able to connect easily to co-workers, partners, customers and information.

 We designed and developed our business productivity applications -- including Office, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync -- to work together. For instance, Exchange enables a great e-mail experience in Outlook; Lync helps you stay connected to others while working in Office apps; and SharePoint allows you to collaborate effectively on Office documents with social networking tools inside your business.

While many customers use Office every day, we want to help more people experience the full power of our 2010 products working in unison. We believe the value of the integrated experience is much greater than the individual parts working alone.

With a services-based approach that takes advantage of the cloud, we are bringing businesses of all sizes the ability to experience the benefits of our 2010 products. This means:

• You can see at-a-glance if a colleague is available, and then in one click call, IM, e-mail, or even start a video conference with that colleague through the 'rich presence' that lights up everywhere in Office.
• You can bring social networking to everyday work tasks, including document sharing and collaboration in Office - with all the security and privacy that business requires.
• You can avoid e-mail faux pas - such as accidentally e-mailing to a big distribution list - with "Mail Tips" in Outlook.
• You can broadcast PowerPoint presentations to colleagues, and everyone on your team can tune in - even those on mobile phones.
• You can work on one Word document with multiple people at the same time, see each other's changes, and collaborate without creating conflicts or losing data and formatting.

 More than ever, I am excited to enter this next stage in the evolution of Office. What do you think? How do you see Office 365 changing the way you work? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Takeshi Numoto

Corporate Vice President, Office Product Management Group

Microsoft Corp.