Microsoft will upgrade on Wednesday its existing Office 365 cloud email and collaboration suites for businesses, as well as introduce new bundles, growing even more the list of Office 365 editions, which some analysts and users had already termed somewhat confusing.
Microsoft has taken steps to make Office 365 more attractive to U.S. and European customers who have to comply with regulatory requirements related to data protection, the company is expected to announce Wednesday.
Microsoft's declaration this week that Office 365 is enjoying unprecedented levels of sales success didn't fully convince some industry experts who were expecting the company to back up its claims with more concrete figures and who feel it's too early for a victory lap.
Office 365, Microsoft's cloud collaboration and communication suite for organizations, is selling eight times faster than its predecessor, the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and has been particularly successful among small businesses, which make up over 90 per cent of its customer base,according to the company.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer launched the much-awaited Office 365 on Tuesday, after a beta program of about nine months, as the company responds -- some critics say belatedly -- to the rising popularity of cloud-based applications for collaboration and communication.
Microsoft's BPOS Cloud-hosted communication and collaboration suite suffered an outage on Wednesday, the latest in a string of technical problems in recent months.
Microsoft is expanding the beta testing program of its Office 365 cloud collaboration and communication suite, almost doubling the number of countries and languages it's available in, the company said on Monday.
Although Google Apps has made progress over the past few years as a cloud-based collaboration and productivity suite for businesses, the first big wave of adopters have been government agencies, schools and nonprofit organizations.
Google is modifying its Apps service level agreement in ways that increase the company's accountability whenever the hosted collaboration and communication software experiences downtime, the company plans to announce on Friday.
Oracle on Wednesday announced Cloud Office 1.0, a Web-based productivity suite that is set to give online applications from Microsoft and Google a fresh dose of competition.
Microsoft said on Tuesday that it would backport an Office 2010 security feature to the older and more widely used Office 2003 and Office 2007 early next year.
Microsoft made its long-awaited move to package the hosted version of Office with the hosted versions of Lync, SharePoint and Exchange with the unveiling on Tuesday of Office 365.
A recent Microsoft video suggests the company considers OpenOffice.org a significant threat to its own Office suite.
Google is developing a way for Microsoft Office users to edit documents collaboratively without using Microsoft's Sharepoint collaboration server. It also has plans to extend the ability to edit Google Docs documents to mobile phones and iPads too.
Google has increased the controls that Apps administrators have over their end users' iPhone, Nokia and Windows Mobile devices, the company announced on Tuesday.