Yesterday the software giant introduced Microsoft Office 365, a cloud-based suite of productivity apps. The product was first introduced last October and now comes with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint), SharePoint, Exchange and Lync as well as email support and Microsoft Access in the cloud. ActiveSync is a new tool that lets customers access their cloud-based data (email, web apps, websites, calendars, etc.) from almost any device, including mobile phones and tablets. The company also guarantees 99,9% uptime.

Photo:www.guardian.co.uk

According to Guardian, Office is Microsoft’s best monopoly, making profits of 60% per copy sold. It’s a real big stride for the company taking into account popularity of the Google Apps. To hit back the strike Google posted ‘365 reasons to consider Google Apps’ on its official blog.

There are two variations of the Office 365: for small business and for enterprise. The small business plan of Office 365 is designed specifically for small teams that don’t want to deal with IT, while the enterprise one is a customizable version of Office with advanced IT configurations, Office Professional Plus, use right controls and more.

The small business version costs $6 per user per month, and the enterprise version varies between $2 and $27, depending on which features a company decides to implement. One of the top10 of the Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies, already has about 400,000 customers on board from the beta testing of the cloud-based software.

Bell Canada, Intuit, Telefonica S.A., Telstra Corp. and Vodafone are among Microsoft’s launch partners that provide support for Office 365.