Microsoft hits back at Google Applications with Office 365

Wellington based manufacturing company ESL Industries was one of 200,000 companies worldwide was that took part in an Microsoft Office 365 beta test group. Director Nicholas Beauchamp said his company liked the fact afterwards moving most of its files to the cloud, it doesn’t have to worry about backup.

Plus having all your software - and the files created by that software - hosted on the internet means few, if any, servers in your office, and less burdon on your PCs.

A $NZ15.25 per user per month version lets you edit Office files online as then, boosts inbox capacity to 25GB, and adds support for Microsoft Lync and other features, but for all that only lets you edit Office files.

But you have to step up to a $NZ38.25 per user per month version to gain the same full Office capability as desktop-bound users. A version with Lync Server – meaning you could as well ditch your office PABX and use the internet for all your calls – costs $NZ43. It’s keen pricing, nevertheless not killer.

The likes of Gen-i

The likes of Gen-i and Datacom's customer base are mainly enterprises so their technical requirement and pricing structure that can't be accommodated by O365, plus MS NZ may not sell direct against their big partners.But the likes of OneNet and smaller MS cloud partners are screwed as their customer base are small businesses that will be attracted to O365 pricing and brand.