Microsoft Office 2010 Key Office 365 Sorry, folks

Microsoft held a 30-minute press conference on October 19 to unveil its technique for planned upgrades to its Organization Productivity On the web Suite (BPOS), its Live@Edu offering and its Workplace Reside Tiny Company company. That is what its Workplace 365 announcement was all about. (Much more nitty-gritty Office 365 pricing and licensing particulars may be found here.)The Office 365 announcement wasn't about making a new version of Office which will be hosted in/on/via the cloud (contrary to a variety of headlines/reports you might have read claiming this).Microsoft Workplace did figure into the Office 365 announcement in a couple of ways. Microsoft announced that for consumers who would like to get the Workplace Professional As well as edition of Office — which runs locally on PCs, not in the cloud — Microsoft will offer it to them on a subscription basis. That means users pay a monthly fee for Office,Office Professional 2007, instead of paying for it all at once,Office Pro 2007, up front.(As one of my readers reminded me today, Microsoft volume licensees already can get this same Workplace Pro As well as SKU, though individual who get at retail cannot. The Pro Plus SKU is the full Workplace family of products — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint Workspace,Microsoft Office 2010 Key, Outlook, Publisher, Access, InfoPath and the Lync communications client. Microsoft is not allowing Workplace 365 users to substitute a different Workplace SKU for it, officials told me yesterday)In addition, because the new versions of BPOS — the little organization and enterprise Office 365 offerings — will include SharePoint 2010 functionality, Microsoft will probably be able to offer Workplace 365 buyers the versions of Workplace Internet Apps that sync with SharePoint 2010. (Workplace Internet Apps are not full Workplace; they are the Webified versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that Microsoft rolled out last year.)Yes, Microsoft;s announcement yesterday had a great deal of moving parts. But no,Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, this was not some out-of-the-blue change in Microsoft;s business model. Microsoft is still pushing Workplace first and foremost as a PC-based software package. And the Workplace 365 small-business and enterprise offerings (the update to BPOS) remain Microsoft;s answer to Google Apps and other cloud-hosted business-app suites.Speaking of Google Apps,Microsoft Office 2010 Pro Plus, it looks like New York City played its Google card in negotiating its latest software volume acquire with Microsoft. The New York Times says that the City got Microsoft to change the way it licensed them software and will end up saving $50 million more than five years. It sounds from the details provided that New York got Microsoft to offer them a combination of Workplace Net Apps, possibly some BPOS and some on-premises software licenses mixed together.This is definitely the way extra and additional of Microsoft;s volume license deals are going to look in the not-so-distant future — and Microsoft;s licensing folks are already plotting what to do to capitalize on that mix.One last Office 365 update: If you were among the numerous individual who were attempting to sign up for the limited beta yesterday to no avail, try again. A Microsoft spokesperson sent the following update, re: beta sign-in problems:“The beta sign-up issues visitors we’re experiencing earlier yesterday happened when they were clicking ;submit; about the beta sign up form. The page was refreshing mistakenly. This should be fixed by now.”The beta is limited to 2,000 but signing up will get you a spot in line when Microsoft expands the Office 365 beta program.