Office 365: The power to think big and be small, to be big and act fast

sounds exciting...bummer the link is down now...so apparently in 8 days it'll work?

As a Office Live Small Business customer, I love what I'm hearing.  Essentially retain the existing capabilties (Web and Team sites) but move folks to Office 2010, Exchange and basically a platform that I feel comfortable will be supported.  It was a good idea to change the small business licensing model to accommodate a single user.  The #1 feature I was hoping for was publishing MS Access.  At the moment, its a bit unclear what VOIP capabilities are offered, but I'm very interested if that is an option. 

Is any of this running on windows Azure?

Looks to be interesting... to answer USArcher... I believe that the "voice/video" that everyone is talking about is the internal LYNC-to-LYNC voice/video, but not the external VoIP that a corporate Lync server will allow with SIP add-on devices.

@Aaron: Thanks.  Well, they should collaborate with some IPPBX services (like RingCentral) to more fully integrate with Office 365 Small Business.

There is some discussion going on the Office Live Small Business community forum in regards to this announcement.  Some folks are unhappy with not having a lower cost option than the $6/account/mo.  I can see their point if they are a local community/team organization or micro business.  These folks really don't use OLSB the way it was intended...they are predominantly using it for web and email hosting.  For these customers, Office 365 Small Business is overkill.  Please consider a webhosting only Office 365 option..maybe $20/year and convert email management to Live Admin Center.  For these folks the collaboration features in Live Groups and Live SkyDrive are sufficient.  Keep these customers happy and let them upgrade to Office 365 when they truly need more robust capabilities.

Very cool stuff. Sharepoint is really becoming the de facto intranet solution.

One idea to make Office 365 more compelling...create Lync addon for "Aurora" small business server to enable full voice support.

Is the title a typo ?

Shouldn't it say:"The power to be bloated and be buggy, to be slow and frustrating to use."

Subscription based, are you having trouble selling office for your low low price of an arm and a leg ? 

Oh look, docs.google.com can do all this too and it's _free_ and it's been available for several months 

Take that subscription based bloat-ware !

Sorry i couldn't resist 

By the way, did anyone else notice that he's computer screen was flashing slightly ?

That must get tiresome. 

This article is now featured on the official facebook page for Office 365.
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?saved&&note_id=126879034032599&id=117809774946412#!/pages/Microsoft-Office-365/117809774946412

Full voice support is in the pipeline to be delivered later. What I also need to see is how faculty and students collaborate with SharePoint Online in an LMS scenario to mamage learning management processes.

SharePoint development is one skill that one can really put into this. If you know SharePoint then you get to do custom development for tons of clients on Office365 who won't only have their public-facing websites on there but also tie their backend databases into it for dynamic content. Click on "Learn" at the top of this page and go learn SharePoint development.

It will be great for us developers to know how we can leverage SharePoint Online with SQL Azure for those clients with much heavier database than can sit in-house.

Does Office 365 offers a single sing-on experience with the desktop applications? Does a single tool manages authentications for the desktop applications, or it will be required to manually log-in with each application individually?

@Normand Bédard:
Hello Normand,
I believe you install a service connector onto each computer (once), this then allows a single signon between the desktop and your cloud services.