cloud computingOffice 365 is the latest iteration in Microsoft’s long, long lived suite of Office products that started with Microsoft Word in 1983, at the dawn of personal computing. While Microsoft hasĀ  certainly introduced lots of changes to their Office line over the years, the move to the cloud-based Office 365 is easily the most radical jump they’ve made yet.

So where did Office 365 come from? Let’s take a quick look at its history.

A Nutshell History Of Microsoft Office 365

Office 365 was first announced in October 2010, followed by a beta period and then a wide rollout in mid-2011. It was undoubted inspired in large part by the rapid advances Google had made with their collaborative Google Apps suite which, in 2010, was the only major offering of its type. The rapid embrace of Google’s services demonstrated the hunger people had for cloud services.

The high cost of self-hosting hardware and software was undoubtedly part of this. Companies were looking abroad and doing more business overseas, and to successfully share documents, it required a full Microsoft Exchange server capable of handling a lot of data. The money for such a setup, especially given the high costs of Exchange licenses, simply was not there.

So, Office 365 was conceived: An all-in-one cloud based system that combined high reliability, huge amounts of storage space, and a new version of Office which could do everything in previous versions and then some. Compared to Google’s deliberately stripped-down and simplified Apps offerings, Microsoft could target the large businesses that needed the billion-and-one features of Office.

One of the key elements of Office 365 is that it could be updated whenever and however Microsoft or the users need, without the seemingly endless cycle of license upgrades. This was illustrated last year, in 2013, when Office 365 got a free facelift and feature set expansion so it would stand beside the offline Office 2013. Basically, Officecloud computing 365 users get the benefits of new Office software upgrades, without having to pay extra for them.

Since then, changes have been largely incremental, and aimed at expanding the value of the service. Microsoft has significantly expanded the pricing at the low end, including options for single users, as well as expanding the default amount of storage offered to users. It’s now up to a terabyte of space, which will be plenty for most users.

Office 365: Robust, Resilient, And Growing

While Microsoft has made no announcement shutting down their offline Office suite, we suspect it’s only a matter of time at this point. Office 365 does everything the offline versions can, and more, at a vastly lower per-user cost than maintaining your own hardware and licenses onsite.

If you’re currently an Office user, there’s no better time to investigate a move towards Office 365. Contact Bi101 today to learn just how quick and easy a cloud migration can be!

 

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