The book I read to research this post was Office 365 for Dummies by Ken Withee et al which is a very good book which I borrowed from the library. Office 365 is a cloud computing service which means the processing is done on a server at the other end of the internet & the software is accessed via the internet. Microsoft has data centers for this purpose in Ireland, Singapore & the United States. They have invested billions in these data centers. Pixar the animation company saves a fortune by rendering its cartoons by a cloud computing service, they merely pay for the service not how many processors they are using up. As a result they have reduced how much hardware they have to buy. Office 365 includes office professional plus, forefront for anti virus needs, sharepoint & exchange servers for distributing communications, lync which allows virtual meetings & infopath which allows several users access to the same core information. The prices for this service start at £4 or $10 although for that you only get the basic package. Microsoft has coordinated office 365 to work with smartphones especially windows phones. Google docs although the basic package is free doesn’t work as well with smartphones. In effect when you are working with office 365 you are working with your very own password protected website. Also if your company has a sharepoint site this works very well with it. You can use office 2010 or 2007 with service pack 2 as a client. Microsoft does a version of SQL Server as a cloud computer service called Microsoft Azure which also includes 25 GB of space. Microsoft also operates Skydrive which is free to anyone with a windows live or hotmail account & that gives you 25 GB of space.
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