The Alternative Press

Yes, I said FREE

Microsoft announced late last month their Office 365 suite of cloud services - Hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Lync - is being made available to qualified educational institutions for free!

In addition to the free cloud services, the entire Office 2010 Professional suite of desktop applications is being made available at a ridiculously low monthly subscription price.

For all the details of the Office 365 for Education offering, click here .

The end of Live@edu?

If your educational institution already uses Microsoft’s Live@edu service, you should know that beginning this summer you will be automatically upgraded to the new Office 365 for Education. This upgrade will give students, faculty, and staff free access to the same versions of key Office 365 tools available to enterprises, extending your investment in Live@edu.

For more information on the Live@edu-to-Office 365 upgrade, including Frequently Asked Questions, see the overview here .

From the horse's mouth

In his blog entry of June 27, Anthony Salcito, Microsoft’s VP of Education for Worldwide Public Sector, stated “Students must be more than consumers. They need to be creators. They need to know how to communicate and collaborate with others. Office 365 is the best productivity experience that’s used all over the world and that companies are demanding expertise in. And there is no compromise for going to the cloud with Microsoft. The experience and features that you expect on the desktop and offline are also there in the cloud. Schools can connect all devices to the cloud, and every student and teacher regardless of location, to realize the potential of online learning.”

If you'd like to learn more on how we can help your organization migrate to Office 365 please feel free to contact us at 866-753-6279 or via  email .

About the Author

During work hours David is the President of Plenary Technology, an IT Services company in New Jersey that helps small businesses save money by reducing down time. Off hours he spends as much time as possible romping thru the woods with his dog, Maggie.