Office 365 frequently asked questions

Thirty-eight countries/regions are eligible to participate in the beta release. These countries/regions are the United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United Kingdom.

There are two different beta versions for Office 365: Office 365 (Plan E3) is ideal for larger, IT-based organizations. Office 365 (Plan P1) is best suited for professionals and small businesses—ideal for organizations that have 25 or fewer employees and no IT support. Learn more about the Office 365 (Plan E3) Beta program.

Click the Join the beta button to join the list of beta testers. You will be asked to provide the following information: country/region, company language, first name, last name, company name, company address, city, state, postal or zip code, phone number, email address, and new domain name.

Beta participants can choose to transition to the comparable trial version when Office 365 is commercially released. Then participants will have 30 days after trial activation to choose whether or not to continue with the service as a paid offering.

At the conclusion of the Beta program, educational institutions will not be able to transition beta accounts to a trial for Office 365 for education, rather the comparable Plan E3 or Plan P1. A trial version of Office 365 for education will be made publicly available at a later date.

In today’s competitive global market, businesses of all sizes need technology that enables flexibility and cost-effectively adds value to their organization. Cloud-based services provide a way to meet these objectives. They deliver feature-rich productivity tools to users while helping to relieve the burden of managing and maintaining business systems—freeing up IT departments and businesses to focus on initiatives that can deliver true competitive advantage.

Office 365 replaces the Business Productivity Online Suite. Enterprise customers can contact a Microsoft sales representative or Microsoft Partner directly for purchase details, or get more information about volume licensing.

Existing BPOS customers can transition during the 12 months following general availability of Office 365 in 2011. Check out our blog and the new Office 365 transition center for more information and ongoing guidance and discussion about the transition.

Office 365 for professionals and small businesses offers a simple, monthly subscription to an easy-to-use set of web-enabled tools for small businesses, independent consultants, and professionals.

Working with the business-class productivity tools people know and use today, Office 365 for professionals and small businesses provides virtually anywhere access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars on nearly any device*. Subscriptions start at just $7.25 per user per month, and Office 365 is backed by powerful security features and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Learn more about plans for professionals and small businesses.

Microsoft Office 365 for education will provide institutions with the great communication and collaboration experiences used in enterprises around the world, with the goal of saving time and money. Microsoft Office 365 is intended to deliver all of this while training students on the familiar software that employers depend on. Planned benefits are 25-gigabyte (GB) inboxes, mobile access, team sites and Office Web Apps!

At the conclusion of the Beta program, educational institutions will not be able to transition beta accounts to a trial for Office 365 for education, rather the comparable Plan E3 or Plan P1. A trial version of Office 365 for education will be made publicly available at a later date.

The Office 365 service offerings enable you to work with email, documents, and data from virtually anywhere and on nearly any device with a familiar productivity experience on PCs, phones, and in browsers.

This means that an appropriate device, Internet connection, and supported versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari browsers are required. Access from mobile devices requires Wi-Fi capability or depends on carrier network availability. Some mobile functionality requires Office Mobile 2010, which is included with specific releases of Windows Phones and Nokia phones. BlackBerry® device users can use the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), or for customers who need Hosted BlackBerry service capabilities based on BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), RIM’s cloud-based BlackBerry service, when available, will provide capabilities beyond what are offered in the BPOS-S Hosted BlackBerry service. For more information, please see the Office 365 blog. Office Mobile 2010 is not included in Office 2010 applications, suites, or Web Apps. There are some differences between the features of the Office Web Apps, Office Mobile 2010, and the Office 2010 applications.