Office 365 FAQ

We encourage you to buy the plan family (Plans P or E) you want to move forward with in the future. If, after purchase, you decide you want a plan from a different family, you will have to cancel your subscription and then buy a different plan (e.g., cancel your subscription to Plan P and then buy Plan E). Please be aware that your data may not be preserved, and you will have to provide sign up information again.

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.

Existing Business Productivity Online Suite 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 centre 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*. Learn more about plans for professionals and small businesses.

* Access from mobile devices requires Wi-Fi capability or depends on carrier network availability.

The Office 365 service offerings enable you to work with email, documents, and data from virtually anywhere and nearly any device with a familiar productivity experience across PC, phone, and browser.

This means that an appropriate device, Internet connection, and supported versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari browser are required. Access from mobile devices requires Wi-Fi capability or depends on carrier network availability. Some mobile functionality requires Microsoft Office Mobile 2010, which is included with specific releases of Windows Phones and Nokia phones. Office Mobile 2010 is not included in Office 2010 applications, suites, or Office Web Apps. There are some differences between the features of the Office Web Apps, Office Mobile 2010, and the Office 2010 applications.

Office 365 is offered in the following 21 languages: English, Br Portuguese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Romanian, and Russian.

Office 365 is available in 41 countries/regions: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, United Kingdom, and United States.

Go to the Office 365 Trial pages to find out about the different options that apply to your organisation.

Participants will have 30 days after trial activation to choose whether or not to continue with the service as a paid offering. If you do not continue with a paid offering, your trial account will end.

If you are an administrator of your organisation, you can sign up for Microsoft Office 365 for midsize businesses enterprises on the Buy page. Before signing up for Office 365, make sure that your computer has one of the combinations of operating system and Internet browser listed in the Office 365 system requirements. After you sign up for Office 365, you need to configure your computer so that software updates can be installed. These updates are required when connecting Microsoft Office desktop applications to Office 365. For more information about configuring your computer to install updates, see Set up your desktop for Office 365.

If you choose to buy any of the service plans you were in trial with, your data will be preserved for a seamless transition. For example, you can convert a Plan E3 trial into a subscription for any of the Plan E service plans.

However, for example, if you participate in the Plan P trial and want to buy a Plan E service plan, your data may not be preserved and you may need to provide this information again.

Customers who have purchased Office 365 through an Enterprise Agreement are advised to contact their Microsoft Account Manager. For all other customers, please contact Telstra through the Telstra via T-suite.

Office for Mac will not be available for purchase through subscription as part of Office 365. However, customers who are using Office for Mac 2011 will be able to use some of the Office 365 hosted services. See following questions for detail.

Customers who are using Word for Mac 2011, PowerPoint for Mac 2011 and Excel for Mac 2011 will be able to open, save and upload files to and from SharePoint Online as well as co-author from within Word for Mac 2011 and PowerPoint for Mac 2011 using SharePoint Online. Customers will also be able to connect to SharePoint Online through Document Connection 2008.

Customers can access the Office Web Apps from Safari and Firefox, commonly supported browsers on Macs.

Microsoft Office 365 for education will bring together cloud versions of our most-trusted communications and collaboration products with the latest version of our desktop suite. Office 365 for education will enable Microsoft to deliver on our commitment to education like never before—providing our most powerful productivity technologies to schools and universities worldwide.

Office 365 for education is not currently available for trial. However, you can sign up for the Office 365 for enterprise (Plan E3) trial to have a similar evaluation experience as Office 365 for education.

Today’s Live@edu services that millions of students and educators rely on will be transitioned to Office 365 for education. Office 365 for education will include new services not available in Live@edu today, such as advanced Exchange features, Lync Online, SharePoint Online, archiving, voicemail, and Blackberry support.

Microsoft and Research in Motion (RIM) announced in March 2011 that RIM will provide a hosted BlackBerry service for Office 365 customers, known as BlackBerry Business Cloud Services. A public beta is currently available.

Blackberry Business Cloud Services will provide BlackBerry users with email, calendar, PIM, and additional capabilities.

Until general availability of the BlackBerry Business Cloud Services, BlackBerry smartphone users can use the BlackBerry Internet Service connection to obtain email over the air, and do a wired sync for calendar and contacts. Additionally, customers with on-premises Exchange and BES can use rich coexistence with Office 365 to enable BlackBerry device users on-premises.