“Office 365 is the best of everything we know about productivity, all in a single cloud service,” said Kurt DelBene, president of the Office Division at Microsoft. “With Office 365, your local bakery can get enterprise-caliber software and services for the first time, while a multinational pharmaceutical company can reduce costs and more easily stay current with the latest innovations. People can focus on their business, while we and our partners take care of the technology.”

The suite of Office 365 services at this point include copies of the Office Professional Plus desktop software, that has integration with the new Office Web Apps.  Exchange and Sharepoint online are also part of the package.  Finally a new service called Lync Online offers messaging and even video-conferencing services, again hosted form the cloud.

Microsoft say the key benefits of the new service are…

• Anywhere-access to email, documents, contacts, and calendars on nearly any device*
• Work seamlessly with Microsoft Office and the other programs your users already count on everyday
• Business-class features including IT-level phone support, guaranteed 99.9% uptime, geo-redundancy, and disaster recovery
• Pay-as-you-go pricing options which give you predictability and flexibility for all or part of your organization
• Latest version of Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which has millions of business users today

The most important factor though will be the price.  It could turn out that for small businesses with only a few seats this service could be quite expensive.  There is a pricing document available here as a Word DOCX file, though it doesn’t really seem to include any firm information about the overall cost to each type and size of business.

Regardless, there can be little doubt that any hosted business and productivity service can only be a great thing for businesses of many sizes and also for the environment.  Imagine the effect this move will have on global warming where Microsoft will have a few, admittedly huge, server farms but that their capacity will only be increased to meet the overall demand for the product.  At the same time, the number of small server rooms, all pumping out more CO2 than would be proportionate for the volume of work those servers are actually asked to do can shrink.

This can only be a good thing.

The program will automatically display all available and supported audio and video devices during first run. To start a video conference users need to be selected from the address book. The first step after installation of the software is therefor to add users to the address book. The username that was registered at the iVisit website needs to be added to add the user to the software program.

It is then possible to call or send messages to users that have been added to the address book. The sharing tools can be used to share documents with another user. It is for instance possible to share documents, presentations, applications, web browsers and even the whole desktop.

Presentation Sharing

Web Browser Sharing

The software is available for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh computers. A mobile version is also available for Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional. Interested users can download the video conferencing and collaboration software at the iVisit website.

The first and most notable is the feature that up to six participants can use ooVoo simultaneously which is great if you want to video chat with your friends or need to bring people from different locations together to take part in a meeting. It runs pretty smooth even with six users and offers a good sound quality.

Another feature worth mentioning is that you can record messages with ooVoo and send them to other users even those who do not use ooVoo. Seveal other features that I use in Skype for instance are also supported in ooVoo. They include the ability to text chat with one or more users, send files to someone and add links to automatically use ooVoo to contact someone from a website.

Best of all it is really free. No premium version, no advertisement, no hidden messages, popups.