Yes you did read that right. Microsoft have announced today that Office 365 for education will be free.
Since Office 365 for education was announced at the beginning of 2011 it has been well advertised that Exchange based email will remain free like email in live@edu but there would be an additional cost for any other services.
If you have been able to see the pricing guide for Office 365 for education you would have notice that A1 which is just email services were free. A2 included Exchange, SharePoint and Lync for a small cost per member of staff but this is now free.
So what will you get for free?
- Microsoft Exchange 2010
- Outlook Anywhere
- Outlook Active Sync
- Outlook Web App
- 25GB per member of staff
- Anti Spam filtering
- Microsoft Lync 2010
- Voice and Video conference
- Presence
- Client application
- Instance Communication
- Microsoft SharePoint 2010
- Microsoft Office Web Application
- Word
- Excel
- PowerPoint
- OneNote
- Intranet Team Sites
- Internet facing website
- My Sites
Just to say it again. Office 365 for education for FREE!!!!!!
There are some services that will remain chargeable such as PBX and extra storage. You’ll be able to get Office 365 for education through your EES agreement later in the summer.
BFC Networks will be announcing a new set of product range that will work with both your on-premise and Office 365 for education. Keep an eye open on the website with the first products available in the coming weeks.
You infer that the full versions of Word/Excel/Powerpoint are included but they are not. That is Tier A3 which you must pay for.
In relation to that, I still have not been able to get anyone from Microsoft to tell me if I already have a Campuswide subscription to Microsoft Office, will I have to pay twice to use the full version of Office in the cloud when my campus gets moved from live@edu to Office 365 this summer.
One other question – considering that we will be getting some version of Sharepoint, we are looking at doing Enterprise Search. Could we leverage what we have from Office 365 to use the Microsoft FAST solution somehow?