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http://office365.microsoft.com/en-US/online-services.aspx

Microsoft Office 365 brings together cloud versions of our most trusted communications and collaboration products with the latest version of our desktop suite for businesses of all sizes.

I love the concept and I wonder what range of technologies are being deployed in order to provide this service. More importantly though, the low cost per month coupled with the communication technologies like chat, Office online and collaborative working could bring real opportunities for the SMB/start up space in particular. With a lower access cost, I wonder what possibilities we might see, and whether the platform could be opened towards the development community? Could we see plugins that we can subscribe to as well as the Office service? Could I have specific templates or bolt-ons, a financial or personnel management tool so I log into in effect a small business portal combining the best of the market place using open source and paid for services?

We’ll have to see, for months now I’ve been floating the concept of the smb network, where we can collaborate, share ideas, communicate and have the tools and the knowledge to create real business and technical empowerment, Apple seem to be making a start with their MAC application store, I wonder where the pc equivalent is. As I was saying to a colleague the other day as an IT Manager, a business sponsor or a guy in a bedroom with an ebay business, anyone can download the free scripts, the open source files, but it’s packaging it to a point where it’s four mouse clicks or three line instructions that transform opportunity into business value and revenue stream. The race therefore as the big vendors dip their toes in the enterprise and go after the smb space is to see, who can articulate the smb requirements, manage the fine line between business value, revenue, risk and recognition of where the business model needs to change – to the service provider, I’ll pay £300 for a four year old server to be tested and shipped for me to swap out with my faulty one, but I’m not paying £250 + a per hour charge for an engineer to turn up, with that in mind, with revenues more or less neutral, should we not be going after both?

I would love these kind of cloud services whether it’s PeopleSoft, Collaboration, Office type tools and the like to be combined with social networking, online and offline, combined with the opportunity for knowledge transfer, revenue generation and opportunity, you want a guy that can supply 700 candles, not a problem I met Kev the other day online, let me put you in touch – a LinkedIn taken to the next level. The limit of the cloud is not technological, it’s social, it’s political and it’s what you decide as a cloud provider, as an end user and as a business to be. If you offer a bare bones service, you limit the possibilities, offer a full service also can limit opportunities based on revenue, more and more it is a hybrid of pay on use, open source or accessible services with the right level of components that can be scaled to your business need.  After a server inventory database tool, we’ll give you a free tool that’s open source, that you have development rights to, the catch, we provide a data center audit for three man days at a cost of £1500 including the physical data gathering and auditing for example.

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