Office 2013 is the latest refresh of Microsoft's near ubiquitous
Office suite. The latest version sees it get the Windows 8 treatment,
with a touch-friendly interface and a sparser look, as well as
new features in every application.
As part of the launch, Office has also reached a new
landmark by going into the cloud with subscription pricing,
on-demand installation and automatic syncing of settings and
documents you save online rather than offline. It's called Office 365.
That particular method of purchase ensures you're always
up-to-date, even if the software changes - check out our
Office 365 review.
While the main thing you'll notice with Office 2013 the new
look, there are some really interesting features under the
hood - though sadly not for Windows XP users, who are
now excluded. Office 2013 is strictly for Windows 7 and
Windows 8 users.
As usual, there are multiple versions of Office 2013, but this
time around the different editions are not just about whether
you're using them at home or in a business or which
applications are included.
Although Office 365 Home Premium might also sound like
a great deal for a small business, it's not licensed for
commercial use Like the Windows RT versions of Office 2013
unless you already have an Office business licence. Instead,
you need one of the Office 365 business subscriptions,
available from February 27.
These will include the new Office 2013 versions of Exchange,
SharePoint and Lync Online, which are already available to
run on your own servers. It's taking some time for Microsoft
to upgrade Office 365 to run these new server versions, which
explains the later availability there are a number of issues in
SharePoint the Office 365 team is working on.
We've tried these out with the Office 2013 applications
and we looked at SharePoint Online 2013 in more detail here.
Office 365 Small Business Premium includes Word, Excel,
PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Publisher and Lync.
The annual $149.99 subscription lets you run them on up to five
PCs or Macs at once again, you can use Office on Demand to
download Office to any PC you're using temporarily, and you
get regular updates and new features.
You can host online meetings with audio and HD video
conferencing in Lync and run a public website on SharePoint,
plus you get Exchange with a 25GB mailbox for each user
and SkyDrive Plus storage on SharePoint.
That gives you 10GB of secure cloud storage with an extra
500MB for each user, but you can choose how the storage
is allocated between users and you can control how they use
it – like forcing them to encrypt confidential documents.
Office 365 ProPlus short for Professional Plus), is aimed at
midsize businesses 10-250 employees and includes the same
desktop Office software as Small Business Premium. But it
also has tools for business intelligence, consistency checking to
Excel and automated deployment, as well as more options for
the SharePoint, Lync and Exchange Online services.
