ActiveWin.com - The Most Activated Windows Resource

Microsoft brands its managed services with the ‘Office Online’ name

Time: 00:40 EST/05:40 GMT | News Source: | Posted By: Kenneth van Surksum

A year ago, Microsoft’s head of Office Live told me that Microsoft planned to extend the Office Live both up and down market. On October 1, Microsoft finally explained how it plans to do this.

Earlier this summer, Microsoft officials said that they were rebranding the existing Office Live family of products — Office Live Basics, Essentials and Premium — as “Office Live Small Business.”

Microsoft also is rebranding the growing family of Microsoft-managed/hosted services that it quietly began selling to enterprises with 5,000-plus seats last year as “Office Online” services. (Yes, these are the services that Microsoft began testing with Energizer Holdings in 2005.)

The Microsoft-managed version of Exchange is now known as “Office Exchange Online.” The managed version of SharePoint becomes “Office sharePoint Live,” and the managed Office Communications Server, “Office Communications Live.” As previously acknowledged, Microsoft also is working on a managed business-intelligence service bundle, which one might assume, will be named “Office BI Live” (or something similar), but officials declined to discuss that product when I asked.