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Perhaps you've heard about the advantages of Microsoft Office 365, and want to give it a try. Or maybe you've already completed a 30-day trial and are ready to subscribe on an ongoing basis.  The question is: which plan should I subscribe to?

To make your choice easy, we've updated our Office 365 website to help you quickly select the right plan for your organization.  Now, from a single page, you can compare all the subscription plans side-by-side, including the specific features and prices of each. You can see which plans come with a free, 30-day trial and find organization suited for your the plan best's specific size and needs.

To make our subscription plans easy to navigate, we've also grouped them into four categories: email, small business, midsize businesses and enterprises E1 & E3:

Email (online Exchange): This plan is suitable for organizations of any size that want to move their email, but not their productivity applications, to the cloud. Subscribers receive our web-based email service Exchange online, along with shared calendars, anti-virus and anti-spam filtering, and Active Directory integration. Cost: $5 per user/month. Small Business (P1): This plan is ideal for organizations with 50 or fewer employees. In addition to web-based email complete with anti-virus and anti-spam filtering, it offers instant messaging, voice and video conferencing, and web-based viewing and editing of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files. It also includes a team site for sharing files, an external website, and Microsoft community support. Cost: $6 per user/month.Midsize businesses & enterprises (E1): The basic plan is appropriate for medium and large enterprises that want to move email, communications, and collaboration to the cloud, while keeping their productivity applications on-premises. It offers web-based email, shared calendars, instant messaging and video conferencing. Plus it includes a SharePoint intranet supporting up to 300 sub sites, Active Directory integration, configurable anti-spam filtering and 24 x 7 customer support. Cost: $10 per user/month.Midsize businesses & enterprises (E3): The premier plan is suitable for medium and large enterprises that are taking a hybrid approach to the cloud and want to combine their cloud-based and on-premises versions of Office into a single plan. It includes everything in the basic plan plus web-based viewing and editing of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote files. It also comes with a desktop version subscription of Office Professional plus 2010 for up to five devices per user. And it offers unlimited email storing and archiving, and hosted voicemail support. Cost: $24 per user/month.

You can subscribe to a plan right from our website, or sign up a for a 30-day free trial. You can also watch demos of Office 365, and view answers to frequently asked questions. Please check it outand tell US what you think. We welcome your questions and comments.

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Helping people around the world with our technology

Our friends over at Microsoft Citizenship have numerous programs running worldwide designed to help create social and economic opportunities for people and businesses (such as nonprofit organizations) through the use of Microsoft technologies. To help tell stories of success and impact from these programs, they have created the Local Impact Map (LIM). LIM is an interactive map of the world that lets you pick choose different regions to see stories.

This week the LIM has been updated with several updates and improvements. When the LIM was first launched 2 years ago, it featured only 200 stories. But with 1,400 stories as of today, they had to make changes to the LIM that improves the organization of all those stories. The new LIM uses Bing Maps where little dots are used representing regions where you can discover stories. For example with the United States, dots represent the states. For other countries, dots represent regions within those countries. They even got things down to a specific region like Silicon Valley where a lot of activities take place through our programs.

So why am I blogging about this here? Well, as I mentioned above – these programs from Microsoft Citizenship use our technologies to help people around the world. That of course includes Windows! I thought I would share a few stories with you that serve as good examples of just how we’re helping people:

Helping Teleton Serve the Children of Mexico

Teleton is the largest private children’s rehabilitation system in the world serving over 113,000 children with disabilities in Mexico. When Teleton hosted their annual 24 hour telethon to raise funds for their network, Microsoft made a contribution of US 8.9 million U.S. dollars to the organization and Windows outfitted a number of the centers with Windows 7!

Boys & Girls Clubs Offer Camps on Technology and Leadership

In North Carolina, the Boys and Girls Club of America worked with Microsoft to host Technology Camps to help boost the skills of 11th graders who were looking to study in the IT field. Microsoft donated 100 copies of Windows 7 and Microsoft Office which were installed on laptops given to students.

Upgrading Family Support Centers

Nestwarme is an organization that provides technology support for families with disabled and chronically ill children. In order to streamline its employee and volunteer communication without raising overhead costs, the organization needed an upgrade in technology – and Microsoft helped!

These are just a few of many stories featured on the Local Impact Map highlighting how Microsoft made an impact with our programs to help people and businesses out. I am extremely proud of our company’s ongoing commitment to helping people around the world! For more information on the new Local Impact Map, I suggest reading this blog post from Jean-Philippe Courtois, President of Microsoft International.

One more thing…

The new LIM includes a new “Snapshot” feature. By clicking the little camera icon at the top right of the site, you can take a snapshot of your favorite stories. A URL is then created that you can share out to anyone you want who can then see your collection of snapshots of your favorite stories from the LIM. Click here to see the collection of stories I mention above from the LIM.

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