After a few months of closed beta testing, BlackBerry's Business Cloud Services for Office 365 is finally available to the public. As its name suggests, the service is hosted by RIM (NASDAQ: RIMM) and works together with Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) cloud-hosted Office 365 to offer BlackBerry Enterprise Service-like features without requiring businesses to fork over any money for expensive hardware or software licenses for servers.

Business Cloud Services works in conjunction with the Exchange Online component of Office 365 to seamlessly deliver email as well as synchronize contacts, calendar, tasks and memo pads. Provisioning and managing BlackBerry devices is done from a web-based console, which includes the ability for users to remotely wipe a lost or stolen BlackBerry device.

Under the hood, a silent revolution of sorts is also happening: Business Cloud Services works with both BES as well as the BlackBerry Internet Service data plan. Being able to work with BIS is significant due to the cheaper cost of BIS service plans in many parts of the world.

Ultimately, Business Cloud Services offers a glimpse of how two disparate cloud services may work together to deliver a level of convenience and cost-effectiveness that cannot be achieved by a self-hosted or deployed service--not to mention that it forms the missing link for BlackBerry-toting organizations wanting to migrate to Office 365.

For more:
- check out this article at PCWorld

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