Office 365 has entered public beta, and reviews of the service once known as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) have started to arrive. To the uninitiated, Office 365 is a comprehensive service that's made up of four of Microsoft's business products in online format: Office, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync. Administrators should already be familiar with the first three, while Lync is a service that includes IM, video conferencing, PC phone calling and some enterprise social networking.

For $24 per user, per month businesses can sign up for "Plan E3" which includes the licensing right to install a local copy of the Office 2010 Professional Plus client on top of the web services. Alternatively, companies who are at ease with Office Web Apps may want to opt for "Plan P1," which costs only $6 per user per month. 

As you may expect, the Office 365 service comes with a granular level of control that administrators will be happy with, including Active Directory Sync for ease of managing existing user groups and 24 hours phone support. For now, the Beta program is currently available in 38 countries for both Plan P1 and Plan E3, and offered in 17 languages. Note, however, that there is a 25 user limit during the beta; users who are interested can sign-up for the beta, here.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Ars Technica
- check out this article at PC Magazine

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