Microsoft Office 365 coming 28 June

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Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity suite - Office 365 - will be made available to everyone from 28 June, the software giant has confirmed.

Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of the worldwide partner group at Microsoft, revealed the general availability date for Office 365, which went into public beta in April.

The date was effectively confirmed today as IT PRO received an invite to the official launch on 28 June.

Towards the end of last month, Microsoft chief executive (CEO) Steve Ballmer was talking up Office 365 in Delhi, India.

“We're pushing hard in the productivity space,” Ballmer said.

“We'll launch our Office 365 cloud service, which gives you Lync and Exchange and SharePoint and Office and more as a subscribable service that comes from the cloud. That launches in the month of June.”

Talking more generally about cloud computing, Ballmer said Microsoft was looking to help businesses make the transition to the cloud, both in public and private forms.

“Many companies are saying, I can't go to the public cloud exactly yet or I can't go for all of my applications; we have too much concern about privacy and security and reliability,” he added.

“And so to bring some of the same advantages of the management, low-cost of management and deployment of applications in the cloud back to the enterprise data centre we're pushing very hard with our virtualisation technology, Hyper-V, to let you build Hyper-V private cloud datacenters.”

Read on for our first look at Office 365.

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