Office moves onto the Web Office moves onto the Web Microsoft is to offer its Office 2000 applications as a hosted online resource, but most businesses ought to think carefully before they move their software off users' hard drives, warns David Neal E arlier this month, Sun Microsystems said its free StarOffice suite had been downloaded more than a million times over the last two months, and Microsoft unveiled its plans to offer Office 2000 as an Internet-hosted service called Office Online. The Office Online suite will be delivered by a range of service providers, including Microsoft, which has said that its bCentral portal service will be exclusively focussed on small business customers. According to Jerry Thompson, general manager of corporate business at BT Internet and Multimedia, the deal shows the future of software distribution and use. Small business users may be tempted to take advantage of Office Online's centrally managed solution.
Companies can open a few accounts rather than buy licences for all staff.
ASPs will handle software upgrades and maintenance, making it easier for firms to predict and control their IT spend. To offer savings to most firms, however, cost models may have to be cheaper than those seen by IT Week's sister paper in the US, PC Week. Following extensive testing, PC Week concluded that the benefits of Office Online in centralised storage of documents and the ability to access applications from any Windows system on the Internet were not sufficient to balance its inherent problems. Microsoft's free email service, Hotmail, has also proved susceptible to hacks and viruses, and many firms will ask if Office Online could be just as fallible. The access that application hosts will have to firms' data may also raise fears.