Microsoft pushes Office 365 in education sector

With the release of its cloud-based Office 365 for universities, Microsoft has announced a major push into India's education sector.

While there were variants of Office 365 for institutions, enterprises and other commercial players, this version was targeted at those pursuing higher education.

According to Tarun Malik, Microsoft India's director of product management and strategy, there were 200 million students in India in the age group of 15 to 23 years.

He added it was a big market for Microsoft and the company was looking to move the focus from products to learning. He added, the IT departments at most universities often worried only about hardware procurement. He added Microsoft had a software solution that worked across screen sizes, devices and the cloud.

Despite its size, the learning market remained largely untapped in India. According to Microsoft, it had around 22 million Office 365 subscribers, of which around 10-15 million were in India.

Microsoft hoped to attract students to the university subscription with attractive pricing-just Rs4,199 for a four-year licence, which would include the complete set of Office applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access) that worked across two PCs or Macs, Office on Demand and 27 GB of cloud storage on SkyDrive.

The subscription would be valid for use on Windows Phones, Android smartphones and iPhones.

Meanwhile, Office 365 users could now get business intelligence insights from Microsoft's cloud-based productivity offering direct to their Windows mobile-powered Melet, according to the company's announcement.

The new app used Microsoft's Power BI offering, which according to the company's claims, would allow Office 365 users to stay connected to their favourite reports while on the move.

The Power BI mobile app allowed users to view and stay connected to multiple live reports from Office 365 from their Windows tablet, the company said.

Users could tag their favourite reports in the Power BI Site in Office 365 and have them appear in the mobile app or browse and discover new Office 365 reports from their tablet, it added.

The app also featured sharing functionality and users could browse all their reports in the Office 365 cloud.

The app would run on Windows mobile tablets with x86, x64 and ARM processors and it was currently available only in international and US English.

Though Power BI app was available immediately, it required a paid-for Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 subscription before it could be used.