Steve Fox, CIO at Caltex discusses why the organisation took the plunge with a public cloud service.

Microsoft is rolling out a family plan for its Office 365 service that supports up to five machines under a single subscription, which the company says is enough to cover a typical household.

Microsoft's Office 365 service has suffered two email outages within a week of each other that affected some customers in North and South America that stemmed from different causes but ended in the same result: failed email delivery.

Seeking to beef up its products and services for small and midsize businesses, AT&T Monday announced that it will offer Microsoft Office 365 as a cloud-based service.

The battle between Microsoft and Google for office cloud dominance reminds me of the clash of the Titans. Microsoft and its classic on-premises business model is like Gaia, the earth goddess, and Google with its disruptive lightening bolt, is like Zeus, a sky god and a next generation kind of god.

Latest blend of Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync servers in the cloud combines an excellent feature set with easier setup and management

The shortfalls of Google Apps will likely resonate with the inordinate amount of Microsoft shops in the industry. Years of investment in SharePoint developers, Exchange support teams and business processes built around the fickle aspects of Microsoft Office and its ribbon interface cannot be discarded easily. That’s ultimately where Microsoft’s strength is likely to reside. No matter when its Office 365 bundle is released, and despite numerous attempts to forge links between legacy applications and Google Apps, the complexity of a migration for a large organisation would likely be a headache most CIOs are eager to avoid. At least, that can be said for Coca Cola Amatil CIO, Barry Simpson.

Ultimately, some of the problems facing Microsoft’s Cloud strategy are those affecting many of its long-standing product suites. “Clearly Microsoft is trying to back-solve that problem to the legacy product set and clearly that’s problematic,” AAPT’s chief operating officer and effective CIO, David Yuile, says.

IT behemoths, Microsoft and Google, have for years been embroiled in battles over who would control the move by different industries to the Cloud. Since at least 2007, Australian universities and education authorities eager to outsource their email have turned to either provider in lieu of limited competition from the market. For the next battle, however, the stakes are higher. Both Google and Microsoft are betting all of their chips on a sector that is likely to prove much more lucrative than any before it: Enterprise.