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Microsoft detailed on Tuesday its road map and pricing for Web-based software suites built for big companies and growing businesses.

Enabling telecommuting, which many employers and workers increasingly favor, is likely to be a selling point for the productivity and “deskless worker” tools within the Microsoft Online Services lineup.

The move is part of Redmond’s push to integrate online and desktop software, shifting much of the heavy lifting to the “cloud.”

“Microsoft Online Services is a key component of the software plus services initiative, and we’re seeing customers, partners and even competitors embrace this flexible approach to the cloud,” Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, said in a statement.

Details were unveiled Tuesday in Houston at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

Microsoft’s per-user monthly fees for its online business services.

(Credit: Microsoft)

For $15 per month per person, the business productivity suite offers an Outlook-integrated Exchange Online for e-mail and calendars, Office SharePoint Online collaboration, messaging via Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting video-enabled Web conferencing.

The software giant will charge another $3 per month per user for the Deskless Worker Suite, which combines flavors of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. The SharePoint portal offers access to internal company sites and search. E-mail, calendars, security filters, and Outlook Web Access Light are included with Exchange Online Deskless Worker.

Microsoft aims to simplify otherwise complex corporate tasks managed by engineers or IT technicians. For instance, a WYSIWYG interface would enable an IT worker to give a new employee access to the company tools in a series of steps that could be shorter than setting up, say, a free Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail account.

One can sign up online to try the beta services.

Exchange Online and Office SharePoint Online remain in beta, with final availability set for sometime in the second half of 2008, when Office Communications Online beta is also due. Microsoft plans for international availability in 2009.

The company offers to pay resellers of its Online Services 12 percent of the price of each contract secured during the first year, and 6 percent per subscription year thereafter. Interested companies can learn more at Microsoft’s QuickStart Web site.

Microsoft partners and resellers of Online Services include Accenture, CDW, and Unisys. Nokia is among the companies using the online tools for messaging and collaboration.

Microsoft Online Services includes these tools.

(Credit: Microsoft)

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Microsoft preps pay-as-you-go Web apps for business

So maybe it’s not the end of Microsoft Outlook, but the news coming from Australia this week may be a sign of the changing times for the mighty Marketing machine. Google’s Gmail application has kicked Outlook out of the schools by Australia’s education sector. The New South Wales Department of Education has announced that Gmail will replace Outlook as the email application for over 1.3 million students.

A big win for Google, a big loss for Microsoft.

See more here:
Outlook Dumped for Gmail? Time’s Are a Changing

At the EMC World conference in Vegas, EMC unveiled their latest plans and roadmap for content management and collaboration including tighter integration of new products with the Documentum platform and a new SaaS model designed for SMBs. It sounds like a very busy year ahead for these folks, almost too busy.

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EMCs Latest Roadmap for Content Management

The Outlook plug-in Xobni has been getting a lot of press recently, but it’s not the only Outlook helper out there.

On Monday, ClearContext, which has had a paid, enterprise-level e-mail organizer for a while now, is releasing ClearContext Personal, a free, de-featured version of the product. ClearContext isn’t Webware, but since I’ve covered Xobni here, I’d be remiss to ignore it.

CEO Deva Hazarika acknowledged to me that ClearContext personal might not fit the needs of someone like myself, who gets a lot e-mail that’s important but comes from strangers. I tried it anyway.

ClearContext color-codes and sorts e-mail, automatically.

ClearContext Personal organizes your e-mail as it arrives, in contrast to Xobni, which helps you understand more about the people who send you messages. I think it’s a more useful tool, but it’s also harder to get into, and if you’ve already got your workflow in Outlook set up in a way you like it, you may be frustrated when ClearContext tries to re-write your rules.

It examines your e-mail behavior to determine which senders are most important to you, and it color-codes (and optionally sorts) your in-box by priority. I found it did a middling job of determining who matters to me. You can easily train the app, though. I didn’t bother, which meant I really couldn’t trust the color coding.

The app understands message threads and, in each message window, will show you a list of other messages in the threads; it can even clump messages in a thread together in your in-box. ClearContext lets you “unsubscribe” from threads you don’t want to be bothered with. It’s great for putting down spam-like threads from your co-workers. It can also automatically collect all your notification e-mails (”Bacn“) into folders, and similarly can auto-file all the messages you don’t want to keep but are afraid to delete in case you need them later.

If you’re an e-mail filer, ClearContext makes it much, much easier to move messages from your in-box to their final location.

A new view lets you easily sort through notification from social networks and commerce sites.

The free version of the app has some limits on the number of Outlook files it can support, and it lacks the pro version’s delegation features. Another issue for power users will be ClearContext’s lack of support for mobile devices or for users of multiple PCs. And there’s no online version of it.

ClearContext is not nearly as pretty as Xobni, nor is it as easy to use. (I didn’t like having an interface split between a new menu and a dedicated toolbar.) But it’s a more powerful tool for organizing your e-mail inbox. If you can play by its rules, it could save you time.

There’s a short video on the product. The company is working on a version for Gmail.

See also: Xoopit.

The rest is here:
ClearContext tames Outlook

The e-mail helper app Xobni exits its private beta period Monday morning. Compared to the previous version of the app I tried (see “Handy e-mail helper“), Xobni is now faster and more stable, and thus more useful.

Xobni gives you a useful scorecard for each person who emails you. (Click for full image.)

A refresher: Xobni integrates into your Outlook installation and shows you more about your e-mails than Outlook can itself. For each person who sends you e-mail, it shows you who else they communicate with a lot (their de facto social networks), and it finds their phone number from inside their e-mails. It also shows you all conversation threads you’ve participated in with the person, and all the attachments they’ve sent you. You can drill into message threads (very useful), and it has a snappy e-mail search engine built in (nice, but redundant).

Unlike many other Outlook add-ons that I’ve tried, this one seems to add its functionality without dragging down Outlook’s performance, or worse, crashing it. It is useful and it doesn’t get in the way. There’s no reason not to try it. And it’s free.

Xobni is neat bit of programming, and Microsoft likes it so much it tried to buy the company. But Xobni walked away from the deal, CEO Jeff Bonforte told me. (Microsoft can’t seem to buy anything these days.) At first I thought that was a bad decision, since Xobni is hardly a must-have product. It improves Outlook a bit, sure. But the company is going to need more than this handy little plug-in to become a real business. Microsoft was an easy exit. Why didn’t Xobni go for it?

Xobni also extracts email threads. (Click to enlarge.)

Here’s what Xobni has up its sleeve: Xobni the app runs on Xobni the platform. This platform has hooks deep into Outlook. The platform is what enables Xobni to graft a viewing pane into Outlook, something other plug-ins can’t do. It can also integrate into Outlook’s default search bar (it doesn’t, yet). The platform is what gives Xobni access to all the message data that it uses without bogging down the Outlook host app.

Xobni plans to do two interesting things with the platform: First, write hooks into other e-mail apps (like Yahoo Mail and Gmail), and second, make the platform available to other vendors. So, for example, if Salesforce.com wants to write a plug-in that tightly integrates its CRM data into Outlook or whatever e-mail app its customers are using, Xobni’s toolkit could make that work. Salesforce presumably would make money from such a feature, which Xobni would profit from as well.

It turns out that Xobni is not really an Outlook plug-in company. Rather, it’s a company that makes a platform to abstract the difficult-to-write-for-Outlook, as well as other less-broken e-mail services, and that allows the creation of new products that integrate e-mail data with other apps. That’s good, since the business of painting incremental features onto Outlook is a bit shallow. The fundamental platform business is less visible to consumers, but it might actually make some money.

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Xobni makes Outlook better, but where’s the business?