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Microsoft reveals Office 365 Home Premium Australian pricing

The vendor's cloud Office applications service is now available to "busy households and people juggling ever-increasing work and family responsibilities."
Written by Spandas Lui, Contributor

Microsoft has released the home edition of Office 365, along with the pricing for the cloud service in Australia.

The IT giant launched the small business and enterprise version of the subscription-based Office service in June 2011. The Home Premium consumer edition has been made to cater for "busy households and people juggling ever-increasing work and family responsibilities."

All of the latest Office applications, including Word, Excel, OneNote, and Outlook, are a part of Office 365.

A subscription to Home Premium Office 365 can give users access to the cloud applications for up to five Windows tablets, PCs, and Apple Mac computers. The package also includes 20GB of SkyDrive cloud storage space and 60 minutes of Skype call credit per month for selected countries.

The total cost of the service annually is AU$119. New features for Office will be delivered first through the cloud service, which is a shake-up from the company's traditional three-year release cycle. When the subscription expires, users enter a "read-only reduced-functionality mode," where existing documents can be viewed or printed but cannot be edited.

"With Windows 8, new Windows Phones, and the new Office, it's a new era at Microsoft," the vendor's Office division director Oscar Trimboli said in a statement.

Microsoft Office 365 University was also released today, which was made for university students and staff for a four-year subscription fee of AU$99.

New business Office 365 users that were waiting for the release of updated packages will have to wait until February.

The vendor has unveiled a new crowd-sourcing website called Time to 365 for users of Office 365 to share tips on how to use the applications in the new service.

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