News

Microsoft Previews Office 365 Kiosk Plan Changes

• By Kurt Mackie
• February 04, 2012

Microsoft announced some upcoming enhancements to the so called "kiosk worker" plans in its Office 365 offering last month.

Office 365 is a cloud-based productivity suite that includes hosted versions of Office, Lync, Exchange and SharePoint. It represents multitenant hosting services from Microsoft or its partners that deliver Microsoft's software as services to organizations.

Kiosk workers are Microsoft's designation for employees who don't have a desk or who share a PC, such as retail workers. Microsoft offers an Exchange Online Kiosk Plan and an Office 365 Kiosk Plan as part of Office 365.

Both of those plans are getting added support for Exchange ActiveSync, a Microsoft technology that helps synchronize mobile devices with Microsoft's e-mail server. In addition, both plans will get their e-mail storage capacities doubled from 500 MB to 1 GB. The pricing for both plans with these enhancements will remain unchanged at $2 per user per month for the Exchange Online Kiosk Plan and $4 per user per month for the Office 365 Kiosk Plan.

In addition, Microsoft will offer a new "Exchange Online Archiving" add-on to those kiosk plans that will enable "legal hold and unlimited storage" on those accounts. The price for this add-on is an additional $3.50 per user per month on top of the kiosk plan charge.

Microsoft did not specify when those new kiosk plan enhancements will be available.

See Also:

• Office 365 on the 2012 Microsoft Product Roadmap