Office 365 - what's in it for you? Speak your brains

Live Chat Microsoft Office is the planet’s most ubiquitous productivity suite and Word and Excel still set the standard on personal productivity apps.

The way the software suite is embedded in each office's day-to-day business means that with each new update, Microsoft finds itself struggling to convince people to upgrade. After all, the enterprise in general is known for its tendency to cling to what it's used to.

This time, there’s a new challenge - and it’s not Google Docs: it's the web. Microsoft released Office 2013 with an updated Office 365, a package of webbified Office apps such as Word and Excel combined with Microsoft hosted versions of Exchange, Lync and SharePoint once found in the old Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).

In a world where people are computing on tablets and through the browser, Microsoft has introduced changes to make Office 365 appealing to the cloudy BYOD crowd... Just don’t expect a seamless, admin-free migration.

Microsoft has also thrown up some pricing and packaging fences around Office 365 to protect the existing on-premises, one-machine Office 2013 business.

Join The Reg’s Trevor Pott and Neil McAllister, All About Microsoft’s Mary-Jo Foley and Reg readers this Friday at 3pm UK to put Office 365 under the microscope.

We’ll thread our way through the Office 365 and Office 2013 features and licensing maze, look at what’s inside the subscription-based collaboration package and why it matters, find out how Office 365 slots into Microsoft’s productivity apps and its cloud strategy, and why some organisations are embracing Office 365 rather than playing the traditional waiting game. We talk browsers, SharePoint, Skype, Lync, Yammer and more - and also look ahead to Gemini, the successor to Office 2013.

Kick-off is 3pm BST, 2pm GMT, 10am Eastern, or 7am Pacific, and you can register in the box below (yes, we know the timezone in the iframe is wrong). ®