Schools To Get Free MS Office 365 From Microsoft

Microsoft is making an interesting offer to schools, with its new office product. Yes!, Schools that make use of Office 365 for academic purposes will be happy to hear the recent announcement made by Anthony Salcito, Microsoft's VP for education. In a post on his blog, Salcito declared the launch of a new product called Office 365 for Education, which will provide schools with a comprehension cloud-based collaborative platform made by Schools.

Office 365 for Education will include almost all features of the enterprise version of the product, and will be available to academic institutions for free. Office 365 is already utilized by many school districts, colleges and universities around the country including Dartmouth, Cornell, the ennessee Department of Education and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools.

In addition, the platform was recently selected by the Scottish Government to power their Glow project, which connects more than 1.2 million teachers and students across the country.

There are many schools across Europe moving to Office 365, including the University of Dundee that is moving off Novell Group Wise to expand communication capabilities on campus. These schools join other large academic institutional and countrywide commitments to Office 365, such as the India Council for Technical Education wit 7.5 million users and the Catholic International Education Office with over 4.5 million users across 102 countries.

It will take about a year and a half to fully transition to the the new platform, so the Catholic International Education Office will continue its contract with RM Education at least until December of next year. However, according to TMCnet, some of the schools have already started using Office 365 when classes began this academic year.