Empowering customers to be productive anywhere and on any device
Hong Kong, April 23, 2014 — Microsoft Hong Kong today announced a new partnership, new products and new customers for Office 365 to further expand the service coverage and benefits to more consumers and organizations in Hong Kong and the new market of Macau. A new Office product, Office 365 Personal, has been added to the portfolio to compliment Office 365 Home along with new capabilities including Office for iPad and Office Online for mobile scenarios. This further showcases Microsoft’s mobile-first, cloud-first strategy and reinforces its cloud and mobile leadership.
“Microsoft is focused on delivering the cloud for everyone, on every device. It’s a unique approach of ‘work wonders, work anywhere’ that centers on people – enabling the devices you love, to work with the services you love. These announcements on a new partnership, new Office capabilities and a new market will enable more people to enjoy Office productivity when and where they need it. We are glad that in addition to new commercial customers, 8 out of 10 local universities are enjoying the benefits of Office 365,” said Horace Chow, general manager of Microsoft Hong Kong.
New partnership with Hutchison Global Communications (HGC) in launching Office 365 Home
Microsoft announced a new partnership with 3Home Broadband, the residential fixed-line service of HGC, to jointly introduce an exciting new family productivity package, enabling local households in to enjoy the utmost in productivity and cloud flexibility, at home and while on the go, across most devices and platforms.
“Office 365 Home is a cost effective solution which is ideal for family productivity uses. It has added improved family sharing capability to share the benefits of Office more easily with family members getting extra OneDrive storage,” said Horace Chow, general manager of Microsoft Hong Kong. “HGC provides high-speed broadband service with extensive coverage. It is unquestionably a great partner for Microsoft to launch Office 365 Home. We believe that our new partnership will bring consumers a ubiquitous and unparalleled productivity experience.”
“3Home Broadband is pleased to partner with Microsoft to launch Office 365 Home, as we share the same vision of transforming the way people work and learn with technology, thus improving the quality of our customers’ lives,” said , Consumer Market Director of Hutchison Global Communications Limited. “We believe that this partnership will bring customers of both companies an enhanced Office productivity suite, enabling them to enjoy real-time collaborative working and learning experiences through the combined strength of our ultra-fast residential broadband and “hgc on air” out-of-home Wi-Fi services, together with Office 365 Home.”
New customers subscribing to designated 3Home Broadband’s service plans will enjoy a one-year free subscription for Office 365 Home. Designated plans start from 100M at $165 per month to 1G at $225 per month, which include both indoor and out-of-home Wi-Fi services.
New and updated capabilities of Office 365
- Office 365 Personal — Office 365 Personal is a cost effective subscription offering for individuals that enables customer to install the latest full desktop version of Office applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook, on 1 PC or Mac, in addition to 1 Windows tablet or iPad. At an annual subscription price of just $540 HKD per annum or $54 HKD per month, Office 365 Personal delivers great value for money.
- Office 365 Home — Renamed from Office 365 Home Premium, Office 365 Home has added improved family sharing capability to make it easier to share the benefits of Office to up to 5 PCs or Macs and 5 Tablets within the family. In addition each family member gets an extra 20Gbytes of OneDrive storage.
- Office for iPad and free Office apps for iPhone and Android phones — In meeting the demand for Office productivity tools on all devices, Office 365 subscribers can take full advantage of the new Office for iPad, now available for download at the iTunes App Store. Office for iPad lets users read, view and present documents, spreadsheets and presentations for free. With an Office 365 Personal or Office 365 Home subscription, users unlock the power to edit their documents on-the-go and enjoy the robust capabilities and the familiar look and feel that is unmistakably Office, while enjoying a fantastic touch experience that Microsoft has built from the ground up for iPad. In the first week of launch, there were more than 12 million downloads of these apps, and was among the top 5 markets for downloads. Office is now free for iPhone and Android Phone – joining Windows Phone which is already free.
- Office Online — Office Online at Office.com is a free online version of Office for consumers. Previously called Office Web Apps, Office Online with new updated features including the addition of real-time co-authoring, will make the online Office experience even easier for users to find, share and collaborate with others. Now, users can not only collaborate better with Office Online, but also save documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online, in OneDrive.
- OneNote now on Mac, free everywhere, and service powered – OneNote is the ultimate extension for our brain: it revolutionized the way we capture, annotate, and recall all the ideas, thoughts, snippets and plans in our life. With the latest update, OneNote is now available for free on all platforms you care about: PC, Mac, Windows tablets, Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Android, and the Web. They are always in-sync and enable any application to connect to it – makes it easier than ever to capture ideas, information and inspirations from more places straight into OneNote.
Office 365 expands to new market and showcases strong customer momentum
Microsoft also announced today that it has expanded Office 365 availability to Macau, offering the same unparalleled cloud and mobile benefits to businesses, academic and non-profit organizations in .
In Hong Kong, Office 365 continues to gain traction with service adoption growth in triple digits year-on-year. The Crown Worldwide Group is a new commercial customer of Office 365. The Crown Worldwide Group operates from 265 locations in almost 60 countries, providing its customers with mobility, transportation and logistics services.
“With such a broad geographical coverage, our success relies on real-time collaboration, instant knowledge sharing and the ability to work anywhere,” said Chris Davis-Pipe, Group Vice President of Information Technology, Crown Worldwide Group. “We’ve used Lotus Notes for 15 years but it’s time to refresh our communication and collaboration strategy to meet modern business needs and increase our appeal to Gen-Y staff. Office 365 offers us enterprise-class productivity tools, mobile capabilities and a great social platform creating a cohesive platform that our teams love to engage with. We expect to complete migration for all 3,000 office staff around the world to Office 365 before the end of September 2014.”
In 2012, Microsoft launched Office 365 for Education to benefit the local academic sector. To date, 8 out of 10 local universities are enjoying the benefits of Office 365. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) is one of the top universities which have recently migrated to Office 365, and upon completion it will be one of the biggest Office 365 education deployments in . HKUST started its deployment of Office 365 for users in March 2014, and all new student email accounts will be provisioned on Office 365. Office 365 will roll out in phases for all students and alumni of the university, a total of about 68,000 users.
“HKUST chose Office 365, a modern communication and collaboration platform that delivers the power of cloud productivity, better security, lower costs, greater mobility on multiple devices and platforms, anytime, anywhere,” Dr Samuel Kwan, Director of IT Services of HKUST. “Security and privacy are among the major considerations in choosing cloud service. Microsoft has given us strong assurance of Office 365’s compliance with high standards of security and privacy. In addition, Microsoft also guaranteed us that no user data will be used for unauthorized purposes.”
“Office is the most widely used productivity tool around the world. Providing Office 365 for our students will empower them with the right skillsets and increase their job readiness when they graduate and enter the workforce. HKUST also benefited notably from the help of Microsoft’s local support team in the whole deployment process, particularly from the comprehensive program of administrative training, help desk training, and end user training sessions,” added Dr Kwan.
In addition The Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) is one of the committed customers of Office 365.
Consumers can purchase Office 365 Personal from Retail outlets or Online, and they can purchase Office 365 Home from HGC and have the option of a free trial of Office 365 Home from www.office.com.
Commercial customers from Hong Kong and can evaluate Office 365 from www.office.com and should contact their resellers for current promotional offers. With a limited time up to June 30, 2014, customers can get 1 year free subscription of OneDrive for Business – 25GB Cloud Storage– with the purchase of Office 365 ProPlus under the Open License program. OneDrive for Business is Microsoft’s commercial file storage offering.
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About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
