Microsoft opens up Office 365 as public beta

Microsoft has opened the tap on its cloud-based Office 365 and is now offering the service as a public beta for anyone to try out.

Available in 38 countries and in 17 languages, the new beta follows several months of limited testing among a couple thousand businesses that were able to kick the tires on the service. After the public beta, Office 365 will officially launch later this year.

Unveiled last October, Office 365 is Microsoft's attempt to offer businesses a cloud-based alternative to some of its traditional desktop and server products. The service combines Office Web Apps with hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint as well as Microsoft's Lync product, which provides the online communication and collaboration piece.

As such, Office 365 is designed to offer a gamut of features, including document creation and sharing, e-mail, IM, online meetings, and public Web sites. Microsoft is also including protection in the form of its enterprise ForeFront security client and is promising a 99.9 percent uptime for the entire service.

Once it officially launches, Office 365 will be offered as two different plans depending on the size of the company. Smaller businesses with 25 or fewer employees can pay $6 per person per month to receive Office Web Apps and the hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint. Larger enterprises will have to choose one of four different plans at a cost of anywhere from $10 to $27 per person per month.

In addition to targeting the business world, Microsoft is reaching out to the educational market with five different plans geared toward faculty, staff, and students.

Also now available as a beta is the Office 365 Marketplace. Designed to supplement Office 365, the marketplace tries to help businesses find apps and services offered by different Microsoft partners.

CNET reporter Josh Lowensohn took Office 365 for a spin last November to evaluate the service's pros and cons. He found that everything worked as advertised, but that, as things stood at the time, "Google Apps this is not."

Facing The New Evil Of Facebook Depression

 While the whole idea might sound absurd but researchers have coined a new phrase called ‘’Facebook depression ‘’ for a kind of depression that might be caused to certain teens by the excess usage of Facebook. Dr. Gwenn O’ Keefe of Boston has supported the whole idea of how updates on a social networking site can actually be very perturbing for a teenager who suffers from low self-esteem.

Many kids are always conscious of having an imperfect life that is not half as
happening as other peers. When these teens keep receiving updates from other friends of photographs of happy moments that they have captured with near and dear ones and boastful or happy status messages on how lucky they are in life, these just add salt to the wound of the already depressed lot. This is when the additional impact of facebook to their low self-esteem can be called Facebook Depression.

It is not easy to combat this kind of depression at a time when social networking is on a high. However, one of the methods that paediatricians and psychologists suggest is that parents should be aware of what is going on in their teenage offspring’s lives.

This can solve the problem largely. Once parents are aware they can emotionally support their kids in a more reassuring way by dealing with the problem directly and talking about it. Low self-esteem can be cured by motivation and parents are the best people in motivating teenage children who really need it to regain their confidence.