Microsoft Plans to Give Office 365 to Students For Free

With Office 365, Microsoft now set its sights on college students to give it a try. They already make a heavily discounted $80/4 years version of Office 365 University available to students.

They had announced a new offer for college students with

- 3 months of free Office 365 access

-  Another 3 months when they share the offer on Facebook

-  In addition to this, get 20GB of storage on SkyDrive (A Microsoft product)

Microsoft launched this campaign because, They has seen a lot of excitement among customers as they use SkyDrive to access documents and can collaborate anywhere on any device. So, Microsoft thought that students are group who can give direct feedback for these types of tools.

Microsoft’s biggest competitor in this space is obviously Google, which makes its Google Drive apps available for free. However it is, still Microsoft Office is arguably a rich product and also using at many campuses. But Microsoft’s hold on the academic world is slowly shrinks despite quite a few colleges who have adopted Office 365 for Education.

Download Office 365 free for 6 months here. You must provide .edu email address

This deal is clearly meant to lock students into the Microsoft Office ecosystem early, but given that the documents are all in standard formats. Obviously you can always leave and take your documents with you.
After the trial period, the Office apps changed to read-only mode, you can only view and print the documents. But the files are obviously still yours to download from SkyDrive.

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Written by Prem

Prem Mohan is a Blogger who's passion is to write or provides information related to Search Engine Updates.