Microsoft has unveiled two new families of services positioned in the cloud: Online and Live. The initiative is nothing more than another step in the natural evolution of the Redmond company's Software plus Services Business approach. The Online and Live Microsoft families are essentially a bundle of client, server and service products addressed at both end-users and businesses with the purpose of making available various options of connected computing. Online and Live spell the next stage of client programs combined with server software and in the cloud services synthesized and offered under the two families of online offerings.

"Microsoft plans to deliver a wide variety of new solutions over the coming months under two key families of service offerings: "Live" and "Online." As part of this announcement, we are launching Microsoft Office Live Workspace, a Web-based feature of Microsoft Office that enables people to access their documents online anywhere and easily share their work with others. Testing continues on another of our new services offerings, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and I'm thrilled to say that the reception this new offering has received during an early access program has been great. We are also excited to announce that today Microsoft opened Exchange Labs, a new research and development program for testing next-generation messaging and unified communications capabilities in high-scale environments," revealed Microsoft Business Division President Jeff Raikes.

The Redmond company is building a bridge between client software, server programs and online services, and in this context, it advances its vision of Software plus Services. First, Microsoft focuses on the businesses with the following online services: Exchange Online; Office SharePoint Online and Office Communications Online. Dynamics Live CRM , a set of on-premise and partner-hosted solutions, has also transitioned under the Live umbrella brand.

In addition, an update was delivered for BizTalk Services, a solution set up to permit an advanced level of interconnectivity between business systems. Corporate users can also access Exchange Labs, a research and development program that will permit users to test-drive the latest next-generation messaging and unified communication solutions. And through the Office Live Workspace, Microsoft is delivering an online extension of the office System, permitting users to view and share up to 1,000 documents.

"We believe that the future of technology at work will be a combination of local software on client PCs or on-premise servers, along with services available in the "cloud." Our approach is to give customers the choice, flexibility and power of both software plus services. Think of it as a continuum, ranging from pure software to pure services approaches. Most customers will be somewhere in the middle. Different customers will make different decisions and even customers with similar situations will make different decisions for what they want on-premise and what they want as a service from the cloud," Raikes added.