Office 365 University will be available in first quarter of 2013, but if you are eager to use this and of course if you are eligible for it in first place, you can purchase Office University 2010 or Office University for Mac 2011 “and receive a free subscription to Office 365 University when it becomes available.” Office goodies are not all the subscribers will get, there is also 20GB of extra SkyDrive storage, making it total of 27GB and 60 minutes of free international Skype calls. Office 365 Home Premium edition can be installed on up to 5 computers but the University edition is limited to two PC's.

This is not the only project Microsoft has for students, for example there is also DreamSpark, formerly Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance, where participating schools pay an annual fee for the service, and them students gets licensed copies of Microsoft Software, like Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, even Windows (mostly professional versions). It is always nice to see that students get this kind of software cheaper if not for free via their universities, and hopefully more of these projects will be present in future.

[Ed – We told you that Microsoft would be pushing their cloud services harder up to and right after the launch of Windows 8. They feel it is going to be their main revenue stream in the future. This will be a big push for many development companies; they want to tie you to services that keep you dumping money into their companies.  Right now Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Server 2012 are the first steps to put both the consumer and businesses into the cloud. Whether or not these two markets go willingly or make Microsoft pay for this attempt at control is another matter…]

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