A recent story in Network World shows one way that Microsoft will make future wins over to its cloud-based Office offerings, now called Office 365 and still in beta: with favorable enterprise pricing for Exchange Online.

Yes, that old war horse. The story has some intriguing analyses that were done for two government accounts that were considering both Office 365 and Google Apps. The city of Winston-Salem North Carolina had 2,700 Groupwise seats that they wanted to upgrade, and when took stock of what they had to buy from Google, plus that they really wanted to continue to use the rest of Microsoft’s Office suite, it made sense to choose Office 365. The same decision was made last week with the city of San Francisco and its more than 23,000 users spread across seven different email systems. San Francisco plans on recouping its million-dollar investment in Office 365 within two years.

While cost was a factor, Winston-Salem’s IT staff liked the archiving features and the ability to customize smartphone support that Microsoft offered.

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Cloud Services, Mobile Computing and Social Networking To Go Mainstream
Cloud services, mobile computing and social networking will mature and become a mainstream platform for the IT industry and the sectors these technologies support. That is according to researcher IDC.

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6 Lessons Google Learned About the Cloud
Google’s history of making search convenient and delivering sound online apps shows what other companies should do as they build cloud-based services.

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Although by no means a new technology, cloud computing retains the buzz as one of the latest innovative – and potentially transformative – elements of the industry. But there remains quite a bit of confusion about what exactly is meant by cloud computing, often making the question of whether or not your startup should be in the cloud difficult to answer.

Should you move (or launch) your startup into the cloud? Proponents of cloud computing will likely tell you unequivocally “yes.” more entrenched IT forces may respond with an unequivocal “no.”

Cloud Computing: Quick Definitions

There are three main categories of cloud computing.

Software as a Service (Saas): the most common use of the cloud, SaaS is also known as “software on demand.” rather than downloading and running software locally, customers access the software via the Internet.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): As the name suggests, PaaS involves the delivery of a computer platform, with the ability to develop and deploy websites and services via the Internet.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): IaaS provides all the basic computing building blocks, but is the most complex choice. This does allow you build your platform and your services.

Five Things to Consider Before Moving to the Cloud

1. Your Needs: Just as you would have to assess your computing needs out of the cloud, moving to the cloud requires some planning. Do you need a provider that offers a lot of flexibility? What are your performance and availability expectations? Will you need additional support and services?

2. Your Budget Although you will save money by avoiding hardware investment, hosting for the cloud is not necessarily cheaper. As the cloud treats computing like a utility, you are billed as such: depending on your usage.

3. Scalability and Flexibility Although cloud computing makes scaling easier, the ability to launch new, larger servers (or shrink to smaller instances)

4. Security Security may be one of the main arguments naysayers make against the cloud, with fears that co-location in the cloud is more of a threat than co-located hardware in the server room.

5. Backup Nothing is foolproof, and simply because you’re in the cloud does not mean you should forgo backups.

Despite the promise that cloud computing holds, you shouldn’t go into the decision naively (just as, hopefully, you wouldn’t make the same decision to buy a bunch of hardware without thorough research).

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A big question of any cloud-based OS is how it will handle local tasks such as printing. Today, that question is answered.

Googles Chromium blog goes in depth and gives two viable ways that printing will be handled in the cloud and through the cloud.

Traditional printers will work on a through basis, where the request will be sent to the cloud, then come back to a local printer. Conversely, cloud-aware printers would use a model where the data is pushed to the printer from the cloud.

More after the jump.

Theres some discussion as to whether this is the most efficient manner, and of course some are concerned with security. But when it comes to those of us who spend the vast majority of our time using online applications, this is a breakthrough.

Cloud printing would also allow for wireless printing from mobile devices, such as Android-based phones. Further, you could access your email or documents from any Internet connected computer and print your documents to an approved printer in a location of your choice.

Of course, Google being Google, we have a lovely graphic to help explain things:

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