While Microsoft Office 365 was been available free to students in the United States since 2012, Microsoft recently announced they are widening the opportunity to "any eligible student or teacher where Office 365 is available."

On February 11, "New York City council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viveritto announced that New YorkCity Department of Education is providing a free version of Office for the school system's 1.1 million students," reported EdTech magazine, and the global announcement came two weeks later.

According to Microsoft's Office Blogs, "Millions of students around the world are eligible for free Office from their school and today we are announcing that we've made it easy for all eligible students globally to sign up themselves to get Office 365 and install free Office. That includes the 5.5 million eligible students in Australia, the nearly 5 million eligible students in Germany, 7 million more in Brazil, 1.3 million at Anadolu University in Turkey, every student in Hong Kong and millions more."

The program will be cloud-based and include the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access and Publisher, in addition to 1 terabyte of storage per student.

"Microsoft's and Google's cloud-based education solutions have been at loggerheads for several years," reports EdTech. "The dispute further extends to cloud service providers such as Amazon, Dropbox and Apple, which offer storage solutions in the cloud."

Students can visit office.com/getoffice365 and teachers can visit office.com/teachers.

"Students getting Office at no additional cost to schools is a benefit Microsoft provides to education institutions that buy Office for faculty and staff. That means teachers can also sign up and enjoy all the benefits of Office connected to a cloud service, like using the OneNote Class Notebook," the Office Blog states.

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By Samantha DiMauro, Education World Contributor