Scepticism surrounds Office 365 sales claims

PCWorld says.

Office 365, a cloud collaboration and communication suite for organisations, launched in June, is selling eight times faster than its predecessor, the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), and is on track to become one of the company's fastest-growing products ever, Microsoft said on Tuesday.

The IT giant's dedication to promoting remote working was also highlighted, with Windows Phone 7.5 able to access and update documents from any location via a handset, Outsourcery reports.

Its update emerges after a high number of international firms adopted Microsoft Office 365 to enable employees and customers to collaborate within the cloud.

Analysts say Microsoft is hoping to get some of the roughly half a billion people worldwide who use Microsoft Office at work to start using Office 365, and expect the company to integrate its software into mobile products going forward, The Wall Street Journal notes.

"Office is the killer app in the Microsoft universe," said analyst Al Hilwa of IDC, an industry research group. "They see this as a long-term play."