After a year or two of sticking a toe in the managed-services waters, Microsoft has decided to take the full software-as-a-service plunge — at least for some of its enterprise apps.

Contrary to rumors circulating around the blogosphere over the weekend, the company is not rolling out a Web-based version of Office. Instead, Microsoft is expanding the scope of its Microsoft-managed business services around SharePoint and Exchange, as company officials told me under an embargo on Friday.

Until now, Microsoft was offering what it has branded SharePoint Online and Exchange Online — a k a Microsoft-hosted versions of its SharePoint Server and Exchange Server products — only to very large enterprise customers with 5,000 users or more. But on March 3, Microsoft will be opening up a beta of Microsoft-hosted SharePoint and Exchange (via which Microsoft hosts your service and your data) to companies of any size.

Microsoft officials are stressing that the company is not moving away from its “Software plus Services” strategy/branding, via which the company is offering customers a choice of running Microsoft software on-premise, via Microsoft partners and/or in Microsoft datacenters, hosted by Microsoft. But with this latest announcement, there’s no denying Microsoft is accelerating its presence in the managed service space, which Google, Salesforce.com and others of its services-focused competitors dominate.

Microsoft has attracted a small handful of corporate users (lead off by Energizer Holdings) to pony up for Microsoft-hosted services. But starting March 3, customers of any size can request a spot in a limited beta for Microsoft-hosted e-mail, calendaring, shared workspaces, and web conferencing and videoconferencing. Microsoft officials said the final version of these standalone Microsoft-managed services will be available sometime in the latter half of 2008.

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