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Gary Edwards

Business Process Documentation: Automate It! | CIO - 0 views

  • Training Documents. Creating step-by step-documents for training business users on how to perform normal process activities (such as creating a new order or processing a shipment), has historically been time consuming, tedious, and quickly outdated. With software like Worksoft AnalyzeTM, step-by step-training materials include a narrative of each process step along with sample data, full screenshots, and even highlighted data entry fields used for every transaction. Results are automatically generated in MS Word or PDF documents. Best of all, when part of a process changes (because a business user has captured a process in a new way), new documentation is generated with the click of a button. With automation software, the generation of training material is automatic, and automatically updated.
  • Audit & Compliance Documents. When external or internal auditors are deployed in your organization, one of the first things they ask for is a description of the processes used in your business. In my experience this is time-consuming and takes away valuable time from your team’s normal activities. In addition to detailed, plain-English process narratives described above, Worksoft Analyze allows you to provide auditors with up-to-date flow charts describing the overall process (when an overview is needed), as well as detailed step-by-step documentation. Manual steps or signature approval blocks can be easily added because the process description is generated in easy-to-edit formats, like MS Word. There’s much more we could discuss, so don’t hesitate to contact me if you’d like to continue the conversation. Next time, we will describe how you can layer analytics on top of captured business process flows for process optimization, streamlining, and re-engineering.
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    "Audit. Compliance. Team training. Process re-engineering. Every one of these activities requires that your team have accurate business process documentation in-hand to maximize success. Is it optional? Not really. For a variety of reasons, complex enterprises need to have a firm understanding of how they actually conduct business and "how things really work around here." And it needs to be written down in a way that your team, your auditors, your regulators, and your business analysts will understand and be able to use and customize for their intended purpose. Challenges. The problem is that generating and maintaining accurate business process documentation is a real pain because it's time consuming and difficult. The knowledge of the process has to come from business users and business analysts, whose time is expensive - and any time spent creating documentation takes them away from their primary mission of running the business. Even worse, once this hard-won information is captured, it can become out-of-date in a matter of days or weeks as business processes change over time. The cost of documenting your business processes can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct costs for consultants, interviewers, and document preparation - not to mention your team's opportunity cost which can be much greater. An Automation Path. If you've made it this far, it's because you're looking for a better way - and the good news is that automation provides today's most effective solution. With software for automated business process documentation, the business user turns on a process "capture" feature from their desktop toolbar when executing a business process in their enterprise application of choice, such as SAP or a web application. When the process is complete, they simply turn off the capture feature. Every business process function, keystroke, and transaction has been uploaded into the automation software. In this way, the softwar
Gary Edwards

MS Office 365 and its Influence on Business - 0 views

  • “MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats”
  • Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats.
  • Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted.
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  • Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.).
  • There are three essential reasons why Office 365 will be highly demanded by business: - Business currently needs services for collaborative editing of the huge documents as well as for arrangement and management of their ample quantities; provision of the required safety level in the document workflow systems without additional expenses. Set of the Microsoft services and its integration with MS Office 365 offer solution for these tasks with some minor reservations. -Integration of MS Office 365 with existing services and employment of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions for organization of the document workflow are also the promising trends. -Good results can be expected from employment of the cloud-based Azure platform for extension of the MS Office 365 capacities and building process setup and document workflow systems in the small and mid-sized business environment.
  • But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats.
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    "Microsoft Office 365: what is important for business to know about the "cloud-based" office? Cloud-based service Microsoft Office 365 has become more and more popular solution for managing document workflow in companies. Subsequently, the number of MS Office 365 subscribers is growing by tens percent every year. For instance in the third quarter of 2015 the cloud-based services Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM became the principal drivers of the profit markup of Microsoft. Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats. Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted. Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.). "MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats" "
Gary Edwards

ONLYOFFICE Documents - ONLYOFFICE - 0 views

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    "The Documents app for iOS allows you to access the files stored in your ONLYOFFICE account on your mobile device, view and edit existing text documents, create new ones and organize them. Supported devices The application runs under iOS 8.0 or higher. Documents will open in the editing mode on iPad Air and later tablet models. On older tablet models and iPhones, documents will open in the viewing mode only. Application sections Tap icons at the left panel to switch between the Documents sections. ONLYOFFICE for corporate use contains the following sections: My Documents is a section that contains your personal documents; Shared with Me is a section that contains documents that were shared with you by other portal users; Common Documents is a section that contains files and folders available to all portal users; Project Documents is a section that contains folders corresponding to existing projects from the portal 'Projects' module; Recycle Bin is a section where all deleted files are stored and can be restored or permanently deleted later."
Gary Edwards

The Same Page : Acrobat and Word for Commenting Part 2: Export PDF Comments Back to Word - 0 views

  • Marking the valid ones with a checkmark by right-clicking the comments and choosing “Mark with Checkmark” or just clicking the checkbox to the left of the comments in the Comment List of the Comments Navigation Panel. Note that this checkmark won’t appear in the document when viewed by others. Otherwise… Right-click on a comment and choose “Set Status > Review” and either “Accepted” or “Rejected”. You can also do this from the Comments List. Others will see this status for the comment as part of the review.
  • Export PDF Comments From Acrobat to Word To get started, choose Comments > Export Comments to Word… in Acrobat, or if you have the Comments list open, choose Export Comments to Word… from the Comments List Options button. What this will do is launch Microsoft Word, if it isn’t open already, and now that you are there, open the “Import Comments from Adobe Acrobat” wizard [I know, I know, that’s not the exact title of this article, but it is the same thing really]. If you are already in Word, or have the original DOC/DOCX document open, you can also go to the Acrobat ribbon (or menu) and choose “Import Comments from Acrobat…” under “Acrobat Comments”. If you haven’t been through this before, a screen of instructions will appear first: click OK to continue. You will then see one of three possible scenarios, depending on how you launched the wizard:
  • If you are coming from Acrobat in this step, the PDF file you had open before with all the comments will be shown under “Take comments from this PDF file:”. If you launched the wizard from within Word and the source DOC/DOCX file was open, it will be listed under “Place comments in this Word file:”. By default, the wizard will look for a PDF file in the same folder and with the same file name, and if it finds it, lists that too. It’s assuming that PDF file is the one that has comments. If you got to the wizard from Word with no file open, both fields will be blank.
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  • All Comments. This includes drawing markups such as polygons and callouts. If a comment or markup has a pop-up with text in it, then this will be made the text for the Word comment. The PDF comment or markup type, and the date that the comment was made, are also added to the Word comment text. For example, “Comment [08/21/09#3]:Highlight: The text from the pop-up.” All Comments with Checkmarks.This will only include comments and markup that you checked off using Acrobat’s Comments List, for example. Text Edits only: Insertions, Deletions and Replaces. This will just integrate the suggested changes to the Word document, and not just add the Text Edits as Word comments. Custom Filters, for the comments you would like to include and apply. With this option you can be choosy about what is imported and applied to the Word document, including which authors comments you would like incorporated. For example, you can specify that only comments and markup that you have checked and accepted be imported by the wizard. Everything else will be ignored.
  • Finally for this part, as you can see from the previous image, you can also instruct the wizard to turn on Word’s Track Changes feature so you can see what gets changed once the wizard has completed its task. Once you are back at the start of the wizard, the real fun begins when you click the “Continue” button. First, the wizard will go ahead and import all the PDF comments into the Word document (unless you filtered them using the options I mentioned before). You should see them over on the right hand side of the pages, as expected with Word comments, pointing to the location where they were originally added to the PDF file. You will get the best results here if the Word document was converted to a PDF file using Acrobat PDFMaker and was tagged, but it still works otherwise. The wizard will then report back on how many comments were imported to Word, breaking it up by Text Edits and Other Comments:
  • If you thought that was cool, just wait for the next part…Integrate Text Edits is the next optional step (click Cancel to skip it), and it does just what it says on the tin. The wizard will go through the imported insertion, deletion or replacement Text Edits comments, and apply those changes for you. Acrobat is even doing your work for you now! You can apply or discard them one-by-one by clicking on the appropriate button. You can then either click “Next”, or check the “Automatically go to next” option, and the wizard will jump to the next Text Edit comment and move the dialog and document so you can see the highlighted area to be changed. If you know you want to apply them all because you have already checked and/or accepted them in Acrobat beforehand, go ahead and click “Apply All Remaining”.
  • You don’t have to use what you see in the “New Text” field. As you can see in this example, a typo was missed in the original Text Edit comment: I don’t believe the author of this document really wants to extol the virtues of causing unwanted and annoying color changes to garments, but would rather mention the commitment to environmentally responsible practices [granted, I am the one who made the mistake]. Just go ahead and type in to that field what the text should be, and that is what the wizard will use. Once all the changes have been applied, the wizard wraps things up by giving you a final report on the text integrations it made, with a couple of tips for cleaning things up in your Word document via the Acrobat ribbon/menu, including merging tracked changes and deleting comment bubbles.
  • Now think back to what you just read or tried yourself, and how you would have gotten to that same result before. If you were lucky to have two monitors, you may have the PDF and DOC/DOCX files open side-by-side and visually scanned from comment to comment applying those changes as you saw fit. If you had only one monitor, it was either a) very large or b) you are beginning to wear out your Alt and Tab keys on your keyboard. You may also have printed out the PDF document with comments, or the Comments Summary from Acrobat, and visually scanned that for changes to make [not very (su)stainable]. Either way, it was a process that was certainly slower than using Acrobat’s Export(Import) Comments command, and probably had a greater risk of introducing errors or missing important changes. Give this real time-saver a try and see how it works out for you. Remember, for best results use a PDF document that was created from the same Word document using Acrobat PDFMaker – no refrigeration after opening required.
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    "Acrobat and Word for Commenting Part 2: Export PDF Comments Back to Word In Part 1 of this article, I wrote about exporting comments in a Microsoft Word document to a PDF file with comments when using Acrobat PDFMaker. When converting Microsoft Office files to PDF documents it is important, possibly even critical, to preserve as much information from the source as possible, and to have the option to be selective about it: Acrobat PDFMaker can help you there. But the really productive part is after you have received comments from others on a PDF version of the document, possibly via a Shared Review. That is the time you will want to apply - or integrate - the changes to the source Word document: you got it, Acrobat can help you out here too by exporting PDF comments from Acrobat back to Word. [As I stated in Part 1, this method applies only to supported versions of Microsoft Word on Windows. Apologies to my Mac brothers and sisters.] Before you get started, I suggest opening the PDF file with comments, going through the feedback and suggested changes from reviewers. This is so you ca determine what is exported to Word and then integrated for you [this is optional, but will save you some time later if you have a lot of suggested changes, some of which you know won't be integrated]. You can do one or both of the following: "
Gary Edwards

Native Documents Viewer-Editor-PDF Converter - 0 views

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    Native Documents on line view-edit-pdf converter. Drag and drop a native Office document to view and edit. And convert that ND to PDF. This Web Service also demonstrates ND deep messaging. EX: Drag and drop a native Office document and the browser will open the document for viewing and editing. Highlight a section of the document that you want to discuss. The URL will reflect this highlight. Copy the URL and paste into another app such as Slack, and slack will display the highlighted text as a message. The reason this deep messaging is significant is that ND captures the moment of conversation and records the action. The basic idea behing deep messaging is that the conversations that surround in-process documents is logged with the document. When these in-process documents are loaded into worklow WORD processors, the conversations appear in the "documents" comments, with each comment connected to the relevant highlighted portion. Very cool! Very productive.
Gary Edwards

Gigaom | 'Work Processing' and the decline of the (Wordish) Document - 0 views

  • Chat-centric work management, as typified by Slack-style work chat, is getting a tremendous surge in attention recently, and is the now dominant form of message-centric work technology, edging out follow-centric work media solutions (like Yammer, Jive, and IBM Connections).
  • Workforce communications — relying on a more top-down messaging approach for the mobile workforce — is enjoying a great surge in adoption, but is principally oriented toward the ‘hardwork’ done by workers in retail, manufacturing, transport, security, and construction, and away from the ‘softwork’ done by office workers. This class of tool is all about mobile messaging. (Note: we are planning a market narrative about this hot area.)
  • Today’s Special Advertisement Today, I saw that David Byttow’s Bold — a new work processing app — has entered a private beta, with features that line it up in direct competition with Google Docs and the others mentioned above. Bold raised a round of $1 million from Index Ventures in January 2016. Advertisement The competition is hotting up.
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  • Work Processing Will Be The New Normal Advertisement What I anticipate is the convergence on a work processing paradigm, with at least these features: Advertisement Work processing ‘docs’ will exist as online assemblages, and not as ‘files’. As a result they will be principally shared through links, access rights, or web publishing, and not as attachments, files, or PDFs, except when exported by necessity. Work processing apps will incorporate some metaphors from word processing like styling text, manipulating various sorts of lists, sections, headings, and so on. Work processing will continue the notions of sharing and co-editing from early pioneers (Google Docs in particular), like edit-oriented comments, sharing through access-control links, and so on. Work processing will lift ideas from work chat tools, such as bots, commands, and @mentions. Work processing will adopt some principles from task management, namely tasks and related metadata, which can be embedded within work processing content, added in comments or other annotations, or appended to ‘docs’ or doc elements by participants through work chat-style bot or chat communications.
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    "I've been exploring a growing list of web-based tools for the creation and management of what most would call 'documents' - assemblages of text, images, lists, embedded video, audio and other media - but which, are in fact, something quite different than the precursors, like Microsoft Word and Apple Pages documents. The big shift underlying these new tools is that they are not oriented around printing onto paper, or digital analogues of paper, like PDF. Instead, they take as a given that the creation, management, and sharing of these assemblages of information will take place nearly all the time online, and will be social at the core: coediting, commenting, and sharing are not afterthoughts grafted onto a 'work processing' architecture. As a result, I am referring to these tools - like the pioneering Google Docs, and newer entrants Dropbox Paper, Quip, Draft, and Notion - as 'work processing' tools. This gets across the idea that we aren't just pushing words onto paper through agency of word processing apps, we're capturing and sharing information that's critical to our increasingly digital businesses, to be accessed and leveraged in digital-first use cases. In a recent piece on Medium, Documents are the new Email, I made the case that old style 'documents' are declining as a percentage of overall work communications, with larger percentages shifting to chat, texting, and work media (enterprise social networks). And, like email, documents are increasingly disliked as a means to communicate. And I suggested that, over time, these older word processing documents - and the use cases that have built up around them - will decline. At the same time, I believe there is a great deal of promise in 'work processing' tools, which are based around web publishing, web notions of sharing and co-creation, and the allure of content-centric work management."
Gary Edwards

Learn from past mistakes to avoid Amazon lock-in: Office 365 - 0 views

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    Hey David! The horses have left the barn. Unlike the last great platform transition, the move to the Cloud involves moving billion and billions of existing data bits and documents. Much of this content (data + documents) is valuable "in-process" information vital to the current operations of legacy business systems. The last time there was a platform shift it was from the Mainframe-workstation era to the PC client-server era. Digital information was in its infancy. Today the volumes of digital business information is enormous. Meaning, the horses have already left the barn. The lock-in is set. Volumes of document content is locked into Microsoft Office applications, and can only be "worked" by either Microsoft Office, or Office 365. No business is going to move their systems to the Cloud and leve these billions of "in-process" documents behind. Another aspect to consider is the productivity equation which says that collaboration = the integration of communications and content (data + documents). ALL THREE must be integrated!!! Meaning if Microsoft apps have billions of documents locked up, an enterprise cannot make a decision based on best communications or data integration. They must choose Microsoft's Cloud where all THREE aspects can be integrated. This is the hook that has made Office 365 the most successful Cloud mover ever (85 million subscribers with an annual run rate of $13.5 billion - and all this after only two years in the marketplace) Quote: "The majority of IT decision-makers believe that vendor lock-in prevents their companies from maximizing the business value of public cloud. IT leadership often chooses not to move applications to the public cloud because they believe investing in just one cloud provider will hinder flexibility. Several studies reinforce this conclusion, stating that the overwhelming market dominance of public cloud players, like AWS, is negative for the industry. Even when using core services, such as Amazon Elast
Gary Edwards

Docady, The Smart Document Storage And Management App, Raises $1.5M | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • However, it’s Docady’s existing and forthcoming ‘smart’ features that attempt to differentiate the app from potential competitors or simply backing up your documents to a secure cloud storage service manually. The idea is that the app will be able to make sense of the different kinds of data featured in each document to help with things like reminders for when a document needs to be renewed or action taken. “Currently, people can scan their documents with one app, store them with other cloud services, or email scans to themselves. As these are plain images of documents, however, they can’t ‘communicate’ with the user to tell them that something – like a renewal – requires their attention,” say the app’s founders.
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    "Docady, an iOS app that lets you store and manage all your important documents, has been doing well in the App Store since its official launch in mid-July, including being featured by Apple as a 'best new app' for the last few weeks. And to help continue with that momentum, the Tel Aviv-based startup has just closed a $1.5 million funding round. Investors include Pitango Ventures, and Disruptive, the VC fund from Tal Barnoach, Eilon Tirosh and various unnamed former AOL video execs. The new investment will be used to bring the app to more platforms, with Android up next, and for the development of additional 'smart' features to make your documents work harder for you."
Gary Edwards

Office 2016: Reinventing productivity and business processes - The Official Microsoft Blog - 0 views

  • Third, productivity requires a rich service spanning all your work and work artifacts (documents, communications, and business process events and tasks). It is no longer bound to any single application. It’s a service that leverages the cumulative intelligence and knowledge you and your organization need to drive productivity.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      This statement misses an important point. Productivity demands "focus". Spreading the artifacts of productivity across the broad spectrum of communications, messaging, conferencing, scheduling and documents is anything but productive. Take eMail for example. It's a great messaging and communications platform, but it takes the focus away fromt he workflow and puts into a forced focus on a broader messaging flow. If conversations are focused on the documents in a workflow, and the workflow is tracked and managed by document, the focus remains exactly where it should be - ON THE DOCUMENTS! Things like eMail, collaborative editing and comments, real time messaging, phone calls and scheduling, are critical to capturing the conversation, but they need to be tied to the document in question and the overall activity of the workflow. Keep the focus on the documents; keep the conversation surrounding the documents with the documents; and the focus will be exactly where it needs to be! Use the notification systems to notify workers of what is happening with each document, and keep them aware of how the workflow is progressing.
  • Mobility. Conversations. Intelligence.
  • Its entrepreneurs see Office as a universal language for their company to fuel collaboration with their team across a range of devices and for data-driven decisions about their inventory as they ship more than 10,000 designer dresses every hour.
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  • Our ambition to reinvent productivity includes reinventing business process. In the past, these processes were rigid, imposed and inflexible. Office and Microsoft Dynamics are changing the game with solutions that make business processes a catalyst to organizational productivity.
  • striving to build a new productivity and business process system that any organization can use to harness the power of human networks, respond to business events in real time, and find and share data insights as businesses create more information than they can consume.
Gary Edwards

Startup Documents - 0 views

  • Sales Agreement When Y Combinator startups make their first sales, we provide them with a sales template to make the legal part easy. In 2015, Y Combinator open sourced its sales template for the benefit of all startups. The sales template here is specially tailored for software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups – i.e. companies who charge for cloud software on a subscription basis. You should consider YC’s template as a starting point and customize it to meet your needs. We’ve highlighted the areas that in our experience are most likely to vary startup to startup. Y Combinator Sales Template Agreement Special thanks to James Riley at Goodwin Proctor for helping us draft this. Needless to say, YC & Goodwin Procter do not assume any responsibility for any consequence of using these documents.
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    "SAFE FINANCING DOCUMENTS The safe (simple agreement for future equity) is intended to replace convertible notes in most cases, and we think it addresses many of the problems with convertible notes while preserving their flexibility. In addition to being simpler and clearer, we intend the safe to remain fair to both investors and founders.During its development the safe was positively reviewed by many of the top startup investors. We believe it's a positive evolution of the convertible note and hope the startup community finds it an easier way to accomplish the same goals. Features of a safe: Unlike a convertible note, a safe is not a debt instrument. Debt instruments have maturity dates, are typically subject to certain regulations, create the threat of insolvency, and can include security interests and sometimes subordination agreements, all of which can have unintended negative consequences for startups. Because the money invested in a startup via a safe is not a loan, it will not accrue interest. This is particularly beneficial for startups, but also better embodies the intention of investors, who never meant to be lenders in the first place. As a flexible, one-document security without numerous terms to negotiate, a safe should save startups and investors money in legal fees and reduce the time spent negotiating the terms of the investment. Startups and investors will usually only have to negotiate one item: the valuation cap. Because a safe has no expiration or maturity date, there should be no time or money spent dealing with extending maturity dates, revising interest rates or the like. A safe still allows for high resolution fundraising. Startups can close with investors as soon as both parties are ready, instead of trying to coordinate a single close with all investors simultaneously. There are four versions of safe, corresponding to the four types of convertible note: Safe Primer Safe: Cap, no Discount Safe: Discount, no Cap Safe: Cap
Gary Edwards

Microsoft (MSFT) Announces New Office 365 Investments; Includes Skype for Business Mac ... - 0 views

  • The Skype for Business Mac Preview will release in three cumulative stages leading to public availability planned for Q3 of 2016. Today’s initial release lets you see and join your meetings. We’ll soon follow up with additional value, including the contact list and conversations via chat, audio and video. Commercial customers can request an invite to test the new Skype for Business Mac Preview at SkypePreview.com. We’ll start by issuing invites to IT professionals and continue rolling out invites on a daily basis with the goal of rapidly increasing usage before opening up the preview to everyone. To learn more about the Mac Preview, read the Skype for Business Mac Preview blog.Bringing collaboration to the forefront in OfficeThis month’s updates to Office 2016 desktop client bring the collaboration experience front and center. Core sharing capabilities, a new document activity feed, presence information and Skype for Business instant messaging are now all available at a glance in the top right corner of documents that you are sharing with others.
  • Now you can easily see who’s working and where in your documents, as well as quickly start real-time conversations with Skype for Business.The enhanced collaboration experience in Office 2016 includes:People hub—Now you have more visibility into who is actively working in a Word or PowerPoint doc with you. At a glance you can quickly see everyone participating in the document on the ribbon and then, with one click, jump to exactly where they are working.Skype for Business integration—You can click a person’s thumbnail to initiate a Skype for Business IM conversation or see their full contact card. Click the Skype for Business logo to initiate a group chat with everybody currently working in the document.
  • The Activity feed provides access to a full history of document changes, including prior versions.Activity feed—Quick access to the activity feed makes it easy to see what’s been happening in your document, presentation or spreadsheet saved in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. The Activity feed shows you a full history of changes, and you can easily open or even revert to a prior version if you need to.Comments—With one click you can make or view comments in your document or slide. Collaboration flows easily with threaded conversations and quick access buttons that let you reply to or resolve comments, and then mark items as complete.
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  • Yammer external groups are now availableOffice 365 customers can now create external Yammer groups for seamless and secure collaboration across company and organizational boundaries. External groups work just like internal groups by enabling conversations around topics, documents, notes and links that can now extend to customers, partners or people in other organizations. We have put controls in place to ensure the security of information, such as requiring group admin approval before external members are added and allowing Office 365 admins to disable external groups for the organization. Visit “Create and manage external groups in Yammer” to get started.
  • Work smarter and more intuitively on the goWe’re continuing to improve the Office mobile apps so that it’s even easier to be productive anywhere and on any device. Some highlights this month:Edit with speed—New mobile updates provide access to the most popular commands right at your fingertips in Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Windows Phone, iPhone and Android. These commands appear at the bottom of the screen, tailored for the content you select.
  • Quickly access relevant features based on content you select in Word, Excel and PowerPoint on phones.Record audio into OneNote on Windows Phone—It’s easy to capture a quick audio note on the go with your Windows Phone. Simply tap the paper clip and then the microphone on your keyboard command bar to get started.Use your pen as a pointer—We introduced instant inking earlier this year so you can use an active pen to ink instantly without first selecting a feature or control. This month, we are addressing feedback we heard from customers who wish to keep using their pen as a pointer to select and interact with content. To learn more, see “Draw and annotate with ink in Office 2016.”Get insights at a glance—We expanded Smart Lookup to Word, Excel and PowerPoint on iOS and Android. Smart Lookup is powered by Bing and uses the selected text and surrounding content to give you contextually relevant results. Right click on text and select Smart Lookup to get started.
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    "Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) posted the following to its Office blog on Tuesday: This month, we're announcing several new Office 365 investments to help people better collaborate. This includes the much anticipated Skype for Business Mac Preview, new Yammer external groups and improvements in our Office Mobile apps on Windows Phone, iOS and Android. Please read on for details. Introducing Skype for Business Mac Preview Today, we are excited to announce the start of the Skype for Business Mac Preview. This new app offers a simple yet powerful experience that brings our Mac customers into the modern era of Skype for Business. "
Gary Edwards

How workers really use Microsoft collaboration tools | CIO - 0 views

  • A new report suggests the most common activity among businesspeople using Microsoft collaboration tools is document sharing, and much of that activity occurs early in the week, on Monday and Tuesday.
  • Document access and sharing represent the bulk of enterprise collaboration using Microsoft tools, according to a new report from harmon.ie, a company that makes software to combine Microsoft's cloud and social utilities into a single interface. Online and offline access to private or shared documents represents 81 percent of all business activity in harmon.ie's mobile apps and email products.  The research, which is based on data from 1,500 harmon.ie users from 800 companies in more than 75 countries, stresses the importance, and dominance, of documents in enterprise collaboration.
  • Four of every five minutes spent using harmon.ie apps are dedicated to document access, but the social conversations associated with the documents are comparatively few and far between, according to the research. For example, business users opened documents 68 times more often than they participated in Yammer discussions. The next most popular activity behind document access was adding SharePoint sites; seven percent of respondents said they add SharePoint. Just three percent of users conducted document searches, and less than two percent participated in Yammer discussions, viewed activity streams or looked up a colleague's SharePoint profile, according to harmon.ie.
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  • the company says 24 percent of its mobile customers now use Office 365 in the cloud, up from 18 percent six months ago.
Gary Edwards

3 steps to digitizing your work for maximum productivity | CIO - 0 views

  • Why go digital?One advantage for businesses to ditch paper– and perhaps the single most important factor – is convenience. Digital data is both highly searchable, and is also easily transferrable. What’s more, the mature state of cloud services today means that you can expect the information you store online to be available across whatever devices you may own -- be it a smartphone, tablet, PC laptop, Mac computer – or even a Web browser at a cybercafé or hotel lobby when on a vacation.Digital documents are also clearly suited to data backup. Despite the calibration required to get things set up in a way that works for you, it’s infinitely easier to make a copy of digital data versus photocopying stacks of printed invoices or bills. And a growing list of cloud storage services (Dropbox and SugarSync, to name two) have taken document storage a step further by saving multiple versions of a doc so you can revert to earlier versions of a document if necessary.
  • Finally, digitization opens the door to greater levels of collaboration at work by making it easy to collaborate with coworkers on only the relevant data. On this front, an entire generation of online tools are available for a diverse range of tasks such as time tracking (Toggl), project management (Asana) and collaboration (Yammer) – of which all are captured digitally without printing out a single piece of paper.So how should you go about joining the digital document revolution? More like this 12 Evernote hacks and apps for power users 8 time-saving productivity hacks 20 uses for Evernote that you probably haven’t thought of yet on IDG Answers How to disable the Windows button on a Microsoft Surface tablet?
  • 1. Choose a digital notebook systemOne of the starting points for digitizing your business docs is to decide on a platform for filing away notes, ideas and documents. Not only does it serve a critical role as a virtually unlimited digital repository for filing important details, charts, audio clips or screen grabs, a good digital system will make it easy to organize and find the information when you need it.
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  • Microsoft OneNoteThe popular Microsoft OneNote allows you to enter rich text, images, media files or even drawings into fully searchable notebooks. OneNote works on a variety of platforms, including Windows PCs, Mac computers, Android and iOS devices, and even from a Web browser.The strength of OneNote is its support for freeform data, with complete freedom to align (or misalign) text and all supported objects. The latest version also adds Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for images, making it easy to search for specific words within new images, and adds support for Dropbox on top of Microsoft’s own OneDrive cloud storage service.
  • EvernoteEvernote is another popular, free, online note-taking service. It offers effectively unlimited storage, albeit with a monthly upload cap (which is much larger for users willing to shell for one of the two fairly inexpensive tiers). The advantage of Evernote is its support for an incredibly diverse list of platforms, which includes native support on the BlackBerry 10 smartphone, third-party clients for Linux, and even scanners with the capability to scan straight into Evernote.Notebooks can be shared among multiple users – including those without a paid account – while individual notes can be shared publicly with a unique URL. Evernote also saves multiple versions of a document, which ensures that any accidental edits can be undone. Finally, paid users get to work offline, and can utilize the service to conduct text searches through Office docs and PDFs, as well as stored in Evernote.
  • Other optionsFor those of us who keep a to-do list, Trello and Todoist are digital equivalents that can facilitate collaboration with colleagues. Google Keep captures notes, lists, photo and audio via supported Web browsers and mobile devices. Finally, there is the text-only SimpleNote, or even the Notes feature in Microsoft’s Office 365 or an on-premises Exchange Server deployment.
  • 3. Effortlessly digitize legacy dataHaving the tools and the capability to natively capture your notes, docs and the like in digital form is a good thing. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop receiving paper bills, invoices, statements, receipts, business cards, product brochures and other printed material.One of the best ways to minimize ink-on-paper collateral is to aggressively digitize all documents whenever possible. You have a variety of options. The easiest is to use a smartphone app such as Scanner Pro to quickly capture everything from business cards to paper printouts. Quality may vary, however, depending on such environmental factors as lighting and the quality of your smartphone’s camera.
  • A more robust alternative is to make use of an automatic sheet-fed scanner – such as the NeatConnect Wi-Fi scanner – to scan printed sheets straight to OneNote or Evernote. Portable scanners also exist, such as the battery-powered Doxie Go Wi-Fi and Doxie Flip. The former lets you scan wirelessly to an iPad or iPhone, while the latter is best described as a portable flatbed scanner that can be inverted to scan items that are fixed in place, or which are too thick to pass through a sheet-fed scanner.
  • Finally, the Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600 is a deskbound scanner that simplifies digitizing magazines and bound books. Items are placed face-up on its scanning mat. The scanning takes about three seconds to dump into a USB-connected computer. Any curvature in the pages is automatically smoothed out via software, resulting in a high quality capture.Depending on your needs, the ScanSnap SV600 could allow you to continue scribbling down your ideas and notes in a physical notebook, yet be able to quickly scan the physical pages into their digital notebook of choice at the end of each day.
  • Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to digitizing your work. There are hundreds of tools that exist to facilitate the full range of business activities and processes without ever having to involve a single printed sheet.
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    "From the earliest days as a marketing slogan, the elusive concept of the so-called paperless office may finally be taking shape, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. A growing number of small businesses and startups, unencumbered by legacy processes, are quietly ditching printouts for an all-digital ecosystem, buoyed by soaring BYOD ownership and growing familiarity with a plethora of cloud services. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, the driving factors are collaboration and productivity, as opposed to any ecological or "green" concerns. With this in mind, we take a look at the advantages of going digital, and outline how workers can embrace this new digital-first paradigm to collaborate more, do things faster and work more efficiently than ever."
Gary Edwards

Hyland tosses hat into EFSS ring with launch of ShareBase - FierceContentManagement - 0 views

  • ECM vendor Hyland tossed its hat into the EFSS ring this week with the release of ShareBase, a cloud-based file sync and share app for enterprise. Though it can be used independently of Hyland's flagship ECM product, OnBase, the app is primarily designed to allow OnBase customers to securely share and access documents in and outside the organization. ShareBase only works with corporate email addresses, so shared documents remain firmly under administrator control. User rights are easy to change, transfer and revoke so content remains unaffected by employee turnover. The app automates notifications and sharing when used with OnBase, triggering events as soon as documents upload into ShareBase.
  • "The creation of ShareBase was our response to continual feedback from customers needing a better way to share and collaborate on content," Bill Priemer, president and CEO of Hyland,
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    "ECM vendor Hyland tossed its hat into the EFSS ring this week with the release of ShareBase, a cloud-based file sync and share app for enterprise. Though it can be used independently of Hyland's flagship ECM product, OnBase, the app is primarily designed to allow OnBase customers to securely share and access documents in and outside the organization. ShareBase only works with corporate email addresses, so shared documents remain firmly under administrator control. User rights are easy to change, transfer and revoke so content remains unaffected by employee turnover. The app automates notifications and sharing when used with OnBase, triggering events as soon as documents upload into ShareBase."
Gary Edwards

The PDF file format: A work in progress - SD Times - 0 views

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    "With almost every sector of the economy facing a digital transformation, businesses must find new ways to get their information and data online. No longer does it make sense to have documents stored on paper. To keep up with the ever-changing times, more and more businesses are turning to the Portable Document Format (PDF). "Due to proliferation of new platforms, devices, and technologies, providing a quality PDF solution is more challenging than ever before," said Catherine Andersz, director of PDFTron. "So far the PDF format stood the test of time, but it's facing challenges due to fragmentation and poor implementations of the standard as well as relevance in the new world of small devices." The biggest benefits to moving to PDFs are that businesses can guarantee their documents will be accessible, viewable, and printable by everyone at any time, according to Gerald Holmann, founder and president of Qoppa Software. Today, PDF viewers are available across browsers, operating systems and applications, making it ubiquitous, according to Matt Kuznicki, CTO of Datalogics. However, as more users take interest in the technology, there will be a wider range of industries that PDFs have to address. "The PDF format contains a huge set of features and functionality designed for different audiences, and understanding the needs and capabilities of different workflows is now more important than ever," he said. PDF 2.0… The PDF file format was once a proprietary format owned by Adobe systems. Today, it is an open standard maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The last version of the PDF standard Adobe put out was version 1.7. As part of PDF 1.7, Adobe added supplementals incorporating features that came out after the release. Since the standard was handed over to ISO, the organization has been working to integrate those features into the upcoming main standard, PDF 2.0. Notable features include redaction annotations and
Gary Edwards

It's Time for Microsoft to Reboot Office - WSJ - 0 views

  • The target customer for much of Office’s evolution is corporate. But there are 15 million people who pay $70 or more a year for Office updates—and countless more who, like me, have bought Office for a home computer.
  • There’s a generational divide at work here: A survey last summer by the tech firm BetterCloud found that companies whose employee base averaged between 18 and 34 were 55% more likely to use Google than Office; those who average 35 to 54 were 19% more likely to use Office.
  • I'm a transactional lawyer, been using Word since 2002, and I think it's a terrible word processing program.  But we're stuck in it - there's no way out.MS has never fixed the two core horrible problems in Word - Styles and Section Breaks.  They should be removed from the program completely - there is no way to "fix" them.Before you say that they can be learned -- and I have indeed learned them -- here's the reality:  No one but me -- and I mean not one single lawyer or secretary I have ever worked or emailed with -- works correctly with Styles or Section Breaks.  Our long documents are emailed to the lawyers for the other parties, they make changes in their own, different Styles with additional manual formatting, and the documents become a mess.  Since we save and re-use our documents, I have to spend a lot of time cleaning them up, only to see them messed up again by the end of each deal.  And Styles can break by themselves.Word is junk.  Still inferior to 1996 WordPerfect.
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  • Thom - We still have WordPerfect on our office PCs.  We stopped using it because all our clients have only Word.  And no one has WordPerfect.  So what good does it do to make a document in WordPerfect when no one else can open it or revise it.We're stuck with Word, and it is awful awful awful. It was a shock how bad Word was when we switched from WordPerfect in 2002, and Word gets worse with each iteration.And it's not just Styles and Section Breaks; it's so many other things.I could do and edit macros in WordPerfect.  Not Word.Automatic numbering in Word is a failure, and Word does not play nice when we buy "add-ons" to try to fix that.Word does NOT incorporate an Excel spreadsheet easily, and Word's tables are below primitive.Word cannot even capitalize correctly in "Title Case", but WordPerfect could in 1996.
  • What Microsoft needs to do is fix some of the issues it's had for years - creating robust numbered/billeted lists that don't mysteriously change format - word styles that just work instead of changing anytime a word in that style is bolded. I spend more time fixing templates than I do using them in some instances. Word should look at Adobe FrameMaker for some methods on how they could simplify the application while making it more robust.
  • Fowler is correct that workplaces are the bread and butter of Office. Many home users who aren't students really don't need a complete office suite. But they never did - that's nothing new.
  • @Kevin Morgan, the problem is that everyone uses Office and Word.  They are compatible with offices across the world.
  • @Timothy D. Naegele @Kevin Morgan I think that the problem is that users (neither companies nor individuals) have pushed for standard formats such as open documents.  When you are tied to a particular standard, you are stuck with the platform.
  • @Vance Burks  Vance there are several very specific examples of things that make my teeth grind right here in Mr. Fowler's article.  I ran into exactly the same things. The biggest thing that bugs me about Office 365 is that you never know whether your document, or your edits are going to be there when you come back.  It relates to their decision to hold back the full feature set of the product, and the way they sync.  It's a flawed product architecture. With Google docs, it's sticky and I know that no matter what, my doc and my edits are going to be there when i return.  Also there are the annoying, unnecessary prompts - detailed in this article.  They are sort of Microsoft's signature, a symptom of their culture. I lived in Woodinville-Redmond for almost two years, and I never once met a happy Microsoft employee.  Well, there was one he has 18 patents and worked there for 25 years.  Then they fired him, and now he's unhappy too.  It's a very messed-up company. Unhappy culture.
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    "I've purchased the latest Microsoft Office for every computer I've owned. It was a foregone conclusion. Dating back to when Word was white type on a blue screen, I used it so often I could recite the shortcuts. (Thesaurus? Shift-F7.) But Microsoft has run out of reasons to keep me paying. How we get work done on computers has fundamentally changed. For the new Office 2016, Microsoft wants you to pay $150 for collaborative capabilities that others already do better, free. It brings little new to people who rely on deep features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Its mediocrity led me to a larger conclusion: It's time for Microsoft to press Control-Alt-Delete on the whole concept of Office. My relationship with Office started to sour as smartphones carried my work everywhere while my Office files stayed in the cubicle. I began emailing myself instead of fretting about scattered .doc files. Google ran with the work-anywhere idea early. Its free Web-based word processor and spreadsheet allow people in different locations to edit a document together. With Google Docs and Sheets, there's no more emailing drafts back and forth."
Gary Edwards

Editing PDF Text: The Most Reliable Way To Edit PDF Text - PDFelement - 0 views

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    "PDF is the most popular type of document format that has use in technical areas, schematics, white paper, brochures and a whole lot of documents to numerous to mention. Unfortunately, some PDF documents may need to be edited to get to the standard required. Even though, there are many ways to edit PDFs to get what you want. For example, it is possible to edit PDF text online with numerous online solutions, however, the disadvantages of using this method outweighs its advantages. There is a reliable way of editing PDF files and that is by using Wondershare PDFelement."
Gary Edwards

Open365: open source Office 365 alternative - gHacks Tech News - 0 views

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    "You can sign up for the service on the official website currently but the makers plan to release repositories that you can install on servers you have control over to create a self-hosted version of Open365 that you have more control over. When you sign up for the service you get an email address automatically assigned to you that you use to sign in to the web service and the sync clients, and for mail. You do get 20 Gigabyte of storage as well right now which is more than what many other file synchronization services offer at the time of writing. It is unclear however if the 20 Gigabyte are only available during the beta period. The web service loads the "Hub" view on start automatically. It lists all libraries that you own and that are shared with you by default. A click on a folder opens the contents directly on the web, a click on files either in one of the editors if the file format is supported, or offered for download if it is not. The focus is on documents but support goes beyond typical document formats such as docx, xls or pptx. Open365 supports an image viewer that supports all common image formats, and a media player to play audio and video content. Libraries or individual files can be shared or deleted online, and you may upload new files directly to the web interface using your web browser of choice. One interesting feature is the ability to create new libraries on the Web, and here specifically the option to encrypt content so that it can only be accessed if the right password is supplied. The password is not linked to the account password. As far as sharing is concerned, you can share files or libraries with individual users or user groups, and get full control over shared links and permissions online as well. Document editing and creation"
Gary Edwards

Mining the knowledge locked in ECM | IDM Magazine - 0 views

  • The first announcement was that Google open sourced TensorFlow, a type of machine learning system that uses unsupervised learning, i.e. “Deep Learning.” TensorFlow powers Google Photos, Google Translator and backbone features such as search and Smart Reply. Not to be outdone, Microsoft announced that it is a open sourcing its “Deep Learning” system called Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK).
  • Why would Google and Microsoft open their “secret sauces” to the world? There are a number of reasons one can speculate, but anytime you open up your secret sauce, it’s to win over programmer’s minds. In fact, machine learning and specifically Deep Learning subjects are not for the average corporate web application developer. You will need people who have strong mathematics and computer science skills along with machine learning background.
  • The impact of having access to these Deep Learning system capabilities will be truly disruptive, especially in the area of unstructured data. It is true Hadoop has all the underpinnings of a great ECM system with its distributed file system, map/reduce for large-scale data processing. Generating indexes associated with documents is a natural progression since Hadoop abundantly provides these capabilities.
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  • However, ECM is much more than just large volumes of documents that is in need of indexing. ECM involves the whole life cycle of document management that includes: create, capture, indexing, approval (workflow/case management processing), publishing (version management), collaboration (share), archiving & defensible disposal (Records Management) Having Deep Learning capabilities will transform ECM into a more advanced type of product. A product that can determine the content regardless of its content type (image, text, audio, and video). This will shift the technology from a simple content management solution to a knowledge management system.
  • Today, the best ECM systems can do is to classify your content by looking at metadata tags and keywords in documents. As an example, it will not be enough to look at a document and classify it as a legal contract. Deep Learning will take ECM to the next level, by not only classifying the document as a contract but also evaluating it to make sure it is an iron clad contract that has the necessary clauses to assure your company is protected!
  • Deep Learning will also provide Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities. You now have turned your corporate Enterprise Content Management system from a simple unstructured data repository into an oracle of corporate data.
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    By Mitch DeFelice Recent announcements from Google and Microsoft regarding machine-learning capabilities will provide the ability to transform corporate Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system from a simple unstructured data repository into an oracle of corporate data. In their book Smart Customer Stupid Companies…Why Only Intelligent Companies Will Thrive, and How to Be One of Them - the authors Michael Hinshaw and Bruce Kasanoff articulate how customers are becoming "smarter" with technology advancements.  The book presents a sound case that companies that do not evolve with their customers will become irrelevant. There have been two recent announcements that have occurred (November 9th, 2015 and November 12th, 2015 respectively) that have the potential to turn the metaphorical phase "Stupid Companies" to mean literally that.
Gary Edwards

Dropbox Rolls Out Google Docs Competitor - Cloud Computing on CIO Today - 0 views

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    "eady a major player in enterprise file sharing and hosting, Dropbox is launching a public version of its new Paper service to make a name for itself among collaborative productivity suite providers such as Google Docs and Microsoft's Office 365. Paper, which has been available in beta since last year, is aiming to win converts from the big names in the space with a user interface that the company said makes collaboration between coworkers easier. The cloud-based platform will allow users to manage shared documents by assigning different tasks and deadlines to various collaborators. Making Collaboration Easier The service also includes a variety of features designed to make collaboration between team members easier, no matter where in the world they're located. A Paper app is coming to iOS and Android devices to enable users to work on documents even while offline. The Web interface, meanwhile, is currently available in 21 languages, an important feature for multi-lingual teams. These new capabilities join other recent additions such as presentation mode, a feature that turns documents into presentation slides and integration with Google Calendar to make it easier for teams to create and share notes. Paper has already reached early enterprise adopters such as InVision, Ben & Jerry's, Shopify, Campaign Monitor, Getaround and Patreon, according to Dropbox. But the company appears to be positioning Paper to steal market share away from Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. New Business Plans Going head-to-head with such well-established players will likely be a tall order. To help make Paper more attractive to its enterprise clients, Dropbox is also making its file hosting environment more enterprise-friendly. The latest version of the Web interface, which was released in conjunction with Paper, is more streamlined and potentially easier to navigate. Dropbox has also introduced a new feature that allows users to see others on their teams who have viewed their s
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