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Gary Edwards

Why companies are switching from Google Apps to Office 365 | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...google-apps-to-office-365.html

Office-365 gDocs

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps. Motorola’s recent decision to move from an elderly version of Office to Google’s cloud service bucks the more common trend of companies who have been using Google Apps switching to Office 365.
  • 87.3 percent are using Office 365 services, with each organization uploading an average 1.37 terabytes of data to the service each month.
  • That fits what identity management company Okta is seeing. Office 365 is the most commonly deployed application among its customers (beating even Salesforce) and adoption is growing faster than any other cloud applications. It’s also the cloud service customers use the most, probably because that usage includes all the email users send and receive.
  • The only industry segments where Google Apps has more share than Office 365 are in technology; media, Internet and software companies. The smaller the company, the more share Google Apps has among Okta’s customers; but even in the smallest companies Office 365 is still in the lead.
  • “There are different dynamics that matter based on the company size,” McKinnon points out. “Large companies need manageability, security, reliability. You wouldn't see this acceleration of Office 365 in large companies without Microsoft doing a lot of work [in those areas].”
  • The majority of new Office 365 customers are moving from on-premises, but even companies that have already adopted Google Apps for Business are switching to Office.
  • Microsoft claimed they won back 440 customers in 2013, including big names like Burger King and Campbell’s, and the trend is continuing. Some of that may be the halo effect of the Office 365 growth making companies that picked Google Apps question whether they made the right decision. But often, it’s because of dissatisfaction with Google Apps itself.
  • The simplicity of Gmail and Google Docs clearly appeals to some users, but as one of the most widely used applications in the world, the Office software is familiar to many. “When you put these products into companies, the user interface really matters,” McKinnon says. “For email, the user interface really matters.
  • Google Apps is dramatically different from Office and that’s pretty jarring for people who’ve been using Outlook for a long time. It's like it beamed in from outer space; you have to use a browser, the way it does conversations and threading with labels versus folders, it's pretty jarring.”
  • Even if you like the Google backend better, you have thousands of users saying ‘what happened to my folders?’”
  • And it’s hard to use Outlook with Google, many customers report. “Some companies, they go to Google and they think they are going to make it work with Outlook; what they find out when they start using the calendar is that it just doesn’t work as well with the Google Apps backend as it does when you’re using Office 365. The user interface is so important that it pulls them back in.
  • If you’re pushing somebody who's used to an Office environment into a Google cloud, they're going to feel this vacuum because they no longer have the programs they're familiar with. It represents a huge investment in time that people aren't going to be receptive to. And you have Microsoft saying ‘for just $3 a month more you could have all these great programs you're used to. Now they’ve got the pricing so you get more than you get on Google, what Microsoft is offering is fantastic, and for $3 more it’s a premium worth paying. Microsoft is still the king of hill for a reason.”
  • “Quite frankly, Google is completely outclassed by Office 365 in this arena and despite the price difference corporations who made the switch to Google Apps to save money usually end up coming back within a year.
  • The primary driver of this appears to be Outlook integration over everything else, followed by the inability to do some advanced things that Microsoft Office excels at.”
  • For larger companies, this goes beyond the familiarity of Outlook into advanced features. “You can integrate Skype into Outlook, you can integrate OneDrive for Business into Outlook.
  • It becomes essentially like a command center, and there is nothing Google gives you that does that.
  • “The reason people have been moving to Google is cost,”
  • But a lot of people don’t find the usability and collaboration nearly as effective as Office 365.”
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.Office 365 is even more popular with the 21 million customers of Skyhigh Network’s cloud security services, where 87.3 percent are using Office 365 services, with each organization uploading an average 1.37 terabytes of data to the service each month.
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15
     
    "The combination of familiar software and enterprise-class support is bringing early adopters disappointed by Google's lack of progress back to Microsoft."
Gary Edwards

Office and the iPad Pro: It's just business, stupid | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-its-just-business-stupid.html

Office-365 Pricing

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Microsoft will require owners of Apple's not-sold-until-November iPad Pro to pay for almost all functionality in its Office suite, a point neither Microsoft nor Apple bothered to highlight this month when the latter invited the former to share stage time at the tablet's introduction. 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 But that's not news. Recommendations CSO Hacking Team hacked, attackers claim 400GB in dumped data ITworld Up your coding game with these 7 habits of great programmers Network World VMware CEO hits on network virtualization reality, feuding with Cisco & the... More INSIDER Microsoft is simply sticking with a formula it crafted almost a year ago and has echoed since: It would field one version of a touch-centric, made-for-mobile Office but divvy up customers into two pools, each getting a different mix of free from the freemium business model they shared.
  • Potential iPad Pro customers can be excused for being confused. Office on the iPad Air 2, Apple's latest 9.7-in. tablet, is free for most document creation and editing chores when used by consumers. And the list of the not-free features is small and, not surprisingly, slanted toward business users. The overall impression, then, is the Office is free when the messenger is a consumer, or the target audience of the report is consumer.
  • But Office is not free. Not by a long shot. And therein lies Microsoft's motivation for the two pools.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • While Microsoft seems glad to give away Office Mobile to consumers -- with some exceptions -- its revenue model requires that it make money from business workers.
  • That's easiest to see, and understand, when one realizes that the difference between what's available to one pool but not the other is that the two are identified not as free/not-free, but as non-commercial and commercial.
  • By Microsoft's current licensing, any use of any feature of any Office Mobile app on any device -- whether smartphone, tablet or 2-in-1 -- for a business purpose requires an Office 365 subscription, specifically a small business- or enterprise-grade plan. Want to edit a work-related document in Word Mobile? Office 365 is required. Want to view a work-related spreadsheet in Excel Mobile? Office 365 again. Show a PowerPoint Mobile slide on the job? Ditto.
  • The "separate agreement" mentioned in the license is an eligible Office 365 subscription: Office 365 Business ($8.25 per user per month), Office 365 Business Premium ($12.50), Office 365 ProPlus ($12) or Office 365 Enterprise E3 ($20).
  • Consumers, of course, get most Office Mobile functionality free, and all features when they subscribe to Office 365 Personal ($70 annually or $7 monthly) or Office 365 Personal ($100 a year, $10 a month). But business users, or more accurately those who use the apps for anything but personal, non-commercial, work? They pay, always, to be legal.
  • What's apparently miffed people -- read consumers -- is that Office Mobile on larger devices isn't free for them.
  • Microsoft's used screen size to separate what it considers consumer-grade tablets from those it believes are suited for business, with the break-point at 10.1-in.
  • The confusion among consumers comes from the licensing of Office Mobile on devices with screens larger than 10.1-in. For those devices -- which includes Microsoft's own Surface Pro 3 and Surface 3 -- consumers get little for free: Essentially only viewing documents. What Microsoft dubs as "core editing" isn't available for free to consumers on larger-screened hardware.
  • That's because Microsoft classifies devices with displays 10.1-in. and larger as business systems, no matter who buys them or for what purpose.
  • The inclusion of Office 365 Personal on the Surface 3 -- and if Microsoft extended the same offer to buyers of the new Surface Pro 4 -- allows consumers to run Office Mobile on the larger screens, at least for the one-year free subscription's stretch.
  • That lets Microsoft give its Surface clan an edge over Apple's iPad Pro, for it certainly will not bundle the Office Mobile apps or an Office 365 subscription with its rival's 2-in-1, not without making Apple pony up.
  • Even bundling, though, only affects consumers; businesses won't get the same deal. Bottom line: Consumers may get a free Office ride, of sorts. But businesses? No way.
Gary Edwards

Philipp Karcher's blog | Forrester Blogs - 0 views

blogs.forrester.com/philipp_karcher

Office-365 Office-Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Today Microsoft starts shipping Office for iPad, finally plugging the gap in its portfolio that’s been filled by popular document viewers and editors like QuickOffice and SlideShark.   Does this come too late for Microsoft? As much as naysayers like to proclaim Office is dying, people still overwhelmingly use it at home and at work. Office is supported at virtually every organization. Our survey of Forrester clients at the end of last year showed strong strides by Google Docs with 13% of firms using it.* However, the caveat is companies that have gone Google are using Docs to complement Office with collaboration features and mobile support, not to replace it.   You could argue how much incremental revenue Microsoft lost out on, but I don’t think the lack of native Office apps has caused Microsoft to cede ground to other office productivity suites on the PC, where the vast majority of content is still created. Keep in mind that out of the 20% of information workers in North America and Europe that use a tablet for work, 60% of them use some office productivity software on it.** Half of tablets used for work are iPads. So immediately just 6% of information workers will be considering the Office apps as an alternative to what they are using on their tablets today.    Is Microsoft really multi-platform now?
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 15
     
    "Today Microsoft starts shipping Office for iPad, finally plugging the gap in its portfolio that's been filled by popular document viewers and editors like QuickOffice and SlideShark.   Does this come too late for Microsoft? As much as naysayers like to proclaim Office is dying, people still overwhelmingly use it at home and at work. Office is supported at virtually every organization. Our survey of Forrester clients at the end of last year showed strong strides by Google Docs with 13% of firms using it.* However, the caveat is companies that have gone Google are using Docs to complement Office with collaboration features and mobile support, not to replace it.   You could argue how much incremental revenue Microsoft lost out on, but I don't think the lack of native Office apps has caused Microsoft to cede ground to other office productivity suites on the PC, where the vast majority of content is still created. Keep in mind that out of the 20% of information workers in North America and Europe that use a tablet for work, 60% of them use some office productivity software on it.** Half of tablets used for work are iPads. So immediately just 6% of information workers will be considering the Office apps as an alternative to what they are using on their tablets today.    Is Microsoft really multi-platform now?"
Gary Edwards

The Office 365 Story: Is Microsoft leading the way for Cloud Office Applications? - 0 views

microsoft.cioreview.com/...ications-nid-23166-cid-50.html

Office-365 Microsoft

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Oct 16
     
    "Shortly after the start of the millennium, Microsoft stated a goal to be the go-to enterprise platform for the data center. Many in the industry scoffed at the idea that Microsoft could dominate in a market traditionally led by Unix. Today, there are few enterprises that don't have a significant investment in Microsoft servers and infrastructure. Five years ago Microsoft launched Office 365 and, right now, we're seeing a parallel in their move to lead the cloud office application sector. Office and the enterprise applications that support Office 365-Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business - have become ubiquitous in the market. In July this year, it was reported that Office 365 is used daily by over 70 million enterprise users. However, Microsoft hasn't achieved this success without challenges. In 2013, many industry pundits saw Google Apps for Enterprise as the heir apparent for cloud and productivity, but things have changed significantly in the last three years. Under Satya Nadella's leadership, Microsoft has rebranded to support its 'mobile-first, cloud- first' go-to-market. The move to support Office on the Apple and Google platforms has strengthened its position in the market. Following this success, their next ambition is to enable customers and partners to move to Office 365. Earlier this year, Microsoft launched a number of initiatives to help clients consume Office 365 licenses more effectively. One such program is geared towards securing the license base by motivating renewals and preventing-churn versus a completely new sale. Once a client activates and consumes the licenses on Office 365, they receive ongoing upgrades, renewals, and new features as part of an evergreen service. Employees experience the latest across all their devices. This compares favorably to the historical process of waiting every three to four years for the on-premises Enterprise Agreement to be signed and subsequent refresh of a laptop with a new office applica
Gary Edwards

Office productivity software no closer to becoming a commodity | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...closer-to-becoming-a-commodity

Office-365 Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Microsoft continues to have a stranglehold on office productivity in the enterprise: Just 6 percent of companies in our survey give all or some employees an alternative instead of the installed version of Microsoft Office. What's Hot on ZDNet Windows 10: You've got questions, I've got answers Windows 10 Yes, Apple TV will be a HomeKit hub Apple ​A new day, a new Ubuntu smartphone Hardware Will your PC run Windows 10? Use the official compatibility checker to find out Windows 10 Most surprising of all, multi-platform support is not a priority. Apps on iOS and Android devices were important to 16 percent of respondents, and support for non-Windows PCs was important to only 11 percent.
  • For now, most technology decision-makers seem satisfied with leaving employees to self-provision office productivity apps on their smartphones and tablets if they really want them.  Do you think we're getting closer to replacing Microsoft Office in the workplace?
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 15
     
    "We just published a report on the state of adoption of Office 2013 And Productivity Suite Alternatives based on a survey of 155 Forrester clients with responsibility for those investments. The sample does not fully represent the market, but lets us draw comparisons to the results of our previous survey in 2011. Some key takeaways from the data: One in five firms uses email in the cloud. Another quarter plans to move at some point. More are using Office 365 (14 percent) than Google Apps (9 percent).  Just 22 percent of respondents are on Office 2013. Another 36 percent have plans to be on it. Office 2013's uptake will be slower than Office 2010 because fewer firms plan to combine the rollout of Office 2013 with Windows 8 as they combined Office 2010 with Windows 7. Alternatives to Microsoft Office show little traction. In 2011, 13 percent of respondents supported open source alternatives to Office. This year the number is just 5 percent. Google Docs has slightly higher adoption and is in use at 13 percent of companies. "
Gary Edwards

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

www.wsj.com/...ft-to-reboot-office-1444155726

Office-365 Office-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 16
     
    "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

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

www.streetinsider.com/...11543171.html

Office-365 Skype-for-Business

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Apr 16
     
    "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

Office 365's corporate takeover is imminent | InfoWorld - 0 views

www.infoworld.com/...rate-takeover-is-imminent.html

Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 16
     
    "For the past two years, I've been doing a road show about Office 365 with Mimecast to businesses of all shapes and sizes in America and Britain. At the beginning of the show, when I asked the audience, "Who of you has moved or is looking to move to Office 365?" not one hand went up. Fast-forward to a week ago, and more than half the hands went up when I asked the same question. This shift is happening much faster than I would have predicted. [ Considering the move to Office 365? Take these crucial steps before, during, and after for a successful migration. | The InfoWorld review: Office 365 fails at collaboration | Stay up on key Microsoft technologies with the Enterprise Windows blog and Windows newsletter. ] There is no doubt that the driving force behind this shift is Office 365's Exchange Online component. I hear that rationale from everyone I talk to. And it's not only the people I talk to: A recent Gartner survey showed Exchange was overwhelmingly cited as the reason to move to Office 365. Oddly enough, OneDrive for Business was the second motivator, but it was also one of the biggest disappointments thus far. Why? Because, as my colleague Galen Gruman has shown, OneDrive for Business works only partially. Some organizations are motivated by Office 365's preconfigured SharePoint Online to assist with document collaboration and workflow, though the on-premises SharePoint remains much more capable. Skype for Business is making headway for instant messaging and conferencing as well, though it continues to be iffy in multiplatform environments. Then there are the productivity apps -- Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- which Microsoft has made work well not only in Windows but also in iOS, in Android, and in OS X. Keep in mind that none of this means Office 365 has triumphed over Microsoft's on-premises services. On-premises Exchange -- IT's biggest reason to adopt Office 365 -- is still the leading email server by far. But over the next year or so, we will see
Gary Edwards

Microsoft's Office 2016 preview gets real-time editing in Word and more | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-editing-in-word-and-more.html

Office-365 Microsoft-Office-2016

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Office 2016 won’t release with Windows 10 next month, but Microsoft has said that the next version of its productivity suite will be available later this year to go along with the newly released operating system. Until then, anyone who wants to try out the future of Office can install the public beta version of the app, which is available as a free trial or through Office 365.
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Jul 15
     
    "Microsoft quietly updated its Office 2016 Preview apps for early adopters over the past two weeks with a slew of new features the company announced in a round-up Wednesday. The new features let people who have installed the public beta of Microsoft's forthcoming productivity suite update try out real-time collaboration capabilities that will be rolling out more broadly later this year, along with other changes that make it easier to find particular functions and gather contextual information about what they're working on. 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 Word 2016 now has support for Live Typing, which allows desktop users to see the edits their colleagues are making to a shared document in real time. It builds on a feature unveiled last month that let users see where colleagues were working within a document, but didn't immediately show the words they added. Similar features should be coming to other Office apps with future updates, so that people can work in real time on Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Microsoft already offers a real-time, co-authoring feature inside Office Online, but this update brings those capabilities onto the desktop for the first time within Microsoft's productivity suite. It will be possible for people to collaborate in real time across Office Online and Office on the desktop when Office 2016 launches later this year, but until then, users will have to choose between collaborating inside a Web app or inside a desktop app. That feature set puts Office in closer competition with Google's productivity suite, which has grown in popularity and features robust support for real-time collaboration. "
Gary Edwards

Microsoft limits unlimited OneDrive for Business storage to priciest Office 365 enterpr... - 0 views

www.cio.com/...fice-365-enterprise-plans.html

Office-365 OneDrive

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Microsoft yesterday announced that only the priciest enterprise Office 365 subscription plans will be eligible for an unlimited OneDrive for Business storage allotment.
  • "We ... recognize we are disappointing customers who expected unlimited storage across every Office 365 plan, and I want to apologize for not meeting your expectations," said Jeff Teper, Microsoft's top OneDrive executive, in a post to a company blog yesterday.
  • Previously, Microsoft had said that all Office 365 customers would have a never-ending supply of storage in OneDrive for Business, the service for commercial customers. As of Thursday, the firm's roadmap for the subscription service still states, "Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost [emphasis added."
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  • Microsoft significantly revised that on Wednesday. Only the most expensive Office 365 plans -- Enterprise E3, the to-be-retired Enterprise E4, and the new Enterprise E5 plans -- will offer unlimited storage if more than five users are on the plan. And then only in stages, with each increase requiring Microsoft's approval.
  • Office 365 Enterprise E3 lists at $20 per user per month (or $240 annually), while E5 -- which replaces E4, with the latter set to fall off the catalog by June 2016 -- runs $35 per user per month ($420 annually). Less expensive plans, including the $12.50 per user per month ($150 annually) Business Premium, will have a 1TB cap on OneDrive for Business.
  • Naturally, Microsoft would love if Business Essentials users upgraded to E3 to get, among other things, more OneDrive space, as the company would see a 60% revenue jump from those customers.
  • Microsoft has made other moves recently to boost revenue from Office, including a 59% price increase in the top-tier enterprise-grade plan.
  • Microsoft hasn't gotten around to changing the Office 365 roadmap, which continues to promise unlimited OneDrive and OneDrive for Business storage space.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Dec 15
     
    " "We ... recognize we are disappointing customers who expected unlimited storage across every Office 365 plan, and I want to apologize for not meeting your expectations," said Jeff Teper, Microsoft's top OneDrive executive, in a post to a company blog yesterday. Previously, Microsoft had said that all Office 365 customers would have a never-ending supply of storage in OneDrive for Business, the service for commercial customers. As of Thursday, the firm's roadmap for the subscription service still states, "Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost [emphasis added." Microsoft significantly revised that on Wednesday. Only the most expensive Office 365 plans -- Enterprise E3, the to-be-retired Enterprise E4, and the new Enterprise E5 plans -- will offer unlimited storage if more than five users are on the plan. And then only in stages, with each increase requiring Microsoft's approval. Between now and March, Microsoft will increase the storage allowance for customers on those plans -- as well as the corresponding ones for government customers and education -- from the current 1TB to 5TB. After that, companies and organizations that want more will have to ask for it."
Gary Edwards

Survey: Businesses Keen on Office 365 Despite Some Qualms -- Redmond Channel Partner - 0 views

rcpmag.com/...ice-365-business-adoption.aspx

Office-365 Gartner

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Office 365 is Microsoft's unified product now. It has evolved quite a bit from the time when the Office suite of applications was first introduced in 1989, Cannell explained. Some capabilities are only available through Office 365 services, such as Groups, Delve and Office 365 Video, he added.
  • The use of Microsoft's 2013-branded products topped the roster among the current survey respondents. SharePoint Server 2013 was used by 47 percent. Exchange Server 2013 was used by 38 percent. In the 2014 study, Microsoft's 2010-branded products had topped the list, Cannell said.
  • The most important Office 365 capabilities included Exchange Online for e-mail and calendar use. In second place was OneDrive for Business, with Office 365 ProPlus ranking third. Office 365 ProPlus is the suite of Office applications offered with various Office 365 subscription plans.
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  • Cannell said he was surprised by OneDrive for Business' top ranking among the survey participants, particularly because it has had some syncing issues. However, he also noted that Microsoft recently announced some improvements along those lines.
  • Office 365 services aren't exactly doing away with the server products. For instance, the survey results aren't indicating strong results showing that Exchange Online adoption has cut into Exchange Server on-premises use. Exchange Server use only decreased by 5 percentage points compared with Gartner's 2014 study result. Cannell speculated that hybrid Exchange use might be an explanation for this somewhat unexpected finding.
  • Organizations should limit the use of OneDrive for Business until it's been proven in the enterprise. Until recently, the OneDrive for Business storage service has been considered broken, although Microsoft has implemented a next-generation sync client to improve it, Cannell said. He recommended testing it before adoption.
  • Organizations still need to develop Office 365 management competencies. In particular, back end systems are still complex to administer, Cannell said. Organizations should test to see how well the service is performing globally, too, he added.
  • Organizations should plan to implement hybrid integration with Office 365 services. Take hybrid integration seriously as it will be a normal state of affairs going forward, Cannell said. Gartner thinks that all enterprises should plan to implement single sign-on directory integration.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 16
     
    "Enterprise adoption of Microsoft's Office 365 suite is very high, according to a recent poll of IT decision makers by market researcher Gartner Inc. About 78 percent of the survey's participants reported their organizations are either currently using or planning to use Office 365 software and services. That figure represents a 13 percentage-point increase from the results of Gartner's last Office 365 study, which was published back in 2014. The results were described in Web presentation Thursday by Larry Cannell, an analyst with Gartner's Technical Professionals Group."
Gary Edwards

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

www.wsj.com/...5726-lMyQjAxMTI1MjAwNjgwMTY1Wj

Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • But if you’re in my dad’s camp, you don’t need to keep buying new versions of Office. Microsoft hasn’t added a ton of new innovations to typesetting and presentation building—those all work just fine on what you’ve already got. My dad was using Office 2008 for Mac, so I asked him to install 2016. His verdict: It’s not terrible, but he sees no reason to change. (There are also a number of free or cheap basic productivity programs, including Apple’s iWork suite and LibreOffice, that, like Google, can still open and save in compatible Office formats.)
  • 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.
  • But Office 2016 doesn’t give enough reasons for previous Office owners to upgrade. And people looking for rich collaboration don’t need to wait for Microsoft to catch up.
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Oct 15
     
    "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

Office productivity: Has Microsoft blown it? | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...ctivity-has-microsoft-blown-it

Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Microsoft Office quickly became as much a part of office culture as beige cubicles and office parks, and with the coming of Sharepoint at the turn of the century (trojan horsed free into many companies) we entered the golden age of digital filing cabinets to keep Office docs in. This was genius business strategy by Microsoft: for decades Office has been the golden goose and the de facto business standard 'productivity' tool... extending it to Sharepoint storage infrastructure created another gusher of revenue.
  • Throughout the dot com era, the web 2.0 read/write web era and the explosion of mobility and digital first strategy Microsoft have arguably held the office productivity market back in order to protect the Office golden goose revenues to spectacular financial success.
  • Waves of innovative collaboration software have attempted to loosen this business culture chokehold, with minor incursions made by 'Storage as a Service' vendors, although that area has become a costing race to the bottom.
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  • This brilliant business strategy and marketing hypnosis of the business world by Microsoft is now showing some signs of wearing off as the digital era matures and more people finally start to realize how anachronistic and bureaucratic document driven workflows are.
  • The question is how much longer this can endure as Microsoft's power wains at the center of the office productivity business world.
  • Windows phone has failed - it wasn't even mentioned in the early stages of yesterday's earnings call - and Lync/Skype are old hat in unified communications.
  • Dynamics was until recently a very small facet of Microsoft's world but is being beefed up to compete in the wide open customer relationship management world, Azure is doing well in the cloud infrastructure world but in a very fast moving and quickly evolving space with tight margins.
  • After years of stifling innovation in collaboration, the pace of digital may have finally caught up with Microsoft and left them exposed for now.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Apr 16
     
    "Office productivity: Has Microsoft blown it? Microsoft has dominated the 'office productivity' tools market for decades and is a de facto way of working in most companies. Having significantly held back innovation in the last 10 years, Office is arguably reaching the end of its useful life as modern digital tools make it look like an old bureaucratic anachronism."
Gary Edwards

Enterprise Productivity Apps Are Dominated By Google And Microsoft - ARC - ARC - 0 views

arc.applause.com/...rkplace-productivity-apps-data

Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • “Our data revealed some very interesting findings,” wrote Okta’s director of analytics and big data Cathy Tanimura and content manager Katie Hahn, in a blog post. “Traditional on-prem software companies are successfully reinventing themselves in the cloud. Enterprises continue to build out their library of applications with new and emerging apps. And, no app is invincible.”
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 16
     
    "Google Apps and Microsoft's Office 365 compete to be the workplace productivity tools of choice. But they are not mutually exclusive as most companies find room for both. A report by cloud identity and mobility management company Okta said that 40% of its customers used Google Apps and Office 365 on a daily basis. According to Okta's 2016 Businesses @ Work report, different departments within a corporate infrastructure are happy to use different parts of the apps for specific tasks such as email or spreadsheets. Around 30% of "overlappers" use Office 365 for Excel, Word and PowerPoint while Google Apps is used for email and inter-office collaborations. Certain industries prefer one to the other, Okta said. Around 82% of financial companies and 77% of biotech firms use Office 365. Google Apps is used by 50% of Internet-centric companies. Office 365 is the dominant force in IT, nonprofit, construction, healthcare and telecommunications. Google Apps is the preferred tool in marketing/advertising and education. Software companies are almost split down the middle-around 27% use both, while Google Apps is used by 38% of companies compared to the 35% who go for Office 365."
Gary Edwards

Ditch Your Office - & Watch Employee Productivity Soar - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...tch-employee-productivity-soar

Cloud-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Email Email generates a “push” interruption in your daily work. When people want something from you, they sends you email, which interrupt your flow of thought. In our company, we turned to alternatives to reduce email — options such as Basecamp, Asana and Slack. Now, when someone is contributing to and working on a project, instead of giving a “push” with email — which distracts the people from their work —they make a “pull” and retrieve information directly from the place where everyone is working together on the same project. Additionally, it encourages more collaboration. The problem with email is that all the information remains enclosed between the sender and receiver. The communication remains behind closed doors. When a new team member wants to join in on a project, they have to bother another person to catch up on the state of the job and learn the way the project is advancing, triggering another flow of email to catch the person up to speed. Now, that new team member can simply log onto the platform, Basecamp, for instance, search for the corresponding project, and find everything they need to begin working.
  • Meetings As shown in this infograph, $37 billion dollars are lost each year in the United States alone because of unnecessary meetings. Employees spend more than 60 hours per month in unproductive meetings (with half of those being considered by them to be a total waste of time). Who creates meetings? Yes, people who live from one meeting to the next —managers! Their agenda is full of meetings. This is due to the fact that they are not the ones doing the true work — the work that serves a purpose, which has value and adds up, the productive work. The ones who do the productive work are the programmers, designers, etc. They need to have a work schedule with no meetings for them to reach their maximum level of productivity.
  • Another reference point is this article by The Economist, where a study showed that a factory was able to save the equivalent of eliminating 200 jobs just by limiting meetings to a maximum of 30 minutes and 7 people per meeting.
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  • Embrace the Digital Workplace When you work without email, meetings (both by phone or physical) or bosses, you will go from having synchronous to asynchronous communication. What this means is that if someone needs something from you they will have to communicate strictly by text using the project management tool and when you finish your three to four hours of continuous work you will be able to answer the messages based on your time, without it being an interruption.
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Aug 16
     
    "Six years ago, we surveyed our employees with the goal of determining the optimal place for each of them to work in terms of maximum efficiency and productivity. What we quickly determined was that no one wanted to work in the office. Workers Can't Concentrate in the Office When asked to identify the best place to get work done - specifically work that requires maximum concentration and creativity, such as designing a web page, programming new functionality for software, developing a financial report or writing a sales proposal - not a single member of our 34-member team chose the office. Rather, they selected: An extra room at their home Their favorite coffee shop A train or airplane Our finding wasn't an anomaly. In a much larger study based on 2,600 interviews, FlexJobs concluded that 76 percent of workers prefer to avoid the office when they have important work to do."
Gary Edwards

MSFT Stock: Here's Why the Bears Are Wrong on Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) - 0 views

www.profitconfidential.com/...wrong-on-microsoft-corporation

Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Apr 16
     
    "One standout in the cloud business is the company's "Office 365" product suite. Nadella took the old Office suite, which charged users every couple of years for a licence, and moved it to the cloud, where users now pay a monthly fee instead. Microsoft hasn't given a revenue breakdown for Office 365, but in the latest quarter, Microsoft said that revenue grew 63% on a constant currency basis over the same time last year. It also now has 22.2 million subscribers, up from 20.6 million subscribers in the previous quarter. Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler forecasts that the cloud version of Office 365 had annual sales trending to $6.5 billion in the most recent quarter. (Source: "Microsoft Office Shines in the Cloud, Azure Will Be Profitable, Says Bernstein," Barron's, April 8, 2016.) That's out of total commercial cloud revenue that Microsoft reported of $10.0 billion in annualized sales. (Source: Microsoft Corporation, op cit.) So Office 365 is growing like crazy, but that's not the only bright spot in Microsoft's cloud business. In the battle for cloud computing services, "Microsoft Azure" is second to Amazon.com, Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AMZN) "Amazon Web Services" (AWS). However, Microsoft is starting to gain. While Azure has about 10% of the market to AWS's 30%, Azure is becoming bigger and bigger and it's bound to erode Amazon's lead. In the latest quarter, Azure grew 120% on a constant currency basis, which is almost double AWS's growth. (Source: "How Microsoft's Azure Is Giving Stiff Competition to Amazon's AWS," Yahoo! Finance, April 8, 2016.) Again, Microsoft didn't break down revenue for Azure but according to Bernstein's Moerdler, Azure's annual sales run rate is about $1.8 billion. (Source: Barron's, op cit.)"
Gary Edwards

Pssst! Office 365 customers pay Microsoft up to 80% more over long haul | Computerworld - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...to-80-more-over-long-haul.html

Office-365 wordSDK

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 May 15 - No Cached
  • Transactional customers buy Office once every five to seven years, said Hood. But by convincing businesses to subscribe to Office 365, specifically the E3 plan, Microsoft can realize an 80% increase in revenue over the years-long relationship. Office 365 E3 includes the core Office application suite, as well as cloud-based Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business, shifting those services from on-premises systems to Microsoft's servers.
  • One expert scoffed at Microsoft's multiplier, which he said was actually a low-ball estimate. "A 1.8x multiplier? How about a 6x or 20x multiplier?" said Paul DeGroot, principal at Pica Communications, a consulting firm that specializes in deciphering Microsoft's licensing practices.
  • DeGroot's point was that Microsoft rakes in much, much more than just an additional 20%, 40% or 80% by pulling customers to the cloud. "I think those numbers are conservative," DeGroot said in an email. "
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  • I always remind customers that Microsoft's internal rationale for the cloud is not superior technology or a better fit for customers, but that they can switch customers from purely transactional strategies -- where they wait for Microsoft to produce value before buying in -- or from standard EAs, where customers can stop purchasing SA but keep using the product -- to a subscription model where the customer owns nothing and must continually pay Microsoft."
  • DeGroot, like many licensing gurus, is often called in when a Microsoft customer grows weary of paying Redmond and wants ideas on cutting costs."We routinely reduce customers' payments to Microsoft by 40%, and the two most recent engagements were 75% lower," asserted DeGroot. The latter, he said, was accomplished by dropping the SA annuity when the customer had no plans to upgrade in the next three years, the length of SA contracts.
  • "Customers can drop SA but keep using the latest products in the full Microsoft stack for the next three years with very little downside," DeGroot added. "That's devastating for Microsoft's revenue stream. But if Microsoft can get them into [Office 365] E3, that can't happen. Microsoft will determine what features are available, when they upgrade to new versions, and how much they pay."
  • In her presentation to Wall Street, Hood also talked about even greater revenue opportunities based on selling more cloud-based services to Office 365 customers.
  • "There is additional 'yield opportunity,' in our language, to add lifetime value here, in addition to adding users," she said. For Hood, "yield" means, in her words, "selling more things on top of an installed unit."
  • the lifetime value of a customer. "When we get a cloud customer completely deployed and get utilization and consumption, it opens up with the first service, it opens up the ability for me to get the other services in there,"
  • Gary Edwards on 07 May 15
     
    "Microsoft loves subscriptions. Moving a corporate customer from "transactional" purchases of Office -- the once-traditional practice of purchasing one-time, perpetual licenses that let workers use the suite as long as their firms want -- to Office 365 rent-not-buy subscriptions results in almost a doubling of revenue for Microsoft. "Over the lifetime, the increased reach, the increased frequency in this example, as well as some yield, adding some incremental services, results in a 1.8 times lifetime value of that user in the transition," said CFO Amy Hood in a meeting with Wall Street last week."
Gary Edwards

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

www.cio.com/...-for-maximum-productivity.html

Office-365 productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 15
     
    "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

Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps in use together for many enterprises - GeekWire - 0 views

www.geekwire.com/...ise-market-new-players-joining

Office-365 gDocs

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Okta, a company focused on verifying identities across devices, found that the average employee has access to between 10 and 16 cloud-based apps. Microsoft Office 365 is the most-used app, with Salesforce, Box, Google Apps and Amazon Web Services also making the top five.
  • Microsoft actually extended their lead over the past year. That may be, in part, due to the growth of Office 365 as the go-to way to licence apps like Word and Excel on mobile and desktop devices alike. And with more employees using mobile devices to get work done, they want the same access to Office apps as they have to things like Slack and Google Apps.
  • Office is also maintaining its dominance even as companies add Google Apps to their offerings, letting employees choose between Microsoft or Google options. It turns out that employees stick with Office apps for many projects they’re getting done on their own, but when collaborating they switch to Google products.
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  • Email-killer Slack is also moving up quickly, with a 77 percent increase in adoption in the second half of 2015. For companies that use Slack, it is used widely throughout the organization. While Amazon Web Services are used by less than 10 percent of employees on average, Slack is in use by nearly three-quarters of employees at organizations that use it at all. That puts Slack behind just four apps (including Microsoft Office 365) in terms of saturation.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Mar 16
     
    "Microsoft has held its dominance in the software market in part because it is the go-to provider for many business solutions. Word, Excel and Powerpoint are essential pieces of software across almost any industry, whether they are used for presentations and memos or tracking expenses and marketing products. However, enterprise apps from competitors are growing in popularity, according to a new report from Okta, with apps and services filling gaps left by Microsoft's products. That doesn't mean Microsoft is losing ground, though. In fact, Okta found that Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 use overlaps at more than 40 percent of companies."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Vs. Google And The Battle For Workplace Supremacy - ARC - ARC - 0 views

arc.applause.com/...icrosoft-enterprise-cloud-apps

Productivity workplace microsoft

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The young prefer Google while large, old enterprises go for Microsoft.
  • Microsoft Vs. Google At Work: Age Is A Factor In what will come as surprise to nobody, size and experience matters. The report found that larger, older organizations prefer to use Office 365, while newer companies—startups, for example—prefer to use the Google suite of office tools. IT teams at companies that use Office are five times as large as those that work on Google Apps, although project collaboration between employees is more likely with Google—84% of large enterprises that have switched from Office to Google Apps report that they have experienced a rise in worker interactions.
  • In addition, companies who have a workforce aged between 18-34 years of age are 55% more likely to use Google Apps than Office 365, a scenario that the authors of the report believe is linked to the fact that most youthful entrepreneurs have grown up with Google. Office 365 users, on the other hand, are likely to work for companies that have been using the various iterations of Office for many years—the majority of which will be using the local version installed on their workplace PCs.
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  • The report also found that the age of the customer was a significant path to adoption of either suite of tools. Companies that were founded, say, in 1982 were more likely to use Office 365 and adopt a cautious attitude to cloud adoption—hybrid as opposed to full integration—while the cloud-centric Google Apps was found to be the preferred option for organizations founded after 2010 whose workforce was filled with Millennials.
  • Back in February of this year, Google stated that it wanted to take 80% of Microsoft’s customers. BetterCloud doesn’t see that as happening in the near future but lines of engagement are certainly being decided.
  • “Office 365 organizations are easing into the cloud, allowing employees to choose their preferred working style, rather than abruptly shifting to a cloud-only workplace,” the report said. “Google pushes organizations to undergo transformational change, deploying Google Apps rapidly and over the course of a weekend, or in the case of a larger organization, several weekends.”
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 16
     
    "As a means of measuring for how technology is being adopted in the marketplace, the most common metaphor is usually war. Companies are always involved in battles for consumers, new products are launched at strategic dates in the calendar and there is often an overwhelming sense that victory must be achieved at any cost. In the software sector battlefields are vast, ongoing and filled with casualties. More often than not, the definition of who has won and who has lost is blurred-victory is defined by market share and by how and by whom the technology is being used. In the last decade, there has been a war in the workplace, especially when it comes to the integration of the cloud into daily working and collaboration practices. Both Microsoft and Google want to be the dominant players in the arena, but it appears that neither side can currently claim total victory."
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