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Gary Edwards

The Ultimate Guide to Creating Shareable Infographics Using PowerPoint or Keynote - 0 views

blog.hubspot.com/...infographic-powerpoint-keynote

hubspot infographic

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Nov 16
     
    "Want to learn how to plan, publish, and promote viral infographics? You're in the right place. But let's start by making something clear: If you're thinking, "I'm not a natural designer" or "I've never made an infographic before," you're not alone. However, instead of making excuses, answer this: Have you ever made a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote? Great. Believe it or not, you've got the skills to make an infographic. And now that I know you can do this, I'm here to walk you through the seven steps that I take when creating infographics. The plan is to cover each of those steps in detail so you know exactly how to create and launch infographics for your business as well. Let's dive in. How to Create Shareable Infographics Using PowerPoint or Keynote"
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

HTML5 Presentation Software | Video Presentation Maker and PowerPoint alternative | Foc... - 2 views

focusky.com

Focusky PowerPoint Presentations

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Jun 16
     
    " The easiest way to create HTML5 presentations and animated videos. Professional looking results in just 5 minutes Infinite canvas & unlimited Zoom and Pan effect Smooth transition animation with 3D Camera. Tons of pre-designed templates and styles. Build-in animation tools with dynamic characters. Create, share, and present from anywhere. Custom Whiteboard Animation, Scribe&Explainer Videos Tons of Advanced Features(details)"
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

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'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

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

Microsoft's big plan to dominate Android and win mobile is coming together | New York News - 0 views

www.dailynewsx.com/...-is-coming-together-22258.html

Office-365 Android

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Windows Phones have shipped just 110 million handsets in their entire lifetime while Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have shipped 4.5 billion units. 
  • “[Bundling Office on smartphones] is a cornerstone of our broad services strategy, to bring an array of Microsoft services to every person on every device,” writes Parker.
  • The company announced that around 340 million people are using Office on iOS and Android devices in the three months leading up to January, while a further 900 million are using Skype in total. 
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Feb 16
     
    "Microsoft has signed up over 70 smartphone manufacturers to pre-install its services onto phones, up from 20 in May last year.   In a blog post announcing the milestone, Nick Parker, the man in charge of relationships with smartphone makers, wrote that "Microsoft has been working hard to win over the hearts and minds of our partners and customers" which has culminated in 74 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) signing up.  The partners, which include Acer, LG, Samsung, and Sony, will ship Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive, and Skype on devices starting soon. Essentially, Microsoft will have its most important products on millions of phones. "
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.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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

Wireless WeKast offers alternative solution to awkward laptop presentations - 0 views

www.gizmag.com/...42482

WeCast Presentations

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Mar 16
     
    "Whether presenter or presentee, many of us have sustained minutes of stinging silence as human and machine grapple to cooperate. Such is the cliche of pairing laptops with projectors for the purpose of narrating PowerPoint slides in a somewhat restless room. But a new, pocket-sized adapter may replace all those hassles with smart simplicity. The WeKast is designed to be plug and play, instantly casting presentations from a mobile device without the need of Wi-Fi, cables, or a laptop. Wireless HDMI cast devices have been out for a few years. We've seen the Apple TV and have reviewed Google's Chromecast, the Roku Streaming Stick, and Amazon's Fire TV Stick. Each are useful and powerful in their own right - at least when it concerns home media and entertainment. Although possible to use such devices for professional boardroom presentations, the process may end up more time-consuming and complicated than not. Unlike those other wireless adapters, WeKast is designed with the business market in mind. Simply plug WeKast into any HDMI or VGA port (e.g. TVs, projectors), connect a smartphone or tablet via mobile app (available for Android and iOS), and then select any presentation to start. Since WeKast provides its own Wi-Fi and doesn't require internet access, users won't need to worry about restricted, unreliable, or nonexistent wireless networks. The WeKast mobile app handles the launch and remote control of content to be presented. With smartphone in hand, users can more openly engage audiences than by leaning over a laptop. Files are meant to be uploaded onto mobile devices first, be it from a computer, Google Drive, or Dropbox account. No data is stored on the WeKast dongle itself, and communication is encrypted through a secure connection."
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

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).
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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

Paper is Dropbox's new vision for how teams can work together - 0 views

www.engadget.com/...paper-team-collaboration-tools

DropBox Office-365 gDocs Collaboration Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Project managers can add to-do lists, complete with checkboxes and "@" mentions to the member of your team who needs to take care of the associated task. If coding is more your game, you can start typing lines of code right into Paper and it'll automatically format it appropriately. Beyond text, any file you store in your Dropbox can quickly be added to Paper -- if you grab the sharing URL of the file and paste it into Paper, the program automatically formats a preview for you. That way, you can peek at an Excel or PowerPoint file right in line with the rest of your Paper document, or click to see it in full or save to your Dropbox. Google Docs files are even supported here -- it's the first time Dropbox has really integrated with Docs and Drive, itself a competitor to Dropbox's main business.
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Oct 15
     
    " Six months ago, Dropbox quietly announced a collaborative note-taking tool called Notes and launched it in an invite-only beta test. But starting today, the product is being officially branded as Dropbox Paper and the beta test is expanding significantly. You'll still need an invite, but the company gave us a preview of what's probably the biggest addition to Dropbox in years. It's far too early to tell if Paper will be able to keep up with entrenched tools from Google, Microsoft and many others -- but there are definitely some interesting features here that make it worth keeping an eye on. For now, Paper is a web-only app that you can access through your Dropbox account, although the company says it'll have a mobile app ready to go when the product comes out of beta. At first glance, Paper's UI is reminiscent of the scores of minimalist, lightweight text-editing apps that have come out in the past few years, such as IA Writer. But while IA Writer and its ilk are designed for solo composition, Paper is all about working together. As in Google Docs, multiple users can edit a document at the same time. Each is designated by a colored cursor, and the user's full name is displayed in the margins, crediting their contributions to the file. From a text perspective, Paper is quite basic; there's only one font and three sizes available. You can do your basic bold, italics, underline and strikethrough formatting and format text into a block quote, but that's about it. Dropbox specifically said that the purpose of Paper was to keep the focus on sharing ideas rather than formatting. In particular, the company made it so that you can use its app to share pretty much anything, regardless of what tools you might be using."
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