Group items tagged

"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

"Nintex has partnered NEC Australia to provide customers with the company's workflow and forms solutions. The partnership with NEC Australia will allow Nintex to provide additional support to the many customers looking to boost their workplace efficiency and effectiveness. Nintex has a strong presence in Australia and is continuing to evolve its partner network in the region to ensure customers have the best possible experience with Nintex's workflow productivity platform. The rise of organisations focusing on streamlining and automating their business processes demonstrates an increase in partners looking to Nintex to provide a value-added offering around workflow automation to their services and solutions, according to a company statement. NEC Australia partner alliance practice lead, Tim Pagram, said he had seen businesses across the board experience significant gains in productivity and customer satisfaction by using Nintex technology."

"Microsoft Office 365: what is important for business to know about the "cloud-based" office? Cloud-based service Microsoft Office 365 has become more and more popular solution for managing document workflow in companies. Subsequently, the number of MS Office 365 subscribers is growing by tens percent every year. For instance in the third quarter of 2015 the cloud-based services Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM became the principal drivers of the profit markup of Microsoft. Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats. Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted. Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.). "MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats" "

"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

"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."

"he Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) marketplace is ripe for disruption, but probably not via a huge technological breakthrough of some sort. EFSS options are maturing quickly and it's becoming quite commoditized. Consider that, according to Gartner, there are more than 140 vendors in the space - and that's too many. Sixteen of them meet the criteria for Gartner's Magic Quadrant (MQ) for EFSS. That's probably more than the market needs, but it's likely to be a problem that solves itself. Industry Consolidation Monica Basso, Charles Smulders and Jeffrey Mann, who researched and wrote the Gartner report, expect less than 10 percent of today's stand-alone EFSS offerings will exist by 2018. To be frank, not every vendor in the MQ wants to be classified as an EFSS player. Alastair Mitchell of Huddle has told me that he thinks of EFSS as an "albatross" and doesn't want his company to be known for "shuffling files back and forth." More on that in our next article. Gartner defines EFSS as a "range of on-premises or cloud-based capabilities that enables individuals to synchronize and share documents, photos, videos and files across mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets and PCs." The analysts noted that "sharing" can take place between coworkers, suppliers, customers and others, mobile devices and as content exchange between apps. "Security and collaboration support are critical aspects for enterprises to adopt EFSS," they wrote. The Gartner analysts also wrote that beyond standard EFSS functionalities, the vendors they selected might offer additional features around mobility, security, administration and management, back-end server integration via connectors to corporate servers (for example, SharePoint) and cloud services, content manipulation, collaboration and more. Software EFSS products may or may not have one main repository. Some products integrate with existing third-party repositories that are deploy

"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. "

"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."

"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."

Good interview but i'm looking for ways to short Box.net.  I left lots of sticky notes and highlights on this page - all of which are under the Visual Document list since i didn't have a Cloud Productivity list going.  I spend quite a bit of time studying Box.net, DropBox and a ton of other early Cloud sync-share-store operations while doing research for the Sursen SurDocs product.  Also MS-Live/Office/SkyDrive and Google Docs Collaboration.  No one has a good bead on a Cloud Productivity Platform yet.  But Microsoft and Google clearly know what the game is.  They even have a plan on how to get there.  Box.net, on the other hand is totally clueless.  What are these investors thinking?