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Gary Edwards

Problems with Slack - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/it-completely-heres-why-2016-3

slack

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Slack, you’re asking for A LOT of my time I may have been fooling myself when we were still in the honeymoon phase, but when there was all the talk of you killing email, I have to admit I thought it was the email problem you were attacking, not just the emailplatform. Which is to say, I thought you were providing some relief from the torrential influx of messages, alerts, and notifications I was receiving on a daily basis. “Me + Slack = Fewer distractions and more productivity,” I thought at the time. I have to say, though, that I’ve since found it to be the opposite. Like, WAY the opposite. With you in my life, I’ve received exponentially more messages than I ever have before. And while it’s been awesome to have such a connection with you, it has been absolutely brutal on my productivity.
  • You’re splitting my attention into a thousand tiny pieces While it’s true that email was (and, despite your valiant efforts, still very much is) a barely-manageable firehose of to-do list items controlled by strangers, one of the few things that it did have going for it was that at least everything was in one place. Trying to keep up with the manifold follow-up tasks from the manifold conversations in your manifold teams and channels requires a Skynet-like metapresence that is simply beyond me. With you, the firehose problem has become a hydra-headed monster.
  • You’re actually making it HARDER to have a conversation Back before we met, I had two primary modes of digitally communicating with people: Real TimeSome of the digital platforms I used were inherently “real time” (phone, Skype, IRC, Google Hangouts, etc.), where there was a built-in expectation of an immediate, rapid-fire conversation wherein everyone involved was more or less fully-present and participating. AsynchronousConversely, there were other platforms that were inherently asynchronous(email, voicemail, iMessage, Twitter DMs, etc.), where there was no expectation of an immediate response, and people tended to send cogent feedback in their own time. Then you came along, and rocked everyone’s world by introducing a conversational melting pot that is neither fully real time, nor fully asynchronous. You’re somewhere in between: You’re asynchronish. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • You’re turning my workdays into one long Franken-meeting I think you and I can both agree that meetings are kind of the worst. And, on the surface, you do totally obviate the need for a ton of them. I can definitely think of many times in which a quick Slack whip-around has saved me from all kinds of interpersonal tedium. So thank you for that. However, I’m wondering what the cost of it is. Specifically, I wonder if conducting business in an asynchronish environment simply turns every minute into an opportunity for conversation, essentially “meeting-izing” the entire workday. All-day meetings every day of the week are substantially more “meetings” than the ones you’re saving me from.
  • Lastly, you’re a bit on the possessive side I will put this simply, Slack: not unlike Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, I wish I knew how to quit you. When I started feeling like our relationship was getting to be just a little too much, I decided to take a few days off. That was never a problem when I was with email — I’d just fire up a vacation autoresponder and be on my merry way. With you, though, there’s apparently no option for deescalating our relationship outside of a few hours in “Do Not Disturb” mode. This means there’s no bigger-picture safety valve to make sure we’re not about to drive off a cliff hand-in-hand, like a socio-digital Thelma & Louise.
  • I’m sorry, but I need my space Maybe you will say I’m afraid of commitment, but I’m just not interested in a relationship that seems to want to swallow up more and more of my time and attention, and demand that more and more of my interactions with other people go through you first.
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Mar 16
     
    "Hey there, Slack. This won't be easy, but it's for the best. As you and I both know, things started out so wonderfully. Me with my exploding inbox, you with your (very sexy) ambition to make email obsolete. Only, I don't know if we're so good for each other, after all. Or, more to the point, I don't know if firing up a relationship with you ever really fixed what was broken in my other one to begin with. Everyone knows email and I had our issues. Email started as a frisky exploration into a whole new world and quickly escalated to a scale beyond anyone's expectations. Next thing I knew, email and I had not only put a ring on it, we'd bought a minivan and moved into a little place in the suburbs. Was it rushed? Sure. I think if we'd known just how big the relationship was going to become, email and I would have set things up very differently from the start. Still, a commitment's a commitment, and we'd settled into a routine we could at least call our own. Then, out of nowhere, here you come riding into my life like a goddamned Clint Eastwood straight out of Bridges of Madison County. The personality! The colors! You were all promises, rose petals, and sex appeal. And SO much more responsive to my needs. Soon, we were messaging every day. It wasn't long until it was hard to think of a time I'd ever gotten things done without you. "
Gary Edwards

SF Startup Aims to Make Email More Collaborative - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...-make-email-more-collaborative

eMail email-productivity Emmerge

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 May 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 18 May 16
     
    "SAN FRANCISCO - The number of worldwide email users will reach 2.9 billion by the end of 2019, according to predictions from The Radicati Group. But has anyone really learned to use it effectively and efficiently in the workplace? Two-year-old San Francisco startup Emmerge claims it has: It's marketing an inbox with collaboration features, which is designed to streamline team projects. Project Management and Collaboration The project management and collaboration platform in one allows users to assign action items in the body of emails and build on ongoing tasks and projects. Emmerge organizes information by hashtags and also offers a way for employees to track billable hours if they need to do that, too. Emmerge CEO and founder Marc Blinder said his company isn't trying to replace email. Rather, it is trying to enhance it with a little "social DNA" and other features. "We know everyone in the business world is going check emails," he said. Emmerge offers a new way to look at it, he continued. Blinder said the Emmerge solution is more collaborative than the way Google looks at email, with a "consumer-first lens … We do it on a team basis. The fundamental philosophical difference is that team aspect that gets better and better as more people use it.""
Gary Edwards

Addappt makes your address book smart | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...s-your-address-book-smart.html

Contact-Management

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • How it worksWhen you install the addappt app on your device and verify your email ID, the app stores your profile information on its server. You profile includes only that information that you added to your own profile, including phone numbers, email IDs, physical address, social network. And you can selectively make any property private at anytime. The second step is to get your friends on addappt. You can send invites to your friends and when they join addappt their profile is uploaded to the sever. The app automatically helps people connect using the verified email or verified mobile so all your friends need to do is download addappt and make sure they have one of your emails or mobile. Resources White Paper CloudFlare Advanced DDoS Protection White Paper Don't Let Your Security Strategy Become Irrelevant See All Go Now the magic begins. Addappt will sync your profile with your friends' address books and vice versa. Now when you change anything in your profile on your own phone, it will sync those changes in your friends' address books. No need to send bulk emails or messages. This puts you in control of your information. You determine which is the preferred phone number to or email address to reach you at. Ane addappt also remembers the number you called last and will automatically dial it. Since often we have different channels of communicating with different folks, the app also remembers how you communicated last with someone (i.e., it "adapts" to you).
  • Cool featuresOne feature that is extremely important from a privacy point of view is that addappt uploads only the profile that you added in your address book, stuff like your phone number, email ID, LinkedIn profile, physical address -- whatever you choose and nothing else. No contacts from your address book are uploaded to the sever. Also, and very importantly, your connections never see your other connections and you can’t see theirs. It is all private. I recently discovered another interesting feature of addappt when I was travelling to India and had a local number there. Previously I would have to bulk email hundreds of people in my address book to give them my new, temporary number, only to change it again 4 weeks later. With addappt, I updated my profile and added the temporary local number and, boom,  everyone who was connected with me via addappt had my new local number instantly. When I came back to the U.S., I removed the temporary number from my profile and it automatically removed it from my friends’ address books. And unlike some popular social networking sites, if you quit addappt, your contacts will remain on your device. What you will lose is the ability to keep syncing your contacts. That’s it.
  • New featuresAddappt recently introduced Widgets so your favorite contacts are now available on iOS and Android from anywhere on the phone and you don’t have to open the app. They require no setting and they are live since addappt remembers how you communicated last. They reorder, get removed or added just as within the app. You can also message your friends with one “tapp.” On iOS, you can email URLs from your browser to yourself using the action extension. You can group  contacts very easily and then send a group email, group chat or a group “tapp". Addappt’s  one "tapp" messaging is also available on the Apple Watch. Addappt makes it much easier to share your contact info with people you meet at conferences, for example with a feature called Share My Info.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 May 16
     
    " remember the days before smartphones when managing your contact list was a herculean task. I used to maintain a notebook where I would add phone numbers, email IDs and physical addresses. But people change their contact info all the time and it was close to impossible to keep up. Download the April 2016 Digital Magazine Inside: How companies are making wearables work, why CIOs aren't ready for container tech & much more! READ NOW When we moved to smartphones, the physical address book was gone and along with it the crossed out or hastily erased names and numbers, but the challenges of staying updated remained. I had been looking for a solution where some magical app will keep my address book updated and keep my friends and colleagues informed of my latest contact details without having to send spam mails to everyone I could remember. Then I found addappt, a new way to make your addressbook as smart as is your smartphone. I spoke with addappt founder Mrinal Desai to learn about his background, how the app came to be and how it works. Desai was a very early LinkedIn employee (employee number 15, to be precise). He was LinkedIn's first business development manager. "LinkedIn is basically who I am offline. I build relationships over years and years and I believe that is the way to live life, based on very full and enriching relationships." said Desai. The problem Desai is trying to solve with addappt twofold: On one hand the onus is on the person who is moving to inform "everyone" about the move and send them updated information. On the other hand, you have to keep your address book updated every time someone changes contact info. There were two constantly moving goal posts to chase. "It started getting harder and harder, so for me to get the latest information. One, I have to depend on you, hopefully that you will remember to email me or all your friends in a mass spam-ish way, if you will. Then, I go take it in and I have to remember to now update some
Gary Edwards

Email took an almighty beating this week, but it's far from dead | VentureBeat | Apps |... - 0 views

venturebeat.com/...his-week-but-its-far-from-dead

eMail Messaging

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Yesterday, email-killing team-collaboration upstart Slack nabbed another $200 million in funding, valuing the company at $3.8 billion. But perhaps more importantly, Slack now claims 2.7 million daily active users, up from 2.3 million just last month, with big-brand customers including CenturyLink, CBS, Dow Jones, Harvard University, Samsung, the U.S. State Department, and the Federal Aviation Administration.
  • Fast-forward six years and you could now say that SMS is also on the way out, replaced by a plethora of Internet-based messaging services. But Sandberg had a point — looking at the methods of communication that permeate the lives of young people gives the biggest clue as to where we’re heading. But it will be a gradual process guided by the demographics of people who use a given service; Uber may be phasing out email completely, but that’s because the majority of its users — in the U.S. at least — are under the age of 35 according to recent reports. But an airline such as KLM will have customers spanning all age groups, so it would be less likely to switch off telephone or email support quite so quickly.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Apr 16
     
    "While 2016 is shaping up to be the year virtual reality and the Internet of Things went mainstream, it could also go down in history as the year email's much-touted demise cranked into overdrive. At least, if this week's events are anything to go by. With the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter, and a myriad of communication conduits springing up over the past decade, there's little question that people use email less than they once did for personal communications, and when you swing the demographic dial down to teenagers, the shift is even more pronounced. But email has remained in rude health despite the rise in mobile messaging, and this has been in no small part due to businesses - within companies, between companies, and between companies and customers. But things are changing."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft's Latest Buy, Acompli, is a Great Email App | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-app-is-a-worthy-download.html

Microsoft Acompli Office-Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Dec 14
     
    "Microsoft this week announced it had acquired Acompli, an email and calendar integration app for Android and iOS. Re/code reports that Microsoft paid "north of $200 million," a far cry from Facebook's nearly $19 billion buyout of messaging app WhatsApp. Still, Microsoft's acquisition raises two questions (at least) for mobile users: 1) With approximately 10 zillion email apps available today, why Acompli? And 2), is the free app worth a download? According to a Microsoft blog post, Acompli "provides innovative ways to focus on what's important in your inbox, to schedule meetings, and work with attachments and files. Users love how it connects to all email services and provides a single place to manage email with a focus on getting things done." Let's parse that paragraph to help determine if Acompli is worth a look."
Gary Edwards

Everyone wants to reinvent email, workflow: Here's what we really need | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...flow-heres-what-we-really-need

email-productivity workflow Cloud-Productivity-Platform collaboration docflow-conversation

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Here's where all these efforts fall flat: These products are all pitched as magic bullets to simplify your work life, but in reality are just another item to sell or keep current customers in the fold. Another reality: These applications are trying to tackle human issues with collaboration and communications. Tech isn't going to fix those communication quirks or cure humans' need to try and keep up.
  • We don't need another tool. We need less of them. We don't need another app to aggregate tech functions. We need to simplify tech functions starting with a bunch of check boxes marked delete. We don't need technology to help us communicate. We need to be taught how to communicate. And we sure don't need more messaging. We need to turn our damn phones off so maybe we can really get some work done or look up and actually talk.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15
     
    "In recent weeks, email and other collaboration and workflow tools are being re-imagined with new interfaces, social components, integrated video conferencing and easy swipes to dismiss messages. To wit: IBM launched  its Verse effort with a snazzy interface that combines, social, email, analytics and mobile nicely. Google floated Inbox , an app designed to help you manage your email better. For the most part, it's effective. Cisco's Project Squared is an app that runs on its collaboration cloud and integrates video conferencing, messaging and other tools. Facebook is pondering Facebook at Work with a news feed and doc sharing. We could go on, but the list of tech vendors trying to deliver a workflow leapfrog is long. And we're not even counting efforts by Workday, Salesforce and others to include collaboration with core business functions. WHAT'S HOT ON ZDNET Windows 10: You've got questions, I've got answers Windows 10 ​How to use Google's new My Account, the one-stop control center for all of its services Security Apple Watch or Android Wear? Neither. Why smartwatches aren't ready for prime time Mobility The tech of Computex 2015 in pictures Hardware Here's where all these efforts fall flat: These products are all pitched as magic bullets to simplify your work life, but in reality are just another item to sell or keep current customers in the fold. Another reality: These applications are trying to tackle human issues with collaboration and communications. Tech isn't going to fix those communication quirks or cure humans' need to try and keep up. We don't need another tool. We need less of them. We don't need another app to aggregate tech functions. We need to simplify tech functions starting with a bunch of check boxes marked delete. We don't need technology to help us communicate. We need to be taught how to communicate. And we sure don't need more messaging. We need to turn our damn phones off so maybe we can really get some work done or look up a
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

Facebook Messenger: inside Mark Zuckerberg's app for everything (Wired UK) - 0 views

www.wired.co.uk/...inside-facebook-messenger

Messaging Conversation Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • It's the job of Marcus, a gently spoken 42-year-old French-born fintech guy, to turn a proprietary messaging app into this all-encompassing platform - essentially, an operating system on which third-party apps, and entire businesses, can be built in ways that lock them into the Facebook ecosystem. The Chinese have already shown what's possible: social media giant Tencent enables 600 million people each month to book taxis, check in for flights, play games, buy cinema tickets, manage banking, reserve doctors' appointments, donate to charity and video-conference all without leaving Weixin, the Chinese version of its WeChat app.
  • "The messaging era is definitely now," Marcus says. "It's the one thing people do more than anything else on their phone. Some people were surprised when I joined Facebook, but it's because I believe that messaging is the next big platform. In terms of time spent, attention, retention - this is where it's happening. And it's a once in a generation opportunity to build it." Or, as Zuckerberg acknowledged in a public Q&A last November, "Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking."
  • Some questioned why the company was competing with its own acquisition, WhatsApp, bought two months earlier for what was then $19 billion (£12.5bn). But over the next year, as WhatsApp remained lean, Messengerfunctionality kept growing - video and voice calls, peer-to-peer payments, location-sharing - even as its use was made independent of a Facebook account.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Messenger Platform." Messenger would be opened to outside developers - initially 40 pre-selected partners, including ESPN, Giphy, Boostr, Dubsmash and Talking Tom - to build new "tools for expression" that would let users create and share content inside the app.
  • But Messenger would also, he revealed, let users communicate with businesses just as if they were friends - through simple conversation threads that would let them "make a reservation, buy something, change shipping information…"
  • There are lots of different ways that people want to share and communicate. In a lot of countries, as much as 99 per cent of the people online will use SMS or send text messages - with people sending 15-20 messages or more every single day."
  • Zuckerberg continues, explains the continuous iterations designed to let Messenger"enable you to express yourself in new ways": photo and video messaging; stickers to help you easily display emotions; geolocation to let you find your friends; Messenger for business; and peer-to-peer payments. Now the Messenger Platform would let people "use creative new apps to have richer conversations". "We expect these improvements to continue making Messenger a more useful and engaging experience for people."
  • People send 30 billion daily messages on WhatsApp alone, according to the company - compared with 20 billion daily SMS messages. Even smaller apps such as Telegram are claiming ten billion daily deliveries.
  • And when people are inside messaging apps, they're not encountering web ads or discovering retailers or interacting with an existing social network.
  • "Facebook, Amazon and Google are all threatened by the way the operating-system owner has control on mobile," says Benedict Evans, a partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz who writes widely on the mobile ecosystem. "It's why the Kindle Fire exists. It's too late for Facebook or Amazon to create an operating system, so Facebook is thinking, how do we create our own layer on that power structure? So it's trying to create its own runtime withMessenger. It's about attention or engagement: do we become commoditised as just another messaging app, or do we do something more profound? T
  • service discovery: you put stuff inside a messaging app, so you have social as part of discovery
  • Can you turn this into a discovery acquisition channel, which is what Facebook on the desktop became?" 
  • WithMessenger, everything you can do is based on the thread, the relationship. We want to push that further."
  • Transforming interactions with businesses represents "the first baby steps in a series of millions of steps," Marcus says. "Even calling a restaurant is complicated - but when it comes to calling an airline to change a booking, it ranks with a visit to the dentist - it's painful and nobody wants to do it. And email is completely broken. Look at the traditional e-commerce journey: you go to a website. You have to create an account - that's one email. You add something to your shopping cart and check out - that's another email. The package ships - that's another email. When it arrives, that's another. That's four emails that are distinct threads that are not canonical. And the only thing you can do for interactions inside an email is click on a link and go to a website, where you have to re-authenticate. It's painful on desktop, it's impossible on mobile. That's why, for the majority of online retailers, north of 60 per cent of their website traffic is mobile - but only ten to 12 per cent of checkouts are mobile. And mobile traffic will continue increasing.
  • So the thought is, what would those interactions look like if the web and desktop had never existed?"
  • Messenger's answer is to enable businesses and customers to communicate through conversation threads that its 14-person product team calls "interactive bubbles"
  • Once you interact with a business, you open a thread that will stay forever. You never lose context, and the business never loses context about who you are and your past purchases. It removes all the friction."
  • "There are certain conversations that can be handled by an AI quickly and easily - forms don't work on the mobile web, free search is hard," Chudnovsky says. "AI can solve those pain points for you. You'll say, 'I want the cheapest flights from New York to San Francisco, what are the options?' And if you're not satisfied with the results, you can get a human to help. If we do this right, it becomes your primary interface for getting your tasks done. That sucks in a pretty big part of intent."
  • When you're a business that generates most of its revenues from advertising, it's just a better business," he says.
  • "eBay takes a cut of every transaction and listing; Alibaba does all that for free, and makes money from advertising. Alibaba is bigger than eBay and Amazon combined, and is growing much faster. We take the same approach.
  • We want the maximum number of transactions on the platform, while enabling the best possible mobile experience for commerce. The margins on payments aren't that high, and we want the broadest reach. Businesses will want to pay to be featured or promoted - which is a bigger opportunity for us."
  • Julien Codorniou
  • Codorniou, 37, now Facebook's director of global platform partnerships, runs teams in London, Singapore and the US who have brought in the initial Messenger partners such as Everlane, Boostr and YPlan.
  • Michael Preysman, Everlane's CEO and founder, sees value in "a more human one-on-one dialogue that you can track over time, unlike email, which goes into black holes.
  • Marcus reflects on the hours we spend interacting with businesses. "If you can reduce that time and increase delight, if we can increase the fidelity of the conversations with those you care about, then Messenger will be a very important part of your life."
  • "What's happening in Asia is an inspiration - and not only WeChat," says Chudnovsky, "but that's more about proof of what's possible. It's proof that everything starts from a conversation.
  • The trouble with platforms is that they, rather than the businesses built on top, set the rules.
  • Zynga was once the world's biggest social-gaming company; then Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm to limit how it could promote its games. Yet Facebook's reach is hard to ignore: last year, the company says it drove 3.5 billion app installs across desktop and mobile, and more than five billion pieces of content from third-party apps were shared on Facebook's platform.
  • And yet… the platform's interests will not always align with those of the third-party businesses that rely upon it. Marcus dismisses the risk. "Every business is building on top of other platforms, whether iOS or Android,"
  • It's owning the existing identification platform that gives Facebook a distinct edge.
  • "Plugging in GIF-makers into Messenger - OK, that's interesting. But turning it into a universal notification platform for the web - that's much more interesting
  • We live in a world shaped by the web on mobile, but web is a desktop, not a personal experience. We see the world as people-based. If we can recreate that, it reinvents mobile interactions from the ground up."
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15
     
    ""As Messenger has grown, we think this service has the potential to help people express themselves in new ways, to connect hundreds of millions of new people, and to become a communication tool for the world," Zuckerberg told 2,000 developers at his company's F8 conference in San Francisco in March, as he announced that Messenger was becoming so much more than just an app. "Helping people communicate more naturally with businesses will improve, I think, almost every person's life because it's something everyone does.""
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

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

gigaom.com/...work-processing

Work-Processing Documents Visual-Productivity Cloud-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Chat-centric work management, as typified by Slack-style work chat, is getting a tremendous surge in attention recently, and is the now dominant form of message-centric work technology, edging out follow-centric work media solutions (like Yammer, Jive, and IBM Connections).
  • Workforce communications — relying on a more top-down messaging approach for the mobile workforce — is enjoying a great surge in adoption, but is principally oriented toward the ‘hardwork’ done by workers in retail, manufacturing, transport, security, and construction, and away from the ‘softwork’ done by office workers. This class of tool is all about mobile messaging. (Note: we are planning a market narrative about this hot area.)
  • Today’s Special Advertisement Today, I saw that David Byttow’s Bold — a new work processing app — has entered a private beta, with features that line it up in direct competition with Google Docs and the others mentioned above. Bold raised a round of $1 million from Index Ventures in January 2016. Advertisement The competition is hotting up.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Work Processing Will Be The New Normal Advertisement What I anticipate is the convergence on a work processing paradigm, with at least these features: Advertisement Work processing ‘docs’ will exist as online assemblages, and not as ‘files’. As a result they will be principally shared through links, access rights, or web publishing, and not as attachments, files, or PDFs, except when exported by necessity. Work processing apps will incorporate some metaphors from word processing like styling text, manipulating various sorts of lists, sections, headings, and so on. Work processing will continue the notions of sharing and co-editing from early pioneers (Google Docs in particular), like edit-oriented comments, sharing through access-control links, and so on. Work processing will lift ideas from work chat tools, such as bots, commands, and @mentions. Work processing will adopt some principles from task management, namely tasks and related metadata, which can be embedded within work processing content, added in comments or other annotations, or appended to ‘docs’ or doc elements by participants through work chat-style bot or chat communications.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Jun 16
     
    "I've been exploring a growing list of web-based tools for the creation and management of what most would call 'documents' - assemblages of text, images, lists, embedded video, audio and other media - but which, are in fact, something quite different than the precursors, like Microsoft Word and Apple Pages documents. The big shift underlying these new tools is that they are not oriented around printing onto paper, or digital analogues of paper, like PDF. Instead, they take as a given that the creation, management, and sharing of these assemblages of information will take place nearly all the time online, and will be social at the core: coediting, commenting, and sharing are not afterthoughts grafted onto a 'work processing' architecture. As a result, I am referring to these tools - like the pioneering Google Docs, and newer entrants Dropbox Paper, Quip, Draft, and Notion - as 'work processing' tools. This gets across the idea that we aren't just pushing words onto paper through agency of word processing apps, we're capturing and sharing information that's critical to our increasingly digital businesses, to be accessed and leveraged in digital-first use cases. In a recent piece on Medium, Documents are the new Email, I made the case that old style 'documents' are declining as a percentage of overall work communications, with larger percentages shifting to chat, texting, and work media (enterprise social networks). And, like email, documents are increasingly disliked as a means to communicate. And I suggested that, over time, these older word processing documents - and the use cases that have built up around them - will decline. At the same time, I believe there is a great deal of promise in 'work processing' tools, which are based around web publishing, web notions of sharing and co-creation, and the allure of content-centric work management."
Gary Edwards

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

www.cio-today.com/...index.php

DropBox

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Feb 17
     
    "eady a major player in enterprise file sharing and hosting, Dropbox is launching a public version of its new Paper service to make a name for itself among collaborative productivity suite providers such as Google Docs and Microsoft's Office 365. Paper, which has been available in beta since last year, is aiming to win converts from the big names in the space with a user interface that the company said makes collaboration between coworkers easier. The cloud-based platform will allow users to manage shared documents by assigning different tasks and deadlines to various collaborators. Making Collaboration Easier The service also includes a variety of features designed to make collaboration between team members easier, no matter where in the world they're located. A Paper app is coming to iOS and Android devices to enable users to work on documents even while offline. The Web interface, meanwhile, is currently available in 21 languages, an important feature for multi-lingual teams. These new capabilities join other recent additions such as presentation mode, a feature that turns documents into presentation slides and integration with Google Calendar to make it easier for teams to create and share notes. Paper has already reached early enterprise adopters such as InVision, Ben & Jerry's, Shopify, Campaign Monitor, Getaround and Patreon, according to Dropbox. But the company appears to be positioning Paper to steal market share away from Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. New Business Plans Going head-to-head with such well-established players will likely be a tall order. To help make Paper more attractive to its enterprise clients, Dropbox is also making its file hosting environment more enterprise-friendly. The latest version of the Web interface, which was released in conjunction with Paper, is more streamlined and potentially easier to navigate. Dropbox has also introduced a new feature that allows users to see others on their teams who have viewed their s
Gary Edwards

Why CIOs can't sell enterprise collaboration tools | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...prise-collaboration-tools.html

collaboration Cloud-Computing Cloud-Productivity-Platform wordsdk

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 May 15 - No Cached
  • Enterprise collaboration is a dubious pursuit. You can almost sense its impending failure the minute it gets introduced to a workforce and becomes just another tool that employees are supposed to use.It doesn’t help when CIOs downplay the value of collaboration tools by simply procuring something that meets the lowest common denominator and enables them to check another item off their to-do list. More like this 6 IT leaders share tips to drive collaboration How Mobile, Social Tech Elevate Enterprise Collaboration CIOs Need to Snap Out of Complacency on IDG Answers How to retrieve data lost from Outlook address book after creating a shortcut? State of the CIO 2015 More than 500 top IT leaders responded to our online survey to help us gauge the state of the Read Now “There’s a lot of failures in enterprise collaboration, loosely termed, because people don’t really know what they’re aiming for so obviously they don’t hit it,” says Joel Confino, CEO and founder of the enterprise Q&A platform Haydle.
  • The promise of collaboration is to replace face-to-face communication, but if the implementation isn’t well-planned, it can’t become something extra that people have to do, Confino says. Collaboration also has to perform better than the incumbent, which is email for most people.
  • CIOs can’t merely launch a tool and tell employees to go forth and collaborate. The C suite needs to lead by example and use these new tools to accomplish meaningful business objectives.“The majority of these implementations are underperforming and plenty of them are just outright ghost towns,” says Confino.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Why these tools are failing to supplant a technology as static as email is a question vexing the minds of countless IT managers. The reason for enterprise collaboration is still so hazy that relatively few CIOs agree on what challenges lie ahead.
  • CIOs and other IT decision makers face a host of challenges in their pursuit of enterprise collaboration, some of which are ingrained into the culture of their companies. Resistance to change is the obstacle facing CIOs at most companies and the reasons could include anything from workplace culture to perceived cost and complexity, says Scott McCool, group vice president of IT and CIO at Polycom.
  • One of the biggest challenges is determining how to implement enterprise collaboration in cross-functional manner, says John Abel, senior vice president of IT at Hitachi Data Systems,“Teams are pretty good at communicating within their own group but when it comes to integrating across departments silos tend to happen, which ultimately becomes problematic when each team needs to align on certain campaigns or key topics,” he says.NetScout’s CIO and Senior Vice President of Services Ken Boyd says the landscape of collaboration tools available today makes it difficult to pick the best ones for a specific workforce.
  • “Locating a collaboration tools provider that can offer the right balance for the needs of our enterprise users can be a significant challenge,” he says. There are many point solutions for voice, video, chat and document collaboration, but splicing together those solutions from multiple vendors isn’t always the most productive or cost -effective method.
  • “There is an atomic shift taking place in how the enterprise operates, and so the CIO and CIO's team must decide whether [on-]premises and cloud-based collaboration tools can and will address the needs of the enterprise users -- anytime, anywhere, and on any device -- plus smoothly work between business and consumer applications,” says Boyd.
  • CIOs must also navigate and please the different age groups, says Chris McKewon, founder and CEO of the managed services provider Xceptional Networks.
  • Millennials are more comfortable with video, short messaging and have embraced newer collaboration tools like Slack and HipChat while older execs are still trying to master WebEx and GoToMeeting, and unfortunately there’s no common ground, McKewon says.“CIOs need to shift their mindset, strategies and projects to be more inclusive and collaborative,” says Shamlan Siddiqi, vice president of architecture and application development at the systems integrator NTT Data.
  • The biggest challenges, according to Siddiqi, are organizational buy-in on major transformational decisions, employee adoption, sustainable engagement, security, content quality, standardization and tool selection.
  • Brian Pillar, IT manager at the software firm TechSmith, agrees that adoption is a major challenge. Enterprise collaboration tools rarely come cheap, so making sure the organization rallies around the new platform is key.Organizations will never realize their return on investment for collaboration until individuals or teams stop creating workarounds to avoid an enterprise collaboration tool altogether, says Pillar.
  • Ruven Gotz, director of collaboration services at the IT solutions vendor Avanade, says collaboration is about helping people work together to achieve more meaningful and impactful outcomes.As such, the biggest challenges lie in approaching collaboration with the right mindset, he says.“Technology is an amplifier of human touch and interaction. Its effectiveness in enabling collaboration is entirely dependent on achieving results with methods that make sense to the way people actually accomplish work,” says Gotz
  • “You really have to understand the true nature of the business results you seek to achieve,” says Gotz.If you can’t see the business result you seek to achieve, take the time to stop and find it. If you can’t rationalize a process that is simple to understand, don’t try to automate it, he says.“Understand what the tool imposes on the experience,” says Gotz. “Don’t let the tool bind natural human interaction.”
  • Gary Edwards on 13 May 15
     
    "Collaboration platforms offer the promise to eliminate unnecessary meetings, phone calls and other time-consuming interactions. However, to succeed those tools have to perform better than the incumbent, which for most people is still email."
Gary Edwards

Working Remotely? Try These 27 Tools for Better Communication, Collaboration & Organiza... - 1 views

blog.hubspot.com/...remote-work-tools

productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jul 15
     
    "One of the best parts about being in marketing is that most of us can work anywhere and everywhere -- as long as we have an internet connection, it's relatively easy for us to get most our day-to-day work done. To publish that blog post, send that email, or set up that email nurturing workflow, we simply need to connect to Wi-Fi and get to work.  But an internet connection doesn't solve everything we need to accomplish during the day. Often, we need to communicate with team members, project managers, and freelancers -- and when you're remote, that communication can get a little ... messy.  To help make it easier for their employees to have flexible work arrangements, many companies are discovering and implementing new tools and resources. To help you figure out which tools might be handy for your team's work arrangement, we compiled some of the best ones my friends on the Inbound.org discussion boards suggested for remote working. Check 'em out below. When You Need to Stay Organized"
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 has lightweight collaboration, project management mobile apps in the works | ... - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...ement-mobile-apps-in-the-works

Office-365 native-documents wordSDK

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 15
     
    "Flow, Microsoft's lightweight email/chat application that looks as if it will debut on iPhones, seems to be just one of a number of new mobile-first productivity apps the company is building. Microsoft also is believed to be working on a lightweight collaboration and document-sharing app (which may be using "Flip" as its working name), as well as a lightweight project-management application, (which may be known as "Highlander"), according to sources of mine who asked not to be named. Flow, Flip and Highlander are all productivity apps that are aimed at mobile users. My bet is they're all the handy work of the "Do More Experiences" team that is part of Microsoft's Applications & Services group, as that team is focused on redefining productivity and building "next-generation experiences" for mobile platforms, including phones and tablets. One of my contacts said Flip may include some of the features that will be part of the Flow email/chat application, but will go beyond Flow by offering document viewing, editing and collaboration features. Highlander is meant to provide lightweight project management for smaller-sized projects, making it easy for users to update tasks and watch projects' progress, that same contact said. Microsoft already sells a more fully featured project-management application, Microsoft Project."
Gary Edwards

Working Remotely? Try These 27 Tools for Better Communication, Collaboration & Organiza... - 0 views

blog.hubspot.com/...remote-work-tools

Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Apr 15
     
    "One of the best parts about being in marketing is that most of us can work anywhere and everywhere -- as long as we have an internet connection, it's relatively easy for us to get most our day-to-day work done. To publish that blog post, send that email, or set up that email nurturing workflow, we simply need to connect to Wi-Fi and get to work.  But an internet connection doesn't solve everything we need to accomplish during the day. Often, we need to communicate with team members, project managers, and freelancers -- and when you're remote, that communication can get a little ... messy.  To help make it easier for their employees to have flexible work arrangements, many companies are discovering and implementing new tools and resources. To help you figure out which tools might be handy for your team's work arrangement, we compiled some of the best ones my friends on the Inbound.org discussion boards suggested for remote working. Check 'em out below."
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

What Salesforce's acquisition of Quip means for enterprise software startups | TechCrunch - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...r-enterprise-software-startups

Productivity Enterprise-Productivity SaaS Quip Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • So which startups are gunning to take Quip’s place? The answer is surprising: none. There are hundreds of task/project management apps and dozens of communication platforms, yet full productivity suites are few and far between.
  • Sure, there are solutions like OnlyOffice, Zoho Docs and Polaris Office, but these can hardly be considered startups. That last part is important because startups, with their fresh outlook and high risk tolerance, are the true drivers of innovation.
  • Meanwhile, enterprise giants will continue snapping up these enterprise software upstarts to bolster and innovate higher-performance offerings in an attempt to provide customers with a seamless, uninterrupted workflow.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Enterprise software spending is on an upward trend, and is expected to reach $326 billion this year; meanwhile, startups and investors have taken notice. There are currently 1,425 active startups in the space — as listed by CrunchBase — and there’s been an influx of venture funding. According to PitchBook, venture funding of enterprise productivity startups has more than doubled, from $4.75 billion in 2012 to $11.46 billion last year. This year, these software startups have already raised $6.26 billion to date, and the median deal size is up 25 percent compared to 2015, reflecting current market demand and investor appetite. With investors hot on enterprise startups, the market will become more fragmented and saturated than ever before. End users are already inundated with dozens, if not hundreds, of similar software solutions, each which focus on filling one specific business need as effectively and efficiently as possible.
  • In an environment where the biggest technology leaders are looking to startups for new innovation and transformation, there will likely be a coming spike in M&A activity. A historical analysis of CrunchBase data reveals an ongoing trend: enterprise software startups are seven times more likely to get acquired than they are to shut down, while only 4 percent make it to an IPO.
  • Email, communication and collaboration Email clients and collaborative communication platforms are at the epicenter of modern workflows. For a software giant like Salesforce, whose core product (CRM) relies so heavily on email communications, startups in this segment are particularly attractive targets for an acquisition.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 16
     
    "A new player has entered the enterprise productivity race. For decades, Microsoft reigned as the market leader in enterprise productivity - until Google pushed into the space with Google Apps. Now, with the acquisition of Quip, Salesforce is joining Microsoft and Google in the race. The implications, however, extend far beyond productivity and CRM. Recent developments in enterprise software - including Oracle's acquisition of NetSuite, Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn and Salesforce's acquisition of Demandware and Quip - point to a shift in the market. Enterprise software (not just productivity apps) can no longer be siloed applications bolted together with varying degrees of integration. Today's tools are expected to be cross-functional, with native integration, real-time collaboration and smart communication at their very core. Enterprise software giants across different verticals are moving in the direction of end-to-end solutions in an attempt to own more of the workflow - Salesforce's acquisition of Quip will only intensify the competition. For enterprise software startups, it's indicative of more mergers and acquisitions to come."
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 Lumia 650: sophisticated, metal design and Windows 10 under $200 USD | Micros... - 0 views

blogs.windows.com/...n-and-windows-10-under-200-usd

Business-Productivity Microsoft-Lumina-Business-Phone

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The Best of Microsoft Productivity If you’re like me when you work, you want to really get things done. We need to be able to seamlessly move between our work and personal needs. Building on our success of more than 200 million devices running Windows 10, the Lumia 650 puts Microsoft’s smooth, responsive and most productive OS in your pocket. Our business customers continue to send great feedback on Windows 10 and are compelled by the mobility of the Windows experience across devices. Lumia 650 runs the latest Microsoft Office apps right out of the box, allowing you to create and edit documents on-the-go and sync them to the cloud via OneDrive. It’s also perfect for picking up on email and an important presentation during your commute. And with Cortana, your very own personal assistant, you’re always organized and prepared for the day ahead.
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Feb 16
     
    "The Best of Microsoft Productivity If you're like me when you work, you want to really get things done. We need to be able to seamlessly move between our work and personal needs. Building on our success of more than 200 million devices running Windows 10, the Lumia 650 puts Microsoft's smooth, responsive and most productive OS in your pocket. Our business customers continue to send great feedback on Windows 10 and are compelled by the mobility of the Windows experience across devices. Lumia 650 runs the latest Microsoft Office apps right out of the box, allowing you to create and edit documents on-the-go and sync them to the cloud via OneDrive. It's also perfect for picking up on email and an important presentation during your commute. And with Cortana, your very own personal assistant, you're always organized and prepared for the day ahead."
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