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Gary Edwards

5 ways Dropbox Paper could have an edge over Google Docs | PCWorld - 0 views

www.pcworld.com/...-an-edge-over-google-docs.html

DropBox Google-Docs gDocs Office-365 Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Comments: You can add comments to any part of a document by highlighting the relevant line of text. In the toolbar that pops up, click the speech bubble. Your comment will appear in the right margin. Add an @ mention to alert your colleague. Attribution: Paper displays an author’s name next to any text they contributed—even if the text is copy and pasted from another Paper document. Task lists: You an create lists of to-do items in any document by highlighting text and clicking the check-mark icon in the popup toolbar. Then put @ mentions next to each task to assign them.
  • The ability to track document changes is an essential feature in any collaboration tool. Paper makes it exceedingly simple. Just click the three-dot icon in the upper right of the document and you’ll be able to see all that document’s changes and who made them along with the comment history.
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Sep 16
     
    "Dropbox Paper, which was announced last October, is now in open beta. Given that the collaborative writing tool is going head-to-head with well-loved apps like Google Docs and Evernote, I couldn't wait to get an early look. Though Paper is clearly still a work in progress, I'm impressed with its simple design, thoughtful features, and especially its ease-of-use. Here are five features that are especially promising."
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."
Gary Edwards

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

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

Office-365 gDocs

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

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."
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