Cloud Productivity Platform Wars

"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."

Native Documents on line view-edit-pdf converter. Drag and drop a native Office document to view and edit. And convert that ND to PDF. This Web Service also demonstrates ND deep messaging. EX: Drag and drop a native Office document and the browser will open the document for viewing and editing. Highlight a section of the document that you want to discuss. The URL will reflect this highlight. Copy the URL and paste into another app such as Slack, and slack will display the highlighted text as a message. The reason this deep messaging is significant is that ND captures the moment of conversation and records the action. The basic idea behing deep messaging is that the conversations that surround in-process documents is logged with the document. When these in-process documents are loaded into worklow WORD processors, the conversations appear in the "documents" comments, with each comment connected to the relevant highlighted portion. Very cool! Very productive.

Converts Native Office Documents to PDF. On line Converter

"Microsoft has signed up over 70 smartphone manufacturers to pre-install its services onto phones, up from 20 in May last year.   In a blog post announcing the milestone, Nick Parker, the man in charge of relationships with smartphone makers, wrote that "Microsoft has been working hard to win over the hearts and minds of our partners and customers" which has culminated in 74 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) signing up.  The partners, which include Acer, LG, Samsung, and Sony, will ship Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive, and Skype on devices starting soon. Essentially, Microsoft will have its most important products on millions of phones. "

"SaaS/subscription businesses are much more complex than traditional businesses, and SaaS performance cannot be measured in the same way as traditional businesses are measured. Based on a talk given at the SaaStr Annual Conference in San Francisco, this slide deck offers a comprehensive and detailed look at the key metrics that are needed to understand and optimize a SaaS business, and how these can be used to drive SaaS success. This presentation includes information on: An intro to SaaS metrics Unit economics LTV and churn: An in-depth look Variable pricing axes Months to recover CAC The primary unit of growth: Sales Understanding public SaaS companies"

The cloud has quickly become a mainstay in IT departments, with recent research from cloud solutions provider RightScale showing 93 percent of businesses using cloud technology in some form or another. But it's not all smooth sailing after the initial migration and integration - many businesses find that the second wave of cloud adoption is just as rough as the first. According to RightScale's 2015 State of the Cloud report, which surveyed 930 IT professionals about their current adoption and future plans involving cloud computing, 88 percent of businesses are using public cloud technology and 63 percent are using private cloud. Eighty-two percent have a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74 percent in 2014, a clear indication that the cloud has quickly become an essential ingredient of modern IT.

"As reviewed by Tom's IT Pro, Egnyte's enterprise file sync solution has three aspects: Cloud File Server,  Storage Sync and Storage Connect. The alliance/partnership announcements further demonstrate Egnyte's serious intent to compete for the higher-value enterprise market, with unique capabilities fostering expansion beyond commodity-based storage into a hybrid data access platform as communicated by Egnyte's CEO, Vineet Jain."

This is the VC group April Underwood joined before funding Slack. She is now with Slack.

"The 2015 holiday season is upon us and the year is drawing to a close. Soon our thoughts will drift to our hopes and goals for 2016. For those who are dreaming of a new job at an up-and-coming young company, we've compiled this list to help. All of these companies specialize in making tech for work and business use, a $3.5 trillion worldwide market. All of them had spectacular years in 2015, by launching great new technology or getting a boatload of funding or landing big partnerships and generally setting themselves up for a successful 2016 and beyond."

Microsoft's Office 365 - the cloud-based version of Microsoft's flagship productivity software solution - is growing by leaps and bounds. The enterprise adoption rate of Office 365 has nearly tripled since 2014 and some estimate the offering is now the most widely used business cloud application available - even more than Salesforce.com.

"The press release introduces detailed capabilities of PUB HTML5's online brochure maker. The software is developed for people to prepare brochures online easily. PUB HTML5 is a leading publishing destination suitable for business owners, non-profit organizations as well as individuals. Whether you have a small scale business or a huge multinational company, you can certainly depend on PUB HTML5 for digital publishing. It is an open access HTML5 Digital Publishing Platform that allows you to convert PDF, MS Office and Open Office documents to HTML5 and jQuery based publications at no cost at all. These features make your flipbook even more attractive for the customers. Anna Lee, the chief designer of PUB HTML5 has announced a new online brochure maker (http://pubhtml5.com/digital-brochures-maker). It would make brochure designing simpler for the users. With the help of this software, you will be able to customize your catalogs, brochures and magazines online. More than six lakh users rely on PUB HTML5 for online publishing. The content published using the software program is compatible with all leading computers, laptops, tablets and mobile interfaces. Operating Systems like Android, iOS and Windows 8 also support this software quite well."

"Google operates one of the world's biggest networks of computers. But its business of renting time on those computers to others-a concept known as cloud computing-lags far behind Amazon.com Inc. and others."

" "We ... recognize we are disappointing customers who expected unlimited storage across every Office 365 plan, and I want to apologize for not meeting your expectations," said Jeff Teper, Microsoft's top OneDrive executive, in a post to a company blog yesterday. Previously, Microsoft had said that all Office 365 customers would have a never-ending supply of storage in OneDrive for Business, the service for commercial customers. As of Thursday, the firm's roadmap for the subscription service still states, "Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost [emphasis added." Microsoft significantly revised that on Wednesday. Only the most expensive Office 365 plans -- Enterprise E3, the to-be-retired Enterprise E4, and the new Enterprise E5 plans -- will offer unlimited storage if more than five users are on the plan. And then only in stages, with each increase requiring Microsoft's approval. Between now and March, Microsoft will increase the storage allowance for customers on those plans -- as well as the corresponding ones for government customers and education -- from the current 1TB to 5TB. After that, companies and organizations that want more will have to ask for it."

"The combination of familiar software and enterprise-class support is bringing early adopters disappointed by Google's lack of progress back to Microsoft."

" 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."

""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.""

"Few academic management theories have had as much influence in the business world as Clayton M. Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. But how well does the theory describe what actually happens in business?"

"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."