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Gary Edwards

Microsoft offers more details on its three new financial segments - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/-new-financial-segments-2015-9

Microsoft-Cloud

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • You can really see how all of Microsoft's current growth is being driven by its enterprise business — Windows Server, SQL Server, the Azure cloud, and so on. Revenue and profits from the Office business declined between its fiscal 2014 and 2015 years, and profits from the Windows business dropped quite steeply. In detail, here's the breakdown of the new segments:
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Oct 15
     
    "Microsoft has filed a document with the SEC giving more details on its new financial structure, which it announced yesterday. The company is moving from five business segments to three. Basically, the new Productivity and Business Processes segment corresponds with Office; Intelligent Cloud corresponds with Windows Server and other infrastructure products; and More Personal Productivity corresponds with Windows. Other businesses that used to be reported on a standalone basis, like online services and the Xbox, have now been lumped into those three big categories. Here's how the three business segments fared in terms of revenue and operating profit (loss) for the last two fiscal years. The "Corporate and Other" segment includes broad-based expenses that can't be put into a single business unit, like legal judgments and general and administrative costs - and the $7.6 billion write-down from the Nokia acquisition, which happened at the end of its last fiscal year."
Gary Edwards

Office and the iPad Pro: It's just business, stupid | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-its-just-business-stupid.html

Office-365 Pricing

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Microsoft will require owners of Apple's not-sold-until-November iPad Pro to pay for almost all functionality in its Office suite, a point neither Microsoft nor Apple bothered to highlight this month when the latter invited the former to share stage time at the tablet's introduction. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to Read Now But that's not news. Recommendations CSO Hacking Team hacked, attackers claim 400GB in dumped data ITworld Up your coding game with these 7 habits of great programmers Network World VMware CEO hits on network virtualization reality, feuding with Cisco & the... More INSIDER Microsoft is simply sticking with a formula it crafted almost a year ago and has echoed since: It would field one version of a touch-centric, made-for-mobile Office but divvy up customers into two pools, each getting a different mix of free from the freemium business model they shared.
  • Potential iPad Pro customers can be excused for being confused. Office on the iPad Air 2, Apple's latest 9.7-in. tablet, is free for most document creation and editing chores when used by consumers. And the list of the not-free features is small and, not surprisingly, slanted toward business users. The overall impression, then, is the Office is free when the messenger is a consumer, or the target audience of the report is consumer.
  • But Office is not free. Not by a long shot. And therein lies Microsoft's motivation for the two pools.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • While Microsoft seems glad to give away Office Mobile to consumers -- with some exceptions -- its revenue model requires that it make money from business workers.
  • That's easiest to see, and understand, when one realizes that the difference between what's available to one pool but not the other is that the two are identified not as free/not-free, but as non-commercial and commercial.
  • By Microsoft's current licensing, any use of any feature of any Office Mobile app on any device -- whether smartphone, tablet or 2-in-1 -- for a business purpose requires an Office 365 subscription, specifically a small business- or enterprise-grade plan. Want to edit a work-related document in Word Mobile? Office 365 is required. Want to view a work-related spreadsheet in Excel Mobile? Office 365 again. Show a PowerPoint Mobile slide on the job? Ditto.
  • The "separate agreement" mentioned in the license is an eligible Office 365 subscription: Office 365 Business ($8.25 per user per month), Office 365 Business Premium ($12.50), Office 365 ProPlus ($12) or Office 365 Enterprise E3 ($20).
  • The confusion among consumers comes from the licensing of Office Mobile on devices with screens larger than 10.1-in. For those devices -- which includes Microsoft's own Surface Pro 3 and Surface 3 -- consumers get little for free: Essentially only viewing documents. What Microsoft dubs as "core editing" isn't available for free to consumers on larger-screened hardware.
  • What's apparently miffed people -- read consumers -- is that Office Mobile on larger devices isn't free for them.
  • Microsoft's used screen size to separate what it considers consumer-grade tablets from those it believes are suited for business, with the break-point at 10.1-in.
  • Consumers, of course, get most Office Mobile functionality free, and all features when they subscribe to Office 365 Personal ($70 annually or $7 monthly) or Office 365 Personal ($100 a year, $10 a month). But business users, or more accurately those who use the apps for anything but personal, non-commercial, work? They pay, always, to be legal.
  • That's because Microsoft classifies devices with displays 10.1-in. and larger as business systems, no matter who buys them or for what purpose.
  • The inclusion of Office 365 Personal on the Surface 3 -- and if Microsoft extended the same offer to buyers of the new Surface Pro 4 -- allows consumers to run Office Mobile on the larger screens, at least for the one-year free subscription's stretch.
  • That lets Microsoft give its Surface clan an edge over Apple's iPad Pro, for it certainly will not bundle the Office Mobile apps or an Office 365 subscription with its rival's 2-in-1, not without making Apple pony up.
  • Even bundling, though, only affects consumers; businesses won't get the same deal. Bottom line: Consumers may get a free Office ride, of sorts. But businesses? No way.
Gary Edwards

Idle Words: "Talks by Maciej Cegłowski" - 0 views

idlewords.com/talks

Maciej-Cegłowski Technologist

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Sep 15
     
    An extraordinary collection of commentaries about the Internet, Technology and Silicon Valley - wrapped in a very provocative and thought provoking social context. This stuff definitely belongs in the must read category. Maciej Cegłowski: I am a Level VII Internet thought leader and I can't stop talking. Fly me somewhere, put me on a stage, point me at the audience and I'm pretty much good to go. Click on any talk title to see the HTML version with slides. I've added audio and video links where they exist."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft raises prices of Office one-time licenses 5% to 7% | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-one-time-licenses-5-to-7.html

Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Sep 15
     
    "Microsoft today launched Office 2016 for Windows, and simultaneously raised prices of the stand-alone licenses for both it and the Mac edition between 5% and 7%. Office 365 subscription prices -- the "rent-not-own" model that Microsoft's been aggressively pushing since early 2013 -- did not change. resume makeover executive IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to Read Now The cost of a single-license Office Home & Student 2016 edition climbed $10, from $140 to $150, a 7.1% increase. Meanwhile, Office Home & Business 2016 -- which adds Microsoft's Outlook email client to the suite -- also rose $10, from $220 to $230, or 4.5%. Office Professional 2016, available only for Windows, retained its $400 price tag. The single-license, stand-alone editions are sold primarily at retail, and are dubbed "perpetual" licenses because they require a one-time payment, but can then be used as long as the user wants. That's in contrast to Office 365, which requires a monthly or annual fee to continue using the software. On the consumer side, customers can choose between Office 365 Personal ($70 annually, $7 monthly) and Office 365 Home ($100 per year, $10 each month), while businesses have options that range from $99 to $240 per user per year. Office 365 Home is notable because it allows up to five installations of Office 2016 on PCs or Macs in the same household. All Office 365 plans, both consumer- and business-grade, also include rights to run the Office apps designed for Android, iOS and Windows 10 touch-centric mobile devices, including Android smartphones and tablets, iPhones and iPads, and Windows 10 touch-enabled tablets and notebooks. Microsoft's price increase for Office 2016 perpetual licenses was the second since January 2013, when the company revamped its retail line-up and boosted prices by as much as 17%. Microsoft duplicated those price increa
Gary Edwards

Office 2016: Reinventing productivity and business processes - The Official Microsoft Blog - 0 views

blogs.microsoft.com/...ctivity-and-business-processes

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Third, productivity requires a rich service spanning all your work and work artifacts (documents, communications, and business process events and tasks). It is no longer bound to any single application. It’s a service that leverages the cumulative intelligence and knowledge you and your organization need to drive productivity.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 25 Sep 15
       
      This statement misses an important point. Productivity demands "focus". Spreading the artifacts of productivity across the broad spectrum of communications, messaging, conferencing, scheduling and documents is anything but productive. Take eMail for example. It's a great messaging and communications platform, but it takes the focus away fromt he workflow and puts into a forced focus on a broader messaging flow. If conversations are focused on the documents in a workflow, and the workflow is tracked and managed by document, the focus remains exactly where it should be - ON THE DOCUMENTS! Things like eMail, collaborative editing and comments, real time messaging, phone calls and scheduling, are critical to capturing the conversation, but they need to be tied to the document in question and the overall activity of the workflow. Keep the focus on the documents; keep the conversation surrounding the documents with the documents; and the focus will be exactly where it needs to be! Use the notification systems to notify workers of what is happening with each document, and keep them aware of how the workflow is progressing.
  • Mobility. Conversations. Intelligence.
  • Its entrepreneurs see Office as a universal language for their company to fuel collaboration with their team across a range of devices and for data-driven decisions about their inventory as they ship more than 10,000 designer dresses every hour.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Our ambition to reinvent productivity includes reinventing business process. In the past, these processes were rigid, imposed and inflexible. Office and Microsoft Dynamics are changing the game with solutions that make business processes a catalyst to organizational productivity.
  • striving to build a new productivity and business process system that any organization can use to harness the power of human networks, respond to business events in real time, and find and share data insights as businesses create more information than they can consume.
Gary Edwards

Docady, The Smart Document Storage And Management App, Raises $1.5M | TechCrunch - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...it-of-a-stickler-for-paperwork

Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform Office-365 native-documents VC

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • However, it’s Docady’s existing and forthcoming ‘smart’ features that attempt to differentiate the app from potential competitors or simply backing up your documents to a secure cloud storage service manually. The idea is that the app will be able to make sense of the different kinds of data featured in each document to help with things like reminders for when a document needs to be renewed or action taken. “Currently, people can scan their documents with one app, store them with other cloud services, or email scans to themselves. As these are plain images of documents, however, they can’t ‘communicate’ with the user to tell them that something – like a renewal – requires their attention,” say the app’s founders.
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Aug 15
     
    "Docady, an iOS app that lets you store and manage all your important documents, has been doing well in the App Store since its official launch in mid-July, including being featured by Apple as a 'best new app' for the last few weeks. And to help continue with that momentum, the Tel Aviv-based startup has just closed a $1.5 million funding round. Investors include Pitango Ventures, and Disruptive, the VC fund from Tal Barnoach, Eilon Tirosh and various unnamed former AOL video execs. The new investment will be used to bring the app to more platforms, with Android up next, and for the development of additional 'smart' features to make your documents work harder for you."
Gary Edwards

Google's In-House Programming Language Now Runs on Phones | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...mming-language-now-runs-phones

Google-GO

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Released as an experimental language in 2009, Go now helps drive the massive services running inside Google. Its influence is also expanding well beyond the company, mainly as a way of building “cloud” services as Google does. It’s at the forefront of a new breed of languages that can rapidly execute code across a large number of systems, while still allowing large teams of coders to build this code at speed. This also includes languages such D, used at Facebook, and Rust, developed at Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox web browser.
  • On Wednesday, Google released a new version of Go. Equipped with a revamped “garbage collector”—a way for programs to automatically clean unused code from machine memory—it’s even more efficient than previous versions, says Russ Cox, one the project’s leading engineers. But what’s most interesting is that the language can now run on various ARM processors, the sort of chips that typically drive our smartphones.
  • Today, we need new languages for building Google-like internet services. And as time goes on, we’ll also need new language for building smartphone software. Apple is building a new language called Swift for the iPhone, hoping to streamline the process in its own way And now, Google is exploring the use of Go on both Apple and Android devices.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • One of the big strengths of Go is “concurrency.” It runs well across many machines. With the rise of multi-core processors, our individual phones are behaving more and more like collections of machines. As Cox says, “There’s a good analogy there.”
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 15
     
    "GOOGLE BUILDS SOFTWARE in ways that software was never built before. It builds software that runs across thousands of machines, spread across a worldwide network of computer data centers-a setup that allows it to serve information quickly to millions across the globe, from Search to Gmail to Maps. And it builds this software at an enormously rapid pace, dedicating enormous numbers of coders to each project, the only way to keep pace with the ever-evolving technological landscape. With the rise of multi-core processors, our individual phones are behaving more and more like collections of machines. Building such software involves all sorts of new programing tools, including, well, a new programming language. This language is called Go. "We realized that the kind of software we build at Google is not always served well by the languages we had available," ex-Bell Labs researcher Rob Pike, one of the language's rather well known creators, told me in 2011. "[We] decided to make a language that would be very good for writing the kinds of programs we write at Google.""
Gary Edwards

Salesforce Ventures now a VC powerhouse - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/res-now-a-vc-powerhouse-2015-8

VC salesforce.com

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • InsideSales.com CEO Dave Elkington
  • VC arm Salesforce Ventures,
  • “Making larger investments is the biggest change recently,” said Menlo Ventures’ managing director Matt Murphy, who invested in the same round for InsideSales when he was general partner at Kleiner Perkins. “They are definitely one of the most active and collaborative corporate VCs in the valley.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Even compared to some of the other corporate VC powerhouses, Salesforce’s investment seems pretty high. Intel Capital, historically one of the most active corporate VC firms, spent $134 million during the first six months of 2015, while Qualcomm states in its latest filings that it is committed to spending only $105 million to fund “certain strategic investments” in fiscal 2015.
  • Salesforce currently has over 130 companies under its venture portfolio, 31 of which came in the last four quarters. It states that its investments range from $200,000 to $50 million, with eight investments individually exceeding $10 million.
  • “Corporate VC arms’ sweet spot is usually $1 million to $5 million,” Menlo Ventures' Murphy said. “What’s more unusual is Salesforce leading rounds and its willingness to invest $10 to $50 million.”
  • “The whole goal of the program is to increase the cloud ecosystem and to deliver more solutions for our customers,” John Somorjai, EVP of corporate development & Salesforce Ventures said. “So we’re really careful on making sure we’re investing in companies that really help that cause, and not just the next great startup.”
  • That means investing mostly in subscription-as-a-service (SaaS) providers that help grow the Salesforce platform’s overall reach. Most of them are built on top of the Salesforce1 platform and are part of the AppExchange marketplace.
  • Some of the biggest names its invested in include Box (which went public this year and now worth around $2 billion), Docusign (whose last reported valuation was $3 billion), and Dropbox (reportedly last valued at $10 billion). In fact, according to CB Insights, Salesforce has the highest number of investments in companies worth over $1 billion, surpassing Google Ventures for the top spot this year.
  • Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, a software that helps companies renew customer contracts, recently attended a two-day event hosted by Salesforce Ventures in Sausalito. There, he was able to meet over 100 SaaS company CEOs, all under Salesforce Ventures portfolio, and make connections that he was able to build upon for the long term.
  • Salesforce is sitting on top of $1.9 billion in cash,
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 15
     
    "Considering Salesforce is sitting on top of $1.9 billion in cash, the amount they spent on venture capital is still pretty small. The $145 million cash they invested last quarter is only a fraction of the $731 million it generated in operating cash flow, too. But the fact that Salesforce is increasingly looking for ways to find the next future growth engine through these investments sends a positive sign to the market, Stifel's Rodericks says, especially as Salesforce becomes a more mature company. "They're sitting on a ton of money on their balance sheet, so to a certain degree, investors would like to see them make these strategic investments in companies around this space," Roderick said. And that could potentially lead to more acquisitions, he noted, as Salesforce Ventures has been more active on the buy side too lately. It acquired sales intelligence software RelateIQ for $390 million last year, after spending $2.5 billion on marketing software ExactTarget two years ago. "This certainly gives them more visibility in the companies that they might look at as partners or potential acquisitions down the road," he said. We should be able to get to find out more about it on Thursday, when Salesforce reports its second quarter earnings. Analyst estimates are pretty much in line with Salesforce's forecasts at $1.6 billion in revenue for an EPS of $0.18."
Gary Edwards

How to reduce IT complexity to better serve the business - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...xity-and-increase-agility.html

Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Aug 15
     
    ""Complexity grows over time," says Bryson Koehler, chief information and technology officer (CITO) of The Weather Company in Atlanta. "Systems are built to do one thing, and then they're modified, morphed and bastardized to do things they were never meant to do." Complexity occurs when technologies overlap one another -- "when you add new stuff but keep the old instead of getting rid of it," agrees Dee Burger, North America CEO of Capgemini Consulting. [ Further reading: 5 lessons small IT shops can teach the big guys ] Even as recently as three years ago, Burger says, "people thought they could do massive replacements of technology" -- say, move everything to SaaS applications in the cloud -- "but now we're seeing way more adding of technology rather than replacing." Just consider how many new collaboration tools the enterprise has embraced without replacing or reducing email. The result can be a tangle of overlapping, redundant systems that costs money, slows innovation and hinders organizations from identifying new business opportunities."
Gary Edwards

Meteor Is The App Platform For The New World Of Cloud-Client Computing - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...orld-of-cloud-client-computing

Cloud-Productivity-Platform Meteor Andreessen-Horowitz

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • To adequately understand the opportunity on which Meteor is trying to capitalize, you need a racewalk through the history of computing. Meteor CEO, Geoff Schmidt, put me through these paces in a recent meeting at his HQ in San Francisco. First there were mainframe computers that people accessed through dumb terminals. With the rise of the PC, networks of autonomous machines shared databases on servers over corporate networks. Software companies completely rewrote their applications to create better graphical user interface-based experiences that took advantage of the processing power on people’s desks. Superficially, the web seems to mimic this client-server model. But for most of its history it has resembled the mainframe era with the “cloud” of web servers sending entire web pages to dumb browsers. Web browsers (like the mainframe terminals before them) are “thin” clients in comparison to PCs which are “thick” clients.
  • Web browsers, however, had a “massive distribution advantage,” says Schmidt, which “overwhelmed the user experience advantage” of more powerful desktop app clients. The rise of the smartphone has made the mobile web or app client more and more powerful. 20 years on, we’re back to “thick” clients. That supercomputer in your pocket can do a lot more than render a web page on its screen, and this has shifted the pendulum back towards distributed processing.
  • The astounding scale of this revolution is captured by Benedict Evans, an a16z partner, in his presentation, Mobile: It Changes Everything. “An iPhone6 CPU has 625 times the transistors than a 1995 Pentium,” he points out. And on the launch weekend for the iPhone 6, “Apple sold ~25x more CPU transistors than were in all the PCs on earth in 1995.”
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  • My understanding of this alternation between periods of centralized and distributed computing leveled up when I read a16z partner Peter Levine’s trend piece on Cloud-Client Computing. He writes, “we have more processing power in our hands today through smartphones than we did in large computers decades ago. So why shouldn’t some of this processing move out of the cloud and back into the endpoint, into the phone?” This move has many advantages since Levine says, “the cost of an endpoint CPU and memory is a 1000x cheaper than the cost of CPU and memory in the server.” And smartphones don’t need to be cooled (a major cost for data centers), “so it’s almost like free computing at the endpoint.”
  • Levine has been Meteor’s champion at a16z since his first meeting with the founders post-Y Combinator in 2012. Javascript started as a client-side language that benefitted from the increasing compute power of the devices rendering web pages. Over time, javascript has gone from providing some animated touches to “running the application logic locally on the client [that] results in performance, usability and scale for users,” Levine wrote at the time. Meteor’s big breakthrough has been to run the same javascript code “isomorphically” on both the client and the server. If you put Levine’s perspective on distributed computing together with Meteor’s method for building apps for this environment it is easy to see how this becomes a significant story.
  • Levine concludes his piece with the observation that, “These endpoints aren’t just phones; they could be wearables and other small devices and screens connected to the internet. Beyond the devices themselves, it all adds up to a massive amount of compute power. The next decade of computing will be about doing something with it.” Clearly we are no longer in the land of apps as shiny novelties. Instead, we are talking about decentralizing computing power while making better use of it. From this perspective, utilization of these resources is dependent on the ease of app development and deployment.
  • Interestingly, Schmidt and his partners Matt DeBergalis and Nick Martin were originally planning to build a “local, mobile, social travel guide monetized with deals” at Y Combinator. (Schmidt writes this off as a “sign of the times.”) The partners noticed how much time the other teams were spending just getting their apps to work as opposed to working on their products. The Meteor team pivoted when they realized that their framework was their product.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Jul 15
     
    "What is an app? Most people think of them as the little, self-contained bits of software on our phones. They have shiny icons, and we get them through app stores. Sometimes they are useful. Often they are amusing distractions. But there is another way to think about apps in terms of the data they consume and create. In this view, apps are what will turn the global network of smartphones into a massively distributed computing platform. Everything we know about user experience still applies in this world, but reducing friction for each user is only part of the problem. The bigger issue becomes how to coordinate the data bouncing around between all of these devices and servers in the cloud. This coordination is the primary problem that the JavaScript app platform Meteor has set itself to solve. In order to scale, the solution must be simple. Skilled app developers and data scientists are already in scarce supply. Software may be eating the world, as Marc Andreessen says, but not, in fact, nearly fast enough to keep pace with global problems it could be solving. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), has invested in both Meteor's A and B rounds (Matrix Partners led the B round with total funding now more than $30 million). Pointing to the road not taken by the browser company he co-founded, Andreessen has said "Meteor is what we should have built in 1994 at Netscape.""
Gary Edwards

Gartner Shakes Up File Sync and Share - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...-shakes-up-file-sync-and-share

DropBox EFSS Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Why Citrix Rules Citrix executes on basic EFSS functionalities, is HIPAA and FINRA compliant and provides a “single pane of glass” to view content from almost anywhere, including from repositories like Microsoft’s One Drive for Business, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and others. It also shines in the Citrix ecosystem when integrated with Citrix XenMobile, Citrix Receiver and Citrix Desktop. Better yet, it’s practically a poster child for International compliance via its Restricted Storage Zones feature, which takes care of the concerns that European Enterprises have.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Jul 15
     
    "he Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) marketplace is ripe for disruption, but probably not via a huge technological breakthrough of some sort. EFSS options are maturing quickly and it's becoming quite commoditized. Consider that, according to Gartner, there are more than 140 vendors in the space - and that's too many. Sixteen of them meet the criteria for Gartner's Magic Quadrant (MQ) for EFSS. That's probably more than the market needs, but it's likely to be a problem that solves itself. Industry Consolidation Monica Basso, Charles Smulders and Jeffrey Mann, who researched and wrote the Gartner report, expect less than 10 percent of today's stand-alone EFSS offerings will exist by 2018. To be frank, not every vendor in the MQ wants to be classified as an EFSS player. Alastair Mitchell of Huddle has told me that he thinks of EFSS as an "albatross" and doesn't want his company to be known for "shuffling files back and forth." More on that in our next article. Gartner defines EFSS as a "range of on-premises or cloud-based capabilities that enables individuals to synchronize and share documents, photos, videos and files across mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets and PCs." The analysts noted that "sharing" can take place between coworkers, suppliers, customers and others, mobile devices and as content exchange between apps. "Security and collaboration support are critical aspects for enterprises to adopt EFSS," they wrote. The Gartner analysts also wrote that beyond standard EFSS functionalities, the vendors they selected might offer additional features around mobility, security, administration and management, back-end server integration via connectors to corporate servers (for example, SharePoint) and cloud services, content manipulation, collaboration and more. Software EFSS products may or may not have one main repository. Some products integrate with existing third-party repositories that are deploy
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

3 steps to digitizing your work for maximum productivity | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-for-maximum-productivity.html

Office-365 productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Why go digital?One advantage for businesses to ditch paper– and perhaps the single most important factor – is convenience. Digital data is both highly searchable, and is also easily transferrable. What’s more, the mature state of cloud services today means that you can expect the information you store online to be available across whatever devices you may own -- be it a smartphone, tablet, PC laptop, Mac computer – or even a Web browser at a cybercafé or hotel lobby when on a vacation.Digital documents are also clearly suited to data backup. Despite the calibration required to get things set up in a way that works for you, it’s infinitely easier to make a copy of digital data versus photocopying stacks of printed invoices or bills. And a growing list of cloud storage services (Dropbox and SugarSync, to name two) have taken document storage a step further by saving multiple versions of a doc so you can revert to earlier versions of a document if necessary.
  • Finally, digitization opens the door to greater levels of collaboration at work by making it easy to collaborate with coworkers on only the relevant data. On this front, an entire generation of online tools are available for a diverse range of tasks such as time tracking (Toggl), project management (Asana) and collaboration (Yammer) – of which all are captured digitally without printing out a single piece of paper.So how should you go about joining the digital document revolution? More like this 12 Evernote hacks and apps for power users 8 time-saving productivity hacks 20 uses for Evernote that you probably haven’t thought of yet on IDG Answers How to disable the Windows button on a Microsoft Surface tablet?
  • 1. Choose a digital notebook systemOne of the starting points for digitizing your business docs is to decide on a platform for filing away notes, ideas and documents. Not only does it serve a critical role as a virtually unlimited digital repository for filing important details, charts, audio clips or screen grabs, a good digital system will make it easy to organize and find the information when you need it.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Microsoft OneNoteThe popular Microsoft OneNote allows you to enter rich text, images, media files or even drawings into fully searchable notebooks. OneNote works on a variety of platforms, including Windows PCs, Mac computers, Android and iOS devices, and even from a Web browser.The strength of OneNote is its support for freeform data, with complete freedom to align (or misalign) text and all supported objects. The latest version also adds Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for images, making it easy to search for specific words within new images, and adds support for Dropbox on top of Microsoft’s own OneDrive cloud storage service.
  • EvernoteEvernote is another popular, free, online note-taking service. It offers effectively unlimited storage, albeit with a monthly upload cap (which is much larger for users willing to shell for one of the two fairly inexpensive tiers). The advantage of Evernote is its support for an incredibly diverse list of platforms, which includes native support on the BlackBerry 10 smartphone, third-party clients for Linux, and even scanners with the capability to scan straight into Evernote.Notebooks can be shared among multiple users – including those without a paid account – while individual notes can be shared publicly with a unique URL. Evernote also saves multiple versions of a document, which ensures that any accidental edits can be undone. Finally, paid users get to work offline, and can utilize the service to conduct text searches through Office docs and PDFs, as well as stored in Evernote.
  • Other optionsFor those of us who keep a to-do list, Trello and Todoist are digital equivalents that can facilitate collaboration with colleagues. Google Keep captures notes, lists, photo and audio via supported Web browsers and mobile devices. Finally, there is the text-only SimpleNote, or even the Notes feature in Microsoft’s Office 365 or an on-premises Exchange Server deployment.
  • 3. Effortlessly digitize legacy dataHaving the tools and the capability to natively capture your notes, docs and the like in digital form is a good thing. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop receiving paper bills, invoices, statements, receipts, business cards, product brochures and other printed material.One of the best ways to minimize ink-on-paper collateral is to aggressively digitize all documents whenever possible. You have a variety of options. The easiest is to use a smartphone app such as Scanner Pro to quickly capture everything from business cards to paper printouts. Quality may vary, however, depending on such environmental factors as lighting and the quality of your smartphone’s camera.
  • A more robust alternative is to make use of an automatic sheet-fed scanner – such as the NeatConnect Wi-Fi scanner – to scan printed sheets straight to OneNote or Evernote. Portable scanners also exist, such as the battery-powered Doxie Go Wi-Fi and Doxie Flip. The former lets you scan wirelessly to an iPad or iPhone, while the latter is best described as a portable flatbed scanner that can be inverted to scan items that are fixed in place, or which are too thick to pass through a sheet-fed scanner.
  • Finally, the Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600 is a deskbound scanner that simplifies digitizing magazines and bound books. Items are placed face-up on its scanning mat. The scanning takes about three seconds to dump into a USB-connected computer. Any curvature in the pages is automatically smoothed out via software, resulting in a high quality capture.Depending on your needs, the ScanSnap SV600 could allow you to continue scribbling down your ideas and notes in a physical notebook, yet be able to quickly scan the physical pages into their digital notebook of choice at the end of each day.
  • Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to digitizing your work. There are hundreds of tools that exist to facilitate the full range of business activities and processes without ever having to involve a single printed sheet.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 15
     
    "From the earliest days as a marketing slogan, the elusive concept of the so-called paperless office may finally be taking shape, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. A growing number of small businesses and startups, unencumbered by legacy processes, are quietly ditching printouts for an all-digital ecosystem, buoyed by soaring BYOD ownership and growing familiarity with a plethora of cloud services. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, the driving factors are collaboration and productivity, as opposed to any ecological or "green" concerns. With this in mind, we take a look at the advantages of going digital, and outline how workers can embrace this new digital-first paradigm to collaborate more, do things faster and work more efficiently than ever."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft's Office 2016 preview gets real-time editing in Word and more | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-editing-in-word-and-more.html

Office-365 Microsoft-Office-2016

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Office 2016 won’t release with Windows 10 next month, but Microsoft has said that the next version of its productivity suite will be available later this year to go along with the newly released operating system. Until then, anyone who wants to try out the future of Office can install the public beta version of the app, which is available as a free trial or through Office 365.
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Jul 15
     
    "Microsoft quietly updated its Office 2016 Preview apps for early adopters over the past two weeks with a slew of new features the company announced in a round-up Wednesday. The new features let people who have installed the public beta of Microsoft's forthcoming productivity suite update try out real-time collaboration capabilities that will be rolling out more broadly later this year, along with other changes that make it easier to find particular functions and gather contextual information about what they're working on. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Word 2016 now has support for Live Typing, which allows desktop users to see the edits their colleagues are making to a shared document in real time. It builds on a feature unveiled last month that let users see where colleagues were working within a document, but didn't immediately show the words they added. Similar features should be coming to other Office apps with future updates, so that people can work in real time on Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Microsoft already offers a real-time, co-authoring feature inside Office Online, but this update brings those capabilities onto the desktop for the first time within Microsoft's productivity suite. It will be possible for people to collaborate in real time across Office Online and Office on the desktop when Office 2016 launches later this year, but until then, users will have to choose between collaborating inside a Web app or inside a desktop app. That feature set puts Office in closer competition with Google's productivity suite, which has grown in popularity and features robust support for real-time collaboration. "
Gary Edwards

The 55 Unknown Rock Stars In Tech, According to Marc Andreessen - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/ing-to-marc-andreessen-2014-10

Marc-Andreessen

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 15
     
    "On Sunday, investor Marc Andreessen launched into another one of his famous tweetstorms. This time, Andreessen was inspired by Jessica Lessin's article in The Information, "Silicon Valley's Frontman Problem." In it, Lessin questioned whether Silicon Valley was accurately being represented by its figureheads who are most often cited - including Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. In response to Lessin's article, Andreessen tweeted out Twitter handles that belong to 55 people - "only a highly abridged selection," he mentioned - who "aren't widely famous (yet) but who routinely say interesting and provocative things," Andreessen noted. We've compiled a slideshow of the 55 people Andreessen included in his tweetstorm. They're investors, company CEOs and founders, doctoral candidates, pundits, and writers. There's even one high school senior on the list."
Gary Edwards

Roudcube open source email & collaboration platform Roundcube beats Indiegogo funding g... - 0 views

venturebeat.com/...e-beats-indiegogo-funding-goal

Cloud-Productivity-Platform

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  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 15
     
    "Web mail, calendaring, task management, conferencing, and file sharing have become essential parts of our lives and work. They live on the web, but increasingly on mobile devices. At stake is our data and who owns it, and at the enterprise level it's a game of lock-in and standardisation that can make users feel like peasants of Westeros in giant games played by titans of the tech industry. Roundcube.net is a platform created with the goal of enabling applications that would feel native to any platform and on any device. Ten years ago the Berne, Switzerland-based project used the most advanced technologies and was ultra-modern, dynamic, and beautiful. Reviewers and users were delighted and Roundcube quickly became the default choice for many governments, universities, companies and individuals. The results to date? cPanel reports that Roundcube is dominant with 62 percent of all users in its systems. The technology is installed on approximately half a million websites globally, and it's used daily by hundreds of millions of users. Roundcube is integrated into major commercial offerings such as the Kolab Enterprise Collaboration suite, and offers a full Exchange replacement for organizations and corporations all the way up to the Fortune 50. Simply put, Roundcube is the unsung work horse of web mail. But a decade is an eternity in technology. When Roundcube started, mobile devices were large, clunky affairs used by the few. Today they are the most commonly used communication device. Roundcube Next is today's answer to that radical change. Instead of once more embarking alone on that ten year journey, Roundcube Next is about building a strong, healthy and diverse Open Source community to achieve that task within 12 to 18 months."
Gary Edwards

Philipp Karcher's blog | Forrester Blogs - 0 views

blogs.forrester.com/philipp_karcher

Office-365 Office-Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Today Microsoft starts shipping Office for iPad, finally plugging the gap in its portfolio that’s been filled by popular document viewers and editors like QuickOffice and SlideShark.   Does this come too late for Microsoft? As much as naysayers like to proclaim Office is dying, people still overwhelmingly use it at home and at work. Office is supported at virtually every organization. Our survey of Forrester clients at the end of last year showed strong strides by Google Docs with 13% of firms using it.* However, the caveat is companies that have gone Google are using Docs to complement Office with collaboration features and mobile support, not to replace it.   You could argue how much incremental revenue Microsoft lost out on, but I don’t think the lack of native Office apps has caused Microsoft to cede ground to other office productivity suites on the PC, where the vast majority of content is still created. Keep in mind that out of the 20% of information workers in North America and Europe that use a tablet for work, 60% of them use some office productivity software on it.** Half of tablets used for work are iPads. So immediately just 6% of information workers will be considering the Office apps as an alternative to what they are using on their tablets today.    Is Microsoft really multi-platform now?
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 15
     
    "Today Microsoft starts shipping Office for iPad, finally plugging the gap in its portfolio that's been filled by popular document viewers and editors like QuickOffice and SlideShark.   Does this come too late for Microsoft? As much as naysayers like to proclaim Office is dying, people still overwhelmingly use it at home and at work. Office is supported at virtually every organization. Our survey of Forrester clients at the end of last year showed strong strides by Google Docs with 13% of firms using it.* However, the caveat is companies that have gone Google are using Docs to complement Office with collaboration features and mobile support, not to replace it.   You could argue how much incremental revenue Microsoft lost out on, but I don't think the lack of native Office apps has caused Microsoft to cede ground to other office productivity suites on the PC, where the vast majority of content is still created. Keep in mind that out of the 20% of information workers in North America and Europe that use a tablet for work, 60% of them use some office productivity software on it.** Half of tablets used for work are iPads. So immediately just 6% of information workers will be considering the Office apps as an alternative to what they are using on their tablets today.    Is Microsoft really multi-platform now?"
Gary Edwards

Microsoft starts rolling out real-time coauthoring in Office 2016 preview | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...thoring-in-office-2016-preview

Office-365 Office-Collaboration Office-Real-Time-Pressence

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15
     
    "Microsoft is starting to roll out to testers the real-time coauthoring functionality it has promised will be part of the next version of Office for Windows desktops. Microsoft officials said in early May that real-time coauthoring would be coming to Office 2016. The first public preview of Office 2016, which Microsoft made available in May, did not include this functionality. In a blog post that Microsoft inadvertently published on June 3 and later unpublished, company officials said that real-time presence -- a key piece of real-time coauthoring -- is rolling out to Word 2016 testers. The real-time typing component of coauthoring is still not there and will be included in subsequent test builds, officials said. From the blog post: "Real Time Presence in Word: While Real Time Typing will ship in subsequent builds, we are rolling out a key part of that collaborative experience with Real Time Presence. Real Time Presence allows you to see where in a document your teammates are editing. We are turning this on first for OneDrive for Business subscribers but it will be available more broadly soon.""
Gary Edwards

Two types of fear, or how to win in the next stage of the cloud | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...in-the-next-stage-of-the-cloud

business-process-management workflow Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • For years, big software providers like Oracle, SAP, IBM, and HP have been taking their big software solutions for managing business processes and slicing them into industry-specific solutions. And, of course, they'll also send an army of consultants who can help you customize those solutions to your specific company--for a big fee. All of these big software providers are now trying to transition their solutions to the cloud, or offer private cloud or hybrid cloud solutions. They usually aren't in a hurry to make this switch because it means swapping lucrative licensing and maintenance fees for software-as-a-service subscription fees. But, customer demand is driving the move to SaaS, and so is a host of new competitors--smaller, industry-specific vendors who can better cater to the needs of specific industries and sub-specialties.
  • Many of these smaller vendors are SaaS-first or have been able to navigate the transition to the cloud must faster because they are smaller and more narrowly-focused. We refer to this emerging movement as the "industry cloud" and we recently released a joint ZDNet-TechRepublic special feature on the industry cloud to delve into how it's affecting businesses of all sizes and in various industries and to give our readers some guidance and best practices for navigating it. If you're faced with the decision of sticking with a traditional vendor or trusting an upstart cloud company with your company's most important applications and data, then I'd definitely suggest reading our special feature to understand all of the nuances involved, as well as the drawbacks of going with an upstart cloud provider.
  • But, I'll also boil down the decision-making process for you. In this type of decision, there are two types of fear. And, it depends on which one motivates you more. If you have a solid market advantage to protect and don't need to innovate so much as simply remain steady and stable, then you should probably stick with your traditional vendor. Your biggest fear is making a mistake that could rock the boat.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • On the other hand, if your biggest fear is getting lapped by a competitor because you can't move fast enough, then you should give some serious consideration to the industry cloud upstarts, who can give you some important shortcuts and more hands-on service. They can also enable you to punch above your weight limit.And just to give you a little perspective on how the industry cloud is suddenly reshaping things, take a look at the following data point from the original research we did as part of our special feature:
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15
     
    ""The real opportunity is moving mission critical systems in the cloud. [Industries] are the biggest hold out. We see that as the biggest opportunity." That's how Stephan Scholl, co-president of Infor--an enterprise software company that specializes in solutions for specific industries--explains what he sees when he looks at the cloud market. For all of the endless hype about cloud computing over the past five years, most companies have remained slow to move their most important applications to the cloud. Sure, the cloud has been good enough to run a few experiments and save big money on licensing fees with less critical apps like HR and collaboration and some overly-glorified shared address books. That's because if those services go down or get hacked or employees have a slow internet connection then it's no big deal because people can still get their work done. It's different when it comes to the software that your whole company is logged into every minute of the business day. That was the conventional wisdom. But, it's starting to change. PINBOX The Industry Cloud: Why It's Next Read More Large enterprises, SMBs, startups, and everything in between are now taking a hard look at moving their core business applications to the cloud. While that obviously includes software like ERP and financial systems, the even more interesting story is the software that's specific to each industry--insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, real estate, etc. These industries all have specialized needs because they all have very different kinds of business processes. In many of them there are even sub-specialties within industries that have even more specialized needs. "
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
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