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"Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps have raised the bar for cloud productivity suites. Formerly pale shadows of available desktop programs, the two suites are now more than enough for many offices and businesses. But are they right for you? In this exhaustive review, InfoWorld covers multiple aspects of the cloud suites, starting with the many Office 365 SKUs and Google Apps for Business options and proceeding to: Setup Features Ease-of-use Administration Value InfoWorld examines all the details and fine points Microsoft and Google have to offer over the desktop suite -- and potential deal breakers for anyone considering the switch. If you've been thinking about breaking up with Microsoft Office on the desktop, this could be the time, but don't make any decisions before checking out InfoWorld's Microsoft Office 365 vs. Google Apps superguide. Download this PDF -- with InfoWorld's full and complete review, along with more expert advice -- for a handy rundown of both offerings and how they apply to your business. Office 365 and Google Apps have changed in the last couple of years. Find out if it's enough for your office to make the switch too. Download InfoWorld's Microsoft Office 365 vs. Google Apps superguide here."

"At I/O, Google always seems to find a way to squeeze the fun from Microsoft's master plan to rule the business world. This year, the 'something' comes in the ability to edit Microsoft Office documents in Google Docs. At face value, it doesn't seem too serious. But when you stand back and look at it, it takes on far more significance than first impressions convey. Who Needs Office? Equally important is the fact that Google Docs enable users to open Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, make changes and then save them onto the Google cloud in their native formats. By enabling users to edit Office documents through the cloud-based platform, it removes one of the biggest obstacles to Google Docs adoption. It also puts Google right up there with Microsoft Office as an option for enterprises looking for a business productivity suite. OK, we know. Microsoft Office has a lot more punch than Google Docs or even Google Apps, offering all kinds of functionality that Google still hasn't introduced. But Google Apps is still cheaper than Office 365 - and in light of this week's Outlook.com outage, it is probably looking a lot more attractive, especially to those who couldn't access their emails. It is also worth remembering that, as we saw in April, a lot of business users are using only limited functions in Office and could quite happily dump it, take up Google Docs and still work away without any problems. In fact, the research by SoftWatch showed the average employee spends only 48 minutes per day in MS Office programs, and most of that time is spent on Outlook. Other Office application use usually occurs for viewing and light editing purposes, with only a tiny portion of the workforce identified as heavy users. The new editing functionality Google is offering is also available for mobile devices along with offline support that means that users can work away on their documents even when they are out of mobile reach and have the changes uploaded once they

"Microsoft has developed a document management add-on for Office 365 intended for lawyers, signaling a possible interest by the company in creating vertical-industry tools for the suite. Featured Resource Presented by Riverbed Technology 10 Common Problems APM Helps You Solve Practical advice for you to take full advantage of the benefits of APM and keep your IT environment Learn More Microsoft announced the product, called Matter Center for Office 365, Monday, saying it's in limited preview and available via a beta program to which customers can apply. The company provided few details about how the product works and what features it has, focusing instead on the fact that it is closely integrated with Office 365. Customers will be able to use Matter Center from within the suite's interface and components, like the Word and Excel apps, the SharePoint Online collaboration server and the OneDrive for Business cloud storage service. Matter Center has been designed to let lawyers and other legal professionals "easily find, organize and collaborate on files" within Office 365, instead of having to use a separate document management product. It remains unclear whether Matter Center will have all the security, compliance, retention and search functionality of full-featured document management products already used in legal settings."

Big barrier in that vertical market; law firms are required by Bar disciplinary rules to protect the confidentiality of client files. Unless Microsoft implements end to end encryption for Office 365 so that it's nigh impossible for the NSA et ilk to gain access to the plain text and rewrites its end user license to guarantee confidentiality of customer files, MSFT will get only the unwary law offices to use Office 365.

"Microsoft's Office 365 "rent-not-buy" subscription service is at an annual revenue run-rate of more than half a billion dollars, Microsoft signaled last week. According to CFO Amy Hood, Microsoft ended the June quarter with more than 5.6 million Office 365 subscribers to its consumer-grade plans, labeled "Home" and "Personal." The former sells for $100 annually, while the latter -- which was introduced in mid-April -- lists for $70 a year. "

Yesterday Google announced dramatic price reductions for their Cloud Computing platform. This announcement was followed immediately by a similar announcement from Amazon. But what about Microsoft? The truth is that Microsoft doesn't need to reduce prices, and they are forcing both Google and Amazon reductions. My guess is that there are more reductions to come too. The answer is in this review of SharePoint OnLine and Office 365, where the author points out the fact that Google Drive / Apps totally mangles an MSOffice document. Once Google converts the documents, they are useless. "I previously wrote about how my company used to juggle two distinct file storage systems. We had Google Drive as our web-based cloud document platform, buts its penetration didn't go much further than its Google Docs functionality. That's because Google has a love-hate relationship with any Office file that's not a Google Doc. Sure, you can upload it and store it on the service, but the bells and whistles end there. Want to edit it with others? It MUST be converted to Google's format. And so we had to keep a crutch in place for everything else that had to stay in traditional Office formats, either due to customer requirements, complex formatting, or other reasons. That other device for us was a simple QNAP NAS box with 1.5TB of space." In 2006-2007, when we were in the middle of the great ODF vs OOXML document wars, I had a conversation with Google's Open Source - Opoen Standards guru, Chris DiBona. It was during the Massachusetts crisis, and we were trying to garner Google Corporate support for ODF. Chris listened to my pitch and summarized his position that conversion methods were very advanced, and going forward, file formats really didn't matter. He famously said, "Let a thousand formats bloom". I wonder if he still thinks that?

"Google is closing the loop on bringing support for natively editing Microsoft Office files to all of productivity apps today. The company's iOS apps for Docs and Sheets are getting a couple of minor new features and design updates today, but most importantly, these apps will now also be able to natively open, edit and save files from Microsoft's Office suite. After launching the original standalone apps for Google Docs and Sheets on iOS a few months ago, it was only a matter of time before Google would also free its PowerPoint competitor Slides from the Google Drive app. Today is that day. Google Slides is now available as a standalone app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. 2014-08-25_1104Just like the Docs and Sheets apps and their counterparts on Android (the standalone Slides app launched there two months ago), the new Slides app will feature some aspects of Google's new Material Design user interface language and all the Microsoft Office conversion goodness the company acquired when it bought Quickoffice in 2012." ........................................................... Hey, Google is pulling the Cloud version of "bait and switch". The bait is calling a standalone application for iOS "native". The switch is that Microsoft is using the term "native" to describe the editing of MS Office native documents. Google is trying to market a native, written explicitly for iOS application, presenting it as "supporting native document editing and collaboration". Wow. They've got nothing!! This is just market spin. And the article's title suggests that they know exactly what they are doing with this egregious misrepresentation. There is no doubt in my mind that Microsoft has committed to the "Office 365 - native document" narrative. Its designed to totally obliterate Googe, Dropbox, Box, iCloud and anyone trying to offer Cloud based business solutions. They are going to crush Google, taking both Android and Booble Apps / GoogleDrive out of th

"the road that Nadella chose marked a shift in direction from the old Microsoft. Nadella has only been in there six months and his daring - daring for Microsoft, that is - is breathtaking. He has released Office for iPad, which rumor has it was developed under Ballmer, but kept in storage for fear that it would impact on Microsoft's Office business. Nadella also oversaw the release of a free version of Windows for devices that had screens less than nine inches. On top of this he changed the entire release cycle for Windows by announcing regular upgrades as soon as they are developed, and not as a single major release once a year. Office 365 has also been opened up and he has made its roadmap transparent, enabling enterprises plan where their productivity spending will go."

"ODF - open document format - is an open, XML-based rich document format that has been adopted as the standard for exchanging information in documents (spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents), by many governments and other organisations (see, for example, here), including the UK Government. This is despite strong opposition by Microsoft; but I have seen Microsoft's proposed "open XML" standard and, frankly, it is huge and horrid (in the word of standards, these go together). If I remember correctly, the early draft I saw even incorporated recognition of early Excel leap-year bugs into the standard. ODF is now a pukka ISO standard, maintained by OASIS, under the proud banner: "The future is interoperability". My personal thoughts, below, are prompted by an ODF session at ApacheCon Core titled "Beyond OpenOffice: The State of the ODF Ecosystem" held by Louis Suárez-Potts (community strategist for Age of Peers, his own consultancy, and the Community Manager for OpenOffice.org, from 2000 to 2011), and attended by very few delegates - perhaps a sign of current level of interest in ODF within the Apache community. Nevertheless, and I am talking about the ODF standard here, not Apache Open Office (which is currently my office software of choice) or its Libre Office fork (which seems to be where the excitement, such as it is, is, for now), the standards battle, or one battle, has been won; we have a useful Open Document Format, standardised by a recognised and mature standards organisation, and even Microsoft Office supports it. That's good. So what could be the problem? Well, I don't care whether I use ODF from Open Office, Libre Office or even Office 365, I just want to be sure that everyone else can read my ODF documents (with a .odt, .ods or .odp extension, for text, presentation or spreadsheet, respectively), with whatever software they like; and that they'll either see exactly the functionality and formatting I see; or a well defined (an

Stats on Cloud usage shows that only 29% of Internet users are using a cloud service. One of the charts provided shows that iCloud (Apple) and DropBox have over 300 million users. Microsoft OneDrive has come out of nowhere to claim the third position with 250 million. And Google Drive finishes in fourth place with 200 million. Funny that Google would be so short when gMail and Chrome have proven to be so successful. And gDOCS was a pioneer of cloud based editing of productivity documents. Office 365 has only been available on iOS since May, yet look at the numbers! Incredible. Oh, Box is also listed in fifth place with 25 million users. I'm starting to think that DropBox, RackSpace and Egnyte are in big trouble. Microsoft is on a huge roll, and my gut instinct is that they have some kind of a deal going with Apple iCloud and Office365. Amazon is surprisingly missing.

Stats on Cloud usage shows that only 29% of Internet users are using a cloud service. One of the charts provided shows that iCloud (Apple) and DropBox have over 300 million users. Microsoft OneDrive has come out of nowhere to claim the third position with 250 million. And Google Drive finishes in fourth place with 200 million. Funny that Google would be so short when gMail and Chrome have proven to be so successful. And gDOCS was a pioneer of cloud based editing of productivity documents. Office 365 has only been available on iOS since May, yet look at the numbers! Incredible. Oh, Box is also listed in fifth place with 25 million users. I'm starting to think that DropBox, RackSpace and Egnyte are in big trouble. Microsoft is on a huge roll, and my gut instinct is that they have some kind of a deal going with Apple iCloud and Office365. Amazon is surprisingly missing.

"Microsoft has long dominated the corporate-software market, and its new CEO Satya Nadella has set his sights on owning all things related to productivity and the cloud. But Google-fueled by its search-advertising business and consumer popularity-has been coming on strong for years with lower-priced, cloud-based services such as email and calendars, productivity apps, video hangouts, and storage. And among certain types of customers, it is succeeding. + For a snapshot of Google's progress, Quartz looked up the email-hosting MX records for 150 companies across three general size categories: the "Fortune 50″ largest US companies; a group of mid-size tech and media companies, both public and private; and 50 startups from the last Y Combinator incubator class in Silicon Valley. The results are…exactly what you might expect! "

"Microsoft has attacked the UK government's decision to adopt ODF as its standard document format, saying it is "unclear" how UK citizens will benefit. The Cabinet Office announced its new policy yesterday, whereby Open Document Format (ODF) is immediately established as the standard for sharing documents across the public sector, with PDF and HTML also acceptable when viewing documents. SERGIGN - FOTOLIA The decision was a rejection of Microsoft's preference for Open XML (OOXML), the standard used by its Word software, which remains the dominant wordprocessor in government. "Microsoft notes the government's decision to restrict its support of the file formats it uses for sharing and collaboration to just ODF and HTML," said a spokesman for the software giant in a statement to Computer Weekly. "Microsoft believes it is unproven and unclear how UK citizens will benefit from the government's decision. We actively support a broad range of open standards, which is why, like Adobe has with the PDF file format, we now collaborate with many contributors to maintain the Open XML file format through independent and international standards bodies," it added"

"Version 4.3 of LibreOffice, the free and open source productivity suite developed by the Document Foundation and derived from the OpenOffice.org project, was released today. Aside from the usual array of bug fixes and new features designed to make it more cross-compatible with Microsoft Office, version 4.3 has features that give files from legacy Macintosh productivity software a new lease on life. Take control! 30 essential OS X command-line tips Go beyond the graphical user interface and take full advantage of Mac OS X at the command line READ NOW Most of the improvements around file handling in 4.3 involve better support for various aspects of the Office Open XML (OOXML) format used by Microsoft for its productivity software. LibreOffice users have often complained of opening Word 2010 or Word 2013 documents and finding that the formatting had been mangled or features like annotations hadn't survive being resaved in LibreOffice. Version 4.3 preserves many more of the attributes used in OOXML documents, such as style attributes for text and images. Also new to this edition of LibreOffice is import support for document formats created by a slew of legacy Macintosh applications: BeagleWorks, ClarisWorks, Claris Resolve, GreatWorks, MacWorks, SuperPaint, and Wingz. Likewise, Microsoft Works spreadsheets and databases -- not just word processing documents -- can now also be imported into LibreOffice. Another change, which might not directly affect many users but hints at how the refactoring of LibreOffice's code is reaching many legacy issues, involves the lengths of paragraphs. Previously, paragraphs in a LibreOffice document couldn't exceed 65,000 characters due to a bug in the underlying OpenOffice.org code that had persisted for over a decade and remained unclosed. Other changes include comments that can now be "printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported," according to the Document Foundation; better behaviors for sp

"When I talk to folks at Dropbox, they're eager to tell me about how different people are using its file-sharing service: the musician, the photographer, the professor, the startup founder. They like to talk about new features, like password-protected links and the remote wipe tool that lets you remove files from a lost computer. But what they save for the end of our meeting, almost like an afterthought, are the two numbers that traditionally meant the most for a data storage service: how many gigabytes you can store, and at what price. As it turns out, these numbers look at lot better than they used to. On Wednesday, the company slashed the price of a gigabyte by 90 percent on Dropbox Pro, the paid version of its signature consumer product. Up until now, users paid $9.99 per month to store up to 100 gigabytes of data. Now, for that same price, they can store one terabyte. The cut brings Dropbox in line, once again, with rival services at its gargantuan competitors: Google and Microsoft. But Dropbox's decision to bury the lead signals something more important about the business it's in: in the competitive market for file storing, syncing, and sharing, gigabytes don't matter quite as much as they did in the past. The game is all about what you can do with them. "It's how you get the content in and out and how does it let you do the work you want to accomplish," says ChenLi Wang, Dropbox's head of product. "We want people to rely on Dropbox as the home for all their stuff as opposed to thinking of it as a fixed storage limit." What Dropbox Is Selling"

"Amazon.com came out with its quarterly earnings last week and Technology Business Research analyst Jillian Mirandi crunched the numbers of how much of a lead AWS has on its competitors in the public cloud market. The numbers are striking. AWS broke $1.1 billion in quarterly revenues for cloud IaaS in the first quarter of 2014. The company's next closest competitor in the cloud IaaS market, IBM, came in at $350 million. That's almost a three-fold lead for AWS compared to the nearest competitor, according to TBR. Behind IBM, Microsoft and Google close out the top four public cloud IaaS providers, but those latter two companies only generated about $30 million in cloud IaaS revenue last quarter, TBR estimates."

"Over the past week, I've been blowing the virtual dust off more than a decade's worth of annual reports from Microsoft, Apple, and Google. My goal was to follow the money and figure out how each company's business has changed over the past decade. Consider this a follow-up to my February post, "Apple, Google, Microsoft: Where does the money come from?" My tally starts with financial results for 2002, the year after Microsoft signed a historic consent decree that settled the U.S. v. Microsoft antitrust lawsuit. It was also the first full year after the introduction of the iPod, which was the first step on Apple's transformation from a PC company to one that revolutionized mobile computing and communication. The earliest annual report I could find for Google was from 2003, the year before its big IPO. In Microsoft's case, the question I was most interested in was "How dependent is the company on Windows?" The Windows monopoly began crumbling as soon as the settlement was signed (although it's debatable how much influence that lawsuit had on the market). Over the past 10 years, Microsoft has shifted its reporting structures a few times, making it hard to draw perfect comparisons over time. But the chart below, which shows revenue from the desktop versions of Windows and related products, is close enough."