Document Wars

"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.

"The German city of Munich, long one of the open-source community's poster children for the institutional adoption of Linux, is close to performing a major about-face and returning to Microsoft products. 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 Munich's deputy mayor, Josef Schmid, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that user complaints had prompted a reconsideration of the city's end-user software, which has been progressively converted from Microsoft to a custom Linux distribution - "LiMux" - in a process that dates back to 2003."

"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. "

"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

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"Project management seems so straightforward. You set a deadline. You set a budget. You select the right people. The project gets done. In reality, project management is rarely straightforward. The wrong people are assigned to the project. People don't know what is expected of them or get conflicting information. The scope changes. Deadlines aren't met. Put more succinctly: Stuff happens. Featured Resource Presented by Netskope 10 Alternatives to Heavy-Handed Cloud App Control Blocking any useful cloud app doesn't work and ultimately does the business a disservice. This list Learn More [ 13 Tips for Keeping IT Projects Under Control ] So what can businesses, and project managers, do to improve the odds of projects being completed on time and on budget? Dozens of project leaders and project management experts share nine secrets to successful project management. "

"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"

Two weeks later: My switch from Outlook to Gmail Summary: ZDNet's David Gewirtz has been using Gmail for two weeks after switching all his email from Outlook. After two weeks with Gmail as his primary mail environment, what's his verdict? It might surprise you. David Gewirtz By David Gewirtz for DIY-IT | August 26, 2014 -- 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT) 28Comments 4 Votes inShare more + emptyinboxCan there be anything more relaxing than an empty inbox? Besides my car, wife, and puppy, of course. I have been using Gmail instead of Outlook for the past two weeks. And you know what? I couldn't be happier with it. Yeah, I didn't expect that, either. More on Gmail & Productivity Why I bit the bullet and finally switched from Outlook to Gmail Your questions answered: Why I switched from Outlook to Gmail I figured I'd be somewhat satisfied at best, but more probably I'd evidence the general level of disgruntlement most technology inspires in me. But no. I'm actually quite happy with Gmail. Fundamentally, the reason is simple: my email has been under control for two whole weeks. I can't remember when that was last the case, but it sure hasn't been for a few years, at least. Achieving Inbox Zero Within two days of moving to Gmail, I actually achieved Inbox Zero, that mythical state that described an inbox completely devoid of messages. Even more astonishing, I've managed to keep my inbox at Inbox Zero each day for the last few weeks. I attribute this to a number of factors, each of which I will enumerate here."

"The enterprise ain't what it used to be. That's the message from Google today as it changes the branding of its business products from Google Enterprise to Google At Work. The new brand will be applied to the business version of Google Apps (including Gmail), the Google Cloud Platform, and the Google Search Appliance, among other products. Featured Resource Presented by Citrix Systems 10 essential elements for a secure enterprise mobility strategy Best practices for protecting sensitive business information while making people productive from Learn More Amit Singh, the president of Google at Work, explained why Google is changing the name now, more than 10 years after the company began selling products -- initially the Search Appliance and Gmail for Domains -- to businesses. "Corporate is normally associated with long sales cycles, centralized purchasing, and software that sits on a shelf. Many of the things associated with the word 'enterprise' are not what we do. The dissonance kept growing bigger." In other words, the big shift in business technology over the last ten years -- from centralized IT buying products and forcing them down the throats of users, to users choosing their own tools for work regardless of what IT wants them to use -- has been the big driver of Google's enterprise business. Now the company wants to embrace that trend by abandoning what it sees as a legacy term with negative associations for many users. Google at Work security director Eran Figerbaum told the story of how he joined Google in 2007, and it reflects this shift perfectly."

"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

Lots of possible Constitutional issues lurking. The Constitution creates only two types of intellectual property, patents and copyrights. "(P)roperty interests . . . are not created by the Constitution. Rather, they are created and their dimensions are defined by existing rules or understandings that stem from an independent source such as state law." Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto Co., 467 US 986 (1984), https://goo.gl/ZljO1H (trade secrets case). The traditional source of rights in trade secrets have been state law. Thus there is a state's rights issue lurking in this legislation, a question whether the federal government is invading the States' police power, an "our federalism" question.

"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."

"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."

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