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Today's post was written by Jacob Guttman, IT Manager, Menchies It's hard to believe it when you look at our rapid growth, but Menchies is still a very young company. We were founded in 2007 with a single store in Valley Village, California. Now, we have more than 300 franchise locations around the world. Maintaining connections between Menchies headquarters, the franchise community, and our guests is critical to our success. In the past, we used hosted services for email, collaboration, and document management. And we used a separate, Java-based application for instant messaging. One of the most persistent challenges I faced was trying to support our company's growth with a set of applications that weren't tightly linked together and that didn't fit the day-to-day work needs of our employees. An increasing number of our employees want to be able to access email and other applications on a range of different devices, including their smartphone or tablet. Ultimately, they want to be able to connect with colleagues and seamlessly move information between applications without having to think much about the underlying technology. When we started looking at moving to a new productivity and collaboration solution, the major factors influencing our decision were ease of use, anywhere access, simplified administration, and cost-effective scalability. As we took a closer look at Microsoft Office 365, it was the obvious choice. And, with help from our partner Cal Net Technology Group, we were able to make the switch to Office 365 quickly and easily. With Office 365, we get online access to all of the capabilities we need-email, calendaring, document management, and unified communications-all rolled into one solution. And it automatically works together with the Microsoft Office tools that our employees use every day. One great example of how Office 365 supports the business needs of Menchies and fits the way our people like to work is through our use of Micro

It's been a very busy year for SkyDrive and we'd like to thank all of you for helping us improve the service through your feedback, tweets, Facebook posts, and comments. The service continues to grow: since October 2012 when Windows 8 launched, 50 million more people have started using SkyDrive, helping us reach an important milestone - over 250 million people are now using SkyDrive as the new place to save their files. In just the past few months we've made SkyDrive the default save location for the new Office, updated the SkyDrive app for iOS, and made substantial performance improvements to SkyDrive uploading. Recently, we also announced that Microsoft accounts have grown to 700 million, that we've improved the security of our service with things like two-step verification, and that we now have Extended Validation Certificates integrated on SkyDrive.com. And a few days ago, our friends over at Outlook.com announced that they're rolling out a new feature that allows you to insert anything from your SkyDrive directly into an email message. We continue to push forward to a world where all your stuff is in SkyDrive, so you can always have it with you.

We're excited to announce a major upgrade for our Outlook.com app for Android devices that overhauls the entire user interface and provides a number of new features. You can get the latest app here. www.office.com/setup We believe that the best mobile experience is enabled through Exchange ActiveSync-which provides a rich, powerful, network-optimized experience for Windows Phone, iOS and other mobile devices. However, native support for Exchange ActiveSync on Android devices varies significantly and so we build a separate app to ensure as many people as possible can have a great Outlook.com experience across all their devices. As you've heard us talk about previously, the overall response to Outlook.com has been very positive. However, our Android app has been behind and so we're excited to take this large step forward. Starting today, you can get the same great Outlook.com look and feel you've come to love on Windows 8 and the web on your Android device.

It's been a very busy year for SkyDrive and we'd like to thank all of you for helping us improve the service through your feedback, tweets, Facebook posts, and comments. The service continues to grow: since October 2012 when Windows 8 launched, 50 million more people have started using SkyDrive, helping us reach an important milestone - over 250 million people are now using SkyDrive as the new place to save their files. In just the past few months we've made SkyDrive the default save location for the new Office, updated the SkyDrive app for iOS, and made substantial performance improvements to SkyDrive uploading. Recently, we also announced that Microsoft accounts have grown to 700 million, that we've improved the security of our service with things like two-step verification, and that we now have Extended Validation Certificates integrated on SkyDrive.com. And a few days ago, our friends over at Outlook.com announced that they're rolling out a new feature that allows you to insert anything from your SkyDrive directly into an email message. We continue to push forward to a world where all your stuff is in SkyDrive, so you can always have it with you.

Apple kicked off its 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco today with a slew of new product announcements and updates, most of which will be available in the fall to the general public.

This site was very informative regarding Apple's next approach to reinventing iPhone's IOS and the Apple Desktop and laptop operating system as well. According to the site and the recent WWDC convention; Apple is going to provide a coding application called "Swift." This application is supposedly going to simplify the coding process for mobile developers and software engineers. According to the article and the recent convention Apple is also going to create an application that will monitor your health condition. This application will be able to forward your health information to your health care provider for future health care awareness and updates. Thanks to this site I was able to learn what Apple has been hiding up their sleeves for the past year. I was no aware prior to reading the article that Apple was going to provide new coding software for mobile developers. I believe this type of technology is very inspiring for someone attempting to enter the mobile development industry. This site has confirmed for me that I have chosen the right career path.