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Last week, we welcomed Brian Solis, Altimeter principal analyst, thought leader and book author, to Yammer HQ to give a fireside chat, followed by signing of his new book: "What's The Future of Business?" I was thrilled to interview Brian, and we covered a variety of really meaty subjects - just check out the video below! The theme of the evening was transformation - transformation that is happening in our lives as individuals, how we relate to each other through technology and what we as businesses must do to stay relevant to the connected customer. Even the book itself is transformation of the book publishing convention. Unlike a regular, information-dense business book, "What's the Future of Business" attempts to bring together the best of both worlds: hard-hitting facts and practical frameworks, as well as a visual experience. The experience of the book is just as important as the content therein. What is the future of business? The future of business is experience, according to Solis. We as connected consumers make decisions outside of the sales funnel that companies have organized themselves around. We reference experiences of consumers who came before us, and contribute our own experiences to this dynamic tapestry. When consumers share, they are reacting to an experience, and the future of any business depends on its ability to provide experiences that are worth sharing. In his talk, Brian talked about the 4 moments of truth that add up to shareable experiences. At every stage of the customer journey, it is our job as businesses to design an experience to trigger the sharing of a moment. The Zero Moment of Truth comes when the consumer is starting to explore choices and is just becoming aware of needs and possible solutions. 1st Moment of Truth happens when the consumer is ready to buy. Consumer packaged goods companies have perfected providing the right experience at this point. 2nd Moment of Truth happens after the consumer purchases,

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Office 365 is a subscription based package that buys you time limited access to a number of Microsoft services and software packages, including the latest desktop Office suite, an online version of Office, cloud storage, and premium mobile apps.Stop Bashing Microsoft: 5 Ways In Which They're Awesome Stop Bashing Microsoft: 5 Ways In Which They're AwesomeMicrosoft doesn't always get fair treatment. When it comes down to it, they're a pretty awesome company. There's been enough Microsoft bashing, now it's time for some love.READ MORE Office 365 follows a business model known as Software as a Service (SaaS), which has commonly been used for deploying enterprise software. With subscription-based services like Spotify, Napster, or Amazon Prime, it has found its way into the consumer software market some time ago. Does Office 365 provide enough value to be worth the money? CAN YOU STILL USE IT ON YOUR DESKTOP? Yes, absolutely! Microsoft isn't moving Office entirely into the cloud just yet. While you can access Office Online via the browser and store your documents on OneDrive, Office 365 offers many other ways to access and edit your documents. The current package of Office 365 includes the Office 2013 desktop suite (Office 2011 for Mac users). In the summer or fall of this year, you will be able to upgrade to Office 2016.Don't Pay For Word! 5 Reasons You Should Use Office Online Don't Pay For Word! 5 Reasons You Should Use Office OnlineOffice Online is the free and cloud-connected version of Microsoft Office. Limitations are compensated by features, useful even to users of desktop Office. Best of all is itsREAD MORE Microsoft Office - www.office.com/setup WHAT IS INCLUDED & WHAT IS THE PRICE TAG? The exact composition of the package depends on the Office flavor you choose. Office 365 Home, Office 365 Personal, and Office 365 University include the following software: Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote (now free for everyone) Outlook Publ

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Good Morning America's "Boosting Your Business" segment, sponsored by Microsoft, provides entrepreneurs and small businesses with simple advice and tools to help them grow. On March 15, Good Morning America brought in Maxie McCoy, a career expert, to give tips and tricks to help businesses across the country be more productive and collaborative. To demonstrate some of these tips, Maxie visited WeWork, the hugely successful shared-office space startup, and talked about how the WeWork Creator Awards team can work together in a new way using Microsoft Teams, a new chat-based workspace in Office 365. Maxie gave the Creator Awards team advice on aligning their vision, delegating responsibility and communicating clearly within team workspaces. She showed them how Microsoft Teams creates a secure hub for teamwork, helping them communicate and collaborate more effectively. Unique vision and unquestionable talent has made the WeWork team into what it is today. Microsoft Teams gives them a new way to work together and continue to grow. Watch the segment now: Check out Microsoft Teams to see how your team can be more productive and collaborative as well. Download and read "The Ultimate Guide to Chat-Based Tools."

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Office 2016 isn't just about new Microsoft Word and PowerPoint layouts. The new productivity suite has a ton of amazing new tricks and features that are designed to make your work (and play) a lot easier. If you still think of Office as something you tinkered with to write terms papers back on Windows 95, well you're in for a treat. Download the new Office 2016 and you'll get access to tools that automatically separate important and unimportant emails, connect to your social media accounts to help you plan your weekend, and help you plan group trips and activities. For the business user, there are a ton of new Office features that help you better communicate, collaborate and create. I'll walk you through some of these new features and how you can use them to improve your Office 2016 experience. 1. CLUTTER Our SPAM folders are amazing. They collect emails from retailers and businesses with whom we don't want to have any contact whatsoever. But what about that uncle you just can't stand? Or that annoying coworker who constantly asks you to go to lunch? With Clutter for Outlook, your email usage signals whether or not emails should actually enter your inbox. For example: if you never, ever open your uncle's emails, Clutter will automatically send those incoming messages to a folder where they will land alongside your annoying coworker's lunch requests. You can access this folder anytime and move messages back to the normal old inbox. If you're worried you'll miss something important, don't fret. Clutter sends you a weekly digest that tells you exactly what was hidden. You can then command Clutter to never pull in that type of content again. 2. SKYPE INTEGRATION Office 2016 - www.office.com/setup Office 2016 Microsoft has made cloud document collaboration possible (years and years after Google, but I digress). Now, you and a friend can edit a Microsoft Word document simultaneously without having to save and share the document via emai

Last week, we welcomed Brian Solis, Altimeter principal analyst, thought leader and book author, to Yammer HQ to give a fireside chat, followed by signing of his new book: "What's The Future of Business?" I was thrilled to interview Brian, and we covered a variety of really meaty subjects - just check out the video below!

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

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Today marks the general availability of Office 2016 for Windows, a suite of desktop applications that together with new mobile and web apps pushes Microsoft's new vision for PC-based productivity. Office 2016 is available immediately to Office 365 subscribers, as well as to individuals who would prefer to buy the software in standalone form. "We see Office 2016 as being just as important as the first release of Office," Microsoft group program manager Shawn Villaron told me in a briefing last week. "In the early days, Office was about bringing really important tools together to empower the individual for personal productivity. That was the way people wanted to work at that time. And for 20 to 30 years, Office fit right in. Today, things are changing. More people collaborate on work as groups and teams, so Office 2016 represents the change from personal productivity to team productivity." And that, really, is Office 2016 in a nutshell. If you're a typical information worker, student, or other person in need of standard productivity tools, Office 2016 of course works fine and represents an obvious and stable evolution from the Office version you're currently using. But the real meat in this release-now and going forward, as Office will of course be updated regularly, like Windows 10-is the designed around this new way of working. Confusing matters somewhat, Office-not Office 2016, but Office generally-is all over the place now. In addition to the classic, full-featured desktop suites on both Windows and Mac, Microsoft has high-quality Office Online web apps, mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows/Windows phones-and Office 365-specific solutions that are often available as web apps but are sometimes just integrated into the desktop applications. This ain't your father's Office anymore. Office everywhere: Microsoft Office is available on virtually any device you care to use. - www.office.com/setup Office eve

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Evernote and OneNote are two of our favorite tools, but both have changed substantially since we last compared these two apps-in some ways, not for the best. Here's where these two stand today. www.office.com/setup LIFEHACKER FACEOFF: ONENOTE VS. EVERNOTE Now that Microsoft OneNote is free for Mac and Windows, the price and cross-platform barriers to…Read more WHAT'S NEW IN EVERNOTE In the last year, Evernote introduced a new pricing plan, redesigned its webapp, and added new features for its Android and iOS apps. THE FREE PLAN LOSES A FEATURE, BUT NOW THERE'S A MORE AFFORDABLE PAID PLAN Let's talk price first with Evernote, since it's the biggest change in the last year. The free plan no longer lets you email notes to Evernote, something most users enjoyed and used often prior to that change. Although you can get around this limitation with an IFTTT recipe, you won't get the full flexibility of Evernote's email-to-notes feature, such as specifying your destination notebook in the email subject line. So that's a bummer. On the positive side, however, Evernote introduced a new, more affordable paid plan called Evernote Plus. For $25 a year, you get offline notebooks for Evernote's mobile apps and the ability to lock the app on your phone with a PIN. Both of these used to require Evernote's Premium plan, which used to cost $45 a year. Finally, Evernote's Premium plan now costs $50 a year. But in return for those five extra bucks, you get larger upload limits: 10GB a month, instead of the previous 4GB data cap. With Evernote Premium, you can search attachments, scan business cards, view previous note versions, annotate PDFs, and use the new note presentation mode. EVERNOTE'S USER INTERFACE KEEPS EVOLVING www.office.com/setup Last year, Evernote took its redesigned, minimalist web client out of beta. Though slicker and easier on the eyes, the makeover also made the webapp less functional. You can't order

www.office.com/setup Blogs: We're moving deeper into the modern "walled garden" of digital life. Generally speaking, you choose the garden you like best - be it Apple, Google or Microsoft - and the more time and money you invest, the more painful it is to leave that ecosystem. Similarly, many people pick Evernote or Microsoft OneNote as their repository of choice for digital scraps, doodlings and scanned documents. Then they usually stick with that choice, because it's not easy to toggle between them or switch. About a year ago, I chose Evernote over OneNote, and I started amassing my own digital archive. At the time, Evernote's Mac software was far superior to OneNote's Mac app. However, Microsoft has continually upgraded OneNote for Mac and iOS, and today it's a legitimate Evernote rival; if I were facing the Mac Evernote versus Mac OneNote decision today, it would be a different situation. If you're a Windows user, the choice is even more challenging, because the OneNote 2013 Windows desktop app has valuable features that aren't available in Evernote or OneNote for Mac. To help you decide between these two notebook tools, I've come up with seven things OneNote does that Evernote can't. Of course, this is only one side of the story. For the flip side, read "6 things Evernote does that OneNote can't." 1) ONENOTE IS A DESIGN-FRIENDLY, FREEFORM CANVAS Each OneNote note is a blank canvas, every element its own movable container. If you have a stylus, you can draw anywhere within the note, and you can insert handwriting, blocks of text, images or any other element wherever you want. onenote freeform canvas - www.office.com/setup OneNote 2013 for Windows also lets you customize your notes. For example, you can change the "paper" color, add rule or grid lines, change the dimensions of notes, create new page templates or apply existing ones, and apply text styles. Other versions of OneNote, including the iPad and Mac apps, offer some but not all, of these capab