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In order to stay competitive in today's world, teams need to connect and share with each other more than ever before. On March 28th, we had the pleasure of hosting Rob Koplowitz from Forrester Research and Walton Smith from Booz Allen Hamilton in a live webinar where they discussed why organizations are turning to enterprise social and how they are using it to help their teams work more openly and efficiently. Rob discussed how communication is changing, and how we're accessing and interacting with information in new ways-incredibly, 66% of information workers in North America and Europe already work remotely.* The shift to cloud-based software and platforms is definitely contributing to some of these changes. The old way of building software involved engineers, months of coming up with specs, running Beta programs, and debugging. The time from idea to ship could take years. So the introduction of the cloud-and social-to the Enterprise is enabling companies to innovate and move to market faster than ever before. The cloud provides anytime, anywhere access which is essential to our increasingly mobile work environments; today employees can quickly and easily access a range of business systems, information and expertise from anywhere in the world. Our shift to cloud-based platforms and the introduction of working openly with social are changing the way teams collaborate. Take, for example, Booz Allen Hamilton, a leading provider of management and technology consulting services. The company has over 26,000 employees worldwide, with over 71% of their employees working on-site with customers, which often limits their access to company resources.** But in order to provide the best service to their clients, consultants need to be able to quickly and easily access information and expertise. Booz Allen recently integrated Yammer as a social layer across business tools because the cloud-based platform enables consultants world-wide to collaborate virtually. When o

When FHI 360 wanted to move to cloud-based business productivity services, the organization decided to implement a Microsoft cloud-based solution. We recently spoke to Douglas Wilkins, Director of IT Infrastructure at FHI 360, to learn how the company is benefiting: FHI360 logoQ: Please tell us about FHI 360. Douglas Wilkins: FHI 360 is a nonprofit human development organization dedicated to improving lives in lasting ways by advancing integrated, locally driven solutions. Our staff includes experts in health, education, nutrition, environment, economic development, civil society, gender equality, youth, research, technology, communication, and social marketing-creating a unique mix of capabilities to address today's interrelated development challenges. FHI 360 serves more than 60 countries and all US states and territories. Q: Why did you want to move to cloud-based services for messaging and collaboration? Wilkins: We had a diverse IT infrastructure. Employees in the US had different IT toolsets and Internet access than staff in countries like Mozambique. Subscribing employees to a single, cloud-based solution was the most expedient way to ensure that everyone had the same IT tools, to work efficiently regardless of location. Migrating our communication and collaboration technologies to the cloud reduced much of the time required by our IT staff to manage divergent IT infrastructures and connectivity options found around the world. Q: What criteria did you use to select Microsoft as your vendor for cloud-based business productivity services? Wilkins: We wanted a vendor that demonstrated a real interest in our mission and goals, and that offered online business productivity tools tailored for the enterprise space. The capabilities of the Microsoft Services Consulting team, and the work of Intellinet, the partner Microsoft introduced us to, provided us with that. We migrated our 4,300 staff members around the world from diverse platforms to a Microsoft Offi

When FHI 360 wanted to move to cloud-based business productivity services, the organization decided to implement a Microsoft cloud-based solution. We recently spoke to Douglas Wilkins, Director of IT Infrastructure at FHI 360, to learn how the company is benefiting: FHI360 logoQ: Please tell us about FHI 360. Douglas Wilkins: FHI 360 is a nonprofit human development organization dedicated to improving lives in lasting ways by advancing integrated, locally driven solutions. Our staff includes experts in health, education, nutrition, environment, economic development, civil society, gender equality, youth, research, technology, communication, and social marketing-creating a unique mix of capabilities to address today's interrelated development challenges. FHI 360 serves more than 60 countries and all US states and territories. Q: Why did you want to move to cloud-based services for messaging and collaboration? Wilkins: We had a diverse IT infrastructure. Employees in the US had different IT toolsets and Internet access than staff in countries like Mozambique. Subscribing employees to a single, cloud-based solution was the most expedient way to ensure that everyone had the same IT tools, to work efficiently regardless of location. Migrating our communication and collaboration technologies to the cloud reduced much of the time required by our IT staff to manage divergent IT infrastructures and connectivity options found around the world. Q: What criteria did you use to select Microsoft as your vendor for cloud-based business productivity services? Wilkins: We wanted a vendor that demonstrated a real interest in our mission and goals, and that offered online business productivity tools tailored for the enterprise space. The capabilities of the Microsoft Services Consulting team, and the work of Intellinet, the partner Microsoft introduced us to, provided us with that. We migrated our 4,300 staff members around the world from diverse platforms to a Microsoft Offi

Education world is a resourceful website for teachers offering references and assistance with lesson plans.

When we launched the preview of Outlook.com, our goal was to build the best email service in the world, capable of scaling to over a billion active customers. When Outlook.com came out of preview, it was already the fastest growing email service thanks to your support. The last two months have seen the release of a new, modern Outlook.com calendar, a refreshed Outlook.com app for Android devices, two-factor authentication for your account, new international domains for people around the world, and the release of a preview of Skype calling in Outlook.com. Today, we're excited to announce that we've completed upgrading all Hotmail customers to Outlook.com. Coupled with the growing organic excitement for Outlook.com, this has pushed us to over 400 million active Outlook.com accounts, including 125 million that are accessing email, calendar and contacts on a mobile device using Exchange ActiveSync. We're also pleased to announce that we're adding two new features to Outlook.com: SMTP send, so it's easier to send mail from different email addresses, and deeper integration with SkyDrive.

As governments strive to become more responsive and transparent, it's important for them to make public information easily accessible to citizens. At the same time, it's critical that they protect confidential data. A key reason why governments choose Microsoft Office 365 is Microsoft's leadership in the industry when it comes to privacy, security, and compliance practices. In short, governments know they can trust Microsoft to help protect their data. So how does Microsoft demonstrate leadership and why exactly do governments trust Office 365 to help protect their data? Here are four reasons: We respect your privacy. Google is under criticism for its privacy practices. Office 365 does not build advertising products out of customer data, unlike other companies. Nor do we scan your email or documents for building analytics, data mining, or advertising, or to improve the service. What's more, you own your data. Office 365 customer data belongs to the customer. Customers can remove their data whenever they choose. Office 365 is independently verified. Office 365 is compliant with many world-class industry standards, and it is verified by third parties. For example, Office 365 is the first major business productivity public cloud service to have implemented the rigorous set of physical, logical, process, and management controls defined by ISO 27001, one of the best security benchmarks available in the world. In addition, Office 365 is the first major business productivity public cloud service provider to sign the standard contractual clauses created by the European Union ("EU Model Clauses") with all customers. Office 365 also implements security processes that adhere to the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) required by U.S. federal agencies and to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). With Office 365, you know where your data is located. Office 365 customers know where major Office 365 datacenters are located

When we launched the preview of Outlook.com, our goal was to build the best email service in the world, capable of scaling to over a billion active customers. When Outlook.com came out of preview, it was already the fastest growing email service thanks to your support. The last two months have seen the release of a new, modern Outlook.com calendar, a refreshed Outlook.com app for Android devices, two-factor authentication for your account, new international domains for people around the world, and the release of a preview of Skype calling in Outlook.com. Today, we're excited to announce that we've completed upgrading all Hotmail customers to Outlook.com. Coupled with the growing organic excitement for Outlook.com, this has pushed us to over 400 million active Outlook.com accounts, including 125 million that are accessing email, calendar and contacts on a mobile device using Exchange ActiveSync. We're also pleased to announce that we're adding two new features to Outlook.com: SMTP send, so it's easier to send mail from different email addresses, and deeper integration with SkyDrive.

Challenges to school materials are a common occurrence. How should such challenges be handled? How can they be avoided?

Headquartered in Bad Homburg, Germany, Fresenius Medical Care is one of the world's leading providers of products and services for individuals undergoing dialysis treatments. The company runs a network of more than 3,000 dialysis clinics around the world and treats more than 250,000 patients each year. The company had been using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 since 2010. In April 2012, the Fresenius Medical Care Global Manufacturing Operations adopted SharePoint 2013 with a long-term vision to migrate all SharePoint 2010 dashboards and use SharePoint 2013 as the central collaboration and social system.

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 bringing Yammer to a city near you with Yammer on Tour-a free event series that brings together customers, partners and thought leaders for a unique opportunity to hear our vision for enterprise social, network with like-minded peers, and learn directly from customers how to usher in success in today's rapidly changing business environment. Yammer on Tour features an action-packed half-day agenda including: Keynotes and appearances by Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni and customers Breakout sessions featuring product insights and expert discussions on enterprise social success Hands-on training and certification Networking and demos from Yammer and our partners in the expo hall Join us at Yammer on Tour in the following cities: New York-April 9: Register today Chicago-April 16: Register today Dallas-May 15: Registration opening soon We look forward to seeing you at one of these events!

Most people know that you can create PowerPoint presentations with pictures, music, images, web content, and text, but one little known trick is the ability to save PowerPoint presentations as videos. PowerPoint presentations have been a long time favorite for use in business and academic presentations all over the world. They are highly versatile and offer a wide variety of features that you can use to enhance them. In order to save your PowerPoint as a video you will first need to create a presentation or download the sample we used for this tutorial. Once you have the document open, you will need to save it as a video. Begin by pressing "File." sshot-1 - www.office.com/setup Instead of following the logical train of thought and opening the "Save" section, you will need to click on "Export," then click on "Create a video." sshot-2 - www.office.com/setup Once you do this, you will see the "Create a Video" option. This will offer a few options in the form of two drop-down menus and a time value box. sshot-3 - www.office.com/setup The first drop-down box is where you will choose the quality of your exported video. These three options will also determine the size of your exported video file. For the purposes of this example, we will choose the second option to reduce the size of the video without compromising too much video quality. sshot-4 - www.office.com/setup The second drop-down menu allows you to include or exclude any timings or narrations that you inserted on your PowerPoint presentation. Since the sample document has no timings or narrations, we will leave this as is. The "Use Recorded Timings and Narrations" will be unavailable if you don't have any of them in your presentation. sshot-5 - www.office.com/setup The time value box is where you can edit the amount of time that your slides will appear in the video. The default time is set at 5 seconds. For this tutorial, we will set it to 3 seconds. Lastly, you need

Based in Chicago, Illinois, United is one of the largest airlines in the world. To improve enterprise content management (ECM), United wanted to build communities around the products and services it delivers to customers. The airline initially deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and subsequently migrated to SharePoint Server 2010, which United developed into an enterprise platform for ECM and e-discovery, co-locating approximately 1 terabyte of content for the enterprise. In 2012, the airline deployed SharePoint Server 2013 for a variety of projects-including a service catalog that 87,000 employees rely on to search for and order products from the IT department. By using SharePoint Server 2013, United has also simplified content management-the amount of time required to enter a new item into the catalog has plummeted from two months to a few hours.

Part of the thrill of working for the Office Division is the opportunity to tackle thorny business issues on behalf of our customers while providing them with a road map for the future. That may be why an interesting article caught my attention this week. In it, the author examined some of the investments Microsoft is making in the unified communications space. While I didn't agree with all of the conclusions it contained, the article certainly underscored the interest in communications and collaboration and how to make people more productive. Communicating and collaborating with others is really at the heart of what we do every day. Whether at work or at home, people have the need to make meaningful connections with one another. Compounding that need are the realities of the world we live in where instant access to information is expected, friends and coworkers are scattered across geographies and many adults are juggling multiple mobile devices. At Microsoft, we believe technology isn't the problem to these complexities, it's the answer. We're committed to providing capabilities that help people make sense of it all and to do so in a way that is intuitive, barrier free and agnostic to the devices on which we rely. We're incredibly proud of the fact that our long term-term vision for communications and collaboration not only marries the best of the cloud and the desktop, it's a holistic approach that spans "from the living room to the boardroom" placing people at the center of everything we do. Our communication and collaboration vision comes to life utilizing client and cloud assets, including Lync, Skype, Yammer, Outlook and SharePoint. These tools are enabling enterprise social capabilities, HD video conferencing and document collaboration as part of a highly secured, reliable and extensible platform. At the risk of looking geeky, I have to admit that I have a soft spot for Lync and it's comforting to know I'm not alone. More than 90% of

Five shows into the series, we've looked at what your options are, what's changed and what's new with the new Office. We threw skydiver Fully Sik out of a plane to test if Office 365 ProPlus could be installed during 90 seconds of free fall; we took a look at the new Office telemetry to help you optimize your Office configuration; and we've explored identity and data access with the new user-based Office and caught up with Zero Day and Trojan Horse Sci-Fi author and industry renowned cyber-security expert, Mark Russinovich on the security model for online services. We even performed the great race of Office installs. We've received a lot of your questions along the way so, for our sixth show, we changed gears to present a live 60-minute episode of the Garage Series Live! on real world adoption tips and tricks with live Q&A. If you missed the show you can see it again here.

A teacher would never be satisfied with her performance if she discovered that the entire back row of her classroom was unable to hear her lecture. In the world of cloud services for business, we see things the same way. With Office 365, every user counts! Google has a different approach. It starts counting downtime only after at least 5 percent of users are affected. Imagine if 100 of your 2,000 users had no access to email. Would you, as an IT professional, be satisfied with your performance? Would your business hold you accountable for your performance? The answers to these questions are clear. Calculating downtime only after 5 percent of your users cannot access email, as Google does, makes it more difficult for you to assess impact to user productivity. Google's approach doesn't help your business with meaningful performance metrics. With Office 365, every affected customer and every service counts when we calculate downtime. Downtime means the total minutes in a month during which service is unavailable, excluding scheduled downtime. For services like email, there is no scheduled downtime, an experience that our many Exchange Server customers have long been accustomed to-system maintenance while they continue to be productive in their Outlook inboxes. In addition to the way it calculates downtime, Google also combines consumer and commercial service availability when reporting the availability of Gmail. This means if you are considering Google Apps for Business, you cannot get accurate information regarding the availability of the commercial service that you need. On the other hand, Microsoft's approach to calculating downtime, which includes every user minute, helps you understand whether your users' productivity is being impacted by downtime of email. Google takes a "use at your risk" approach around Google+, Hangout and Google Voice. These services are not part of Google Apps for Business and are excluded from the SLA. Excluding these serv

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

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 2016 for Mac is here, so we bring you everything you need to know about the new version of Office for Mac 2016, including Office 365, UK pricing, new features and more. OFFICE FOR MAC 2016 FIRST LAUNCHED AS PART OF OFFICE 365 IN JULY OF 2015, BUT MAC USERS WANTING TO BUY A COPY OUTRIGHT, RATHER THAN SUBSCRIBE, HAD TO WAIT FOR MICROSOFT TO LAUNCH THE BOXED VERSION. THAT FINALLY HAPPENED IN SEPTEMBER 2015, WHEN THOSE MAC USERS GOT THEIR WISH AND OFFICE 2016 FOR MAC BECAME AVAILABLE FOR £119.99 UPFRONT. HERE, WE TALK YOU THROUGH THE FEATURES IN OFFICE FOR MAC 2016, AND HELP YOU DECIDE WHETHER TO SUBSCRIBE TO OFFICE 365 OR BUY A COPY OUTRIGHT. PLUS, WE SHARE OFFICE FOR MAC 2016 UK PRICING FOR EACH VERSION. A number of new features for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar have been added as of February 2017, these are discussed here. Don't expect Microsoft Office for Mac 2017 anytime soon (or at all, for that matter). There was a five year gap between this current version of Office for Mac and its predecessor, Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. However, those with an Office 365 account will get regular, automatic updates since it is an online subscription. If you buy Office outright as a one-time software download, you won't get these benefits, so something to bear in mind. MICROSOFT OFFICE FOR MAC 2016 UK PRICE: HOW MUCH DOES OFFICE FOR MAC 2016 COST? Office Home & Student 2016 for Mac costs £119.99 ($149.99) and includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. It's available to buy from Microsoft UK here or Microsoft US here. Office Home & Business 2016 for Mac costs £229.99 ($229.99) and includes Outlook as well as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. It's available to buy from Microsoft UK here or Microsoft US here. These versions are only available for one Mac. To install on more than one Mac Microsoft appears to be pushing users towards the 365 subscription model. If you buy a copy outright, you will only be able to install the copy on