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In this episode, the intrepid Garage Series hosts explore the change in guard of compatibility tools. Conducting the great race of Office installs, they catch up with Office engineer John Hoegger about Microsoft's own global implementation of the new Office. Watch as they examine user training, compatibility and pushing out the bits to answer whether or not rolling out Office just got faster.

Office 365 for business allows small and large companies to use the power of SharePoint Online. In this week's webinar, you'll learn some of the basics and we'll answer your questions. Can't view this video? Watch it on Microsoft Showcase. Need a sneak peek? Here's a 30-seocnd trailer. What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar Logging on the first time What's that there? A look around Where can I put my stuff? Sites: for your company and your customer References for this webinar Office 365 for business (includes SharePoint) Video training courses for SharePoint What is SharePoint? (article) Get started with Office 365 business (video) Start using SharePoint sites, SkyDrive Pro, and Newsfeeds (video & links) Set up Office 365 for your business (site) What's new with SharePoint, a top 10 (blog post) New SharePoint mobile offerings (blog post) Sample SharePoint consumer site SharePoint Online for small businesses (index of articles) SharePoint Online for midsize/enterprise (index of articles) NEW: SkyDrive Pro App

Microsoft Project is a flexible tool for project portfolio management (PPM) and daily work, delivered through Office 365. The first place in this category of products is held by Wrike which has a total score of 9.8/10 and is the winner of our Best Project Management Software Award for 2016. You can try out Wrike for free here. You can also compare Microsoft Project with Wrike and see which one is better for your company. Microsoft Project enables businesses to get started, manage project portfolio investments, and deliver successfully with the intended business value. Microsoft Project Professional gives businesses a powerful, visually enhanced way to efficiently manage a wide range of their projects and programs. From meeting important deadlines, to choosing the right resources and empowering your office teams, Project Professional delivers new as well as intuitive experiences to plan, manage, and collaborate with various individuals, teams, and the enterprise.

At Microsoft's annual Public Sector CIO Summit, we were pleased to announce a growing community of public sector customers who've adopted Office 365 including the City of Kansas City, MO; the City of Seattle; King County, WA; the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, Dupage County, the University of Miami, the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Sacramento (Sacramento State) and California State University - all who've moved to the cloud to increase IT efficiencies while improving their communication and collaboration capabilities.

With Google Apps and Office 365 revolutionizing the way people work, you may feel that Microsoft Office is quickly becoming a dated product that will soon be packed away to the back of the closet. But with the 2016 version set to launch in autumn of this year, Microsoft is looking to change your mind. Now they're adapting their classic Office package for today's modern workforce. Here are four of the new features that are reinventing the way you look at your Office applications.

Microsoft today detailed the new features and improvements that it delivered to Office 365 users this month. Key among them are new Excel co-authoring capabilities, Microsoft Teams, and new OneNote inking and accessibility updates. "Office 365 provides the broadest and deepest toolkit for collaboration between individuals, teams and entire organizations," Microsoft corporate vice president Kirk Koenigsbauer explains. Here's what's new in March.

Project 2016 has all the functionality and features you're used to, with some enhancements and the best new features from Office 2016. NOTE: The following feature updates are available to Project Online subscribers. They will first roll out to Office Insider participants. If you have a Project Online subscription, make sure you have the latest version of Office.

Microsoft Forms is a new part of Office 365 Education that allows teachers and students to quickly and easily create custom quizzes, surveys, questionnaires, registrations and more. When you create a quiz or form, you can invite others to respond to it using any web browser, even on mobile devices. As results are submitted, you can use built-in analytics to evaluate responses. Form data, such as quiz results, can be easily exported to Excel for additional analysis or grading.

WHAT IS MICROSOFT PROJECT? www.office.com/setup Blogs: Microsoft Project is a flexible tool for project portfolio management (PPM) and daily work, delivered through Office 365. The first place in this category of products is held by Wrike which has a total score of 9.8/10 and is the winner of our Best Project Management Software Award for 2016. You can try out Wrike for free here. You can also compare Microsoft Project with Wrike and see which one is better for your company. Microsoft Project enables businesses to get started, manage project portfolio investments, and deliver successfully with the intended business value. Microsoft Project Professional gives businesses a powerful, visually enhanced way to efficiently manage a wide range of their projects and programs. From meeting important deadlines, to choosing the right resources and empowering your office teams, Project Professional delivers new as well as intuitive experiences to plan, manage, and collaborate with various individuals, teams, and the enterprise. OVERVIEW OF MICROSOFT PROJECT BENEFITS Arguably one of the best among the currently available project management tools, Microsoft Project is the tool for any company that is tired of trying to boost productivity with whiteboard scribblings, post-it notes, as well as scraps of paper. The tool deals with complexity in a very simple manner. While the tool has an impressively huge range of capabilities, it is relatively easy for any user to get it to do exactly what he or she needs. Microsoft Project is designed by people who have managed real-life projects and know that some things and processes are always changing. Thus with this tool, adding new tasks or revising the organization of a project midway through will be an easy thing to do. It is extremely intuitive and offers great balance of usability and complexity. Project is used in various industries including manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, construction, retail, financial services, government, a

Krishna Mamidipaka is a Senior Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team. Visio diagram templates - www.office.com/setupMicrosoft Visio is one of the most widely used tools for Business Process Modeling (BPM) projects worldwide, and people use Visio for a variety of tasks within the context of their BPM projects. From creating process flows that are validated for critical compliance needs to automating human and document centric workflows, and monitoring these workflows, Microsoft Visio supports BPM efforts of varying complexity. The new Microsoft Visio, powered by interoperability with Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365, provides a strong social, mobile and cloud-based infrastructure for BPM initiatives. In addition to the newer workflows and collaboration features, it also offers several new diagram templates that support the latest industry standards, such as BPMN 2.0 and UML 2.4. Look for us at the Gartner BPM Summit April 2-4, 2013 as we take our very compelling and well-recognized BPM story to the Washington D.C. area. Microsoft is a Platinum sponsor of the summit, and we are very excited to speak with a variety of customers, partners, analysts and press while at the event. Do join us if you can! Learn more about new and improved BPM capabilities in Visio with our Microsoft BPM Whitepaper. -Krishna Mamidipaka, Senior Product Marketing Manager

In order to be taken seriously, small businesses need to convince customers of their professional ability and their value. Small businesses can punch above their weight by taking the time to go to market with a professional set of business documents, templates and content to ensure customers aren't dismissing them before they have a chance to pitch the value of their product or service.

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.

Small businesses have enough to focus on without having to spend time and energy worrying about email, data storage or backup servers. In fact, most small businesses don't know or understand what a server is. The good news is that in today's technology environment, they don't need to. This is because more small businesses are rapidly moving from outdated technology solutions to Web-based solutions to power their company, also known as "moving to the cloud." By moving to cloud solutions like Office 365, small businesses find they can concentrate their resources on growing their business rather than trying to solve technical issues.

Every couple weeks, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. We hope you enjoy our latest selections. The Office 365 Upgrade: New Outlook Web App. The new Office 365 includes "a vastly improved" Outlook Web App. ABB Deploys Office 365 and Yammer Worldwide. Power automation firm ABB plans to deploy Office 365 to its 145,000 employees around the world. V8 Supercar Races Off with Microsoft Office 365. V8 Supercars chooses Office 365 because of trust in Microsoft brand. Microsoft's Lync Communications Platform Used by President Obama's Re-election Campaign. The Obama campaign used the Lync platform during the 2012 elections, enabling staff to work from anywhere. Why Office 365 Makes Sense for Small Business. Three compelling reasons why Office 365 may make sense for small businesses: a low upfront cost, multiple licenses, and Exchange Online. Microsoft's Top Ten SharePoint Online Features. A senior product manager on the SharePoint Team shares his top 10 features of SharePoint Online. Microsoft Turns Up 'Scroogled' Attacks with Campaign Against Google Apps. Microsoft calls on Google to stop providing user information to third-party Android developers.

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Microsoft Community Summit about communities of practice - their business value, how they are different from other internal and external communities, and strategies for success in starting them up and growing them in a sustainable way. I invite you to view the presentation embedded below; here are some main points.

You can access and share Office documents with browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. Learn some of the basics and the latest features of these free tools. Note: Office Online was formerly known as Office Web Apps. There is an updated webinar about Office Online at http://aka.ms/online123.

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.

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

Guest blogger Emily Warn is co-owner of Two Pens, which provides blogging services and teaches business how to write content that grows a social media following. My writer friends think I'm a geek. You can do what?! I can create a spreadsheet with book sales numbers that can be sorted by name and number. I know that is only the first rung of Excel Geek-dom, and unlike my compatriots, I aspire to climb into the ranks of those who know how to create snazzy charts and perform other formatting feats. Perhaps I'll be able to brand myself as a writer who plays with numbers.

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!