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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. But how can small businesses deliver a professional image when they don't have the same resources as big businesses? Web-based solutions, also known as 'cloud solutions,' help small businesses maintain professional-looking documents even while collaborating and editing with employees in real-time from different locations. Gone are the days where employees hoped documents maintained proper spacing and margins; small businesses can now create materials in confidence and showcase their professional ability to customers. Below are just a few of the ways small businesses can ensure they are maintaining a professional appearance when it comes to the business communications: MAKE THE FIRST IMPRESSION A PROFESSIONAL ONE An email newsletter is often a small business' first connection with a potential customer; they can keep it professional by registering a business email domain (johndoe@yourbusiness.com) and sending all communications to customers and potential customers from there. Most cloud solutions offer a cost-efficient and easy way to customize emails with basic client information - small businesses should take the time to add a personal touch to connect with their customers. Messages should be short and to the point to ensure their email will bring value to potential customers. Email signatures should be simple, clean and professional, and employees shouldn't forget to run a spell-check before hitting send. CREATE CUSTOMER-READY DOCUMENTS Whether creating documents on an office desktop or on-the-go on a mobile or tablet device through Office Mobile Apps in Office 3

This episode marks the first in a three part series, as hosts Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsh go deeper on automating the new Office for your organization. Watch as they reveal the second XStream install of the season, as host and pilot Yoni attempts an Office 365 ProPlus install, with no Internet access, while performing outrageously high-G aerobatics.

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. Large enterprises typically have entire divisions dedicated to supporting and keeping their IT infrastructure up and running. Even though small businesses don't have this luxury, they can still punch above their weight by choosing the enterprise-grade IT services in Office 365 to help solve their most top-of-mind business challenges.

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.

EMAILS STUCK IN YOUR OUTBOX? www.office.com/setup Blogs: A common complaint of Outlook users is that their email send process takes too long, "hangs," or traps messages in the outbox. Has that ever happened to you? We collected some troubleshooting instructions that should help you get your messages traveling smoothly again. These steps apply to Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016.

Yana Terukhova is a Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team. Visio offers over 60 types of professional templates to build compelling diagrams, and organization charts are among most the frequently created. Visio organization charts are simple and visual, but what if you want to connect them to key business indicators tracked by your organization, such as sales by region, budget by department, vacation status, or training progress? Sometimes this information is located in another source, like Excel or a complex database. Data-linked diagrams let you add data to Visio diagrams-no code required-and anyone in an organization can quickly create such dashboards to get better insights into data using Visio Professional 2013 or Visio Pro for Office 365.

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.

Stay updated on your Yammer network as new messages come into the feed. Our new integration with The Social Radio provides Yammer users a unique offering: to listen to their Yammer messages, read aloud through The Social Radio interface. The Social Radio reads new Yammer messages, polls, events and praise as they come through the feed, while you simultaneously listen to music. To use, just sign in to The Social Radio using your Yammer credentials and The Social Radio will begin reading your Yammer messages. If you hear something worth checking into - pop over to your Yammer feed to read more about it or join the conversation.

Whether you are a novice user of Microsoft Project 2013 or you want to learn about IT Professional or developer topics, please consider our new quick start training for Project 2013-it's free and available on demand! www.office.com/setup You get over 9 hours of content divided into 13 modules. Don't have much time? Don't worry, each module is broken down into individual videos so you can go at your own pace.

MANY POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS INCLUDE HYPERLINKS TO OUTSIDE SOURCES LIKE WEBPAGES, BUT YOU CAN ALSO ADD LINKS TO LOCAL FILES OR OTHER SLIDES WITHIN THE PRESENTATION. ADDING THESE TYPES OF LINKS IS ANOTHER WAY TO MAKE PRESENTATIONS MORE INTERACTIVE, AND THE PROCESS IS SIMPLE. To add any kind of hyperlink, select the text, image, or shape you want to link and right-click. Then select Hyperlink. To insert a link to another slide, select Place in This Document and a table of contents will appear that lists slides in the presentation. Select the slide you'd like to link to, and click OK. To insert a link to a local file, select Existing File or Webpage. Browse to your file, select it, and click OK.

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.

The Outlook 2016 release focuses mainly on de-cluttering the user interface and simplifying your workflow. Microsoft Outlook is the world's most favored business email client. The application already offers excellent integration with contacts, calendars, notes, tasks, and of course, email.

Today's post was written by Howard Kourik, Director, Information Systems, San Diego County Regional Airport Authority The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority manages operations at one of Southern California's busiest regional airports, San Diego International. We were created to serve the public and have a mandate from the state of California to address the local area's long-term transportation needs. While we are a public entity, we function very much like any other business. In fact, we don't accept any tax dollars to support our operations. Instead, we rely on landing fees, the rent we receive from tenants, and a percentage of the profits from concessions-the restaurants, newsstands, and other shops located in the airport-to fund our growth. And like every business, we're constantly looking for ways to bring down our costs by operating more efficiently. We evaluated a lot of technologies to help us trim costs, but we selected Office 365 because it not only saves money, it gives us what we need to meet future IT demands. With our eyes on current and future needs, we did some modeling to gauge regional demand for our airport services over the next decade. It quickly became clear that we needed to add runways, terminals, and other "bricks and mortar" facilities, and upgrade our network infrastructure. Still, the only way we could budget for that expansion was to reduce or eliminate some of our fixed capital costs. I knew that one important way we could trim expenses was by taking a closer look at the technology we use and how we manage it. Our email system offered a prime example of how, by rethinking the way we deliver core IT services, we could cut down on operational "drag" and potentially save our IT team lots of time. Historically, we've managed our email in a clustered environment across four physical servers. So, we were not only worrying about the cost of the servers; we had to invest in mirroring software and an antivirus so

Today's guest blogger is Javier Vasquez, Senior Director of Productivity Sales, State and Local Government at Microsoft. For the past 15 years, Javier has helped public sector customers implement solutions that help them realize value in their technology investments. As government agencies prepare for this week's Lean Government Virtual Summit, cloud innovation will surely be a hot topic. So why should governments choose Microsoft Office 365 as they consider moving their productivity software to the cloud? The infographic below highlights the advantages of Office 365 versus Google Apps for government agencies. As you can see from the infographic, the benefits of Office 365 are many: Office 365 offers governments substantial cost savings. Governments can rest assured their information is protected and their tools accessible to people with visual and hearing impairments. Office 365 makes it easy for governments to meet email retention policies and fulfill legal discovery requests. Governments have the tools they need to be highly responsive to the citizens they serve. As Todd Kimbriel, Director of E-Government for the Texas Department of Information Resource, puts it: "No other solution provides the rich capabilities of Office 365, including web conferencing, real-time collaboration, and document and calendar sharing." We hope you find the infographic helpful! Also, please note that officials from the City of Kansas City, Missouri and the U.S. Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board will be discussing their experiences with Office 365 at the Lean Government Virtual Summit. It's not too late to register! To learn more, click here.

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.

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.

Yana Terukhova is a Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team. Visually displaying always up-to-date information on clearly laid out diagrams helps to communicate information effectively. In this post, we will see how to connect data from external sources to a diagram. Linking data to Visio diagrams was first introduced in 2007 and has been overwhelmingly popular. We've improved the functionality since then and the capability has become increasingly more powerful. Associating data with shapes on a diagram does not require any code. There's a simple wizard which guides you through linking your data source to your diagram. Once you've linked data to diagram shapes, apply data graphics to shapes-text, data bars, icons, or color by value conditional formatting-to visually display numerical data. The important point here is that data-linked diagrams are dynamic; the data graphics change when data is refreshed in the source (like Excel).

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.