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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

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,

As announced earlier today, over the next few days we are releasing an update to Microsoft account. For people who use Outlook.com, this includes a number of new features such as two-step verification, the ability to sign in with an alias and new international domains for your email address. OPTIONAL TWO-STEP VERIFICATION HELPS KEEP YOU MORE SECURE You can now choose to enable two-step verification for your entire account. Two-step verification is when we ask you for two pieces of information when you sign in to your account-your password plus a code sent to a phone or email that you gave us as security info. Many of you have asked for this and we're delighted to be able to offer this capability. Two-step verification is a great way to add extra protection to your account. Once you've enabled two-step verification, even if a criminal gets your password (for example, through malware on a friend's machine that you used, or if you use the same password for another service that gets breached) they can't access your account. You can read more about two-step verification here, or just start setting it up at https://account.live.com/proofs/Manage -it only takes a few minutes. SIGN IN WITH ANY ALIAS ON YOUR ACCOUNT We've heard from a lot of you that you love using Outlook.com but you wish you had more flexibility signing in. Many of you have added an email alias to your account, but you can't use the alias to sign in to your account. Previously the only option was to permanently rename your account, which is a hassle and requires you to reset certain devices. With this release, you can now sign in with any alias that has been added to your account. We've also simplified the experience of adding and managing aliases, with better advice on when you should add an alias vs. renaming your primary alias.

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.

It was not always easy to find the correct version of a software for your pc/mac. But with time things have been improving and now people are developing easy ways to manage softwares and versions by simply integrating it to there website. Same is done by Microsoft. They have every information on there website. For this we are looking at www.office.com it consists of many micro sites. For Office the website is www.office.com. This is the first step to Microsoft Office If you are new. You will need to purchase it from the main website. Though there are many third party who claim to resell the product but buying directly from Microsoft is the most secure way to do it.

Yes! It has everything. Even if you are trying to setup a list of what to buy and what to do. You will never need any other software but Microsoft Office. It is great to have it on your computer. We recommend Microsoft Office to every person with any device with a display. Lets see why. IT WILL EASE YOUR WORK. Literally, it will check spellings, it will suggest you what you should be writing. Your grammar if its worst, well Office has some Brit English Grammar inside of its gut. Yeah thats write. Microsoft Office has been coming with the Spell check and Grammar corrections since it was rolled out. It has the best typing management system around the globe.

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.

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

May's Customer of the Month is Melanie Hohertz, Online Communications Lead, Cargill. I've been supporting Yammer as a work platform for Cargill for almost a year. We're early in our adoption, but it's been an amazing experience. I am learning, daily, how Yammer can change the way people and teams work and add value in a company that is more than 140,000 strong and spread throughout 65 countries. Our network will pass 10,000 members soon and already, you can't stump us on anything. From food to agriculture to financial and industrial products and services, Yammer is helping Cargill use what Cargill knows, and that's a lot. Yammer can connect people across silos based on organization, geography and hierarchy. I've seen customer reps talking directly to product management, and senior leaders listening to recently-hired employees. We have new ways to realize the power of our communities of practice to speed up ideation and action. Sure, we still have a long road ahead before Yammer is as ubiquitous and instinctive as e-mail, but we throw a heck of a YamJam, and the signal-to-noise ratio in our network is beautiful.

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.

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.

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

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

Remember the vintage game "Pull the Rug Out?" It is a board game where players stack different items on top of a rug. Eventually, one of the players tries to pull out the rug without tumbling the pieces stacked on top of it. Google's recent announcement that it is phasing out several additional services, including the highly popular Google Reader, reminded me of this game, as I recall that the stack most always toppled to the ground. Google introduced Google Reader, gradually built up its popularity, and then pulled the rug out with little warning, causing its customers to stumble. As one Google customer put it: "Google spends millions of wasted dollars on pet projects, then kills one of their best products on a whim." Google's most recent spring cleaning brings the total number of services it has discontinued to 70 in just a year-and-a-half. That's right-a whopping 70 services that have been shut down in just 18 months. Among the services Google will discontinue with little warning is Google Cloud Connect, introduced with a lot of fanfare just two years ago. Cloud Connect is a plug-in that enables Google users to share and edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. To continue collaborating with Microsoft Office, Google users have just four weeks to uninstall Cloud Connect and install Google Drive. Companies that can't get to it by April 30 will be out of luck, leaving them without a way to collaborate on Office documents used by millions of employees, partners, and customers. But of all the services Google is discontinuing this time, the one that's drawing the biggest backlash is Google Reader, a service used by hundreds of thousands of users to keep track of their favorite websites and blogs via RSS feeds. The news of Google Reader's shut down drew outrage from users, who put together a petition demanding that Google reinstate the service. "Our confidence in Google's other products - Gmail, YouTube, and yes, even Plus - requ

Today's post was written by Nick Portello, Network Manager, Steve Moore Chevrolet. Read more Office 365 customer stories here. Office 365 Customer Steve Moore Chevrolet_Nick PortelloWhen I joined Steve Moore Chevrolet as the sole IT staffer six months ago, the dealership was in dire need of new technology. Employees coped with aging PCs, an outdated POP3 email service, a poor mobility experience, data loss, and no collaboration tools. Then I heard about Microsoft Office 365, which gives you the latest version of Microsoft Office, plus a suite of cloud-based communication and collaboration tools that solved all our problems. Unlike Google Apps, the UI was familiar to our employees and Microsoft offered a flexible subscription-based payment option, which is ideal for our fluctuating workforce. Now that our documents are stored in Microsoft SharePoint Online and SkyDrive Pro, we have easy access to collaboration tools with robust security. I no longer worry about falling out of compliance with Chevrolet auditors, losing important financial data, or having to pay fines that could reach $250,000. I can also find data on-demand for Chevrolet auditors and use my mobile device to look up information, which saves about 40 percent of every day-I'm no longer running between my computer and the sales, service, and administration departments. I can focus on what I really need to do. Thanks to Office 365, we are all able to get on with our work! Learn more about Steve Moore Chevrolet and Office 365 by watching the video below and reading the case study.

We aim to make SkyDrive the place for all your documents, notes, photos, videos and other files. With the release of Windows 8 and Windows RT back in October, more and more people every day are using SkyDrive for their most important files through the SkyDrive app, as well as through SkyDrive integration in File Explorer. Of course, there are great SkyDrive experiences for Windows devices, but being the place for all your files means we invest a significant amount of effort ensuring you have a great experience across all the devices you want to use. Today, we're excited to release v3.0 of the SkyDrive app for iOS that includes improved photo features, an updated UI, and a number of other new features and enhancements. You can install or update the SkyDrive app for iOS now via iTunes. Here are the updates we've made to v3.0 of the SkyDrive app for iOS: Support for iPhone 5 and iPad Mini Updated app icons and user experience Works better with your photos: Download full resolution photos to your iPhone or iPad Control the size of photos you upload and download Photo metadata is retained when you upload to SkyDrive Opening and saving files to SkyDrive works better with other apps on your iOS devices Many other small changes, bug fixes and performance improvements

Bella Engen is a Technical Writer on the SharePoint User Content Publishing team, focused on search-driven experiences. Cross-site publishing is a new publishing method in SharePoint Server 2013 that can help streamline the publishing process in your organization, and at the same time reduce costs associated with maintaining and updating your website. By combining cross-site publishing with SharePoint search features, you can reduce the number of pages needed to maintain your website, and gain flexibility in how content is presented to your customers. In a nutshell, cross-site publishing simplifies the authoring experience by separating the process of how content is authored from the process of how content is displayed. SharePoint search features enable you to add user-specific behavior to your website, such as displaying different content to different customer groups, or displaying recommendations based on user behavior. In a blog series on the SharePoint IT Pro blog, you can learn how you can use SharePoint Server 2013 to set up a website that is based on product catalog data. The blog posts describe the different functionalities that are involved when setting up such a site, and show you step-by-step how the features are configured. To demonstrate how it all comes together, data from a fictitious company is used. The blog posts use several screenshots and diagrams to explain everything from how the cross-site publishing feature works, to how you can use search features to influence how product data is displayed to visitors on a site. To give you an idea of what type of site this blog series describes, here are a few screenshots of the final website: www.office.com/setup Visit the "How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint Server 2013" blog series overview page for the complete list of current and upcoming posts.