Displaying items by tag: Office 365

Immediately after the launch of Office for iPad, four applications of this package have reached the top spot by the popularity on the App Store. And with the arrival of new data it seems that the number of downloads is constantly increasing.

Microsoft has announced that from next year they will automatically encrypt the origin of e-mail sent through its services Office 365. The new option, called Office 365 Message Encryption, will allow users to automatically send encrypted e-mail messages to recipients outside their organization.

Although Steve Ballmer is leaving Microsoft they have made statements that the company will continue to follow the plans he laid out for it; at least for the near future. Remember that Ballmer decided to cut the company back to only 4 divisions and decided to put people in charge of these divisions that are already running departments that are less than successful at this point. We have already given our analysis on these moves but want to remind you that most of these moves are intended to bolster Ballmer’s plans for Microsoft. But will Microsoft really follow these plans to the letter? We have a feeling that they will not once Steve is gone.

Microsoft has finally released a version of their famous Office tools for mobile devices based on Android. Office Mobile for Android devices, brings an optimized support for Word, PowerPoint and Excel. On mobile devices, it is possible to create new Word and Excel documents, edit existing Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents, it has a special presentation mode for PowerPoint, offline editing, viewing and editing of Office documents from e-mail attachment.

Microsoft as a corporate entity has had an interesting life cycle. When Bill Gates was in charge the goal was to build systems and software that would interconnect and build the back bone for corporate and home networks. Interoperability was the key and the folks at Microsoft insisted on creating their products to work now and also support older programs (and in some cases hardware). This was vital for their target market; the enterprise. Bill Gates knew that if he build a solid back ground in companies, universities, schools etc then it would spread to the consumer market. The plan worked and continued to work simply because most people want a similar experience across their computing platforms (remember this point). The move was brilliant and Microsoft managed to get themselves very firmly entrenched in the market.

The General Manager of Microsoft's applications for large companies, Julia White, told the New York Times that Google has not yet proven that it is really serious with their business applications. According to her words, Google is still mainly an advertising company and that 96% of its revenue comes from ads, while only 4% comes from services to business users.

We have already told you that Google is pulling their free version of Google docs/apps for groups. This move has upset more than a few small businesses that were using the free service as an alternative to paying the licensing for Microsoft Office or even Office 365. Now Google is removing something else from their free offering that not only has end users upset, but is earning them some criticism from Microsoft. Google is pulling the support for Active-sync from their free version of Google Apps and Gmail.

It looks like Google will be improving on the connection between two of their prime services; Gmail and Google Drive. Although it is not a revolutionary feature it makes it easier to use Gmail, or send a (large) file via e-mail. The files from Drive can be sent as "attachments" e-mail (not actually a word about attachments, but the links to the files on the Drive), access to files from Google Drive in the future will be available in Gmail via special buttons “Insert files using Drive.” The mentioned button should appear in the interface of Gmail over the next few days.

Windows 8, Microsoft’s heavily cloud based operating system, is due to hit the market in four days along with their Surface RT Tablet. While Microsoft (including Bill Gates) is talking up the operating system and its virtues there are many in the industry that are concerned about what will happen once (really if) a larger number of people start using these cloud services. This is highlighted today by yet another outage at Amazon that brought down many services including Reddit.

Microsoft’s Windows 8 has been pushed to RTM and the lucky few with TechNet accounts already have this new software downloaded and installed. We are already starting to read the reviews and observations of people that are fascinated with the new UI and those that hate it. We will have our own review in a few weeks that will include traditional desktop, laptop and also a tablet PC. Still there is a lot of misinformation about the strengths of Windows 8 and also how it will fit into the market.  We were sent a link to what we have found to be one of the better comparisons of the pros and cons of Windows 8 and wanted to cover our take (based on experience in the IT industry) and also to add to their findings.