The Microsoft Office Blog

Project and Portfolio Management Partner of the Year awards announced

Jan Kalis — Tue, 21 May 2013 23:00:00 GMT

The 2013 Microsoft Partner of the Year award winners were announced for all categories across Microsoft Partner competencies, products and regions. We recognize the best of the best Microsoft Project partners with the prestigious Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Partner of the Year award. This year, we have seen great case studies and stunning solutions that Microsoft Project partners have built, and this underscores the great success and power of Microsoft Project and its partner community.

The Project and Portfolio Management Partner of the Year Award distinguishes an exceptional partner who has excelled in offering breakthrough solutions that extend or integrate the Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management solution. Please join us in celebrating the success of the PPM partner community and congratulating the winner and finalists!

Project and Portfolio Management Partner of the Year 2013: UMT

UMT has consistently combined innovative products and consulting excellence to help organizations transform their business and gain even more value from their Microsoft platform investment. UMT has gained unparalleled understanding of customer needs by forming enduring relationships with Global 1000 organizations across a variety of industries.

UMT 360 is UMT's most ambitious product release to date. Built on Microsoft SharePoint Server and with seamless integration with Project Server, UMT 360 combines leading portfolio, project and financial management best practices to deliver a powerful Integrated Portfolio Management offering. With up-to-date data and metrics at your fingertips, UMT 360 helps you create a dynamic blueprint of your business and technology architecture, drive financial transparency and collaborate to make informed investment decisions across your project, program and asset portfolios. To learn more about UMT 360 visit www.umt.com.

Award finalists

Nintex, the world's leading SharePoint workflow company, brings the design experience of Nintex Workflow to Project Server. Nintex Workflow for Project Server allows users and IT developers to automate end-to-end workflows with graphical drag/drop UI. For a Project Management Office (PMO), it's a tool that is easy to use internally and supports the continual changes project management entails, allowing PMOs to be more agile. From demand management and event driven workflows, to workspaces and collaboration workflows, all can be created quickly and easily without the need for complex and costly development cycles.

Campana & Schott's innovation management solution is applicable for companies with focus on research, engineering and product development. The holistic view of the complete product lifecycle enables organizations to select best innovations and manage all required information such as master data, documents, schedules and costs in one repository. This single source of truth combines data from Microsoft Project, SharePoint and SAP through our renowned Line of Business (LOB) integration product, CS Connect, which is certified by Microsoft and SAP and available for Project and Project Online.

Projility's innovative software and services solutions and market-driven approach apply directly to the enterprise market, and are in use today by dozens of corporate, public sector, and upper mid-market customers. In 2012, we found the strongest sales for PPM were in the public sector, healthcare, and manufacturing--areas of high growth, driven by control and regulation ripe for what Microsoft PPM offers.

Honorable mention

Congratulations!
-- Jan Kalis, Product Marketing Manager, Project and Visio

The gift of organization

Office Team — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:12:00 GMT

Guest blogger Leticia Barr, founder of TechSavvyMama.com, shares the gift of technical assistance for the person who has everything. Read on to learn her organization tips using Office 365 Home Premium to help family and friends plan a trip, edit photos, and more.

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SkyDrive Pro client for Windows now available

SharePoint Team — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:00:00 GMT

We are pleased to announce that the SkyDrive Pro sync client is now available for Windows and can be downloaded here. This standalone client allows users of SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online in Office 365 to sync their personal SkyDrive Pro and any SharePoint 2013 or Office 365 team site document libraries to their local machine for access to important content on and offline. The SkyDrive Pro client can be installed standalone and does not require any version of Office to be installed. It can also be installed side-by-side with previous versions of Office (Office 2010, Office 2007).

Please note if you have one of the following versions of Office 2013 installed, then you already have the SkyDrive Pro sync client and do not need to install it separately:

Office 365 Pro Plus
Office 365 Small Business Premium
Office Professional Plus 2013

Once installed, simply click SYNC in the top right corner of your SkyDrive Pro library, SharePoint 2013 or Office 365 team site document library and you'll be on your way to keep your files in sync across your machines. Happy syncing with SkyDrive Pro--cloud storage for employees!

Project Managers win with Project Online and Office 365 cloud services

Mark Sargeant — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:28:00 GMT

For over a decade, Microsoft has delivered flexible software for Project Portfolio Management (PPM) through editions of Microsoft Project Server and Microsoft Project Professional. Now the proven capabilities in Project Server are available as Project Online, a cloud service which offers increased agility and a smaller IT footprint. Project Online works with the SharePoint platform and enjoys the business benefits of Office 365, which modernizes productivity infrastructure without any compromise.

Like building a house, in project management it’s very important to use the right tool at the right time. Many teams start with lightweight spreadsheets for organizing and tracking tasks. When they want to add collaboration and let team members manage their own reporting, task lists in SharePoint are a great way to organize the team’s work in accessible and inclusive ways. At some point, lists of tasks become too complex for simple spreadsheets. They have dependencies, shared resources, unique constraints, or maybe the list just becomes too long and unwieldy.

That’s when the humble task list can "graduate" into becoming a project, and Project Professional is the perfect tool for the job. Almost inevitably, businesses will accumulate a number of projects, and at some point require another sophisticated tool to manage all these projects in one place. Project Server provides this ability to look across many projects and keep the business running smoothly; and now, Project Online does this as a cloud service.

Like Project Server, Project Online integrates seamlessly with Project Professional, Microsoft’s signature project management software embraced by project managers everywhere. When an organization’s many individual projects are managed in Project Online, everything the Project Management Office (PMO) and business leaders need to manage project portfolios and make key decisions is available in one place, accessible from virtually anywhere on nearly any device.

Trends in hardware virtualization delivered substantial cost reductions for companies across many industries in recent years. As virtualization technology becomes mature and standardized, the leading edge of cost control is moving to cloud services, in which workloads that are not mission critical can be accessed with more flexibility, lower costs, and without investments in unnecessary infrastructure. Many enterprises understand that sustained competitive advantage results from strategically directed operations more so than administration of server farms.

Project Online addresses these realities and unlocks opportunity for teams to boost autonomy and scale. Since it’s a service delivered through Office 365, Project Online is always up to date, accessible from virtually anywhere, and can be trusted with sensitive data and mission-critical workloads.

Office 365 leverages best practices and adds unique innovations to give users the power to mix and match the right set of tools to meet business needs. Project Online brings SharePoint Online capabilities with it, and the experience only gets better when licenses are added for Lync Online communication, Exchange Online email services, and streaming Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to personal computers virtually anywhere. Visio Pro for Office 365 is also available as a subscription, enabling integration of business process modelling, zero-code workflow design for demand management, data-connected dashboards, and traditional diagramming.

Read the Project Online PMO Whitepaper to learn more about cloud benefits and considerations, or take a look at all the benefits and capabilities built into Project Online at the Project website.

–Mark Sargeant, Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Project

Travel with OneNote: Staying organized on the road

OneNote Team — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:00:00 GMT

Traveling is blogger Brad Corob's hobby--almost every weekend, he's flying somewhere new to see the sights, sample the food, visit friends, and explore new places--but travel involves a lot of work and planning. Read on to learn how he uses OneNote to prepare for upcoming trips and keep himself on track while he's on the go.

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Data-linked diagrams: Building data graphics

Mark Sargeant — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:00:00 GMT

Yana Terukhova is a Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team.

Visio templates make it easy to build compelling diagrams that communicate visually. Organization charts are among the most popular templates, and you can enhance them to create a data-linked diagram that connects to key business indicators in your organization and then link your data from an external source so that the information is always up to date. In this post, we’ll look at how to display this information with data graphics.

Let’s focus on budget attainment and use a color by value data graphic. To do this, click the Data tab, then select Data Graphics, or select the shape, right-click to select Data, then click Edit Data Graphics. We’ll create a new data graphic with color by value as the type.

Now we can apply the value to all the shapes on the page. Highlight the shapes you’d like to associate with your data graphic, then select Apply to All Shapes.

Once that’s done, you’ll have the following organization chart – pretty nifty, for sure.

We need a legend to indicate what the colors represent, and Visio makes it easy to add one to your diagram. On the Data tab, select Insert Legend, and then you’ll see a key that explains what the colors mean.

You can move the legend around to where you’d like on the page, and you can also delete or modify individual elements in it.

We can quickly see how the team is tracking against budget spending, and sharing your diagram on SharePoint via Visio Services helps you to effectively communicate this simple and intuitive dashboard to others. And the best part is that as the data gets updated in the spreadsheet, we can refresh our Visio diagram. On the Data tab, click Refresh, or you can also set up an automatic refresh with up to 1 minute frequency.

Note: Data-linked diagrams are a feature of Visio Professional 2013 and Visio Pro for Office 365 and are not available in Visio Standard 2013. Although data-linked diagrams may be opened in Visio Standard 2013, they will not be updated, and diagram changes may impact data connections on the page.

–Yana Terukhova, Product Marketing Manager

Join Tuesday’s webinar on the SkyDrive desktop app

Doug Thomas — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:43:00 GMT

SkyDrive is not just for your web browser. You also can download a handy desktop app that syncs your SkyDrive files to your PC or Mac. With the app, files you store in SkyDrive will automatically download to your computer, and those same files will sync to SkyDrive when you update them on your desktop. We start our Office 15-Minute Webinar at 9:15 am Pacific Time, with a Q&A to follow. Click the link below or go to http://aka.ms/offweb for more information on how to join the series.

Join online meeting

https://join.microsoft.com/meet/dougt/F274WBQZ

If you are on Windows 7 or Windows 8, you will join via the free Lync Web App. For other computers, you may need to call in for audio: 888.320.3585, Conference ID: 84172528.

A video of the webinar will be posted shortly after the webinar.

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar

How to install the SkyDrive desktop app
How to sync your SkyDrive...

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Office 365 news round-up

Michael Atalla — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:00:00 GMT

It has been a busy week for Office 365. After announcing our new Office Webs roadmap last week, it was great to see TIME magazine rate Office Web Apps among its 50 best websites. While I hope everybody enjoyed Rob Schneider's turn as the embodiment of Google Apps earlier this week, I'm also hoping the respective blogs on file fidelity and user experience were informative and helpful as you make your own decisions about how to best make the move to the cloud for productivity services. More customers choose Office 365 every day, and a few notable ones try Google first and switch to Office 365 after becoming dissatisfied with its incomplete productivity vision. Here is a round-up of some of these and other key news items from the last couple weeks:

Microsoft Exec Says Google Doesn't Understand Enterprise Web Apps. Microsoft's enterprise background gives it the "broadest vision of productivity" of any vendor out there.

Microsoft Reveals Three New Companies Who Ditched Google Apps for Office 365. Sensia Hälsovård AB, SEPCOIII, and Arysta LifeScience are the latest companies to switch to Office 365 after testing or deploying Google Apps.

Comedian Rob Schneider Stars as Google Docs in Microsoft Office 365 Videos. Microsoft showcases Google Apps deficiencies with two videos starring former Saturday Night Live cast member Rob Schneider.

Google Apps to Office 365: Why To Switch. InformationWeek's Larry Seltzer makes the business case for switching from Google Apps for Business to Microsoft Office 365.

Telefónica Deploys Office 365 Across 130,000 Strong Cloud. Telefónica will deploy Office 365 and Yammer to 130,000 staff in 24 countries as a way to drive greater simplification, agility, and cost reductions.

Pharma Giant Lupin Deploys Microsoft Office 365; Registers Significant Cost Reductions. Pharmaceutical company Lupin Limited adopts Office 365, helping its 11,000 employees to communicate more efficiently while reducing costs by around 40 percent over a three-year period.

50 Best Websites 2013. TIME magazine rates Office Web Apps among its 50 best websites, which calls them "far fresher looking than their Google equivalents."

Microsoft Says Yammer Sales Are Booming. Sales of Yammer cloud-based enterprise social networking software shot up 259 percent in Microsoft's third fiscal quarter, compared with the same quarter in 2012.

Garage Series: Automating user access to the new Office 365 across your organization

Office Team — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:30:00 GMT

This week our intrepid Garage Series hosts take you through your identity options with Office 365 ProPlus and tips and tricks for how to automate provisioning. Watch too as Yoni takes to the water with our latest XStream install while wakeboarding in the backwaters of Sydney, Australia.

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New server release: Spreadsheet controls in Office 2013

Excel Team — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:59:00 GMT

In April, we released 2 important new spreadsheet management server-based applications to complement the desktop spreadsheet management features we introduced with the release of Office 2013. Now available are Audit and Control Management Server (ACM), and Discovery and Risk Assessment, which are both designed to help you manage the use of spreadsheets and Access databases. Read on to learn more.

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Outlook.com now lets you chat with Google friends – one more reason to make the switch

Douglas Pearce — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:00:00 GMT

We're excited to announce that you can chat with your Google friends directly from Outlook.com. With this feature, the next time you're reading an email from someone who uses Gmail, you can reply with a quick chat right from your Outlook.com inbox. And if you're working together on an Office document from SkyDrive, you can send an instant message to a Google contact with just a click. We're rolling out Google chat integration now, so look for it in your inbox over the next couple of days.

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Join Access sessions at TechEd in June

Jeff Conrad — Tue, 14 May 2013 02:00:00 GMT

Join us in New Orleans for Microsoft TechEd North America June 3-6and in Madrid, Spain for Microsoft TechEd Europe June 25-28. Scott McFadden and Jeff Conrad from the Microsoft Access product team will present on the new Access web app features available in Microsoft Access 2013 at this year's event in New Orleans. Harrison Shapley and Kevin Nickel from the Microsoft Access product team will share a similar presentation at the TechEd event in Madrid.

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OneNote Web App now supports viewing and editing of password-protected sections

OneNote Team — Mon, 13 May 2013 18:00:00 GMT

Accessing password-protected sections was one of the most requested features for the OneNote Web App. Enabling this feature allows you to access your sensitive information from anywhere. After opening a password-protected section, you can edit its contents, change the section color, create new pages, and even edit the section name.

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With Office 365, there's no reason to compromise

Michael Atalla — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:00:00 GMT

A lot is said these days about the choices people and organizations are faced with when adopting technology. In the end, it's all about productivity. All of these decisions are made with the aim of optimizing your productivity -- whether you're a stay-at-home mom, accountant, student, or business person.

As people navigate these decisions, their ability to do great work revolves around having the right mix of capabilities delivered by a company they can trust. Why? Because there's an actual cost to compromising our productivity. There's a cost to the time and money spent retraining workers to use unfamiliar applications and applications that don't do what people need them to do or that require workarounds.There's a cost to having to purchase add-on technologies to gain the capabilities you need to be successful. And there's a cost associated with the inability to access the information that's important to you simply because you don't have an Internet connection.

Office 365: A business-class solution

After more than two decades of delivering the world's most highly utilized productivity tools, we know businesses require rich capabilities and solutions that go beyond consumer needs. We understand that one size does not fit all and that choice, flexibility, and administrative control are essential to organizations around the world.

At Microsoft, we have the broadest vision of productivity, which is inclusive of capabilities like enterprise content management and business intelligence with SharePoint, electrifying data analysis and visualization with Excel,and rich applications that enable people to do their best work. We understand that, in the face of an evolving technology arena, what it takes to maximize productivity has evolved as well.

We recently shared our vision and roadmap for Office Web Apps, but people and businesses demand even more. They require flexible web conference solutions that provide immersive, collaboration experiences with presence and instant messaging capabilities integrated at every step using solutions like Lync. Productivity requires enterprise social networking that integrates with email and calendaring but also extends the conversation by connecting static and real-time communication. And for some, it means moving some workloads to the cloud while keeping others on-premises.

Productivity is more than code in a browser. Much more.

Office is the defacto standard for making people more productive at work, at school, and at home. We are humbled that more than 1 billion people on this planet use Office to do their best work and get great results. It has been rewarding to see customers discover the same familiar experience and the same enterprise-class IT tools and business capabilities in the cloud with Office 365.

With Office 365, we've combined the world's most familiar desktop experience and enterprise-class server tools with robust security and privacy. The result is an experience that lights up social, is optimized for pen, touch, mouse and keyboard, and is recognized as a market leader in eight Gartner Magic Quadrants.

Customers are choosing Office 365 over Google Apps

An increasing number of businesses are choosing Microsoft Office 365 over Google Apps. Why? They tell us they can't afford to compromise.

With Office 365, they don't have to. They get the familiarity of Office + the capabilities they need + a cloud service they can trust. The result is a cloud-based service that enables businesses to meet customer needs and gain a competitive edge.

Among the recent companies that have switched to Office 365 after deploying or piloting Google Apps are Arysta LifeScience, SEPCOIII, FHI 360, and Sensia Hälsovård AB. These companies join numerous other organizations that tried Google Apps only to switch to Office 365.

Dissatisfaction with Google Apps

Again and again, companies that deploy Google Apps say they are frustrated by the experience and want a cloud-based service they can count on. Take Arysta LifeScience, for example. An agrochemical company with sales and service in more than 125 countries, Arysta LifeScience until recently supported 34 different email solutions around the world. The company wanted to standardize on a cloud-based email service and initially chose Google Apps for Business. However, employees were unhappy with the user interface, and IT struggled with compatibility issues.

After deploying Google Apps to 300 of its 3,400 users, the company reversed its decision and instead went with Office 365. "If we had moved everyone to Google, the ability to work offline would have been very limited," says Dustin Collins, the company's Head of Global IT Infrastructure. By contrast, "Microsoft meets the needs of an enterprise, with the right levels of privacy and data security better than Google, which is more consumer-oriented," Collins says. "And, with Office 365, you get a complete suite of collaboration services including IM, so everyone was enthusiastic about the decision."

Likewise, the China-based energy company SEPCOIII initially used Gmail for external communication, but employees found it undependable and cumbersome. "Gmail was very unreliable, and employees were losing email," says Pradeep Parmar, Director of Management Information Systems for SEPCOIII. "Employees were frustrated that the company didn't have a stable, reliable email solution."

The company decided to standardize on Office 365 for its Dubai regional office, and plans to move all 5,800 employees by the end of 2013. "We are so relieved to be using Office 365," Pradeep says. "It's a great platform that we can rely on."

Office 365: A top value service

Companies that switch from Google Apps to Office 365 say they now have an enterprise-class solution that offers top value for their money. For example, when the Academy for Educational Development (AED) and the nonprofit FHI came together to form FHI 360, the approximately 2,000 AED employees were using Google Docs and Gmail, while the 2,000 employees within FHI were using on-premises Microsoft solutions.

After analyzing both Google Apps and Office 365, FHI 360 eventually decided to deploy all of its employees on Office 365. The company chose Office 365 based on several factors including the ability to work offline, robust calendaring, support for mobile users, and the "superior" level of support offered.

"Using Microsoft Office 365, we are a more cohesive, efficient organization," says Michael Mazza, Head of Information Solutions and Services for FHI 360. "Empowered with tools that work the way we work, FHI 360 can achieve a greater impact on human development around the world."

Similarly, the Swedish-based private healthcare provider Sensia Hälsovård AB implemented Office 365 even though 30 percent of its workforce had already been using Google Gmail. As a result of a series of acquisitions over a two-year period, the company had seven different IT systems, which made communication a big problem because there was no common distribution list. The company wanted a single communication and collaboration platform and decided on Office 365 over Google Apps. "Gmail wasn't intuitive to use, and when employees got stuck, it was difficult for them to obtain support," says Anders Franzen, IT Strategist for Sensia Hälsovård AB.

With Office 365, communication has "improved tremendously" and the support "has been excellent," according to Franzen. "Already, Office 365 is increasing staff productivity, which means less time sitting at the computer and more time serving patients," he says.

Productivity without compromise

Like Arysta LifeScience, SEPCOIII, FHI 360, and Sensia Hälsovård AB, numerous companies around the world have concluded that it doesn't make sense to compromise when they can power their organizations with Office 365.

As J. Peter Bruzzese put it his recent InfoWorld column, How to make the move from Google Apps to Office 365, "Now that Office 365 is available, it may be time to move to Microsoft's cloud.

Webinar on Office training: 5 top courses and tips

Doug Thomas — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:06:00 GMT

The webinar is over. A video of the webinar will be posted shortly. Go to http://aka.ms/offweb for more information on how to join the series live every Tuesday.

In this webinar we’ll show you the free training courses at Office.com customers have raved about over the years. We will be joined by veteran productivity expert Vickie Sokol Evans (Redcape), who has delivered hundreds of "technology tips and tricks" presentations around the world. She’ll dish on favorite time-saving Office tips and answer your questions.

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar

Top courses for Office 2010 and the new Office 365
What Vickie has learned about giving 1,000 "technology tips and...

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Office is a team player

Jake Zborowski — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:00:00 GMT

It's amazing to think how far Microsoft Office has come since we first launched Microsoft Word 1.0 in 1983. Word has moved well beyond replacing simple typing functions to a rich set of tools that produce an array of highly formatted documents. Excel has grown from simple ledger functions to become an interactive and mission critical analysis and reporting application. And PowerPoint now provides a rich set of tools to make highly visual, customized, professional-looking presentations.

While you may not use all of the features of Office every day, it's likely that someone you work with does. And even if you didn't create it yourself, much of the content you use was probably developed by someone who does rely on the breadth of those features. Having a broad set of features that support the entire spectrum of productivity use cases, from the most basic to the most advanced, helps connect teams with a common communication platform. And those who embrace all that Office has to offer have a powerful set of tools that can set the work they do and the content they produce apart.

Now let's see what happens to team productivity when you choose a productivity suite that has deficiencies:

"Guys ... I've got deficiencies"

Google Docs has deficiencies when compared to Microsoft Office. Google publicly admits Google Docs is deficient, stating: "We know the gaps between our features and theirs." Google also states that it only intends to target 90% of the user base of Office. Google's gaps are not just advanced features used by a few people. Many basic features are missing from Google Docs like grammar check, support for columns, custom date formats, slide numbers, and mail merge. Add to that the many more advanced capabilities missing from Google Docs like Power Pivot, SmartArt, watermarks, master slides, image editing, slicers, and information rights management -- and you watch your productivity start to decline.

"We quickly realized Google would not meet our needs, so asking our employees to put up with less functionality was not an option for us." Read more

-- Sean Maisey, Director of Operations, Colonial Williamsburg

Working harder

As we continue to improve Office, we look for changes big and small that help people do more with less effort. Some improvements are small, like the new paste options we introduced in Office 2010. Other features reduce the amount of time it takes to accomplish a task like Flash Fill and Quick Analysis in Excel. The breadth of capabilities Office can lead to significant gains in what people can accomplish. With Google Docs, on the other hand, people have to find ways to overcome feature gaps by working harder, spending their time finding workarounds, or potentially using third-party tools to overcome the gaps.

"When we switched from Google Apps to Office 365, we freed our people to work together in synergy, and it has produced good results in every area of our business." Read more

-- Andy Springer, Director, Rookie Recruits

Working well with others

Like I said in the introduction, we work to provide the breadth of capabilities from basic usage to advanced features. With the same toolset, teams have a basic trust that they can easily communicate back and forth. Another goal of Office is to provide the tools that help people be more productive anytime, anywhere. You get a consistent and familiar Office experience no matter what device or platform you're using, be it a PC, a browser, a smartphone, or a tablet. By contrast, to get a full Google Docs experience, Google customers must use the Google Chrome browser. In addition, Google has no plans to support the Windows Phone. If you use an Android or iOS and want to edit your Google Docs, you use the Google Drive app on your device. If you want to edit Microsoft Office files, you either must convert these files to the Google file format or use Quickoffice, which also has a only a small subset of features compared to Office, along with some file compatibility issues.

Another issue that can make it difficult to work with Google is the company's choices about which document standards to support. Microsoft Office supports both the OOXML and ODF ISO standard file types. By contrast, Google Docs stores these files in something other than these standards, converting these file types in and out of Google Docs. With both standard file formats, when you convert your Office files to use Google Docs, you gamble with data and format loss.

"We tried to use Google Docs, but it didn't work reliably and often skewed the formatting." Read more

-- Tamara Walker, Public Relations Consultant for Naturally Me

I'm taking the net with me

Unfortunately, even today you can't always take the net with you. When you're in a location without reliable Internet access, there are times when you need a great offline experience. Microsoft Office was built to live in both the online and offline worlds, with features like document merge, track changes, and conflicting change controls in SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro when working on shared documents. With Google Apps, the offline experience is limited. When you lose Internet access, you can still create and edit documents and presentations, but you can only view spreadsheets. You also lose more features in Docs and Slides like sharing, inserting images, help, printing, non-standard fonts, and more. Google also warns you not to work on shared documents offline or risk data loss: "Try to use offline editing for documents that you own and that won't be deleted without your knowledge."

"Google Docs is not really suitable for business use due to limited functionality and the lack of offline capabilities." Read more

-- Paraic Nolan, Finance Director, Big Red Book

More innovation to come

In the timeframe Google is playing catch up, Office is not standing still. We will continue to innovate and provide the tools to help people work better together. Just this week, we announced some exciting new capabilities coming to Office Web Apps. These features bring more core Office features to the browser including real-time coauthoring, editing on Android tablets, and much more. By the way, congratulations to Office Web Apps on recently being named one of Time Magazine's top 50 best websites for 2013.

Google Docs isn't worth the gamble

Jake Zborowski — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:00:00 GMT

When you open a Microsoft Office application, you know what you're going to get. Whether you're working from a PC, a browser or a smartphone, the way the software functions is familiar and consistent. You don't have to fret as to whether you're seeing the Office document as it was intended. Productivity software is built to help people communicate. It's more than just the words in a document or presentation; it's about the tone, style and format you use to convey an overall message. People often entrust important information in these documents -- from board presentations to financial analyses to book reports. You should be able to trust that what you intend to communicate is what is being seen.

Converting Office files into Google Apps is a gamble. See what happens below when our friend is given the opportunity to take the gamble.

On the web:

Why take the gamble on converting your Office files to Google Docs when you can use Microsoft Office and the Microsoft Office Web Apps to create, share and edit your Office files with your content intact? Converting Office files into Google Apps is a gamble. Don't take our word for it; see for yourself. Below is a document created in Microsoft Office 2013 that we opened in both Google Docs and the Office Word Web Apps so you can see the difference:

As you can see, you can lose quite a bit when opening Microsoft Office files in Google Docs including text boxes, columns, graphics, image placement, watermarks, charts, text, spacing and more. The experience with both Excel and PowerPoint files is similar. Check out live side-by-side demos showing some examples here:

PowerPoint Web Apps vs. Google Presentations

Excel Web App vs. Google Spreadsheets

Word Web App vs. Google Documents

On a tablet:

Consistency and trust are really important when you choose a set of tools to help you communicate. Given the importance of mobile devices in our lives, that consistency and trust now extend to our phones and tablets. That is why we recently announced that we are bringing more of the Office experience to the Office Web Apps including the ability to edit and create Office files using the Office Web Apps on Android tablets-in addition to mobile devices in the Windows ecosystem and the iPad. Soon you will have the same consistency and familiarity of Office Web Apps on your tablet of choice. Google, on the other hand, only supports Android and iOS mobile devices. It provides you with two different experiences depending on whether you want to edit Google's proprietary format, Google Docs or Microsoft Office files, Quickoffice. Each has separate compatibility issues. Our goal with the Office Web Apps is to provide people a reliable familiar experience to create Office documents from start to finish, all from the web and to deliver the tools that customers need to be productive anytime and anywhere.

Below is a screenshot of a document created in Microsoft Word 2013 and opened with QuickOffice on an iPad next to the same document opened with the Word Web App on the iPad.

Google Quickoffice does not convert Office files well due to its extremely limited feature set. As you can see, Quickoffice has different yet equally significant formatting and data loss issues compared to that of Google Docs.

With a viewer:

The last gamble with Google is how the company helps you view Microsoft Office documents using their file viewers. Even this is a gamble that may be too risky to take. Google has two Office file viewers: one is embedded into Google Drive, and the second is a new beta application that is part of the Google Chrome browser.

As you can see, even these simple viewers fail to provide you with an adequate picture of the content in the Office file even to the extent of merging two separate pages of the document in the Google Drive Office preview application.

Why gamble with your time and Office content? When you build and share compelling, accurate, and impactful information, make sure you get what you bargained for.

Keep an eye out for more to come on whether Google has the features and skills to play the productivity game...

Yammer and Office 365: Aligning for scale

Office Team — Thu, 09 May 2013 09:50:00 GMT

Last summer, Microsoft made a $1.2B investment in Yammer, recognizing enterprise social as key to how companies communicate and collaborate. Fast forward only eight months, and the momentum is tremendous. We've just finished our third quarter and Yammer sales grew 259% year-over year, Yammer gained 312 new customers, and March marked Yammer's best month to-date in terms of user engagement.

Taking enterprise social to the next level

While we are pleased with the growth, the opportunity for enterprise social is even larger. Yammer and Microsoft have come together with a single vision - to bring enterprise social to all businesses by weaving these capabilities into the apps people use every day. Realizing this vision requires close alignment in product development, sales and marketing.

On the engineering side, we've made great strides in a short timeframe, bringing together Yammer and Office 365 teams to deliver regular updates against our roadmap. Right now our teams are actively focused on foundational work around identity, content and messaging that will drive seamless connected experiences across Office 365 and other applications. We look forward to sharing more exciting developments soon.

The next area of focus is aligning the Yammer and Office 365 go-to-market efforts. On March 1, we began offering Office 365 and Yammer together as part of Enterprise Agreements. We will further simplify the customer buying experience and increase global scale by fully integrating our sales teams this summer. We're going from about a hundred sellers at Yammer to several thousand Microsoft sellers around the world bringing customers the benefits of enterprise social.

We continue to invest aggressively in the Yammer business and are hiring in sales, engineering, customer engagement and marketing this year.

Customer momentum

The reaction from customers has been overwhelmingly positive. They are excited about the transformational potential of enterprise social and recognize the combined value of Office 365 and Yammer. Just one example we recently announced is ABB, a power and automation technology leader using Office 365 and Yammer to provide a single platform for productivity, communication, collaboration and enterprise social in the cloud for 145,000 employees across 100 countries.

We're just getting started

This is an exciting time for Microsoft and our customers as we pioneer the next generation of collaboration services for the workplace. We're excited about the value customers are seeing with Office 365 and Yammer together, and we believe this is just the beginning. Curious about enterprise social and the impact it can have on your business? Check out the Social Journey, a step-by-step guide on driving success using enterprise social or learn more about how leading companies are using Yammer.

Upgrading to the new SharePoint Online

SharePoint Team — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:00:00 GMT

As we announced on February 27, the new Office 365 service is out of "Preview" and available to try and buy today. We received tons of actionable feedback resulting in new features customers want, improved performance, simple user experiences, more admin controls and the stability they expect. SharePoint Online (SPO) customers will soon be able to self-upgrade to the new SharePoint Online experience - a new user interface, global Office 365 navigation and a whole set of new features and supported scenarios. You can go here to read all about What's new in SharePoint Online-top 10.

This article focuses on the coming upgrade experience for existing SharePoint Online customers. New customers will receive these features without any effort on their part.

What to expect during upgrade

Office 365 customers will be notified approximately four weeks prior to their upgrade and will have the opportunity to postpone for a minimum of two months.
Review What's new in SharePoint Online-top 10 to start planning how your company will take advantage of the new SharePoint Online capabilities soon to be at your fingertips.
Evaluate whether content and sites are old or unused, and if so, consider removing content or even whole site collections that are no longer necessary.

You can learn about all the Office 365 service upgrade options at the broader Office 365 Service Upgrade Center, including what you need to know about Exchange Online, Lync Online and Office client.

Test, upgrade, enjoy

The new SharePoint Online experience awaits you. Please take time to review the available documentation and the suggested steps to ensure a seamless transition for your company. Make sure you build in the right amount of time to test the new capabilities and look and feel before committing to it.

You are more in control than ever during your upgrade experience. With a little effort, existing customers will be able to quickly determine the method that provides the right level of testing, allowing you to quickly move to the latest Office 365 has to offer. Let us know via the Office 365 Community forums how you are doing and what we can do to help.

Visit Office 365 Community to read the complete blog post - including best practices for upgrade and some known issues.

Thanks,
The SharePoint Team

Garage Series: Going under the hood of Office software updates

Office Team — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:55:00 GMT

In this episode, our adventurous hosts go deeper on how software updates really work for the new Office. Tune in as they demystify what's different compared to the Office Professional Plus 2013 MSI install and explain the optimized update service for the Office 365 ProPlus Click-to-Run install. Learn how the service works optionally so that you can set up your environment to look at sanctioned updates on premises or in the Public Cloud and see how to go beyond default settings. Plus Yoni gets behind the wheel in a Ferrari F430 Spider to see if he can beat Sydney, Australia traffic in today's XStream Install.

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Office Web Apps: More Office, more collaborative, more devices

Amanda Lefebvre — Tue, 07 May 2013 23:00:00 GMT

When we launched the Office Web Apps in 2010, they were companions to the Office desktop experience that enabled lightweight, on-the-go content creation and review. Since then we've made a number of investments in Office Web Apps to make it easier for people to work together, author documents and access Office content from virtually any device. As we think about how people communicate and collaborate today and how their needs will evolve in the future, we'd like to share our plans for some of the investments we are making in the Office Web Apps over the next year and beyond.

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Software subscriptions: #progressive or #premature?

Clint Patterson — Tue, 07 May 2013 22:00:00 GMT

Last year, Adobe became a pioneer in offering software subscriptions by unveiling Creative Cloud, their subscription-only software service. Yesterday, they took the next step by announcing plans to discontinue development of their Creative Suite or other CS products. Focusing all future effort on Creative Cloud, Adobe will no longer offer its classic, packaged software product in this category.

Industry reaction is mixed. Some pundits point to this as the future, others explore challenges, and a few wonder if Office is next.

Like Adobe, we think subscription software-as-a-service is the future. The benefits to consumers are huge. Subscribers are always up-to-date. They get the latest and most complete applications. They can use subscriptions across the multitude of devices people use today. Web services like SkyDrive and applications like Skype are also more easily integrated with subscription services, like the new Office 365 Home Premium.

However, unlike Adobe, we think people's shift from packaged software to subscription services will take time. Within a decade, we think everyone will choose to subscribe because the benefits are undeniable. In the meantime, we are committed to offering choice--premier software sold as a package and powerful services sold as a subscription.

As proof of this point, since the launch of Office 365 Home Premium and Office 365 University in January, more than a quarter of consumers buying Office have chosen the subscription. This exceeded our expectations, given that software subscriptions are relatively new to most consumers. So, perhaps the shift is happening faster than we originally thought, and Adobe is helping blaze the trail. Tell us @Office or in the comments what you think. Software subscriptions: #progressive or #premature?

--Clint Patterson

Tips and tricks for the OneNote Windows Store App

OneNote Team — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:00:00 GMT

If you're new to Windows 8, you probably noticed that the OneNote app looks and feels very different from other versions of OneNote. How do you search? What happened to the menus? The new Windows is designed to avoid distracting you with commands you don't need, but all that change can be a little intimidating at first. Fear not! In this blog post, we'll teach you how to use the OneNote app from the Windows Store. These tips and tricks can be applied to most other Windows Store apps as well. If you don't have OneNote yet, download it now and follow along--it's free!

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Webinar: A beginner's guide to SharePoint Online

Doug Thomas — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:08:00 GMT

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.

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

Go to http://aka.ms/offweb for more information on how to join the series.

--Doug Thomas

When it’s time to focus: Word 2013 Read Mode

Office Team — Fri, 03 May 2013 14:51:00 GMT

Crafting the right content takes time and attention. To help you minimize the distractions, we created a Read Mode layout in Word. Read Mode is an option in the View menu that hides toolbars and menus to leave more room for the pages themselves. There's always a time for intensive formatting and editing when building great documents. But when it's time for review and final changes, make sure to check out Read Mode.

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