Every couple weeks we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Read on for our latest selections.

Telefónica is a leading provider of integrated communications with more than 130,000 employees in 24 countries across Europe and Latin America. Given the broad, global employee base, the company sought to empower staff to stay connected and work together while on the same platform and with leading productivity tools. To achieve this goal, Telefonica will deploy Office 365 alongside Yammer to harness the full power of their workforce and enable new ways for its employees to collaborate, communicate and share ideas. 

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. Learn more about why customers are selecting Office 365 over Google Apps.

By embracing Microsoft Office, customers get a powerful set of tools that support the entire spectrum of productivity use cases, from the most basic to the advanced. By contrast, Google Docs has deficiencies. These gaps are just not advanced features used by a few people, but basic features. Learn more about what happens when you choose a productivity suite that has deficiencies.

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. On the other hand, converting Office files into Google Apps is a gamble. Learn more about the file fidelity issues that occur when converting Office files into Google Apps via the web, a tablet, and a viewer.

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.

Microsoft Office 365 makes it easy to get work done without workarounds. Learn how an array of useful features within Microsoft Outlook make it easier to organize and search email than with Google Gmail.

Today, we announced a number of educational institutions in Central and Eastern Europe who have decided to move to Office 365 for improved communication and productivity for students and staff alike.

Cloud computing has the power to change the way students learn, especially in rapidly transforming regions like Central and Eastern Europe. Educational institutions across Poland, Romania, Lithuania and other countries in the region are using Office 365 to enrich learning environments with Lync Online, eliminate inefficiencies in email management with Exchange Online and improve internal collaboration with SharePoint Online.

Every couple weeks we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Read on for our latest selections.

To make the case for transitioning our email system, we compared the total cost of ownership to keep the servers running on-premises versus moving to a cloud service. Right away, we saw that we could save up to US$40,000 a year, plus 75 percent of the cost of a full-time employee by taking our email to the cloud.  

Then it was a decision about which provider to go with. We rely heavily on Microsoft technologies throughout our business, and I'd heard a lot of good things about Microsoft Office 365. As part of my research, I asked a peer of mine who had recently deployed Google Apps across his organization for advice. Between the stories he shared about the lack of support that Google offered and what I knew about our organization's need for enterprise-level productivity tools, I knew that Office 365 was the clear choice.