Office Next

Why sign in? Your files are always waiting for you with Office 365

2013-01-31T16:00:00Z

You've read about Office 365 Home Premium and the Cloud and how Office and SkyDrive are better together. If you haven't seen it, check out the Welcome to Office video below for a preview of how Office is connected to the cloud:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

This video plays when you first install the new Office and introduces the idea that signing in connects Office to you and to the cloud.

The goal of this article is to dig deeper into what signing in unlocks and why we're so excited about the functionality it offers.

One of our big investments in the new Office was around making Office yours. This means:

Getting to your stuff, Office programs, and settings wherever you go (even if you don't have your devices with you)
Picking up where you left off from anywhere, across your devices
Making Office a personal experience

In everyday life, this is working on your documents on a phone, PC, or tablet, regardless of whether you're at home, school, work, or on the bus. It means that even if you forget your laptop at home, you'll still be able to get to your files and Office programs, because they're associated with you, not stuck on just one computer.

Subscription and sign-in are how we make all this goodness happen.

What happens once I'm signed in?

Lots of great things! Signing in brings your whole world together. Here are 4 things that happen when you sign in:

1. Your documents, settings, and services go with you

The new Office incorporates the concept of "roaming": your stuff going with you whether you're on your PC, tablet, or phone, or someone else's, like a school, library, or work computer (or even a trusted friend's).

A big frustration is often that you have to reconfigure your Office programs every time you install them on a new computer. We asked: what if you didn't have to do that? What if you could just sign in and all your settings are just... there?

So, that's what we did. Here's what travels with you:

Places. The SkyDrive associated with your Microsoft account is already there to save to or open documents from, but if you have multiple SkyDrive (or SkyDrive Pro) accounts, you can easily add them by clicking Add a Place.

Any places you add here will be available across all of your programs (if you add a place in Word, it'll be there in PowerPoint.) If you sign into Office on someone else's computer, your places will be there as well.

Personalization. If you selected a theme for Office when you first installed it, this also goes with you. It's a visual cue that you're signed in as yourself and another way to make Office feel like it's yours.

Recently used documents. Whenever you launch a program or go to open a file, you'll see a list of your recently used documents. You can also pin important documents here. It doesn't matter where you are or what device you're on: if you're signed in, your most recently used (and pinned) documents will be there.

Pinned templates. Have a favorite template you like to use? If you pinned it to the Start Place (the first screen you see when you launch an Office program), it will remain pinned even when you sign in to Office on another computer.

Resume reading. Office remembers where you left off reading in Word and PowerPoint. The next time you open up that document you'll get a bubble which, when clicked, will let you jump to that location to pick up where you left off:

You will also be able to automatically resume reading across devices, like on your Windows tablet or Windows phone.

Connected services. You can connect accounts like LinkedIn to your Office programs. Plus, your Facebook and LinkedIn contacts will integrate effortlessly with Outlook. Connected services are there wherever you sign in to Office, and you can easily add or remove services from the Account section in any Office program.

Custom dictionary. I don't know about you, but my last name always shows up as misspelled when I first use a program. We had a lot of happy people when we told them they only have to add a word to their dictionary once, instead of every time they install Office or switch computers!

2. Anywhere access at Office.com and SkyDrive.com

With anywhere access at Office.com and SkyDrive.com, there's even more you can do with just a web browser:

Office.com. This is your go-to location to manage your Office account, including:

Your stuff on SkyDrive: A portal to your recent SkyDrive files, folders, and account on SkyDrive.com.
Get Office apps: Download Apps from the Office Marketplace. These integrate with Office in cool ways, like being able to add LinkedIn and Twitter (by PowerInbox) functionality to Outlook.
Gorgeous content. When you sign in, you can get access to over 700 new and beautiful templates designed for the new Office.

Plus, if you have an Office subscription, you can also:

Use Office on Demand. Create and edit documents with all the power of the Office desktop apps with Office on Demand.
Manage your account. See how many PCs and devices you've installed Office on, install Office right from the web, or even remove devices to free up an install.

SkyDrive.com is where your files live when you save to the cloud. Here you can create and edit documents with the free Office Web Apps, and if you're on a computer without Office installed but have an Office subscription, you'll get the option to edit documents with Office on Demand for a full desktop app experience.

3. Office goes with you too

Your files and settings aren't the only things that roam. Here's how you can get to your Office anywhere:

Office on Demand. If you have an Office 365 subscription like Office 365 Home Premium and are connected to the internet, you can stream and use any rich Office programs on any modern PC without having to install them. In short: you can get your Office programs anywhere in a matter of seconds. There's an entire section on Office on Demand in our Office and the Cloud blog post and even more deep technical detail in our engineering article Click-to-Run and Office on Demand.

Office Web Apps. The new Office Web Apps are now live on SkyDrive. You can use the Web Apps to edit or create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more from a browser anywhere, even on your tablet. For more details on some of their new features, check out this post on the new Office Web Apps.

Even install Office on the go. Need your full set of programs on another machine? You can install directly from the internet when you sign in to Office.com.

4. Work (and share) from anywhere

When your documents aren't stuck on one computer, it also makes it easier to share and work with others, regardless of where you (or they) are located:

Work offline. Even if you're about to get on a plane, you can still work on SkyDrive documents even if you're disconnected from the internet. Any changes you make will sync automatically when you go back online. This is called "offline sync" and is just one of the perks you get from installing SkyDrive client along with Office. Check out the Office and SkyDrive post for more info.

Simple sharing. Documents you save to the cloud can be shared right from Office. When you go to "Share", you can invite people you're working on a document with to read or edit documents right from Office. If they don't have Office installed, they'll be taken to the Office Web Apps and can work in their browser.

Work together (also called co-authoring). Coauthoring means that once you share a document with others, you can all work together at the same time. This is possible in Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote, both in the free Web Apps and the desktop apps on your PC or tablet. You're notified when someone else has joined to edit the document, and you can see their changes simultaneously alongside yours. For other programs like Excel, while coauthoring isn't possible, sharing is still simple and makes keeping track of changes easy. When you invite people to read/edit a document using Share, they can separately add their edits and comments, which means you don't need to email different copies or manage multiple versions of the same file. Plus, your document is stored in the cloud, so you can get to it wherever you go.

Present files online. This is a special feature in both Word and PowerPoint, and I can't tell you how useful this would have been for working on projects when I was in school. Even if you and your partner are working from separate locations, you can step through a paper or presentation together (there's even built-in IM functionality so you can message each other). Get more details over at the PowerPoint blog and the Word blog, where they discuss presenting files online in Office 2013.

Simplify signing in

We know that people don't like to sign in a lot or maintain multiple different accounts. Most of us already have several accounts for email, social networking, cloud storage, etc. You don't necessarily want to make a new one, or have to sign in when you didn't have to before.

With this in mind, we've done what we can to make it super easy while still getting you all the benefits associated with sign in. When we asked people what they thought of signing in, one of their main questions was, "Do I have to sign in every time I launch Word?"

The answer is a definitely not! All you have to do is sign into Office once and all your programs will remember you.

To make things even easier: if you use Windows 8 and sign into your computer with your Microsoft account, Office will automatically sign you in. And if you work at an organization that uses domain accounts, you'll also automatically be signed into Office on both Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Where do I sign in?

You can sign into your Office in a few different places:

First Run Experience. When you install Office, you'll see what we call the "First Run Experience" (where you're welcomed with the video and offered a chance to sign in.)

In Office. You can sign into Office from the top right of any app. In your Office programs just look for "Sign in" or "Sign in to get the most out of Office" at the top right:

Online at Office.com and SkyDrive.com. As mentioned in the "What happens once I'm signed in?" section, there are a bunch of things you can do online, too.

Getting a Microsoft account

With so many different sites and services asking you to sign up for an account, it's tough to keep track of all the different usernames you use everywhere. We wanted to simplify the process as much as possible. That's why Microsoft on the whole is switching to using just one account for all of its services, from Windows 8, to Office, to Xbox.

The great news is that chances are, you may already have a Microsoft account without knowing it.

You already have a Microsoft account if you...

Play video games on your Xbox - it's the same account you use for Xbox LIVE
Chat with your friends on Live Messenger or MSN Messenger
Have an @Hotmail.com, @Live.com, or @Outlook.com email address (your username is that email address, and the password you use for that email account is also your Microsoft account password)
Sign in to Windows 8, your Windows phone, and more

But even if you don't have a Microsoft account, you don't have to create a completely new username or sign up for a new email account just to get one. You can use any email address you already own for your username. Then just create a password of your choosing. For more information on Microsoft accounts, check out this video.

Office gets better the more you use it

One of the best things about all the work we've done in this space is that it's just the start. We've gone from zero to sixty in no time flat - from Office just being on your computer to living in the cloud in the blink of an eye.

Signing in gets you a ton already: roaming your documents and settings, using your Office programs from anywhere, coauthoring, presenting online, and more. But this initial push is just the first of many steps to enriching and personalizing the Office experience.

We're dreaming up more ways to make working across devices and collaborating with others an effortless experience from anywhere - one where you don't even have to think about the fact that it's happening; it simply works the way you'd expect it to.

That's why we love sign-in so much, and we think you'll love it, too.

Support for international users and multiple languages in the new Office

2013-01-07T14:00:00Z

Julian Parish is the Senior Product Planner in Office International, responsible for coordinating language and market strategy across Office products and services. He is based at Microsoft's EMEA head office in Paris, France.

We have made major new investments in the new Office to support international users who work in languages other than English. Three new languages have been fully localized for the first time and Language Interface Packs added in 13 more. The range of languages supported in Office 365 and in Office Mobile has also been greatly extended. For the many international users who need to consume or create content in more than one language we are introducing new ways to access Office proofing tools in additional languages.

Support for our international users

We know how important it is for you to feel comfortable using our applications and to be as productive as possible. A key part of that is to use Office in a language you know well or use regularly in your work. We are continuously reviewing the languages we support. As the economies in emerging markets grow further and more people come online around the world, we need to take Office into new languages. In fact, in the past ten years we have increased the number of localized Office languages by over 50%. In the new Office we are therefore investing in two major ways.

Word 2013 templates in German

New fully localized languages

First, we are adding new fully localized versions of Office in three Asian languages: Indonesian, Malay and Vietnamese. This means that the User Interface (UI) and User Assistance (UA) content will be available in these languages across Office--including Lync--and as a Language Pack for SharePoint Server 2013. These new language versions will be available to consumers to buy in 2013 and to enterprise customers as part of our Multilingual User Interface or MUI packs. Alongside the Office Client a dedicated Office.com site in the local language will provide more help and tools for making the most of the new Office.

PowerPoint 2013 in Malay

Language Interface Packs

Secondly, and working closely with our partners in Windows, we are adding thirteen completely new languages as Language Interface Packs to the new Office. These packs--or LIPs for short--provide a localized User Interface (UI) for the most frequently used Office Client applications: Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word. They run on Windows 7 and Windows 8 and will be available in 2013 as free downloads; they can be quickly installed on top of Office 2013 in a base language such as English. The same languages can also be used as Office Web Applications in conjunction with Microsoft SkyDrive. Together, these solutions will make the new Office available to speakers of national languages in markets which are experiencing rapid PC growth (in Africa and Asia, for example) and of additional languages that are preferred by groups of customers in developed markets.

These are the LIP languages we are adding in the new Office:

More than 100 languages worldwide

With these additional investments, the new Office will be available in 106 languages as either a fully localized language or Language Interface Pack. Taken together, these languages are spoken as the first language of more than 4.5 billion people across the globe. They cover at least one official language in nearly every country in the world.

PowerPoint 2013 in Japanese

Doing more in existing Office languages

Changes to the international support in the new Office are not limited to these extra languages. As more and more of our customers move to our new cloud-based service offerings, we have massively increased the range of languages and markets available in Office 365. Already, Office 365 is available in 88 markets and 32 different languages, with more planned to come online in the next year.

The perfect partner to Office in the cloud or on your desktop, Office Mobile will be available in many more languages to accompany the release of Windows Phone 8. Altogether, we will support 51 different languages.

With each new release, we look at the languages we localize each of the Office applications into. In Project and Visio, for example, we are adding support for Romanian on top of the 27 languages already localized in Office 2010.

We have also made significant changes to the Extent of Localization for the Lync family of products. For the Lync Client, Lync Web App and Lync Admin Center 2013 we will provide a consistent end-to-end user experience in 44 languages. Language switching for the Lync Client will now be possible as part of the central Office language settings. For Lync Server we are adding a new localized version in Russian. Finally, we are stepping up our language coverage for the Lync Desktop Phone Edition software, with ten new languages added (Arabic, Czech, Croatian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Turkish and Ukrainian), bringing the total to 26.

Improving the quality of our international products

During the development of the new Office we have worked with our worldwide partners and MVPs to improve not just the range of languages we support, but also the quality of the experience in the local language. For this release more than 8,000 localized terms have been changed and a new, modern voice adopted. This is clearer, less formal and more up to date, whether providing help on a new feature or in error messages.

Creating content in the new Office

Being able to navigate confidently in the new Office, using the UI language you want, is only half the story. Just as important for many of our customers is to be sure of using the right spelling, finding a synonym or checking a point of grammar, whether it's for a proposal in Word or a presentation in PowerPoint. In the new Office we have made significant investments in our proofing tools:

A feature much requested by our customers has been to add spell-checking in the subject line of Outlook messages

There are new thesauri (or dictionaries of synonyms) in Bulgarian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Serbian. The thesaurus feature--in all available languages--can now be accessed in PowerPoint for the first time

The grammar-checking functionality is now available in OneNote
A new definitions feature--available in 22 languages--lets you check the meaning of a word as part of the Proofing Pane. Dictionaries for this feature can be quickly and easily installed--free of charge[1]--from the Office Store

Proofing in additional languages

Research carried out by our planning teams has shown that up to 45% of Office users regularly read or create content in a second or further language, often English for people who do not speak English as their first language. For these users we need to make it as easy as possible to find and use the proofing tools in each language they speak and not just their first language.

In Office 2010 we already include the proofing tools for two or more "companion" languages with each language version. The English version of Office, for instance, includes all the proofing tools for French and Spanish. This feature will continue in the new Office, but we are going beyond it to introduce a completely new approach to proofing in multiple languages. The range of language combinations users may need is almost limitless: a company in Germany may need Greek to do business with customers or partners, a family in the US with relatives originally from Italy may want to send mail in Italian as well as English. To help all these users, we are introducing enhanced functionality to our existing Language Auto-Detect feature.

Imagine that you have an English version of the new Office installed on your PC, but want to write a document in Portuguese. As you start typing your content in Portuguese, Language Auto-Detect will now recognize that you are writing in Portuguese and that you don't currently have the Portuguese proofing tools installed. A pop-up message appears inviting you to download complimentary proofing tools for that language. Minutes later, you can continue writing with full support to check your spelling and enrich all your Portuguese documents.

This new approach to proofing was introduced for the Consumer Preview of the new Office in summer 2012 and is available now in 50 languages. Already, more than 700,000 users have downloaded proofing tools for additional languages; if you are using the Consumer Preview, why not visit the Office Language Options page and try them yourself?

Tell us what you think

We hope you like the changes we have made in our support for international users and multiple languages in the new Office. If you have suggestions for further improvements or would like to hear more about language-related topics, please let us know in the comments below!

--Julian Parish

[1] Internet access required, fees may apply.

Introducing the new Office on Windows Phone 8

2012-10-29T16:56:00Z

By Bert Van Hoof, Office Engineering

Today, we’re proud to introduce the new Office; it comes pre-installed on every Windows Phone 8, which is launching worldwide today.

When we started on this journey we set five clear objectives:

All your Office documents, where and when you want them
The best Office document rendering on any phone
All your notes – in one place and with you, anywhere
Communicate and collaborate effectively from your mobile device
The most world-ready Office experience on any phone

All your Office documents, where and when you want them

Whether you’re using SkyDrive or Office 365, getting access to your Office content is just part of the phone’s easy set up. Windows Phone 8 auto-discovery gets you connected to your accounts, so you can get things done from any place, at any time.

The Office Hub – your go-to spot for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel – is redesigned with a simple and fluid navigation. Finding and accessing your personal and work documents on SkyDrive, Office 365 and SharePoint is also easy and intuitive.

In Office 365 your documents “travel with you,” even on different devices. No matter which device you used to last view or update a file, it will show up in your list of recently used documents on the phone. Email attachments you’ve opened in Outlook Mobile will also show up automatically in the Office hub. And you can access documents on SkyDrive or Office 365, and share them with others.

And of course we’ve made sure that the Office Hub takes advantage of the new ‘Tap + Send’ feature in Windows Phone 8 to let you share documents by tapping your phone on another NFC-capable device.

Figure 1: Your list of recently used documents on SkyDrive, Office 365 and SharePoint, across all of your devices

The best Office document rendering on any phone

Viewing Office content is a natural and delightful experience, optimally adjusted for the unique attributes of Windows Phone 8. Simple edits can be made with ease. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint, we’ve made the best even better by introducing a number of noticeable user experience and content fidelity improvements. All apps put content first and have a greatly enhanced ability to render gorgeous charts.

PowerPoint seamlessly renders all shapes and SmartArt Graphics, and honors your transition effects and timing. We added portrait mode with speaker notes, and slide thumbnails make navigation between slides a lot easier.

Figure 2: Portrait mode with speaker notes, and slide thumbnails in PowerPoint

Excel also offers noteworthy new enhancements. Workbooks open at the last saved sheet and zoom level, and navigating through a large Excel worksheet is fast and fluid. New touch-friendly handles make range selection and resizing of columns and rows a snap.

Figure 3: New cell selection handles in Excel

It is now easy to read cells with lots of text on the small screen. As you navigate and tap through more cells in the sheet, the new reading panel refreshes its content.

Figure 4: New Excel “view cell text” feature

The new full-screen reading mode in Word is a true delighter: Your controls automatically move out of the way as we put the content at center stage. Controls reappear by simply tapping on the document canvas. From there you can switch to outline view for quick navigation around the document, look for comments, or edit, save and share your document. Your cloud-connected document automatically resumes where you left off reading, no matter where you last viewed your document – on your PC, tablet or phone!

Figure 5: Full screen reading in Word

All your notes and ideas – in one place and with you, anywhere

OneNote Mobile is now a separate app, always ready to capture your notes and ideas. Just tap the new OneNote Tile and take quick text, photo, and voice notes. You also have instant access to the notes you have made on other devices, search for specific notes, and get around your notebooks easily.

Notes look the same across OneNote 2013, OneNote for Windows Store and OneNote Mobile, so you always get a great, consistent experience wherever you are. Even ink content and annotations made with pen on your tablet PC will render perfectly on your phone.

OneNote Mobile accommodates both casual and advanced users. Users who just want to take simple notes on their phone, can use the Quick Notes starter experience. Advanced users who already organize their notes in notebooks and sections will enjoy the new navigation fine-tuned for the small screen.

Figure 6: New OneNote navigation on top of the screen

One of the coolest new features is taking voice notes. Speech notes are added to the new Quick Notes section and contain audio playback alongside transcribed text. You can even dictate a note or reminder while the phone is locked, so your spontaneous thoughts are always captured.

And of course, no app makes creating to-do lists easier than OneNote. Creating a check box just takes a quick tap. We moved the icon from the middle to the left making it an even easier to hit target while typing.

Figure 9: Creating checklists in OneNote is easy

Including new or existing pictures in your notes can happen from within OneNote or directly from the Photo Hub.

Just like all of the Office content, OneNote is fully cloud-enabled using SkyDrive and Office 365. This means you can access your notes from anywhere, on many different devices. Setup is seamlessly integrated with the phone’s easy configuration and you’ll have automatic access to your notebooks and notes.

The new Rooms experience on Windows Phone 8 makes it easy for family members, friends, and colleagues to share private notes. Rooms are an invitation-only place on your phone – and on the phones of the other members – where you can share a private calendar, group chat, photos or videos, and notes. When you set up a Room, a shared OneNote notebook is automatically created. No extra logins, it just works. Adding new notes is easy and everyone in your Family Room can do it. How cool is that?

Figure 8: Shared notes in the Family Room

Communicate and collaborate effectively from your mobile device

Windows Phone 8 continues to offer the best Office communications experience on any mobile device. Outlook offers integrated email, contacts, calendar, and tasks – a hallmark experience on Windows Phone. With Skype, Lync, and Yammer apps you can view and manage all your communications, including voice, video, IM, email, SMS, feeds, and presence. It’s easy to participate in meetings from your mobile device without typing in any access codes. We’ll provide more details about our enterprise social experiences in the coming months.

The most world-ready Office experience on any phone

Office on Windows Phone 8 is now available in 50 languages, supports complex script, and UI mirroring (see figure 10). For Right-To-Left languages, not only does the text alignment and text reading order go from right to left, but also the UI elements layout follows this natural direction of going from right to left.

Figure 9: Complex script in Word documents (Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Vietnamese, and Thai)

Figure 10: UI Mirroring in Excel (English, Hebrew)

Go check it out!

Microsoft Office feels right at home on Windows Phone 8 and is ready to serve! Go check it out in person later this year at your local Microsoft Store or phone retailer. The new Nokia, HTC, and Samsung phones all come pre-installed with Office. Visit the Windows Phone website for more information, and stay tuned for more news over the coming months.

Keeping Your Organization Safe with the new Exchange

2012-09-24T15:55:00Z

Editor’s note: Beginning this week at the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC), you will have opportunities to have in-depth dialogues with the Exchange team – both in-person and virtually. We kick off this week with a blog post that highlights a need of organizations everywhere and of every size as they look towards ensuring they have control of their data in a secure and manageable fashion. We hope to continue the conversation with you this week at the conference, and in the future via the EHLO and Office Next blogs. Today Harv Bhela, General Manager for Exchange Program Management, joins Office Next to kick off the week.

Taming the Email Data Beast

This is the age of big data. Around the world, people are creating and transmitting data in unprecedented volume. At the same time, organizations have an extraordinary need to manage liability of this information. A survey conducted by Harris Interactive in March of 2012 showed that 68 percent of companies send sensitive data via email.[1] Another survey showed that 63 percent of organizations are extremely or very concerned about their organization losing sensitive data without their organization knowing it.

Enterprises face extraordinary challenges in keeping all this data safe. Staying ahead of ever-more-sophisticated external threats such as viruses, malware, and spam is a daunting task in businesses of all sizes. IT managers also need to comply with industry regulations by preserving data in a way that is both immutable and accessible. They must also deal with the risk that users will unintentionally create data leaks, typically due to a lack of awareness or education. For example, in April of 2012, a physician at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences emailed a document containing the un-redacted personal financial information of 7,000 patients to an outside party.[2] Businesses need tools that can prevent this type of common but potentially disastrous error.

While the responsibilities of IT professionals grow, their relative numbers dwindle. Over the next ten years, while worldwide data is expected to grow exponentially, the number of people employed in IT will increase only fractionally. With the ratio of data to IT professionals growing rapidly, it is becoming increasingly critical to enable workers to manage this email risk without hindering their productivity and experiences, and to automate and streamline the risk management process wherever possible. Microsoft understands and is addressing these challenges. The data protection and archiving features of Exchange are designed to help IT professionals take control of data protection and archiving in a big-data world. These new and improved features include:

Cloud-based email hygiene with Exchange Online Protection
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technology to identify, monitor, and protect sensitive information
In-place email archiving, hold, and native data governance to preserve email as long as necessary
Advanced, yet easy-to-use eDiscovery tools to locate information in the organization
Integration with SharePoint supports safe team collaboration with site mailboxes

Move Email Protection to the Cloud with Exchange Online Protection

Exchange Online Protection is the Microsoft cloud-based email protection service, which works with Exchange on-premises and online. Companies using Exchange Online Protection no longer have to worry about the disparity between data volume and staff available to manage it. They also benefit from email protection that is continuously updated to deal with present and emerging threats. Microsoft security researchers constantly monitor spam, phishing, malware, and network attacks globally and update Exchange Online Protection to protect against them. Exchange Online Protection uses a sophisticated multi-engine malware detection approach to catch viruses and spam messages before they are delivered. Even the most security-conscious companies would find it difficult to maintain the level of security vigilance, innovation, and virtually unlimited scalability Exchange Online Protection provides.

To keep customers’ email available 24/7, Exchange Online Protection uses a globally load-balanced network of data centers to provide five nines (99.999 percent) network uptime. Exchange Online Protection can actually increase email reliability by queuing email for up to five days, eliminating bounces if on-premises email servers go down. Exchange Online Protection is also highly scalable: when organizations grow, Exchange Online Protection grows with them, seamlessly.

Moving email hygiene to the cloud also has a number of operational benefits. Microsoft has designed Exchange Online Protection to help customers offload the costly, repetitive, and unproductive aspects of email protection such as purchasing and servicing hardware, applying software updates, and managing network connections. At the same time, it gives customers control over what really matters to their businesses. Organizations can set specific filtering rules and policies through an easy-to-use, web-based administration tool. Exchange Online Protection also delivers comprehensive reporting, auditing, and message trace capabilities.

Use Sensitive Data Safely with Data Loss Prevention Technology

Many organizations handle personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, regulatory or other sensitive information in the daily course of business. They need ways to ensure data is sent and used appropriately, keeping it safe without affecting worker productivity. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technology in Exchange uses deep content analysis to identify, monitor, and protect sensitive information.

Exchange administrators can easily create DLP policies in the Exchange Administration Console. DLP policies can include rules, actions, and exceptions, and uses the full power of Exchange transport rules. Upon identifying sensitive information, DLP can automatically take action such as applying Information Rights Management protection, appending a disclaimer, generating an audit log, sending the message for moderation, or preventing a message from being sent. DLP works with a new feature called Outlook Policy Tips that informs users of a potential policy violation before it occurs. Policy Tips help educate users about what sensitive data has been found in the email and can educate them about related company policies. This ongoing education helps users manage data appropriately and avoid sending sensitive data to unauthorized users. The DLP feature is a sophisticated system built into Exchange for helping users work with sensitive data safely and efficiently.

Manage Data with Large Mailboxes, In-Place Archiving, and Retention Policies

With growing volumes of email data, organizations used to face a difficult choice: keep email archives on slow, expensive, third-party archiving systems, or limit the amount of historical email available to users. With Exchange, organizations can provide users with large mailboxes and keep archived and current email data in one system through in-place archiving technology. This provides a number of advantages. Users can access archived and current email quickly and easily, and they no longer have to waste time managing their inboxes to stay within quotas. They also do not need to store messages in .PST files outside the control of Exchange administrators and backup policies.

From the perspective of IT, administrators have the flexibility to balance storage performance and cost to suit business needs. They can manage and search archived and current email through one interface and no longer need to deploy and maintain separate archiving infrastructure. This also means they have a single place to manage compliance and retention.

With large mailboxes, organizations need efficient, automated ways to manage message retention and expiration. Exchange provides easy-to-manage policies for controlling how long messages are kept so users do not have to worry about it. Retention policies can apply to messages, folders, or even entire mailboxes. Organizations can achieve all these benefits while choosing to keep Exchange archives on-premises or in the cloud using Exchange Online Archiving.

Making Data Tamper-Proof with Hold and Searching It Efficiently

Many organizations need the ability to capture and store email in a tamper-proof (or “immutable”) archive. HR policies or litigation can create the need to make content immutable. At one time, virtually the only way to enforce immutability was through journaling—basically, forwarding email to a special, separate archive deployed and managed independently from Exchange. Today, Exchange makes immutability simple with in-place hold. With this technology, an IT administrator can easily place a group, a user, a mailbox, or even individual items on hold from the web-based eDiscovery Center. Users on hold experience no change to their workflow, and there are no client plug-ins to manage.

The ability to search current, archived, and held email is critical in big data environments. Because it can keep archived and active email data in one system, Exchange makes such searches easy. In tandem with SharePoint, Exchange allows organizations to search email, instant messages, calendars, and contacts, as well as SharePoint documents, sites, file shares, blogs, wikis, and more, all from the eDiscovery Center. For greater efficiency, IT administrators can use role-based access control to delegate search, hold, retention policy management, and auditing to HR or legal personnel without providing full administrative privileges. Finally, auditing capabilities built into Exchange can record configuration changes and compliance activities. Audit logs can be used to prove due diligence and, if necessary, pinpoint tampering by an administrator.

Collaborate while Maintaining Compliance using Site Mailboxes

With site mailboxes, Exchange works with SharePoint to give users more ways to collaborate while keeping data safe. In a site mailbox, members of a SharePoint site can access project emails and documents in a central location place—right from Outlook on the desktop or the SharePoint site itself. Users view site mailbox emails just as they would any other Exchange message, while SharePoint enables versioning and coauthoring of documents. Site mailboxes can be searched using the Exchange eDiscovery Center, and the email and documents stored in site mailboxes can be put on legal hold. Additionally, site mailboxes adhere to the lifecycle policies applied to the SharePoint site with which they are associated, enabling automated retention and archiving of the entire site mailbox.

Turn Email Data from Challenge to Asset

Exchange helps organizations deal efficiently and effectively with the explosion in email data. A wide range of new technologies built into Exchange can reduce costs, improve security, and keep workers productive. Businesses can move email hygiene to the cloud with Exchange Online Protection, stopping viruses and spam before they get anywhere close to the company’s network. New DLP technology enables organizations to work with sensitive information safely and helps everyone in an organization better manage sensitive data. In-place archiving and large mailboxes offer better access to the information and organizational knowledge contained in past email while eliminating the need for third-party archives. Built-in eDiscovery functionality makes it easy to find needed information across held, archived, and current email. In tandem with SharePoint, organizations can search email, instant messages, calendars, and contacts, as well as SharePoint documents, sites, file shares, blogs, wikis, and more, all from the eDiscovery Center. Site mailboxes allow users to naturally work together – while compliance policies are applied behind the scenes. By integrating all of these data protection features into one system, Exchange greatly simplifies IT infrastructure and helps reduce costs. With Exchange, organizations can do more than tame vast and growing amounts of email data—they can turn it to their advantage.

- Harv Bhela
General Manager, Exchange Program Management

[1] http://www.techjournal.org/2012/03/sharing-sensitive-information-via-email-ftp-poses-enterprise-challenges/
[2] http://www.govhealthit.com/news/top-10-data-breaches-include-public-health-depts?page=0,1

Weekend Reading on the new Exchange

2012-09-21T20:53:00Z

Editor’s note: Michael Atalla is the Director of Product Management for Exchange Server and Exchange Online. He’s here today to share some interesting content from the world of Exchange and share plans for next week during the Microsoft Exchange Conference 2012 (MEC 2012).

As Gray mentions, next week is the first Microsoft Exchange Conference in 10 years -- in fact, I am finalizing this blog from the Seattle airport waiting to board my flight to Orlando for the conference. When we last held MEC, email was the main way people in the workplace communicated – today the way people work has expanded to include social networking and collaboration with products like SharePoint, Yammer, Lync and Skype to name a few. Back then, Exchange was an email server which dabbled in calendaring. Today it includes email, shared calendars, address books, voice mail, spam and virus filtering, data loss prevention, archiving and e-discovery solutions -- all in one product and cloud service -- tightly integrated with the capabilities of SharePoint and Lync.

This week we began a series of blogs on the Exchange Team Blog (known affectionately as "You had me at EHLO" for those who follow the space closely) focusing primarily on the expanded cloud capabilities of the new Exchange.

We began the week with a post focusing on the new and improved Exchange Online Protection service.
We also compared Exchange Online and Exchange Server, highlighting the key factors to consider when deciding between on-premises and moving to the cloud, along with highlighting the hybrid deployment options supported with Exchange Online.
Yesterday, we had a two part post, the first focusing on deploying hybrid and the second on managing hybrid.
And earlier today we had a post on managed availability and monitoring.

Next week, we’ll be back on both the Office Next and EHLO blogs to share more about the new Exchange, with additional information on the new capabilities in security and compliance, including posts on archiving, eDiscovery, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP).

Thanks for your interest in the Office Preview and Exchange and I hope to see you at MEC 2012 next week!

- Michael Atalla, Director Product Management, Exchange Server and Exchange Online

Building Office for Windows RT

2012-09-13T16:56:00Z

Editor’s note: Earlier this year, Steven Sinofsky announced Windows support for ARM processors (Windows on ARM or WOA). His post on the Building Windows 8 blog included the following news about Office:

“WOA includes desktop versions of the new Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. These new Office applications, codenamed “Office 15”, have been significantly architected for both touch and minimized power/resource consumption, while also being fully-featured for consumers and providing complete document compatibility.”

In the months since that announcement, there has been a great deal of speculation about what we are delivering. David Brodsky, Partner Test Manager and Josh Pollock, Principal Development Manager join Office Next to walk you through what Office for Windows RT is and why it exists; specific optimizations we’ve made (and why most of those will benefit you on other platforms too); what wasn’t possible and the functionality differences that resulted; and finally how to get Office Home & Student 2013 RT.

The Birth of Office for Windows RT

Shortly before the January 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), we were asked if we could create a version of Office that would run on reference hardware with an ARM processor. This led to Steve Ballmer’s CES demo of Word and PowerPoint running on ARM. Office for Windows RT was born.

Why Create Office for Windows RT?

In doing research for Office for Windows RT, we spoke to people to understand how they use current, in-market tablets. We wanted to understand what was missing that would make for a more compelling experience. One answer was nearly unanimous – people wanted a complete Office experience; not just a viewer. However, they also wanted a version of Office that was optimized for the tablet form factor – most importantly supporting touch and providing long battery life.

Office Home & Student 2013 RT is Office running on the ARM-processor based Windows RT OS. It is full Office built from the same code base as the other versions of Office, with small changes that were required as a result of differences between Windows 8 and Windows RT. Our goal when starting the Office for Windows RT project was to deliver:

ARM as a “first class” platform, including the Same look and feel as x86/x64, same level of polish and reliability, full Office feature-set and fidelity and Service parity (e.g., save to SkyDrive, roaming settings, other Windows Live integration, Office.com experience, etc.)
Stunning battery life (both active and idle), great performance and responsiveness

While we knew we wanted to deliver the same great Office experience across Windows and Windows RT, we also knew that Windows RT gave us an opportunity to optimize the product for the type of devices that would run on this new platform.

Optimizing Office for the Windows RT Platform

The Office Home & Student 2013 RT applications – Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint run on the desktop on Windows RT. Our highest priority was making sure that customers can successfully do the things that are most important to them when using Office on these Windows RT devices.

When you use the Office applications on Windows RT, you’ll find yourself in a familiar environment that feels just like what you are used to using on other platforms. You may also notice some of the enhancements we made to optimize Office for the Windows RT environment - like automatically enabling touch mode (but if you don’t notice and find that everything just works as you’d expect, that’s okay too).

When you look at the specifications for Windows RT devices, you’ll find that most share some common characteristics:

Touch-enabled;
Portable with the ability to run on battery for long periods of time;
Memory capabilities start at about 2GB;
SSD drives of 16 to 32 GB capacity; and
Wireless connectivity with some having 3G

We’ve optimized Office for these capabilities. We’ve already described our touch investments in the post “Using the new Office with touch.” In addition to these broad investments in touch, Office applications are enabled for “touch mode” by default, so the touch experience is better out of the box.

Let’s take a look at some of the other improvements we’ve made while developing Office for Windows RT.

Maximizing Battery Life

Battery life is a difficult problem that requires good citizenship from all parts of the system to get the best possible results. A single poorly-performing component, whether hardware, driver, or software can significantly reduce the delivered battery life. In Office Home & Student 2013 RT, we carefully evaluated the impact Office has on the system and then made deep investments to ensure that we met the overall citizenship goals for the platform. For example, ideally Office would have no perceptible user impact at idle. In reality, Office apps need to maintain such things as data freshness which necessarily uses some power. Where we couldn’t remove a feature’s impact on battery, we invested in reducing the extent of that impact. Here are some of the common challenges we addressed.

Software Needs to Let the CPU Sleep

The most actionable thing that drives battery utilization is how often we wake up the CPU to do work, especially when the user is not actively typing, scrolling, etc. CPU power state transitions are expensive. To reduce these transitions, we want to avoid breaking up work across multiple CPU wake ups. Instead, whenever possible, we try to do all the required work at once. We focused on two things to reduce net wake ups: 1) coalesce timers and 2) remove the need for some timers entirely.

The primary mechanism that software uses to ask the system to wake it up is timers. Prior to Windows 8, Windows was not “tickless" meaning you were guaranteed to wake up every ~16 milliseconds. Timers were also often set to wake the process after a specific amount of time or repetitively on a given interval. Windows 8 added new coalescable timers which allow programs to be more battery-life friendly by specifying a range of time to wake up rather than an absolute interval. This allows the system to cluster wake ups with the end result being more CPU sleep time. This extends battery life dramatically.

In Office 2010, there were some situations where applications would wake up the CPU more than 1000 times per minute during idle. With the new Office, we have reduced that by 95% when the user isn’t interacting with the program. Most of the changes are in how Office interacts with the system at a deep level, so you shouldn’t notice any difference. However, there are a few changes that an observant user might notice. One example is the blinking cursor. There is no hardware or operating system support for a blinking cursor so software implements this feature using timers. To minimize the power impact, Office on Windows RT stops blinking the cursor after a few seconds if the user stops interacting with the application. When the user is away, we just show a fixed, non-blinking cursor. This requires no timer and is the best power citizenship option. This is just one example you might notice, and there are several others you won’t notice at all until your battery lasts longer than expected.

Take Advantage of the Hardware

Windows RT is designed to run on ARM System on a Chip (SoC) processors. Unlike a traditional PC where the CPU, graphics card, network adapter, and other systems components are generally all separate pieces, SOC processors combine these components onto a single integrated chip. This improves performance and reduces power consumption. It also guarantees that we can rely on the hardware for expensive operations like playing back videos.

Windows 8 detects this support and takes advantage of it. This is a real benefit to software vendors. For example, in the past, we would write code to detect the level of graphics support delivered by the video card and would write software-based “fallback” code to use when the graphics card in the system did not provide the required capabilities. When using the fallback software-based algorithms, execution cannot be optimized to the extent that can be done when implementing the same algorithm as a dedicated feature of the processor. This impacts both performance and battery life – often dramatically. We’ve taken advantage of these hardware offloads in situations like showing video in PowerPoint. By doing so, we improve the overall battery life of the system.

While the impetus for doing all the work I just described was the desire to deliver great battery life for Office for Windows RT, the fact that it is the same code base as the other Office products means that all users benefit from these changes regardless of what edition of Office they are using.

Using Less Resources When They are Scarce

While running, most programs load or create a great deal of temporary information that is necessary for the program to display information on the screen or to perform other operations. To improve the program’s performance and responsiveness, this information is saved in memory, called caching, so that it can be reused without the overhead of reloading or recalculating. When multiple programs are running the amount of memory available can become limited requiring the operating system to swap out some or all of the program to make that memory available to other programs. This “memory paging” is expensive and can reduce the responsiveness of the system.

Office detects when the user is not actively using the system. When this occurs, Office releases these temporary caches. By having Office determine what memory can most optimally be released rather than relying on operating system memory paging, both Office and the rest of the programs on the system benefit by more effectively utilizing limited memory.

Make Room for the User’s Information

Windows RT systems generally have Solid State Disk (SSD) drives. These drives are fast and battery efficient. However, while the cost per gigabyte continues to decline, these drives are still more expensive that traditional rotational drives. As a result, these drives tend to have smaller capacities. When programs are loaded on today’s large rotational drives that can be over a terabyte in size, most users don’t notice the space used by the program. However, when loaded on a 16GB SSD the operating system and programs can fill a significant portion of the total drive.

While developing Office for Windows RT, we carefully evaluated each feature’s impact on the overall footprint of Office on the drive. For example, rather than including large number of templates and clipart on the drive, we opted to put frequently used templates on the drive while making the more extensive collection available via the start center in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and also online .

One area that was identified for space savings was language packs. Many OEMs load multiple languages onto the systems they ship. If a user only uses one or two languages, the language resources such as spellers, grammar checkers, and UI strings for the other languages historically have continued to take space on the drive. Office is designed to clean up unused languages packs that are not configured for use by the user. If a user decides later that they want one of the languages that were removed the system will automatically download the required files from Windows Update.

Helping Users Avoid Bill Shock

One of the features we expect to see in many Windows RT systems is cellular network support. A characteristic of these networks is that their use is often metered. That is, users pay for the data they utilize – either some amount of money per megabyte of usage or with a monthly cap and then additional fees if they exceed that cap. As a good citizen on these devices we felt we needed to help users know when they are using a metered cellular network and give them the choice whether or not they want to pay for the usage or not take a particular action. Internally we referred to this as helping users avoid bill shock.

Windows RT provides APIs that allow applications including Office to understand the user’s current network state. We can identify if the cellular network is unrestricted or if usage is metered (the user is paying for their usage), if the user is approaching or over their limit, and whether or not they are roaming. When we detect that the cellular network is metered we throttle network traffic to reduce our impact. When users are roaming or over their cap we inform them and give them the options to turn off network traffic. Ultimately, the user knows best what they are trying to do and whether or not they are willing to pay to do it, so we try to give the user more feedback and control.

Benefits for All

While the work I’ve just described was done to optimize Office for Windows RT, most users will benefit no matter what edition of Office they choose to use. Office automatically determines whether or not the necessary operating system and device support is present to enable these enhancements. The majority of the changes are enabled when Office is running on any edition of Windows 8. Only features such as support for touch or cellular networks require additional hardware support.

Differences between Office for Windows and Office for Windows RT


Word 2013	Word 2013 RT

Screen shots of the two applications look very similar because the products are very similar by design. Differences between the versions are subtle. Office Home & Student 2013 RT includes the vast majority of Office Home & Student 2013 features available on PCs, and the features customers use most. Windows RT tablets have special requirements for security, reliability, and battery life, and we’ve worked to ensure that the RT version is well-suited for the platform. Beyond the differences listed below, Office for Windows RT is fully-featured Office with complete document compatibility.

Macros, add-ins, and features that rely on ActiveX controls or 3^rd party code such as the PowerPoint Slide Library ActiveX control and Flash Video Playback
Certain legacy features such as playing older media formats in PowerPoint (upgrade to modern formats and they will play) and editing equations written in Equation Editor 3.0, which was used in older versions of Office (viewing works fine)
Certain email sending features, since Windows RT does not support Outlook or other desktop mail applications (opening a mail app, such as the mail app that comes with Windows RT devices, and inserting your Office content works fine)
Creating a Data Model in Excel 2013 RT (PivotTables, QueryTables, Pivot Charts work fine)
Recording narrations in PowerPoint 2013 RT
Searching embedded audio/video files, recording audio/video notes, and importing from an attached scanner with OneNote 2013 RT (inserting audio/video notes or scanned images from another program works fine)

Getting Office Home & Student 2013 RT

Office Home & Student 2013 RT is only available on Windows RT devices and is not sold standalone. The Windows RT devices available at Windows RT General Availability will include preview editions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. After the final edition of Office Home & Student 2013 RT is released in a customer’s language, their Windows RT device will be automatically updated with the final edition for free via Windows Update (Wi-Fi connection required). Customers can expect to get these updates starting in early November through January depending on their language. We’ll publish the specific update schedule on October 26 on the Office blog.

Summary

Developing Office Home & Student 2013 RT has been a ton of work but also great fun. You’ll find Office for Windows RT to be a full-featured member of the Office family. We hope the work we’ve done helps make Office a great part of your Windows RT experience. We can’t wait to see customers put it to use!

- David Brodsky, Partner Test Manager
- Josh Pollock, Principal Development Manager

Click-to-Run and Office on Demand

2012-08-27T17:25:00Z

Editor’s note: Paul Barr is Lead Program Manager for Click to Run, and joins Office Next to discuss this important technology. Earlier in the blog we’d outlined some aspects of Click to Run and Office on demand, today we’ll expand on the topic in depth.

If you’ve downloaded the new Office Customer Preview, then you probably noticed that your installation experience is quite a bit different than in any previous version of Office. These changes aren’t just cosmetic, they’re part of our strategy to bring the rich Office applications that you know and love into the future as an integrated part of our Software + Services offering. In this post I want to talk about why we think it’s important to invest in client delivery, what we did, how we did it, and what it means to you in your everyday interactions with the new Office.

Changing software landscape

User expectations for software have changed dramatically over the last 5 years. The emergence of rich web-based applications and services, as well as new application models on modern devices have caused a shift in how users expect to interact with their software. Getting a new app on your phone is a fast and painless experience, and so is accessing rich web applications from your internet browser.

We believe that Office applications that are built to take advantage of the unique capabilities of your chosen hardware have tremendous value (whether that’s a desktop PC, a notebook computer, a tablet, or a mobile device). Our goal with Click-to-Run in the new Office is to make finding, installing, and using the Office applications as fast, easy, and secure as possible.

A brief history of Office installation

Office has come a long way from its start in the early 90’s. During that time we’ve seen evolutions in both media and installation technologies. It used to be enough for Office to ship on a couple of floppy disks and copy some binaries to the file system. But as content became richer, applications more powerful, and integration with other software key to users’ productivity, Office needed to evolve. And that meant a bigger and more sophisticated installation. From the basic file copy method, we moved to ACME installations that allowed flexibility for automating the installation. After that came Windows Installer in Office 2000, which could handle sophisticated component co-existence and offered better uninstall and repair support. In Office 2007 and 2010 we supported multi-MSI installs with our “Catalyst” install technology to better support multi-
language and multi-product scenarios.

Office 97 was the last version of the Office suite to ship on floppy disks (45 of them!) and we soon moved to CD-ROM. After that it was the DVD. But during this time, the internet was quickly emerging as a primary vehicle for obtaining software, and none of our existing install technologies were proving to be a great experience for users on the internet.

Going to a physical store is quickly becoming a big barrier for getting new software. Not only that, but we don’t think our customers should even have to think about “getting software”. They just want the right tools, for the right device, when they need it to get their tasks done. Click-to-Run and Office on Demand are about making that happen.

Click-to-Run v1.0

In Office 2010 we made investments to improve downloading Office from the internet. While traditional Windows Installer packages remained the primary distribution vehicle, Click-to-Run v1.0 was available for a limited number of consumer SKUs in some markets. This was our first attempt at building a technology that was designed for installing big applications over the internet, and we learned a lot:

Need for speed: The faster we can get users up and running with the Office applications, the happier they are.
Fresh is best: Don’t download old software! The first thing you do when you get your shiny new application from the internet should not be to install an update.
Balance: Office shouldn’t disrupt other software already installed on the machine, but it has to work well with add-ins and other applications.

C2R v1.0 was successful in proving the need for a new installation technology, but there was plenty of room for improvement.

It could be even faster.
The technology we were using under the covers was too impactful. It required local file system drivers and created a new virtual partition in the system (the infamous Q: drive), that caused problems for some users.
A side effect of the virtualization we were using was that run-time performance was slightly impacted. Booting apps (especially for the first time) was a little slower.
Integration with other software was not as rich as with traditional install technologies in some cases, and compatibility could suffer.

That brings us to…

Click-to-Run v2.0

Our goal with Click-to-Run v2.0 was to make the applications feel like a seamless and integrated part of the new Office service experience. We strove to make installing software a non-event in our customers’ workflows for getting things done. Based on our learning from v1.0 we knew we had to:

Be fast
Be integrated: Office applications are a productivity platform, part of their value is that they are rich, integrated, and extensible.
Be up to date and modern: Gone are the days where you install software and forget about it for the life of your PC. Beyond just making sure your software is secure, we need the ability to evolve the client to support new value coming online with Office services.
Be agile: There are times when the rich client applications are the only tool for the job, but doing a full installation isn’t always an option. We wanted to give users the mobility of a web application and the richness of installed Office applications.

With these goals in mind, and great support from our App-V partner team at the NERD development center in Cambridge, we set out building Click-to-Run v2.0, which is re-architected from the ground up to deliver on our shared vision.

Click-to-Run v2.0: The experience

Let’s take a look at the Click-to-Run installation experience and talk about what’s happening in each step.

First is the “Provisioning experience”. Provisioning is just a fancy word for any website that you use to start a Click-to-Run installation. In the Office 2013 Customer Preview you are signing up for an Office 365 Home Premium Subscription that allows you to install up to 5 copies of Office on machines you own. In the future there will be several Microsoft and even partner websites that customers will be able to install Click-to-Run Office from. We have built Click-to-Run to be compatible with many different provisioning experiences.

There’s a couple of interesting things going on with this website that are worth calling out. First, you can see the link below the “Install” button for “Language and install options”. This is where you will find additional options like native 64-bit installations and additional languages. Note that 32-bit is always the recommended default for compatibility reasons, even on 64-bit Operating Systems, and it’s important to remember that you can only ever install one or the other of 32 or 64-bit Office products on a single machine. You cannot mix 32 and 64-bit products, even across versions (i.e. Office 2007 and Office 2013). This is true for all Office installations (C2R and MSI), and is due to limitations in how the applications integrate between themselves.

Next, this website is communicating with the Click-to-Run Setup Service and the Office Licensing Service to give you a customized experience that doesn’t require you to copy down a 25-digit license key (remember those?) to get up and running. That all happens seamlessly in the background!

Finally, in future releases, this website will actually start early pre-caching of Office client bits before you even click the “Install” button, resulting in an almost instantaneous start of Office applications depending on your network connection.

Once you select the “Install” link, you’ll be prompted to either “Run”, or “Save” an executable file to start the installation. Your experience may vary by what browser you are running, but here’s IE10:

This file, which we call a “bootstrapper”, is a small executable (~500KB) that is both product and language specific. We recommend that you Run it directly from the browser, but you can also save it locally to your computer and Run it later. Don’t wait too long though because this file contains some specific licensing information that is unique to your account, and we can’t automatically activate your Office product if it expires. Don’t worry too much if that happens, installation will still succeed and you’ll just be prompted to activate later on if that’s the case.

Next you’ll see our Click-to-Run streaming splash screen:

What’s actually happening here is we’re downloading just the parts of Office that we need to run the “First Run Experience” (FRE for short), and the “Hero” application. The Hero application is the first Office application users will run when they install Office. For the Customer Preview, that application is PowerPoint.

Next you’ll see the First Run Experience video and other content:

After you’ve navigated through First Run (hopefully you’ve signed in to Office and selected a personal theme), you’re given the option to take a quick tour of some of the new features in Office 2013. Selecting “Take a look” will start PowerPoint with an interactive presentation.

Whether you take the tour or not, the screen you’ll see next looks like this:

This is where we show the overall download progress for Office. At this point you can use all of your Office applications, but the entire product is not yet downloaded, so don’t go offline! We prioritize the download of Office functionality in the order that we think you’ll need it.

If you try to access something that’s not downloaded yet, you’ll get some UI that looks like this. It will only happen once for that part of Office, and once you’re fully downloaded you’ll never see it again. Depending on the speed of your network connection, you may never see this UI, or you may see it multiple times if you’re on a slow connection and really exercising the apps while they’re still downloading.

When Office is done downloading, we show the “You’re good to go” dialog. This is the sign that Office is fully downloaded and installed, and that it’s safe for you to go offline, just as you would expect.

Up until you see this dialog, there will be some subtle differences in Office that are worth talking about. For instance, not all of the fonts that you get with Office will be available, and some integration functionality like “Print: Send to OneNote” won’t be there yet. This is because fonts are really big, and system integration functionality takes a long time to install, so we put stuff like that at the very end of the installation to get you running faster.

That’s the end of the Click-to-Run experience. It’s faster, smoother, and has better progress than any previous Office release. Early data says that Click-to-Run v2.0 installs actually succeed at a higher rate than Windows Installer packages, and we’re doing everything we can to make it the best installation experience ever.

More goodness

That’s the end of the first run experience, but it’s not the end of the value of Click-to-Run. Here are some other areas where our new architecture makes your software world a better place:

Side by side support: Making a change to your productivity tools isn’t always easy. You want the latest version because it unlocks new scenarios you’ve never had access to before, but during the transition, wouldn’t it be great if you could keep your old version around for just a little while? C2R v2.0 lets you do that. By default it installs right alongside with your older Office software, and you can even use two different versions of Outlook for the first time ever.
Repair: Nobody’s perfect, and sometimes things go wrong. Maybe you installed another piece of software and suddenly your Word documents are opening up in an unfamiliar program. Repair is there for you if that happens. With C2R v2.0 you can just repair your shortcuts and file type registration (“Quick Repair”), or you can do a “Full Repair”, which will basically uninstall and re-install your applications (just as quickly and seamlessly as the first time) without losing any of your settings or documents. Both of these options can be found in the Windows “Programs and Features” area.

Uninstall: Now uninstall takes seconds instead of minutes, and it leaves your computer in a cleaner state than ever before. You can even de-activate licenses you’re no longer using so you can re-use them on new machines.

Sustaining: Sustaining is a fancy word for keeping your software up to date, and in today’s computing ecosystem, it’s more important than ever. C2R v2.0 allows us to quietly and automatically keep you as secure as possible. Once you’ve opted in, Office knows to securely check the internet for updates. It downloads them in the background, and the next time you restart all of your applications or computer, you’re running the latest and greatest. In addition to being a great user experience, C2R v2.0 solves three more sustaining problems. First, You never start with old software. Whenever you start a Click-to-Run installation, you’re getting the latest version of the applications. No more download, extract, install, then patch, and patch, and patch… You only ever need one update. In the old world you need to download every individual patch one after the other. And sometimes they wouldn’t install if you didn’t already have the right Service Pack or other updates already installed. With C2R v2.0 you only download one thing, and it always takes you to the latest version of your software. This is possible because we have invented a “differential updating” technology that uses fresh Hash files to move directly from any build to the latest in a single step, so even if you’ve been offline for a long time, getting up to date is fast and easy. There are fewer limitations to the types of changes we can make in an update. This means that if you subscribe to the Office service, we can deliver more application value and features to you over time (even including new versions of Office).
Click-to-Run for organizations: Finally, C2R v2.0 isn’t just for end-users. We’ve built a host of administrator functionality to help automate deployments in organizations of all sizes. You can read all about it here.

Office on Demand

When we first started working on Click-to-Run years ago, we kicked around a lot of crazy ideas. Stuff I won’t even repeat here for the sake of brevity, but one idea has always stuck in our heads and we’ve kept coming back to it over time. What if you could use all the powerful features of the Office applications without doing an install at all? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate “installation experience”? But what would that mean? Well… What if you could just use the applications on demand? Whatever Windows computer you were on, you could log in to a website, run Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, and when you were done, they’d go away. How could we make that happen?

You’d have to be really fast. How fast? Under a minute at least. Under 15 seconds preferably.
You still need to protect your software, so you’d need licensing based on a user’s connected login.
You’d need a declarative install. The applications would need to be able to execute without being configured for each individual Operating System.
The applications would have to disappear from the computer when the user was done using them. You couldn’t install shortcuts, register file extensions, install system impactful extension points, etc.
And most importantly, you’d have to be able to run your application without needing administrative rights on the local computer.

It was always that last one that put this goal out of reach. Office is a large and complex set of applications, and getting them to run on a computer without installing them locally turned out to be a very tough problem indeed. But with a new architecture from our App-V partners, and investments in the applications themselves, we’ve been able to overcome this final hurdle. Using a technology we’re calling “user-mode streaming”, we’ve built Office on Demand.

Office on Demand is a unique feature enabled by the Click-to-Run architecture. It will be available to Office 2013 subscribers, and allows them to run temporary instances of the most popular Office applications on computers where they normally would not be able to install software. Office on Demand versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Visio, and Project will be available.

Using the Office on Demand applications is easy. Just click on the “My Office” tab of the Office 2013 Customer Preview site. Choosing any of the “Create New” icons on this page will start the individual Office on Demand applications. When you close them, they go away, they do not stay installed on the computer.

Office on Demand will also be integrated in to the Office Web Applications for subscribers. If there are no Office applications installed on the computer, subscribers will be able to “Open in <application>” directly from the Office Web App and run their Office on Demand applications.

I could talk for hours about this new feature, but this post is getting pretty long, so let me just leave you with the following points:

Office on Demand is a feature for subscribers of Office 2013.
Only the parts of the application you need are actually downloaded as you need them (not the whole thing). They run locally, and it’s very fast, only seconds depending on connection speed.
It’s always the latest version of the application.
Office does leave behind cache files for performance reasons, but the applications cannot be launched from shortcuts on the local computer. To use the applications again, always start from the website.
You have to be online to use it, and you have to be logged in to Office to validate your rights to use the software.
That’s it!

Summary

Thanks for reading this far. We’re very excited to bring you the next generation of Office applications and services powered by Click-to-Run. We have lots left to do, and we’d love to hear your feedback. If you click on the Smiley Face during installation, then we are reading your comments.

Give the Office on Demand applications a try, and stay tuned to this blog for more information in the future.

Paul C. Barr
Lead Program Manager for Click-to-Run

Apps for the new Office and SharePoint IT admin guide

2012-08-14T18:21:00Z

Editor’s note: Brian Jones and Cyrielle Simeone rejoin Office Next for a final post on the apps and extensibility in the new Office. You can learn more by visiting the Apps for SharePoint and Office blog.

On Monday, we covered the new set of scenarios and user experiences that apps will offer to users in the new Office and SharePoint. If you haven’t watched it already, I recommend you do so by checking out the Medal Tracker video that showcase apps for Office in action. On Wednesday, we talked about the new and enhanced developer experience we are enabling in this release to move the platform to the cloud, and make it more open and accessible.

Today we want to talk to you about deployment, management and security of apps for Office and SharePoint for enterprises.

A little bit of a background

If you are in IT, or just help out around the office with managing machines and accounts, you know how difficult it is to get a handle on what apps folks are using. The problem scenarios often go like this… there is someone in the finance group who builds a spreadsheet and writes a few macros to help that spreadsheet bind to some backend data. The set of macros continues to grow, and that spreadsheet becomes a full blown app. More folks in the org are using the app including the VP of finance. No-one in IT is aware of this app, and as a result, there isn’t anyone on point to help support it and make sure it keeps running. One day someone is cleaning up the databases and gets rid of a few sprocs they didn’t think anyone was using. Turns out the spreadsheet used one of those sprocs and so it breaks. The VP of finance makes an urgent call to IT saying their app is broken, and IT now needs to get a copy of the spreadsheet, debug it, and eventually discover why it’s no longer working.

As a result of challenges like this, we often see IT set a significant amount of their discretionary spend aside to help them deal with these surprises that pop up. In the new Office, we’ve done a lot of work to help give IT much more visibility into what people are using within Office and SharePoint so that they can be better prepared going forward.

A new deployment model

Apps for Office and SharePoint come with two main components: a web app and a manifest file. The manifest file is what is used to “deploy“ the apps, they’re managed through the Office Store, or for internal apps the app catalog. Users then hit the Office Store and App Catalog when they look for an app, and the manifest file is returned. The manifest points to the actual web app, which can run on the developer’s favorite hosting service (Azure, IIS, LAMP, etc…).

For SharePoint apps we even provide an option for developers who don’t want to host the web app on their own servers. They can package the web app files with the manifest and submit the full package into the Office Store. When the app is installed we will automatically deploy the server code directly into Windows Azure.

The store is optimized for organizations

The Office store has been optimized to make it easier for organizations to purchase, consume and manage apps. There are four key reasons why an organization will love the Office Store:

Discovery: The Office and SharePoint stores represent a great opportunity for business users looking for apps solving daily tasks or frequent business processes shared among organizations. Looking for an efficient way to manage expense reports, assets, or event planning? Check out the store before you start building something or calling IT.

Acquisition: Once acquired by a user, all apps are linked to his Microsoft account. As soon as the user logins to Office with their Microsoft account all their apps are ready and available for use. Think of how much time can be saved setting up a user’s machine after a PC refresh or an upgrade. With the Office Store licensing model, apps don’t just follow the machine, they follow the user and hence are available instantly no matter what device a user decides to use.

Deployment: Apps aren’t installed in the regular sense. Instead of embedding the app code into the document or into SharePoint, the app is deployed as a pointer (a URL) to the web server hosting the app. This could be in the cloud, or a server in your datacenter. This model introduces a new decoupled way of managing app lifecycle and Office/SharePoint upgrade cycles independently of each other.

Control: With SharePoint, administrators can see and manage all the apps for SharePoint purchased by the users in their organization. Administrators can also configure Store access so that users can browse for apps and submit a purchase request to their IT department. The admin can then approve (and purchase) or reject the request based on the business need. Once an app is purchased by an IT admin, the admin can then decide which users within the organization would have access to the app subject to the number of seats covered by the purchase. When an admin assigns an app to a user the user can use the app directly within their SharePoint sites without any additional hurdles. Should and organization decide they want complete control over the apps users can install they can switch off the public store (through group policy for Office) and only provide access to approved apps (both in-house and 3^rd party).

Security: In addition to testing all apps that are listed on the Office Store, we also have flexible reactive systems in place that allow us to shut down an app if it is identified to be malicious. Shutting down an app removes the listing from the Office Store and deactivates the app within Office and SharePoint next time it’s run. This ongoing reactive process helps ensure users are protected from rogue apps.

Managing the App Catalog

The app catalog is how you make apps available to the users in your org. In the simplest sense, it’s a SharePoint library that contains all of the apps you have for your org. The Office clients all point to this library, so if you want to give your users access to a new app for Office, just add the manifest file it to the library, and the app will automatically show up for everyone right from Office. The same is true for apps for SharePoint, just add the app package to library and it will start showing up for everyone. Since the app catalog is a SharePoint library you can easily manage who gets access to what app, and quickly make updates when needed. Apps for Outlook require Exchange Server 2013 and use Exchange as a catalog to upload manifest files.

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Learn more about how to deploy and manage apps for Office and SharePoint in the following articles:

The diagram below summarize the different channels for developers and ISVs to reach Office users.

Security and isolation

We have baked security and isolation into the heart of the new cloud app model.

Apps for Office no longer run in the same process as your document, this app isolation is an important change because it helps protect your experience with Office from misbehaving apps. No more frustration from slow or locked up documents while an extension runs.

The figure above depicts an Excel workbook with three apps, these are running across the red dotted line in a separate process (there is one of these app runtime processes per document) and they do not have direct access to the data in the host process or even the same integrity level, making them safer to run than previous extensibility models.

From the security perspective there are three major controls:

The Office file format is clean – we never store the app inside the document, instead we store a pointer to the catalog that holds the app definition, or manifest file. So apps cannot sneak in across firewalls and any nuisance apps can be turned off quickly without having to purge them from existing documents.
Our new app marketplace provides the ability for our customers to feedback on apps. We’ll be looking at all feedback and using it to work with developers to constantly improve the quality.
The Administrator is in control – both of the app capability itself and of any external catalogs. By default the Office Store is enabled, and we take a lot of care to ensure the apps from the Office Store come from verified developers and add value to our customers.
The User has the final say – if the user opens a document that contains an app that they haven’t seen before then we will prompt before we start it – and we always prompt for all apps if we recognize the document as coming from an external source. And remember, an app can’t just insert itself into a document, it always has to be added by someone with edit permissions.

We’ve done a lot of other things under the covers to keep the user as safe as (or safer than) browsing to web sites, an upcoming whitepaper will explain this work in a lot more detail.

Apps for Office are integrated into the new monitoring tools described in the next section, so you can quickly see which apps your users are using in which documents and if these apps are having problems.

Learn more about security with apps for Office and SharePoint by reading the following articles:

Monitoring and managing apps lifecycle

Apps for Office and SharePoint usage can also be monitored by administrators.

Office Telemetry is a new feature that gives IT Pros visibility into what apps, documents, and add-ins are actually used and how well they perform in Office 2013. By giving customers the option of logging how Office is being used, it can answer questions like:

What documents are used by the most people?
What documents host apps?
What are the most popular apps? Are they running properly and not, for example, consuming too much CPU time?
Are solutions loading from the local disk? SharePoint? As mail attachments?
How long do add-ins slow down the loading of Office apps and how can I manage solutions centrally?

It works by having each PC save logs to a network folder. From there the Telemetry Processor aggregates the logs into a SQL Server or SQL Server Express database where it can then be reported on it in Excel. Look for the Telemetry Dashboard under the Microsoft Office Tools folder in the Start menu after installing the Office 2013 Customer Preview. An agent is also included to report on document and add-in usage in Office 2003, 2007 or 2010. Developers can also use Office Telemetry to see the order that solutions are loaded and any flagged issues. Just start the Telemetry Log, also under the Microsoft Office Tools folder. Learn more about the Office Telemetry tool in Makoto Yamagishi’s article: Introducing Office Telemetry in the new Office on the Office IT Pro Blog.

Administrators can track the usage of apps for SharePoint by using the app monitoring features built into SharePoint. App monitoring tracks information like:

How many times was an app launched and by how many unique users?
How many times has an app been installed or uninstalled?
Are users hitting install, runtime, or upgrade errors?

App monitoring works for apps in the app catalog or acquired from the Store.

Call to Action!

We’ve told you about the advantages of the new cloud app model and we know that you’ll be excited about the new scenarios that Office.Next opens up, as well as the opportunity to reduce your existing applications total cost of ownership, so where to start?

Provision a free Office 365 Developer Site, this will only take a moment and we’ve made the process as painless as we can, you can then download the Office client preview from your new site (or get it from here)
Use the Office clients to evaluate the Office Store, does this make sense for your organization? It’s open in preview mode right now and has a host of free applications that span the Office client applications, so take a look and decide if you want to enable these for your enterprise.
Work with your developers to evaluate the new cloud app model for Office and SharePoint, if you have home-grown applications built already that might be ported to the new model, or you are starting a new project then investigating the new model will pay dividends.
And even if you aren’t in a position to do a full investigation we recommend taking a look at the Office Telemetry tools, these open up what is happening on your user’s desktops like never before and will help you deliver a better service to your enterprise, and remember, these tools work all the way back to Office 2003.

Summary

As you can see, it’s now easier to understand and monitor what is used within your organization! In addition of the new monitoring capabilities, this new deployment model will give both developers and IT Pros much more flexibility that before.

By now, we hope you have a pretty good understanding of the new cloud app model and its benefits for end users, developer and IT administrators. We will continue the conversation on our dedicated developer blog, don’t hesitate to let us know what you would like us to cover.

Thanks for reading us!

New file format options in the new Office

2012-08-13T20:35:00Z

In the next release of Office, we have added two additional formats for use: Strict Open XML and Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2. We have also added support for opening PDF documents so they can be edited within Word and saved to any supported format. By adding support for these standardized document formats, Microsoft Office 2013 provides users with more choice for office document interoperability. Regardless of your preferred document file format, the new Microsoft Office gives you more options for sharing, collaborating, and archiving office documents. This post explores the details of the support for these standards in the new Office.

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A new and enhanced developer experience for Office and SharePoint

2012-08-08T18:18:00Z

Developers can now build apps that enable brand new user experiences and scenarios by combining web technologies and cloud services right in Office and SharePoint. New experiences that we could not have dreamt off before. As an example, customers can acquire a collection of apps on stitch them together to create powerful solutions to monitor metrics with KPIs right in Excel. Apps in SharePoint that help solve specific goals that users have like planning events or managing their business contacts.

...(read more)