In the last two posts in our From Inside the Cloud series, we went behind the scenes to share with you different ways we protect your data. My colleagues and lead engineers Perry Clarke and Vivek Sharma focused on how we protect your data at rest and who has access to your data within Office 365. They explained the various mitigations that we have in place through our defense-in-depth approach and the measures that we take to control administrative access to the Office 365 service through our lock box process. These posts followed the overview that Rajesh Jha, our CVP of engineering and general manager for Office 365, shared about how we address security, privacy, compliance, and transparency of operations overall in the Office 365 service.

Today we’re taking a look at compliance. Compliance is one of the areas where we see some of the highest interest from customers who are considering moving to cloud productivity services—understandably so. You want to know not just that Office 365 meets the expected alphabet soup of industry regulations, but that we meet the ones that are important to you and your industry.

As I explain in today’s three-minute video, our goal is to provide continuous compliance. This means that we aren’t just checking through the list of regulations; we are ensuring that we build and maintain a living, growing, dynamic compliance framework. Let me explain.

Our control framework

Core to our approach is assessing your needs worldwide, not just geographically but across industries—healthcare, finance, government, defense, and more. These needs serve as a base set of requirements, also known as “controls,” that our engineering teams take as input when they’re designing the service—for example, when they’re developing ways to keep your data in a certain region or apply certain types of access. Today we have over 1,000 such controls in Office 365 and the number of controls is increasing, which is why we talk about continuous compliance.

The majority of industry regulations share a similar set of controls. And we have teams that even look at draft regulations under consideration, so that we can proactively assess new requirements and develop corresponding controls when we see a gap. What this means for you is that if a new regulation emerges for your industry, more than likely we are already working on the required controls within the Office 365 service and can respond to your specific needs faster. Further, as we add new additional controls, it strengthens the overall control framework.

This ability to support a broad scope of control requirements means that we have the agility to analyze and implement new requirements or regulations as they change or come up in the future.

These controls are significant for another reason, too: they have enabled Microsoft itself to meet some of the most stringent of requirements, from ISO 27001 to standards like CJIS, SSAE 16, HIPAA, and more. You can see our documented list in the Office 365 Trust Center.

Built-in capabilities that support compliance

Beyond our control framework, we also offer you capabilities built into the Office 365 service that enable you to promote the right behaviors in your organization for compliance. One example of this is data loss prevention (DLP), which allows you to set policies to control the flow of data inside and outside of your organization. Another capability built into the service is eDiscovery, for organizational search and in-place hold. If you need to pull application logs to meet your own organizational compliance needs or demonstrate governance over specific information within your company to auditors and regulators, eDiscovery enables you to do so—efficiently.

In the next few weeks you’ll be hearing more about DLP and eDiscovery from my colleagues Asaf Kashi and Kamal Janardhan, group principal engineers from our information protection team.

So where is all of this heading?

Ultimately our vision for the future of compliance is to drive even greater transparency and agility. We want to offer you an increasingly rich set of data and innovative features for compliance that can be integrated into your risk management program, so that you can credibly offer specifics to your auditors on how you are protecting and retaining compliance of your data in Office 365. Also, in doing so we hope to offer a level of visibility, control, and value to compliance officers that exceeds what you may be used to in on-premises environments today.

I hope that this helps clarify how we approach meeting your compliance needs.

Let us know what you’re thinking—send us your comments and questions. And of course you can find out more on this topic by visiting the Office 365 Trust Center.

—Shawn Veney

Lisa is increasing her responsiveness to team members and internal customers, thereby improving public service. Read her story and learn how Lisa keeps lines of communication open and stays flexible to react to technology emergencies and help county employees continue to deliver excellent service to their community.

Government entities sometimes get a bad rap—people don’t know that today the public sector really does move at the speed of business. But it’s not always easy because we have diverse needs to fill and tons of expectations that we’re expected to meet. At Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, we provide public safety, property, social, and other services for 800,000 citizens, which means that a lot of people count on us in a lot of different areas.

As client services manager for the county, I’m in charge of a group of IT professionals who solve technology issues and deliver technology tools to all County employees and make sure that they have access to the information they need to positively affect the citizens of Montgomery County. My team handles everything from password resets and broken mice to workstation rollouts, permissions issues, user groups, and app deployments.

That keeps me on my toes, for sure, but it also makes my work days fly by. I need to be in constant contact with my seven-member team so that I can help answer technical questions and keep IT projects on schedule. I also want to make myself available to other employees because they count on me to resolve technical issues and provide guidance when their projects involve technology.

We recently adopted Microsoft Office 365, and I’m using it to make many facets of my job easier. Our team considered Google Apps, but we asked a cross-section of County users to experiment with both Google Apps and Office 365, and an overwhelming majority of our end users preferred Office 365. Plus, we had some concerns about ease of administration and security with Google Apps.

With Office 365, we can work better as a team from any location. My team and I have to physically or virtually be in a lot of places at once to support the whole county. I might be unpacking new machines and receive an instant message about a networking issue, or one of my troubleshooters might share his screen with me so I can see exactly what problem he’s trying to solve. If I’m not available, the rest of the staff can see that online and find someone else to answer a pressing question. We use our new videoconferencing capabilities in addition to screen sharing and presence, all of which keep us working in sync and able to respond faster to employee needs.

We’re also finding new ways to accelerate the pace of county business. For instance, in the last month, we’ve started to use the Yammer Enterprise social network, and it’s already wildly popular. I post meeting minutes, reminders about upcoming rollouts, and information about training opportunities—it’s a great way to disseminate information across the county without clogging everyone’s Inboxes.

And we’re making it easier to share existing documents across all our departments, which means that County employees can quickly find the information that they need to serve the public. For instance, we get a lot of Right to Know requests—citizens want documents such as land records and birth and death listings, or information about childcare or job training. We use the compliance tools in Office 365 to easily satisfy those requests.

From an efficiency standpoint, I now can conduct countywide searches for tools, resources, and data, without having to make special requests, and that gives me back a lot of time. Those special requests could take days to run through the proper channels, but now I have the ability to search on my own for faster results. Plus, other employees will have the same search capabilities, which means that they’ll need to depend less on my department to get access to the information that they need.

Of course, these days most of us don’t leave work behind when we leave the office. I use my mobile phone and other devices to stay on top of email both at work and at night from home. It feels like the same experience as an on-premises messaging system. I share calendars, make meeting requests—I can’t think of anything I’d need to do that isn’t included in Office 365. As part of a government agency, I like knowing that our email and data are stored securely and that we don’t have the privacy worries that we would with other cloud solutions. That’s especially important for our departments that deal with sensitive information that falls under HIPAA or state regulations.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that now that I have the tools in Office 365, I can’t imagine working any other way. I’m able to be so much more productive, responsive to my internal customers, and available to my team. And ultimately, our team is making it possible for the county as a whole to do a better job of serving the public, which is our primary goal.

Technical Summary:

Montgomery County takes advantage of Microsoft Office 365 to streamline internal communications and responsiveness to citizens. Employees use Exchange Online and Lync Online to connect with each other from anywhere, and departments will use SharePoint Online to collaborate on intra- and cross-departmental projects. They also store a range of documents using OneDrive for Business so that they can access reports, spreadsheets, and other information from the office, field locations, or home. County employees keep up-to-date with events, best practices, and county news through the Yammer social network, and the County expects to expand the use of both Yammer and SharePoint Online to operate as an even more cohesive entity.

Read the full story online. For more success stories about people like Lisa Tolomeo, visit the whymicrosoft website.

Add this meeting to your calendar now, then at the scheduled time, click the Lync meeting in your calendar to join the call.

Presenter: Georg Hinterhofer is a Senior Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft Austria and MCM: Exchange 2010, EMEA Exchange TechLead and a SME on Exchange.

Office 365 technical webcasts are a critical program for encouraging technical readiness. Webcasts are free of charge and are a great opportunity to have conversations with Microsoft employees and get your questions answered.

If you have questions regarding this webcast, please contact the Ignite team.

For more information on future Office 365 technical webcasts, visit the Ignite website.

OneNote solves the shopping list frustrations my wife and I used to have. Our previous method involved sticky notes in the kitchen, and usually neither of us was near the list when either of us thought of something to add. But with a To Do list in OneNote, we can add items wherever we are and always stay up to date.

At the store, I’d inevitably find myself without a pen to check off items, and I’d forget to buy items I’d mentally checked off the list. Or if I’d taken the list with me, my wife would call me to add an item, and then I’d forget it by the time I got to the store.

Then it hit me that using OneNote’s To Do list feature on our Windows Phones and PCs could solve all these problems and more. We always have our phones handy and can update a shared list wherever we are. OneNote automatically syncs across all our Windows devices, and now that it’s free everywhere and available on the Mac, practically anyone can take advantage of how we use it.

Other things I love about this solution: When I find a recipe on a website, I can easily copy and paste all the ingredients and their quantities to our grocery list, so we no longer handwrite or print recipes to take to the store. Recently, my wife and I were shopping in a huge warehouse store, so we split up to save time. Because we both had the list in OneNote, we knew what the other person already had checked off the list.

Here’s how you can recreate this OneNote solution for yourself and share it with anyone:

The set-up: Create a shared OneNote notebook and save it to OneDrive .

Collaborate: Now invite people to share the notebook. I entered my wife’s email address and then selected Can Edit so she can add and delete list items and create new pages herself.

She received the email invitation to the notebook on her phone, and with one click she opened the new notebook and could instantly see the first pages I’d set up.

Create lists: Once your first page is set up, create a list. To do this, click the check mark icon at the bottom left of the screen as shown.

I love that the moment something we need pops into my mind, I can pull out my phone and jot it down before I forget, whether I’m out walking the dog or riding the elevator at work. Before we used OneNote, I’d inevitably get home and have forgotten what I wanted to add to the sticky note in the kitchen.

The other day my wife called me while I was driving home and we realized we needed some things from the store. Rather than rattle them off and hope I’d remember them, she pulled out her laptop and added them to our shared OneNote notebook. When I looked at my phone in the parking lot, the list was right there.

Windows Phone Live Tiles

At first, my wife was skeptical of this whole idea, but she changed her mind fast when she saw that OneNote instantly relieved all of the frustrations of our old method of keeping track of our everyday needs. In fact, shortly after we started using OneNote, she created Live Tiles on her Windows Phone for our two most common lists. Now she can access them with just a tap on her phone’s start screen.

To create a Live Tile for a specific page in a OneNote notebook, open the notebook with the list of all the pages. Select the page you want to make a Live Tile, then tap and hold until a dropdown menu appears. Tap pin to start and the tile will appear. Now you can place and resize it as you desire. Kudos to my wife for discovering that!

Try it for yourself and let me know what you think in the comments.

-       Nicholas Kerr

Get OneNote       |     Follow OneNote     

Today, OneDrive and Office are announcing a BIG change to that benefit for consumers, to the tune of 1 TB per user. That’s right–we’re increasing the OneDrive storage allotment included with Office 365 Home, Office 365 Personal, and Office 365 University from 20 GB to 1 TB. That’s a whopping 50 times, or 5,000 percent increase in storage–and it’s going to be here before classes are in session!

As previously announced in April, all Office 365 business customers will also get 1 TB of OneDrive for Business storage per user as part of their Office 365 subscription, which will begin to roll out in July.

What’s a terabyte? Here’s some perspective:

• 1 TB is equivalent to approximately 50,000 trees made into paper and printed
• 1 TB can store about 1,000 copies of the full edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica
• 1 TB can hold around 2,000 hours of audio recorded at CD quality
• 1 TB can remember roughly 8,000 times more data than the average human

While other cloud storage providers charge more than $100 a year for the same amount of online storage, we’re bringing in a full productivity suite too–with Office 365–starting at just $6.99 per month:

Office 365 consumer subscription options

Application availability varies by platform. Skype world minutes available in select countries. See www.office.com/information for details.

If you’re an Office 365 Home, Personal, University or Business subscriber, you’re good to go. Your TB of OneDrive storage is on its way and will be added to your existing account beginning in July. You should not be concerned about current files that are stored in OneDrive as they will not be affected by this change.

Things are about to get a lot more spacious, and we hope you enjoy the added legroom.

–Jevon Fark, Office Team

Just within the past few weeks, we have made it simpler for admins to configure and monitor Office 365, and we launched the Office 365 for business public roadmap to help our business customers learn more about pending updates before they occur. We also made it possible to create Quick Notes in OneNote using only your voice, made OWA for Android available on select devices, and added the social collaboration capabilities of Yammer to SharePoint and OneNote with a new feature called “document conversations.” We also showed you how Microsoft Office can help you collaborate better across devices (including iPad) and on the web, and how Microsoft is driving the Universal Communications revolution.

Those and many other improvements translate into excellence for our customers, who are using our products to do amazing things. It’s no secret that Office 365 can help many businesses increase productivity and reduce costs, whether it’s a relatively new company like beverage retailer Tastea or a well-established business like Red Wing Shoes, but Office 365 also provides outstanding benefits to government, education and non-profit customers.

By using Office 365 and other Microsoft products, for example, the American Cancer Society is saving $1.5 million annually, and funneling that money into lifesaving programs. Office 365 also enabled the City of Chicago to pull together the community to transform a former rail line into a new public space that will unite the five neighborhoods it once divided. Meanwhile, the largest school district in Texas (the Houston Independent School District) and the largest county in the United States (Los Angeles County) have chosen Office 365 to help them provide better service to students and citizens.

Below is a round-up of some key news items from the last couple of weeks. Enjoy!

Julia White on Office 365, SharePoint, and Yammer Collaboration – Listen in as Julia White, general manager for Microsoft Office, answers questions about Office 365, SharePoint and Yammer.

Microsoft Office 365 prompts more businesses to get onto the Cloud – Find out why so many leading non-profit organizations in India are adopting Office 365 and moving to the cloud.

Zottegem Municipality deploys Microsoft Office 365 – Discover how the city of Zottegem in Belgium deployed Microsoft Office 365 to manage its communications and to improve how it delivers services to its 25,000 citizens.

10 Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 Success Stories – Learn how 10 different companies are using Power BI for Office 365 to build their businesses.

Moving to the Cloud: A Microsoft Office 365 Case Study – Find out why Levick, a leading strategic communications firm with offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City, chose Office 365 for its business

Milwaukee County selects Office 365 as its communication platform – Learn how Milwaukee County, the largest county in Wisconsin, has joined the growing list of state and local government organizations that have turned to Office 365 to help improve employee communication and increase productivity.

Microsoft: Office 365 Data Privacy Assured by ‘Lockbox’ – Find out how Microsoft protects customer data in Office 365.

Microsoft: ‘Literally nobody’ but you has access to your Office 365 cloud data – Hear directly from Microsoft security experts Vivek Sharma and Perry Clarke about the security of Office 365 and cloud services.

How multifactor authentication works in Office 365 – Discover why multifactor authentication in Office 365 is so effective and easy to use.

Show notes

• JavaScript frameworks
  • AngularJS
  • Knockout
  • Durandal
  • jQuery
  • Kendo UI
• CSOM vs REST blog post
• Mobile development
  • This wasn’t announced at recording, but Cordova (PhoneGap) was released at TechEd North America the following week.
• Jeremy’s AngularJS content
• Bill’s sessions from the European SharePoint Conference (registration required)
• Got questions or comments about the show? Join O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network.
• The podcast RSS has been submitted to all the stores and marketplaces but takes time. Please add it directly with the RSS.

 About Bill

Bill Ayers is a consultant developer and software architect who has been working on SharePoint since the 2003 version of the product, and he is a Microsoft Certified Master and MCSM, SharePoint. He specializes in web content management and intranet portals. He has over 20 years’ experience in the software industry and speaks regularly at international conferences and user groups. He is also a moderator on SharePoint.StackExchange.com. You can find Bill blogging and tweeting at @spdoctor.

About your host

Jeremy is a newly appointed technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc, a large ISV as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging and tweeting at @jthake.

Useful links

• Office 365 Developer Center
• Blog
• Twitter
• Facebook
• StackOverflow
  • Ask SharePoint Dev
  • Ask Office Dev
  • Ask Office 365 Dev
• Yammer Office 365 Technical Network
  • Office 365 Dev Podcast
  • Office 365 Dev Apps Model
  • Office 365 Dev Tools
  • Office 365 Dev APIs
  • Office 365 Dev Migration to App Model
  • Office 365 Dev Links
• UserVoice

Weekly Updates

Community

• Poll for next podcast topics

Links

• Improving REST API performance in SharePoint 2013
• Provisioning site collections using SP App model in on-premises with just CSOM
• Creating a Better Notification for Custom SharePoint Apps
• Sample: Building apps for SharePoint with MVC (Edit and Delete)
  Examples

Code Samples

• Video – Office Wikipedia Application Source Code Explained
• Office People Graph Now Available on GitHub
• Microsoft-Buildings-Code-Sample
• People List Code Sample

If you use a mouse and keyboard, make sure you have the Windows 8.1 Update. We’ll show you the new features, improvements (searching is a wow), and some ways Office works with Windows 8.1.

What you will learn at the webinar:

• Using a mouse and keyboard with Windows 8.1
• The new updates & improved searching
• Two ways to begin: Start Screen or Desktop?
• Keyboard shortcuts

References for this webinar

• The 8.1 Update install page
• This blog Windows 8.1 announce blog post
• Windows 8.1 What’s new page
• Working with various devices on Windows 8.1
• New keyboard shortcuts (and the master list)
• Find and start Office applications in Windows 8 (how-to)
• Touch guide for Office
• Use Windows 8 Narrator with Office 2013 (how-to)

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

–Doug Thomas

Those of you who have been following this blog have seen dozens of great improvements that we’ve shipped to Office 365 for business services over the last 18 months. In that time I’ve had the opportunity to discuss our roadmap and release processes with customers across the globe, and two major trends have become apparent to me. First, many of you are really excited about the new update cadence, specifically the ability to consume change in small chunks, our responsiveness to your feedback, and fast access to the high value of the new services and features. And second, just as we transformed our development processes, we need to transform our communication processes regarding changes and future updates to the service. We’ve been working hard on this feedback, balancing our ability to deliver high quality timely improvements to the service with your need for information.

Get a view into the future with our new public roadmap

The most significant change we’re making is in how we communicate updates and provide a forward-looking view of our service plans. We’ve learned a lot from our Yammer team on how customers expect communication in a fast-paced, services world, and we got great feedback from customers like you at the SharePoint and MEC conferences on our transparency for future investments in our business services. Building on this, we decided to take the next step and communicate with you in a new way, via a public roadmap, to make sure that as many people as possible know about the exciting improvements we’re bringing to the service.

Today we’re launching the Office 365 for business public roadmap. The Office 365 for business public roadmap provides you with a way to learn more about upcoming updates before the change comes to your service. It provides a few months’ view of new features, enhancements, and major updates. In some cases we may communicate farther in advance than a few months, like when we announced our long-term investments in the new service Codenamed “Oslo” and the Office Graph. We will provide visibility to planned updates that are in development and in the process of being rolled out to the service, as well as to items that have been launched and are now generally available for all eligible customers. The public roadmap will be your best source of truth for product enhancements coming to the service.

Move to the front of the line with First Release

In addition to the public roadmap, we are also rolling out a new program called First Release. First Release gives customers who opt-in the opportunity to get a small selection of significant enhancements to the Office 365 user experience, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online first. If you opt-in to First Release, you will receive new qualifying feature updates first, a minimum of two weeks before customers in our standard release group.

Updates to Lync Online, Exchange Online Protection, Office 365 ProPlus, or other related services are not included in the First Release program at this time.

By default, all Office 365 customers are part of the standard release group. If you’re in this group, you will receive the new feature updates a minimum of two weeks after availability in First Release. The vast majority of service updates will be made available to all customers via our standard release processes.

Over the past week we began the rollout of the First Release opt-in. If your organization is interested in opting into the release group, an Office 365 admin can log into the admin portal and select First Release under service settings. Go to Admin > Service settings > Updates.

Watch an overview of how we’re improving update communications

Here’s a live Garage series recording from TechEd in which Jeremy Chapman and I describe some of the differences between our on-premises release process and the Office 365 service updates process, provide more detail on our approach to change management, and discuss improvements we’re releasing today.

Built upon a great foundation

These enhancements are built upon previous enhancements we have made to Message Center to improve visibility to changes impacting your service. As we announced in April, Message Center continues to evolve to better communicate service changes and updates. Both the Office 365 for business public roadmap and the First Release program will use the message center to notify you about updates and changes to your service.

We’re excited about these service enhancements and hope they will help improve your ability to stay informed about the valuable improvements and changes we are bringing to the service. Like any feature within the service, how we communicate and the tools and programs we provide to help you manage change will improve over time.

Join our YamJam to ask your questions

On Tuesday, June 24^th the Office 365 Technical Network will host a Roadmap Communications YamJam from 9:00-10:00am PT to discuss the announcements in this blog post including, how we communicate service updates, the first release group, and Message Center. For those unfamiliar with a YamJam, it is similar to a “TweetJam” on Twitter or an “Ask Me Anything (AMA)” on Reddit, except it takes place on Yammer. It provides the opportunity for the community to ask questions and have a discussion with a panel of internal Microsoft experts on a particular topic.

Here’s how to participate:

1. Request access to the Office 365 Technical Network. All requests will be approved as quickly as possible.
2. Join the Roadmap Communications YamJam group. You can find it through by using the Browse Groups function, or through the search bar.
3. Log in at 9:00am PT on Tuesday, June 24th to ask questions, follow the discussions, and connect with Microsoft team members.

Hope to see you there!

— Jake Zborowski

Frequently asked questions

Q: Which Office 365 services will the public roadmap and First Release apply to?

A: Both the public roadmap and the First Release program will apply to the commercial and Academic multi-tenant services. The roadmap and First Release do not apply to Office 365 Government Community Cloud for U.S. Government customers, Office 365 operated by 21Vianet, or Office 365 Dedicated/ITAR customers.

Q: Will the public roadmap include all changes to the service?

A: No. The public roadmap will provide a great view of many updates and enhancements to the service, but it will not capture every change.

Q: When will the First Release opt-in be available?

A: The admin opt-in for First Release started rolling out over the last week and if it is not currently in your admin center, it should be available within the next week.

Q: When will we see the first update in First Release?

A: Over the next month or so we will provide time for customers to opt-in and later this summer we will notify customers via the message center when the first update will be available to First Release customers.

Q: Is First Release a beta program? Are updates supported?

A: No First Release is not beta. All features made available to customers in First Release are fully tested and supported.

Q: How many updates will I get in the First Release group?

A: First Release is a small set of significant updates. The majority of updates will be delivered globally to all customers.

Q: How long after I opt-in or out of First Release will it take for the setting for take effect?

A: Changes to your First Release setting will take up to 24 hours to take effect.

Q: Can I apply First Release to a subset of users within my tenant?

A: No. First Release is a tenant-wide setting.

Q: How will I know when an update is coming to First Release?

A: We will notify customers via the Office 365 message center in the admin center.

Add this meeting to your calendar now, then at the scheduled time, click the Lync meeting in your calendar to join the call.

Presenter: Brian Smith and Maelle Kalboussi will be speaking, while Suzanne Sylliaasen and Solomon Woldesenbet respond to questions during the presentation via IM. Brian is an Escalation Engineer in the project support team, supporting Project Server for as long as it has existed, and now also supports Project Online and Project Pro for Office 365. Maelle is a Support Engineer for Microsoft Project Online and on-premises for Microsoft customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Suzanne is a Support Engineer on the Project support team, working on that team since 2011. She supports all versions of Project including Project Online and Office 365. In her 20 year history with Microsoft she has supported System Center, Windows and Word. Solomon has supported Project Server since 2003 and is currently working as a Senior Support Escalation Engineer on the different versions of Project, including Project Online.

Office 365 support webcasts are a critical program for relieving support issues and encouraging foundation technical readiness. Webcasts are free of charge and are a great opportunity to have conversations with Microsoft employees and get your questions answered.

If you have questions regarding this webcast, please contact the Ignite team.

For more information on future Office 365 support webcasts, visit the Ignite website.

I’m so excited to be writing about OneNote on the new Surface Pro 3 integration. I’ve worked with brilliant people from the Windows, Surface and OneNote teams to create this instant note-taking experience that’s like taking notes on paper–but way better.

In the video below you’ll see how to take a note whenever you want, have your notes with you all the time, clip and write on whatever you see on your screen, and how to customize your note-taking experience using OneNote.

In summary:

• To take a note whenever you want, click the Surface Pen and then write your note. It doesn’t matter if your Surface Pro 3 is locked or unlocked, or if your screen is off or on. Clicking the pen will always let you take a note.
• To take a clip of whatever you see, double-click the Surface Pen, and then select the region you want to clip. The selection is placed in your Quick Notes in OneNote and is ready for you to write on. You also can search for text in the clips you take, which is great if you’re clipping articles and research.
• Your Surface Pro 3 will come with the OneNote Windows Store App. If you prefer, you can use the desktop version, OneNote 2013 – get it free at www.onenote.com. You’ll be prompted to choose if you want to use it. Or you can configure which version to use in OneNote 2013: Click File, click Options, click Advanced, and then select Default OneNote Application.
• To have all of the notes you take on your Surface Pro 3 with you all the time, get OneNote on all your devices for free. We offer Windows, Windows Phone, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android apps. You also can access your notes in your web browser at www.onenote.com.

I’d love to hear about how you plan to use OneNote on your Surface Pro 3—tell us what you think in the comments below.  Happy clicking!

———

Tip: Windows and OneNote recently released updates to add the finishing touches, including the ability to double-click the pen to take a clip. So when you get your Surface Pro 3, make sure you update Windows and OneNote. 

To update Windows: Search on your Surface for Windows Update. Launch it, click Check for updates, and then install all the updates.

To update the OneNote Windows Store App: Launch the Windows Store, and swipe right to see the Charms. Click Settings, click App Updates, click Check for updates, and then install the updates. 

To update OneNote 2013: Start OneNote, then click File, click Account, click Office Updates, and then select Update Now.

Get OneNote       |     Follow OneNote     

As we noted in a previous blog post, we’re on a journey to simplify the Office 365 admin experience. This simplification includes streamlining how you configure your environment, such as adding new domains, and providing you with more insight so that you can efficiently monitor your service.

Add generic top-level domains from the Office 365 admin center

Adding your domains to your Office 365 service provides key benefits to your service, including the ability to use your domain in your email addresses. For example, if you own the domain www.contoso.com, you can use branded email addresses like yourname@contoso.com rather than yourname@contoso.onmicrosoft.com, the domain name assigned to you when you register for Office 365.

You can add domains with common top-level domains (TLDs) such as .com, .net, and .org in the Office 365 admin center. However, until recently, adding domains with generic top-level domains (gTLDs), such as .art or .design, to Office 365 required you to use PowerShell. The Office 365 admin center did not support adding domains with gTLDs—until now.  Office 365 now supports over 1,300 generic top-level domains.

Admins can now add domains with gTLDs directly from the Office 365 admin center. The process is the same as creating domains with common TLDs. Log in to your Office 365 admin center, click domains, and then add your domain. PowerShell is no longer required!

As with domains using TLDs, your domains with gTLDs also have their DNS records proactively checked to find and fix any potential DNS issues.

More reports, so you know which devices are accessing your service

Knowing how users are interacting with your service is important. Using Office 365 with unsupported or unauthorized devices can not only give end users a poor experience and create more support requests, it can also put your company’s data at risk. Knowing which operating systems and browsers are being used is invaluable, especially since support for Windows XP and Internet Explorer 8 has now come to an end.

Two new reports have been released that enable you to monitor which operating systems and browsers are being used to access Office 365 online. These reports give you a summary view of the different operating systems and browsers and browser versions being used, as well as user details so that you can identify the users who are noncompliant. Using these reports will help you ensure that your environment is protected, your users are getting the best experience possible, and that you have technical support in the event that you need it.

The journey to simplify the admin experience is ongoing. We will continue to simplify the common tasks, settings, and other admin experiences so that you can easily get the most out of your Office 365. Stay tuned to this blog for more information on new features and experiences. And please share your thoughts about the admin experience with us.

–Lawrence Chiu

Photo Credit: Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Facebook page

When we talk about technology that enables people to do more, the County of Los Angeles has made a move that brings this notion to life. The County is rolling out Office 365 to more than 100,000 employees, whose responsibilities span public safety, operations, and health and human services. In all, over 30 departments will make the move. This is an exciting step for the most populous county in the country, and helps make its workers more connected and productive from wherever they’re called to serve the residents of L.A. County.

In just the past year, L.A. County provided care to 820,000 people in its hospitals and clinics; assisted in the successful adoption or return of 35,000 animals; served 2.3 million meals to the elderly; filled 33,081 potholes and repaired over 220 miles of public streets; and assisted 1,500 local small business through building improvements and micro loans.

Now, with Office 365, L.A. County Sheriff officers will be able to access critical paperwork from connected devices while on patrol. Nurses providing vaccines in schools and underprivileged areas across the County can better communicate their resource needs with teammates from anywhere – untethered to the office. Social workers, who investigated 87,000 cases of suspected child abuse or neglect this past year, can leverage social tools and have real conversations that drive solutions from the field.

The County saw Office 365 as an opportunity to modernize its current systems, greatly reduce costs and enable mobile employees to be more productive. But not just any cloud service would do. Dr. Robert Pittman, Chief Information Security Officer for the County of Los Angeles, sums it up: “Office 365 provides the level of security and built-in compliance for HIPAA and CJIS that we require.” From marriage licenses to inmate paperwork, sensitive documents can’t afford to be compromised. Office 365 gives L.A. County the highest level of privacy and security afforded by any enterprise cloud service available today.

With this move to the cloud and Office 365, L.A. County’s CIO Richard Sanchez and Dr. Pittman have shown true vision and leadership among government organizations across the country. They recognize what’s possible, and they’re empowering their employees with technology that will not only transform the way they work, but ultimately up-level their impact.

As the Bloomingdale rail line near Chicago’s Logan Square became obsolete in the late 1990s, Chicagoans began to imagine how they could keep the rail line and transform it into open space they could use for recreation. And the idea of the Bloomingdale Trail and Park was born—a physical barrier that once separated five neighborhoods would now unite them. They call it “The 606 Project,” after the zip code prefix all Chicagoans share. An inspired, beautiful plan, yes. But can you imagine the complexity? The millions of tasks and hundreds of people that had to come together to execute such a massive, high-visibility government project? Planning, permits, and people—oh my!

The original builders of Logan Square didn’t have Office 365. But The Walsh Group and the Windy City did. Watch this four-part series to see how adopting and using Office 365 took The 606 from plans to Chicago’s next great park, a park to make the city proud.

Learn more:

• Watch the series
• The Walsh Group case study
• Blog post from Patrick Wirtz, Innovation Manager for The Walsh Group
• More info on Office 365 for Enterprise
• Try Office 365 for Enterprise

Office 365 is the Office you know, on the devices you use most, whenever you need it and virtually wherever you are. Beginning with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, Office 365 provides all the familiar apps you’ve come to depend on, along with a dynamic set of cloud connected tools that help you communicate, collaborate and get more done.

See How Office 365 Works!

Our top 10 copy-and-paste ninja moves for this webinar

10: The new Wikipedia Office app (Word 2013>Insert>Store)
9: Merge formatting in Word (CTRL V, CTRL, [pause] M)
8: CTR+ALT+V is Paste Special in Word
7: CTR+ALT+V for Paste formats and widths in Excel
6: CTR+ALT+V for transpose cells in Excel
5: ALT+; is Select Visible Cells Only
4: The Office Clipboard (Home>little arrow next to Clipboard)
3: Pasting attachments in Outlook (Right-click attachment>Copy>Click body of other message>Paste)
2: Shortcut for snipping into OneNote (Windows 8.1: WINDOWS+SHIFT+S, Windows 8 and earlier: WINDOWS+S)
1: Pasting animations in PowerPoint (ALT+SHIFT+C)

References for this webinar

• Wikipedia on the Office Store (app for Word 2013)
• Paste Special when copying from Excel
• Copy and paste visible cells only in Excel (how-to)
• Use the Office Clipboard (how-to)

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

–Dave Ludwig

We continue to see incredible customer interest in Lync Room System (LRS). LRS has been in the market less than a year, and already partner solutions are available in more than 43 countries, from over 5,000 resellers. Also, many Fortune 100 Customers have deployed LRS, including large enterprises in oil, banking, beverages, shipping, technology, and pharmaceuticals. With all this interest, we’re excited to share the latest updates for Lync Room System.

Starting with this update, we’re adopting a new versioning method, changing the version number from “15.xx” to “15.xx.x.” For example, the June Update is “15.10.0.” Under the old model, it would have been “15.10.” This new versioning method allows for greater granularity in the case that minor updates are pushed.

Room PC View

Apart from the usual fixes and minor updates, the June Update contains one major new feature, Room PC View. We added Room PC View to add functionality to improve the content capture experience for a computer that is always connected in the Lync Room System.

The LRS content capture feature was originally designed to activate and share the screen when the content capture cable was connected to a laptop, and then deactivate when detached. But after shipping we noticed that some users wanted to hard-wire the content capture cable connection to an in-room, always connected PC. Designing for this use was challenging, because in this scenario the room PC remains on and continuously broadcasts a signal to the content capture card, forcing the content capture session to be always active and visible in the pre-meeting state. We knew that some users would not want the content capture session to be visible before a meeting, particularly in a one-screen, front-of-the-room (FoR) scenario, where the person using the room never sees the FoR calendar.

Our solution? We created a Room PC View button on the console that controls the display of the in-room PC screen share. If you want the screen share to display in the room, you can turn the button on; if you want to keep the screen share from displaying, turn the button off.

This feature is optional. System admins can control whether the Room PC View button is present or not by toggling it on or off in the admin UI. If you’re not using a hard-wired in-room PC, the system admin can go into the admin UI and turn off Room PC View, which hides the Room PC View button and returns the LRS to the original content capture experience. Views and options vary depending on your configurations.

Try out Room PC View in the 15.10.0 update. We hope you find it useful!

You can find the full LRS June Update (15.10.0) release notes here.

If you have System Center Operation Manager installed to manage LRS, please visit the related knowledge base article to see if there are any prerequisites for installing the update.

—David Groom

Presenter: Murali Natarajan is an Exchange Online Support Escalation Engineer based in Charlotte, NC. He specializes in hybrid Exchange deployments, free/busy in hybrid environments, eDiscovery and in-place hold on Exchange Online.

Office 365 technical webcasts are a critical for encouraging foundation technical readiness. Webcasts are free of charge and are a great opportunity to have conversations with Microsoft employees and get your questions answered.

If you have questions regarding this webcast, please contact the Ignite team.

For more information on future Office 365 support webcasts, visit the Ignite website.

In SharePoint 2013, the OAuth authentication and authorization flow for apps involves a series of interactions between your app, SharePoint 2013, the authorization server, and the end user at runtime. The authorization server in this scenario is Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS).

Show notes

• OAuth specification
• MSDN documentation on authorization and authentication
• Got questions or comments about the show? Join O365 Dev Podcast http://aka.ms/Office365DevPodcastYam on the Office 365 Technical Network.
  • The podcast RSS has been submitted to all the stores and marketplaces, but takes time. Please add it directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast.

About Radi

Radi Atanassov is a professional SharePoint architect, a Microsoft Certified Master in SharePoint and a diehard fanatic when it comes to SharePoint application development. With many years full of development experience, Radi’s background demonstrates strong ambitions to achieve the greatest quality, architecture, attention to detail, and smooth processes when leading teams to create applications on top of SharePoint. Radi is the founder and lead architect of OneBit Software, a Sofia-based SharePoint “mercenary” company providing solution development and SharePoint resources to Microsoft partners and clients around the world. Radi is also a Microsoft Certified Trainer, training SharePoint across learning centers and universities. In his spare time he blogs, writes articles, runs web camps, plays guitar, and leads the Web Platform User Group in Bulgaria. You can find Radi blogging at http://www.sharepoint.bg/radi and tweeting at @RadiAtanassov.

About your host

Jeremy is a newly appointed technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc, a large ISV as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at http://www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.

 Useful links

• Office 365 Developer Center http://dev.office.com/
• Blog http://blogs.office.com/dev
• Twitter http://www.twitter.com/OfficeDev
• Facebook http://www.facebook.com/OfficeDev
• StackOverflow
  • http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev
  • http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev
  • http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev
• Yammer Office 365 Technical Network
  • O365 Dev Podcast http://aka.ms/Office365DevPodcastYam
  • O365 Dev Apps Model http://aka.ms/Office365DevAppsModelYam
  • O365 Dev Tools http://aka.ms/Office365DevToolsYam
  • O365 Dev APIs http://aka.ms/Office365DevApisYam
  • O365 Dev Migration to App Model http://aka.ms/Office365DevMigration
  • O365 Dev Links http://aka.ms/Office365DevLinksYam
• UserVoice http://aka.ms/OfficeDevFeedback

Familiarity of Office – Office Online offers the familiar Office experience that you already know how to use. It includes hundreds of Word, PowerPoint and Excel templates so you can go from nothing to something with just a click. The familiar Office ribbon allows you to access most common commands. And now the Tell Me capabilities help you easily find the features you need. Let’s face it, when you’re collaborating on an important project, the last thing you need is a learning curve.

Real-time coauthoring on Office documents – For years, users have collaborated on Office documents in a variety of ways. For example, multiple users could leave comments within Office documents and use “Track Changes” to show edits and updates from others. With Office Online, you now have a dynamic way of collaborating with several users. Users can now edit the Office document simultaneously and you can see the changes being made in real-time. And the best part is Office Online automatically saves your documents in the cloud.

Keep file formatting intact – Many of you complain that when you use Office documents in Google Drive, it gets converted to a non-standard document format. Once converted, you lose the formatting of your documents. The fonts look different, the whole layout of the document is different. A lot of your painstaking work is suddenly undone, forcing you to repeat tasks you thought were finished. With Office Online, it doesn’t matter which browsers the individual members of your group are using, everyone can make as many changes and suggestions as they want without worrying about losing the Office file fidelity or the document formatting.

Watch the videos for Word Online, Excel Online, and PowerPoint Online to learn how users can be more productive by collaborating using modern Office experience on the web.

Start using Office Online today!

Windows Phone 8.1

OneNote for Windows Phone 8.1 allows you to record and transcribe voice notes using the Cortana personal assistant.

While Windows Phone 8.1 and Cortana provide the best note-taking experience, you also can create voice notes on Windows Phone 8. Just hold down the Start button, say, “Note,” and speak whatever’s on your mind.

iOS

Using your voice to take notes on your iPhone is easier than ever. To get started, set up me@onenote.com with your email address. Just go to onenote.com/EmailSettings and add your email address. Learn more about this here. Then follow these steps:

Once the message has been sent, the notes you dictated will be available immediately in your Quick Notes section in OneNote.

Android

We integrated OneNote with Google Now to let you take notes on your Android devices using only your voice. Want to set it up on your Android devices? Follow these simple steps:

Watch this 30-second video to see voice notes in action.

Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Get OneNote       |     Follow OneNote     

At the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) in March, we announced that we’ll be bringing a native OWA mobile app to Android phones. Today, we’re pleased to announce a pre-release of this app available in the Google Play store.

During this pre-release, we’ll be gathering feedback, fixing bugs, and making sure the app is ready for prime time! The app distribution will be limited to a few devices to begin with. We’ll be adding new device support regularly, so if your device isn’t supported right now, check back often. Also, let us know which devices we should add next by voting here. Learn more about the background behind OWA for Android on this week’s Garage Series.

Can I use OWA for Android?

Here are the requirements to use OWA for Android:

• Your device must be running Android 4.4 Kit Kat or higher.
• Your mailbox must be running on Office 365 for business. (This does not include Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home, or Outlook.com.)
• Your device size is considered “small” or “normal” by Android OS.

What can I do on OWA for Android?

Everything you can do on OWA for iPhone, you can do on OWA for Android.

When you install the app from the Google Play store, you should see the OWA icon on the Android home screen.

The navigation screen provides easy access to Outlook, Calendar, and People.

When you tap Outlook, you get a list view of new messages in your inbox.

If you tap any individual message, you open the reading pane for that message, which includes support for other new features announced at MEC, such as inline URL previews.

The Calendar and People experiences have also been optimized for the Android phone.

So does this app do anything differently than OWA for iPhone?

With OWA for Android, if you’ve enabled the app to sync your contacts to your device, you can update those contacts directly from the device’s address book and OWA will make sure the changes get made in your Office 365 mailbox. So, if someone sends you a new phone number in a text message, you can just update the contact on your phone, and you’ll see the change reflected in OWA.

Where can I provide feedback?

Let us know your thoughts and concerns by visiting our forum.

–Steve Chew and Tony Hernandez

This week we continue the email theme with another show recorded in Austin, Texas at the MEC Conference. We brought on Greg Baribault last season in the Garage Series to explain how Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) has evolved over the years. This week we explain Exchange ActiveSync from its earliest appearance as AirSync in the Microsoft Mobile Information Server in the Exchange Server 2000 timeframe and updates for subsequent releases of Exchange Server. Over the years, policy controls were added to support Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and then Allow/Block/Quarantine to provide Exchange admins further controls in order to specify trusted device models.

Eventually, these needs culminated to provide a full fidelity email and calendaring experience with support for things rarely implemented like Information Rights Management, email delegation, setting automatic replies or even free/busy in calendaring. When you combine that with the more frequent adoption of BYOD putting pressure on IT departments to manage only the email and calendar-related device storage plus devices’ support for hooking into notification protocols and HTML5 content, OWA for Devices has emerged to fit the need. With support for iPhone, iPad and Android phones, it provides comparable and device-tailored experience of the newest Outlook Web App – even with support for Policy Tips and the new Mail Apps.

Of course we demonstrate all of this and I show the difference between the traditional full device wipe and reset compared to what OWA for Devices enables as a selective wipe or app-level reset. If your IT department allows BYOD, you’ll want to check out this show.

Next week, we invite Jake Zborowski on the show to discuss the latest in change management for Office 365.

See you then,

Jeremy Chapman

More resources

OWA for Android now available on select devices

Setting up Push Notifications with an On-Premises Exchange Server

Mail Apps demonstrated in OWA for Android phones

Office 365 Technology Blog: OWA for iPhone and OWA for iPad

TechNet: Exchange ActiveSync in Exchange Online

TechNet: Mobile Device Mailbox Policies in Exchange Online

Garage Series Video Channel

Garage Series Season 1 Blog Archive

Follow @OfficeGarage on Twitter

Office 365 Garage Series Apps for Windows Phone and Windows 8

About the Garage Series hosts

By day, Jeremy Chapman works at Microsoft, responsible for optimizing the future of Office client and service delivery as the senior deployment lead. Jeremy’s background in application compatibility, building deployment automation tools and infrastructure reference architectures has been fundamental to the prioritization of new Office enterprise features such as the latest Click-to-Run install. By night, he is a car modding fanatic and serial linguist. Greg Baribault is a Principal Group Program Manager in the Exchange engineering team with more than a decade of experience working on Exchange ActiveSync and device management policies.

We all use different devices to get our work done, wherever and whenever we want. Being able to access our content and getting work done is an implicit need. This not only gives users the freedom to be in control of their time, but also helps them collaborate more effectively with other team members and succeed in getting their work done as a team.

Familiarity of Office: For many years, users have relied on rich Office templates to quickly start creating documents. The familiar Office ribbon makes it easy to find the relevant actions so you can edit your documents. Easy formatting capabilities enable you to change the picture styles or chart styles in Word or Excel and help you to create and edit rich Office documents. The recommended charts in Excel help you analyze, manipulate and visualize data quickly. The variety of transitions and animations in PowerPoint help you tell a story with real impact.

Because you and your team members are already familiar with Office, you can avoid the confusion of wondering where to find some feature or function and trying to figure out how to use it. So instead of staying late at the office and missing the party that everyone will be talking about on Monday, you can finish your work more quickly and enjoy the party.

Office File Fidelity: Office provides a consistent experience across devices so no matter what device you access the document, spreadsheet, or presentation from, that familiar experience moves with you. If you open an Office document, spreadsheet or presentation on a PC, you will get the rich Office experience you’ve come to expect. Open that same Office file on an iPad, and the look and feel will be the same—right down to the formatting.

You want your ideas and creativity to be intact as you collaborate with other team members using different devices? With Office available on both PC and iPad, you can easily share Office documents among team members without worrying about losing the fidelity of the standard Office document format. Even when a feature is not supported on a particular device, Office retains the file fidelity and document formatting. So when you reopen the document on a platform that does support the feature, all capabilities are intact.

On the other hand, if someone on your team moves the file to Google Drive and opens it to make changes, you no longer experience that familiar Office look and the formatting is a mess, will likely be recreating the formatting and making sure no content was lost. No matter what kind of group project you’re collaborating on, you don’t want to waste time reformatting and finalizing the collective work of your team, or worrying whether one or more of your team members is unable to share in the rich Office experience on their devices.

Why settle for a suboptimal experience using Google Docs, Sheets and Slides when Office provides you the best experience available with the modern Office experience on PC and iPad already. Office will be available on other platforms soon. These Office experiences will continue to make collaborating across devices easier, richer and more complete than ever.

If you are a student working on a group project watch this video to see how Office can help you be successful at school. If you are collaborating in teams at work, see how the Office experience can help you succeed at teamwork.

Hi all – I want to let you know that our whole team is excited to see how much people enjoy using the Office for iPad apps. Our goal was to create an experience that allows people to get things done in an intuitively familiar way on the iPad. We spent a lot of time polishing experiences that we know are important from years of working with, and listening to, people just like you.

Since launch, I’ve chatted with a few friends who haven’t explored Office for iPad and currently use Google’s productivity apps on the iPad. I’ve explained how Office for iPad makes doing work so much more enjoyable than it is with Google Drive, Docs, Sheets or Quickoffice on iPad, and I think this blog provides an ideal platform to share that story.

Google Drive, specifically, falls far short of Office for iPad. The apps incorporated into Drive don’t let you edit Office documents unless you convert them to Google’s native file format, which often results in formatting havoc across your documents. Drive’s web-based experience doesn’t feel natural on the iPad and isn’t optimized for touch, which makes it difficult to complete basic scenarios like selecting cells, sorting data and formatting your documents. Additionally, users of the recent release of Google Docs and Sheets quickly discovered that the apps are basically just a repackaging of existing Google Drive functionality. Quickoffice does address some of these issues by providing native iPad productivity support, but we believe it falls far short of what you should expect in a seamless productivity experience.

My goal in sharing this blog is to explain some of the key ways that Office for iPad can help you do great work, especially when compared with Quickoffice. As you read, please remember that this is only the beginning for Office for iPad. We’ve got an awesome roadmap, and the experiences are only going to get better. I hope the list below gives you a few reasons to give Office for iPad a try.

Documents that look like…your documents.

When I create or send an Office document to a colleague, I want it to look perfect. Office for iPad apps show your Office tables, pictures, charts and formatting as you’d expect. Our team thought this was so fundamental that we made it one of our top priorities. We want you to be able to create and edit files on the iPad and know that you can send them to colleagues without messing anything up. The pictures below show the exact same document rendered in Word for iPad and Quickoffice. I didn’t include the title page or table of contents on the Quickoffice side, because Google doesn’t even render them. We think you expect more, and we want you to know that your documents, presentations and spreadsheets will render beautifully in Office across all of your devices – including the iPad. Here is what the comparison looks like today:

A familiar experience, with a Ribbon that helps you get stuff done.

In building Office for iPad, we realized that we needed to get the Office Ribbon just right. We pored over data showing which commands people click most frequently, refined our touch targets, and studied how people interacted with various mockups until we got it just right. Another one of our core goals with Office for iPad was to create apps that are ”Unmistakably Office” so that people feel naturally comfortable when opening the apps for the first time. The Ribbon is a key part of that experience. Quickoffice has a few buttons toward the upper portion of its apps, but it would be generous to call what they have a ribbon. We think that’s an important difference, because the familiar Office Ribbon makes it easier for users like you to get things done.

Present and tell a story directly from your iPad.

I’m sure many of you use PowerPoint to tell stories. When discussing ideas here at Microsoft, I often use slide shows to share ideas. It’s pretty typical for me to use transition and animation effects to highlight key points. If you’re still using Quickoffice, you’re probably wondering how this is possible – because Quickoffice doesn’t allow iPad users to create new transition and animation effects in presentations. Quickoffice also does a poor job of rendering slides and emulating the existing transition effects in PowerPoint presentations. We think the ability to create and present beautiful decks is a core part of the presentation experience. We even included special features, like a press-and-hold laser pointer and slide inking and highlighting capabilities, to enhance your ability to tell a story with the app. I encourage you to download PowerPoint for iPad and present one of your favorite decks to a friend or colleague. It’s free to get the app, and I think you’ll love the experience.

Build formulas without being a rocket scientist (even if you are).

Excel makes it easy to make lists, filter information and build models that help you understand the world. That being said, formulas can be challenging and we know that people often need assistance getting them right. Excel for iPad contains a variety of custom elements – a formulas ribbon tab, a list of recently used formulas and a custom formula keyboard – that we think will help you use the formulas you need. Quickoffice and Sheets have some formulas, but you better know exactly what you need to type if you want them to work. You’ll need to type them directly into the spreadsheet, going back and forth between the letter and symbol keyboard multiple times. Quickoffice and Sheets do not even let you quickly reference formula cells using touch. Our Excel for iPad team tried to make formulas much more accessible, because we want to help people like you complete hours of manual work in seconds by using the right formula.

Use templates to professionalize documents, polish presentations and create budgets.

Sometimes it’s important to get a quick start on your work. The templates in Office for iPad make it easy to create a professional proposal, use a polished design for a presentation or spin up a family budget. Quickoffice, Docs and Sheets do not provide iPad users with polished templates, so you’ll be starting from scratch in every new document, working with basic designs for your presentations and staring at empty cells in your spreadsheet. Our Office team tried to help you get work done much more quickly by offering great starting points for many common tasks. We created our templates based upon customer feedback, and we believe they will help you get a variety of common tasks done much more quickly.

Insert pictures, shapes and tables with pre-defined styles.

Quickoffice, Docs and Sheets do not provide users with a way to use predefined styles to quickly format pictures, shapes and tables. Google’s document and spreadsheet applications on iPad don’t even allow you to insert pictures or shapes. At Microsoft, we recognize that richly formatted content often allows you to communicate a key point, tell an effective story or close a big deal. That’s why you can insert, edit and quickly format pictures, shapes and tables across Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps on iPad. We even include a rich set of predefined formats that allow you to put that extra degree of polish on your work, because we know it helps enhance the stories you choose to tell the world. Check out the examples below…you won’t find anything close in Quickoffice, Docs or Sheets.

Thank you for spending time to learn about Office for iPad. If you are already using the apps, we hope you love them. If you have not yet tried them, we hope we’ve given you a few reasons to consider giving the apps a try.

–Aaron Wilson, Senior Program Manager, Office for iPad