Microsoft launched the newest version of Office today (January, 29, 2013). Designed in the Cloud and with people on-the-go in mind, Office 365 Home Premium was aimed at helping businesses and families organize their increasingly busy schedules. See what all the buzz is about with these pictures, tweets, and videos from the launch.
http://storify.com/softartisans/office365-launches-today
[Excerpted from Nothing But SharePoint]
Last week, Alpesh Nakar published a review of Office 365 in which he asserted that “there is no competition for Office 365. Simply nothing.” Sweeping statements like that are catnip to this crochety blogger, so I decided to play devil’s advocate and say: there are a number cloud-based collaboration suites, and presumably most of them have some advantages and some disadvantages over Microsoft’s version.
For the sake of efficiency and my own sanity, I only looked at three of the most popular cloud collaboration suites: Google Apps, HyperOffice and Zoho Collaboration Apps, along with Office 365 Kiosk, SMB and Enterprise editions. I compared each in terms of desktop features, platform compatibility, browser compatibility, system requirements, administration and support offerings. My findings? Not to be all “it depends on your needs” but… it depends on your needs. And on your re$ources. If you want a one sentence recommendation: go with Office365 Enterprise if offline document editing, heavy-duty formatting (especially of PowerPoint presentations) and workflow are integral to your company’s mo, and if you’re all running on Windows.
Continue reading Office 365 vs Google Apps vs HyperOffice vs Zoho
This past Thursday-Saturday, Alison, Nick, Ben and I repped SoftArtisans and OfficeWriter at the inaugural SharePoint Saturday The Conference. Between speaking engagements, vlogging, dance parties and running demos on OfficeWriter’s SharePoint integration, there wasn’t a whole lot of downtime, but as Sandy Ussia told me, “I’ll sleep next week.” (Plus, unless you have Freudian recall, sleeping makes for a boring blog post.) Many attendees and speakers have already published their recaps, but this one is coming to you fashionably late, in a fashionable list.
1. If you don’t have anything nice to say, look up. The cloud was definitely this conference’s hot topic, with everyone from Mary Jo Foley to Jeremy Thake to Joel Ward weighing in. One takeaway: Microsoft’s in-the-works Online Services Delivery Platform will bring all the hosted services into one infrastructure. Maybe it’ll be accessible through a browser-based tool bar, too. Continue reading 23 Lessons from SharePoint Saturday the Conference
There’s been a lot of talk, recently and not so recently, about SharePoint in the cloud, especially with the release of Office 365. Hell, there’s been a lot of talk about cloudification, period (though perhaps not using that particular term). Cloud computing provider CloudShare just finalized a$10 million round of vc funding, Apple is letting users store and stream backups of their iTunes downloads in the iCloud, Google Docs now has pivot tables…From financial and ease-of-use standpoints, it’s easy to see why moving data to the cloud is such an appealing proposition. From a security standpoint, as we witnessed with the Amazon/Playstation hack this year, it’s rather less appealing. And then there’s the current lack of feature paritybetween SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online, and the fact that the latter doesn’t support farm-scoped solutions, full-trust solutions or WebApplication-scoped features. Continue reading Cloudy with a Chance of SharePoint