Windows Keeps Getting Better

to Eugen M, f4denz, Brandon Leblanc:

/fun on /  Initially I was going to sign on as "Grumpmeister3000", but then I thought that "Ultratechmonster9000" would give me way more credibility.   /fun off/

Overall Windows 8 is an amazing technology.  Got Wow factor, sick, yeah, baby! and such. So creative, and so playful. Wonderful. Lovely.  

But it is not very useful for the following groups of consumers:  

1) People who use computers for work.  I mean, the humdrum type of "accounting, taxes, billing, payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable" work.  I don't see how a column of numbers can entered via a touch screen.  It's not that I am that dumb or (imagine air quotes) "out of touch".  There is still lots of data that exists on paper and

needs to be entered into a computer.  Inconceivable to you, but real in the real world.  

2) People who are older than, say 45 years or so, that "baby-boomer" crowd inching toward retirement.   As you know, that demographic group is growing, growing, growing.  And, if you don't mind, ask Bill Gates, who somehow got a lil bit older too,  to answer truthfully about which input device he uses on his computer for basic, everyday, down-to-earth tasks.  I bet he likes a mouse and keyboard, he just can't tell you for marketing reasons.

(and Warren Buffett of course does not even use a computer, but that is way off the old tangent)

Nonetheless, I venture to say that many, not all, but many older people have trouble with the "youthful fluidity of motion" required to successfully interact with a touch screen.   Does Microsoft even have a "focus group of older people"?  You know, the ones who forget what to focus on, like me.  If not, then it should.

So, now, then:  Given that group 1 and group 2 above make up a huge, HUGE, part of potential Microsoft

Windows 8.3 consumers, why is it so hard for Microsoft to understand that ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL.

Next: Given how comparatively easy, EASY, EASEY it is to modify software, why would Microsoft insist that only

ONE FLAVOR of Windows 8 is allowed.  It really would be VERY EASY for MS to accommodate the "Touch crowd"

and the "keyboard and mouse" crowd.    

To imagine that in front of your very eyes, I have to describe it for you:  

You boot up Windows 8.3, and on the  first screen you are given three (reversible) choices:

1) I use Touch screen only. I am so cool.  Keyboards and Mouse are for unteachable boring old folks only.

2) I use Touch screen as well as Keyboard and Mouse.  I am so flexible and fantastic.

3) I use Keyboard and Mouse only.   Touch screen is for unproductive touchy feely artsy folks only.

And, thus, depending on your choice you get booted into the operating environment of your choice.

How hard can that be, really ?

And if you wonder why I am talking about Windows 8.3, which does not exist as yet :  It's because I am looking ahead and can tell from experience that it takes Microsoft on average at least 3 revisions to get things workable enough.   I remember using Windows version 3.11 and Win 95 came along.  I tried to upgrade, but it was a "no go".  Back to Win 3.11 until Win 98 v2 came along. Then I gladly skipped Windows 2000, as well as Win XP SP1, and Win XP SP2.    I jumped from Windows 98 to Win XP SP3.  Good move.  Then I skipped Vista (excellent move), had no need yet for Windows 7, and now I am waiting for a Win 8 version worth jumping to.   May be in 2015.

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Office Web apps: More Office, cooperative, other devices

Microsoft has a fully equipped, inclusive approach to productivity that spans platforms, devices, browser, online and offline experiences. After more than two decades delivering worldwide known and we are incredibly proud of the fact that more than 1 billion people around the world have selected trusted productivity tools, Office use.

When we launched the Office Web apps 2010, they were companions on the Office desktop experience, light that enables on-the-go content creation and validation. Then have we a number of investments in Office Web apps make it easier for the people cooperate, the documents and access to Office content from virtually any device.

As we think about how people communicate and we work today and how their needs in the future will develop, want to share our plans for some of the investments we make in the Office Web apps in the next year and beyond.

Our goal is to provide that people rely on to polished Office documents from beginning to end, to create all of the Web Office Web apps. Since we first launched Office Web apps, have advanced browser technologies and speeds and the development infrastructure is mature, make fast on the Web a better platform for the construction of Office and more innovations on the Web. With these improvements, we are better able to deliver a comprehensive productivity experience with the Office Web apps.

Our aim is to realize an Office experience on the Web, we invest in three areas: ease of use, wide cross-platform browser support, social and cooperation. You'll see that the introduction of a set of capabilities, collaboration in the cloud, giving us new real time implementation to facilitate experience and editing features of more devices.

We tend to see the consistent customer feedback, the next functions must have to consider the people for their Office experience. We have prioritized functions, which make it easier for work on the Internet, even things as simple as adding from search and replace in Word Web app to improve the overall experience of acceleration start times and thus simplifies file management. While we an Office experience on the desktop to deliver, Office Web apps offer yet another option for Office customers to be more productive. With these changes you get uncompromising productivity anytime, anywhere, that you want to work.

The Office Web apps also serve as our customers use an important connection point between the Office and the expanding array. We can use Office content access to and from your device of choice by cross-browser on the device, where Office support tools is not available or installed. The full power of the Office Web apps is available already for Windows 8 tablets and iPads and we are the same capabilities expand on Android tablets mobile chrome-browser support.

Today, we have the implementation functions in Office Web apps and the Office desktop applications, with multiple editors can work at the same time in a single document. Cooperation is very flexible, so that they work together at the same time if all of them are online, or even if you are working offline, while maintaining the rich formatting and design your document and to ensure that users on top of each other to edit does not.

Since the introduction of the first co-authoring in the Office Web apps, we have seen a growing demand for more fluid and dynamic collaboration capabilities when you work online. We were ll real-time presence in the Office Web apps, so all editors, the file automatically and edits of others see as they happen, without having to update. This is a subtle change, but to allow a big improvement of against richer collaboration.

We have started to deliver the PowerPoint Web application where user changes almost now see each other. You can see in action in the video below, or try it yourself with your presentations in SkyDrive or SharePoint online stored. In the next few months you will see PowerPoint web app has received even faster and real-time implementation support in other Office Web apps.

Improve through the construction of more Office Tools for the Web experience on our collaboration and commitment to broad browser support customers can easily to use Office on the Web on your desktop. While the entire process your feedback will help inform, how we prioritize future capabilities and improvements to the Office experience. Working with you is important, as we on our journey, to put Office into the cloud to begin next chapter. Share your thoughts in the comments here or via our customer feedback tool within the Office Web apps.

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Review: Wappwolf automatically converts and synchronizes your files

Wappwolf Wappwolf converted and automatically synchronizes files and puts in a predefined folder.

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Automation is the name of the game these days for Web applications, and Wappwolf aims to combine automation with the power of cloud computing.  Available for dropbox, Google drive and box, the Wappwolf offers on-the-fly conversion, as well as automatically move files to other folder animals, email alerts, Tweets, FTP upload and more. And once you have set the rule, everything behind the scenes is done.

First with Wappwolf, you sign with your dropbox login information and creates a special Wappwolf folder in your dropbox account be.

Alhough some options premium be paid, there is still much for the free basic users, their teeth to get. Free basic users can have up to 10 automation and 100 files of 100 MB per day. But when you pay $5 a month, you get unlimited automation and 1,000 files with 1,000 MB per day.

Before you do anything, you must first visit the Web site Wappwolf and choose the cloud service would like to use with the service. You must then sign in Wappwolf with your cloud computing credentials. In the event that Wappwolf give the entire test run your cloud computing account is scary to you, you can instead restrict its access to only one folder in your account.  And of course it goes without saying that you can at any time revoke Wappwolfs access to your cloud computing account.

After you sign in successfully, a special Wappwolf folder will be your cloud account.  This is where all the action will take place. If you perform an Automation rule, you can subfolder for each rule, so no worries about things, to make getting there really messy.

To start, just click on "create a new automated" and you will be prompted to select a folder (or create a new).  If you put a file in this folder, then the automatic conversion and action is done on the basis of the next step of the rule.

Every time, when you create a rule in the list of automation, with the ability to delete this rule and an upgrade to a paid plan for more options appears.

To set up this part of the rule, you will be... with all the automation options and there are a lot.  The sections are arbitrary file documents, pictures, audio, video, and send info expanded.  So, if the Automation "Convert to Kindle" means he would go then to the section "Documents" next set portion of the rule.  Click on "send to your Kindle", whereupon the file format and your Kindle email address to specify.

If the Automation "convert to JPG" then called the pictures section, select the image of your next port of call, where, what you want would be dealt to.  The same applies to audio and video. Select the action that you want performed. You get the idea. It is not at all difficult, and of course anything that you can do easily deleted and restored.  So that it does not damage the options messing around and see what you come with.

"All files" is particularly interesting because it offers a wide range of options, including email, file encrypt / decrypt them, pack / unpack it, or upload of the data into another cloud service.  You can even set up file folders automatically send out tweets, to generate Facebook status or a Goo.gl short URL.

To pay for the premium service, you would have to be a very great Automator and Converter: I have more than enough to be 10 automation. And the conversion features that paid such as MP3 conversion, can easily be performed by free alternatives (without the file automation, which also offers Wappwolf).

I would like to hear whether you think that this is a better conversion service as some of the competing services out there you in the comments. Is the automation of part of the service of the extra icing on the cake or something, it's beautiful, but completely unnecessary?

Note: The download button takes you to the manufacturers website where you can download the latest version of the software.

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Outlook 2013 RT Coming to Windows RT Tablets as part of Windows 8.1 Update

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AppId is over the quota

Today at Computex 2013, Tami Reller, CFO and CMO of Microsoft's Windows Division, announced that Outlook 2013 RT will be available on Windows RT tablets as part of the free Windows 8.1 update coming later this year.  This means that if you have a Microsoft Surface or a Windows RT tablet made by one of our hardware partners, or you are planning to buy one, you'll soon have access to the familiar tools in Outlook that help you communicate with others, manage your contacts and appointments, and find information fast. 

We're always listening to our customers and one piece of feedback was that people want the power of Outlook on all their Windows PCs and tablets.  In fact, a Morgan Stanley research study found that 61% of people shopping for tablets consider Microsoft Office to be the single most important software feature.  We're pleased to have Outlook 2013 RT join the other best-in-class Office 2013 RT applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.  And just like those applications, Outlook 2013 RT delivers a great touch experience for people using tablets. 

The new Outlook has so much to offer including a streamlined user experience that reduces clutter and makes your content king.  From cool new features like quickly responding to email with inline reply, to using 'peeks' to view your calendar or contacts without having to manually switch between tabs, Outlook brings great new tools to your fingertips.  And with today's news, Outlook will soon be available across Windows PCs, phones and tablets.  To learn more about what's new in Outlook, check out the Outlook section on Office.com.

 *Morgan Stanley Research, "Tablet Landscape Evolution", May 2012

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Why Office 365 is right for my family

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AppId is over the quota

Today's post is from Suzanne Emberton, a mother of six and full-time IT support analyst in Tennessee. Suzanne is an avid Office user, and in this post, she explains why Office 365 Home Premium is the right fit for her busy family.

I am busy. VERY busy. Not only do I have a large family of 4 kids and 2 step kids, I work full-time and volunteer often. I'm also a self-professed geek, so I am always looking for ways to make my life easier through technology. One amazing tool I’ve found to help my busy life is Office 365 Home Premium. With one subscription, I get all the Office products on up to five devices! Since our family seems to have 2 or more devices per person, this gives us plenty of Office goodness to spread around.

Traditional Office applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and even Outlook are basics I've always known and loved. Outlook is my family planning hub. I can easily sort through work and personal email quickly and I manage my calendars and tasks lists here as well. Outlook 2013 has great features like Quick Steps that make managing email a breeze. With an account at Outlook.com, all of the information syncs to the cloud and back to my Windows Phone, so I'm always connected to this essential information. I call it my brain, because I'd be lost without it!

Word and PowerPoint are used extensively in our home as well, for school reports and projects. The kids adore the new feature that allows you to search and insert images from Bing directly into the document. With their Microsoft accounts and SkyDrive making cloud storage so easy, they have access to their documents anywhere. My step-daughter has even started work on an essay for school in Word on her Windows Phone. She saved the initial draft to her SkyDrive and opened it in Word on our desktop at home to finalize it. As the official family proof-reader, the ability to share and manage these documents anywhere makes assisting with homework a much easier task for me. We even have the grandparents helping with homework now through using Skype video chat and sharing and editing a PowerPoint presentation together. Talk about family collaboration!

The Office 365 subscription also comes with a few applications that weren’t traditionally available for a Home and Student license scenario, Publisher and Access. Publisher is fabulous for creating flyers, newsletters, invitations and more. In our family, it has saved us from late night trips to the store, when invitations for a birthday party were needed by the next morning! A diverted family argument equals a happier home! Access is also great for creating databases, such as family heirloom recipes or DVD inventories. Templates on Office.com make getting started with this powerful program super easy.

My favorite program in the Office 365 Home Premium package though, is by far OneNote. With OneNote, I am attempting to go paperless in our home. I keep our chore lists, grocery lists, scans of important documents, scans and pictures of the kids art projects, scans of owner’s manuals to all those electronics and appliances we seem to accumulate, scans of various teacher notes and school reminders and more. I spend a little time each week scanning this stuff into OneNote and it keeps the mountain of paperwork in our house down to a much more manageable pile.

With OneNote on my computer, and my notebooks stored in the cloud and OneNote on my Windows Phone, I have access to all this information everywhere. The rest of the family also has access to the shared notebook and can add items during the week that they need, like notebook paper or shampoo. I make my grocery list at my desk computer, and then head off to the store, with my list on the phone. No more scrap paper or forgotten lists on the fridge!

At only $99 a year, it is a great value as we can easily share one license between all of our household computers and keeps us up to date with the latest Office. I feel like Office 365 Home Premium helps makes me a better mom overall and more focused on the relationships in our house, not keeping up with schedules, schoolwork and the mountain of paper. Office 365 Home Premium has been an amazing tool for our family that makes technology actually useful!

--Suzanne Emberton

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Webinar on Office 365 Education and SkyDrive Pro

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AppId is over the quota

In this webinar, we’ll show you what students, faculty, and staff can get for free with Office 365 Education, plus you’ll learn how to create websites quickly and how to save and share documents with SkyDrive Pro. Non-educators with Office 365 for business will also find helpful hints.

Can't view this video? It's also available here at Microsoft Showcase. Need a sneak peek? Watch a 30-second trailer.

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar

What you get for free with Office 365 Education Build a teacher or class site SkyDrive Pro vs. SkyDrive Share a doc, or keep it private 

References for this webinar

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

--Doug Thomas

View the original article here

Talking Retail: The New Windows Store Only at Best Buy

Today, we announced a strategic partnership to create the Windows Store only at Best Buy, a comprehensive store-within-a-store in 500 Best Buy locations across the United States and more than 100 Best Buy and Future Shop locations in Canada.

The stores within Best Buy will range in size from 1,500 square feet to 2,200 square feet and will be the premier destination for consumers to see, try, compare and purchase a range of products and accessories, including Windows tablets and PCs, Windows Phones, Microsoft Office, Xbox and more.

With that in mind, we wanted to talk with Chris Capossela, Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, who has a passion for retail and is a serious tech guru. Chris is a 20-year veteran of Microsoft, who served as Bill Gates’ speech assistant in his early years, and most recently was Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Office Division. Today, as chief marketing officer, he’s one of the biggest stewards of the Microsoft brand, including how it comes to life in retail.

Brandon LeBlanc: What’s unique about the Windows Store only at Best Buy?

Chris Capossela: Well, unlike a lot of store-within-a-store concepts, this will actually be a department-level takeover within Best Buy stores. And they will be massive in size, up to 2,200 square feet in some locations. The other unique thing about the Windows Store is the people. There will be an additional 1,200 staff on hand to provide a great customer experience, whether it’s choosing the right PC or showing consumers how to stream Xbox music through their Surface. Finally, the online experience should be fantastic. We’ll have a full online Windows Store experience that will mirror the in-store look-and-feel and offer a full range of Microsoft products, even those from other places in the Best Buy store.

Brandon LeBlanc: Is this partnership solely focused on the Windows Stores in these 600 stores?

Chris Capossela: Actually, it goes well beyond the computing department in these 600 stores. It also means we will have a great Windows tablet table inside the Best Buy Tablet Department, Windows Phones in their Phone Department, and lots of space for Xbox in their Gaming and Home Theater Departments. So there will be a big Windows experience where we bring everything together, but we’ll also look great in the other departments where people go. And, of course, we also extend the partnership to Best Buy’s online experience.

Brandon LeBlanc: So, why is Best Buy the destination choice for Microsoft?

Chris Capossela: It’s more about being the best destination choice for consumers. Today, Best Buy is the No. 1 retailer of PCs in the world. We’re able to do some really unique things through this partnership to show the range of our products – from PCs, to notebooks, to Surface, to Windows Phone, to Xbox – and how they all work together. We’re creating a premium experience for customers at scale, and Best Buy has been an amazing partner as we’ve built this out. As we said earlier this year, retail is a priority, and this partnership with Best Buy is a prime example of our commitment to the customer experience in evaluating, experiencing and enjoying Microsoft devices, and the software and services that connect them.

Brandon LeBlanc: Is there a story you want to tell customers when they come into the Windows store?

Chris Capossela: We’ve heard a lot from customers over the last year. They’re buying tablets and other devices to complement their PCs. They’re using technology both at work and at play, and it’s blurring how they think of using tech in their lives. At the same time, they’ve asked us to showcase touch-first devices in a compelling retail environment. We’ve listened, and the story of the Windows Store is that we’ve delivered what customers want: more touch, more hands-on experiences and more opportunities to see Microsoft technologies and how they work together.

Brandon LeBlanc: How is the Windows Store configured – what kinds of experiences and scenarios can we expect to see?

Chris Capossela: It’s something that has to be seen to be believed. Looking at the store head-on, it will feature an innovation table in the front, highlighting the newest and best Windows technologies of the moment. There will be a dedicated Surface area and central showcase tables with the latest and greatest PCs, laptops, convertibles and more. The back wall will feature software and accessories. And there’s an ecosystem section with real-life scenarios across Windows devices. This ecosystem area is exciting, because it will show off stuff like Xbox SmartGlass and SkyDrive. Personally, I love how I can use SkyDrive on my PC and phone, and how it saves me time when sharing documents at work, and photos with friends and family. This is a chance to show our customers the same thing – to let them see how Microsoft technology can enhance their lives.

Brandon LeBlanc: What will be different for customers when they come into the Windows Store vs. the Microsoft Store?

Chris Capossela: Well, first of all, we’re committed to our Microsoft Stores. With 68 stores open in North America, we’re seeing great success in our growing network. The Windows Store at Best Buy is really just another great opportunity to reach customers in more places and give them choice in their technology-buying experience. We’ve taken learnings from the Microsoft Store into the Windows Store at Best Buy, and we ultimately feel this is another great channel to offer a superior experience for the millions of customers who rely on Best Buy to purchase their PCs.

Brandon LeBlanc: What’s in your bag now – which PC and phone?

Chris Capossela: I carry the Nokia Lumia 920 phone and the Acer Aspire S7 on the road with me. I also use the Surface Pro around campus during meetings, but I really love the Acer Aspire’s larger screen for road trips.

Come discover the Windows Store only at Best Buy beginning in late June through September. More information about the Windows Store only at Best Buy is available here at BestBuy.com.

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Review: Unigine's Valley benchmark gives you room to roam

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AppId is over the quota

Unigine's gift with benchmarks has always been the deft, artful touch they lend to their number-gobbling glitter engines. From the candlelit crypts in 2007's Sanctuary to the blue skies of 2011's Heaven, they have a long history of serving up the stats with an extra helping of eye candy. With their latest benchmark, Valley, the new twist is size and plenty of it. Think Skyrim meets granola bar commercial, and you're starting to get the picture. They've squeezed a national park into this one.

Vast environments set Valley apart from other benchmarks.

Heaven fans will feel right at home, as the interface remains unchanged in Valley. Startup presents an attractive options window that offers language selection and visual effects customization. DirectX 9 and 11 APIs are supported, along with OpenGL. Screenshots are saved via hotkey. Most startup options are also available inside the application via a row of buttons along the top of the screen.

You can access most startup options ainside the Valley benchmark.

The Valley benchmark itself consists of 18 different scripted runs through the environment, from flowerbeds to mountaintops, through rainstorms and dappled sunshine. The depth of focus changes, shadows lengthen, leaves flicker and drops of water splash against the lens of your imaginary camera. It's all quite beguiling. At the end you're presented with a raw score and the FPS numbers (avg/min/max). That's not a lot, but it's enough to gauge gaming potential in a general fashion.

As in past Unigine offerings, you can also opt out of the canned benchmark runs and explore the environment at will, either gravity-bound on foot or as a floating camera. While this was a fun sideline in Heaven, Valley's enormous size makes nature hikes through its meticulously designed forests a true holodeck-style pleasure.

Rainstorms show off advanced water and light rendering techniques.

Nice as Valley is, it's a bit rustic in more than just theme. The benchmarking world is moving beyond simple framerate numbers, and a graph with frame time in milliseconds to track stuttering issues would be a welcome addition to the Basic or Advanced versions. It can be quite useful to see the number of frames that spend 50 ms or more being rendered. That information hides inside of avg/min/max framerate formats, but significantly alters quality of play. While the Pro version features deeper analysis, it also sports a $495 price tag clearly meant for professional developers.

More on point are several visual miscues; the most serious among them is noticeable scenery pop-in even at the highest levels of detail. In some areas, the flowers appear to jump out of the ground to greet you as you pass by. In a benchmark that takes its fashionable look so seriously, that's an inexcusable Wal-Mart moment.

This vista isn't just wallpaper. You can walk every inch of it.

These shortcomings don't ruin the ride, however. If you're looking to test or show off your high-end gaming steed, Valley is a fine companion to Heaven and a welcome addition to Unigine's stable.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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Subscriptions take off

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AppId is over the quota

Today, Surf Air, the world's first subscription airline, launched in San Francisco. The new airline aims to shake up the traditional passenger service model in much the same way Netflix upended movie rentals.  Subscribers pay a set fee each month for up to four boarding passes and tailored access to flights between San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.

We're not surprised to see more subscriptions take flight, but it is surprising to see the diversity of industries and use cases--from movies to razors to diapers to software.  Regardless, the attraction of the subscription model is consistent across all of these, and it mirrors feedback we've gotten from our own customers:

Convenience. Subscribers get what they want, when they need it. They also always get the latest products and information without hassles. Savings. Subscribers save money upfront and over time, especially if they are frequent users.Reliability. Subscriptions are easier to budget for, and particularly for businesses, subscription services can help balance expenses over time.

In the world of software, we view subscriptions as the future, and as we said on this blog last month, we think all Office customers will choose to subscribe in the next decade. We're already seeing significant momentum with more than one million Office 365 Home Premium subscribers since the product's launch on January 29--a faster adoption rate than reported by DropBox, Facebook and HuluPlus. And, Office 365 for business is Microsoft's fastest growing product ever and is on a $1 billion annual run rate.

It will be fascinating to watch how Surf Air does and whether this model can extend successfully into even broader territory. What do you think? Will Surf Air take off or be grounded? Talk back to @Office or in the comments below to tell us what you think.

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Review: Defishr removes fish-eye distortion from video

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AppId is over the quota

Is your video giving you the evil eye? The evil fish-eye? Well, Prodad's Defishr has you covered. A companion to Prodad's Mercalli V2 and Mercalli Easy video stabilization software, Defishr renders your fish-eyed video into the flat-horizon variety without a whole lot of work on your part. Defishr costs $99, and has a free demo.

Defishr's separate calibration module lets you optimize the process for your own cameras.

I tried correcting three fish-eyed videos from different cameras with Defishr, and it worked very well on all of them. The interface is simple, and lets you preview the either the original video, the de-fished video, or both side-by-side. If the video has stabilization problems, Prodad recommends that you take care of those after using Defishr. That said, I took care of it up front with decent results. Jitter and other artifacts are more noticeable in de-fished video.

While Defishr comes with 14 profiles, including one generic, to handle a number of cameras, you can also create your own by recording the provided calibration grid, then feeding the video to the program. There's an embedded link to an instructional video in the separate calibration module.

Defishr does have some rough spots, all interface-related. It's apparently not bright enough to discontinue the looping playback when you want to export a file. The program sat there, failing to export until I cancelled said export, stopped playback manually, and restarted the export process. The inability to paste in the product serial number rather than type it in is a nuisance, but at least it's just a one-time nuisance. Also, without the third-party codecs Defishr wants to add to your system during installation, Defishr wouldn't open MP4 files, even though I have Xvid installed to handle that particular codec(and the reason I initially skipped installing the others).

The Defishr interface is clean and lets you see the original and de-fish-eyed video side by side.

Minor annoyances aside, Defishr's core functionality is top-notch and the program is easy to use. You don't even have to take my word for it. The demo's preview function will let you see for yourself if it fixes your fish-eye problems. Video produced in demo mode is limited to five minutes and is watermarked.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
More by Jon L. Jacobi

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Have garage series: Goes under the hood of the new offices-what control you really?

This week our hosts Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsha frequently to address questions such as: "I get more control, when I the traditional Office installation with Office Professional plus 2013 or Office 365 ProPlus?" and "how to make Office 365 ProPlus set automatic updates?" Watch as she through, how to redirect automatic updates and catch up with the people behind the new Office as Skji Conklin, who explain the types of available controls foot, and Chris Yu, who shows the new telemetry features that run Office at the highest level to keep.

Be sure to mark your calendar for new episodes, and especially garage listen series live! on Wednesday, April 3rd 09 Pacific time learned for teaching in the real usage with Paul Thurrott of the Super site for Windows, together with "early adopters" and Office engineers, to discuss lessons learned and providing secrets for the new Office, including live-Q & A.

Read more on www.microsoft.com/garage and check out the complete archive of all previous garage series shows.

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How to encrypt your cloud storage for free

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AppId is over the quota
BoxCryptor One thing that stops a lot of people from using cloud storage companies is the perceived lack of security. BoxCryptor's encryption helps fill that need.

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If you want something done right, do it yourself. That may sound trite, but it rings true as advice for securing files that you've stored online. Several recent incidents—including breaches of Dropbox and iCloud—underscore the fact that, even with built-in encryption and SSL transfers, cloud storage providers can't perfectly ensure the safety of your data.

Luckily, you can take cloud security into your own hands.

A few different tools can help safeguard the privacy of your data when you store it on a remote server. One of our favorites is BoxCryptor, an easy-to-use encryption program that works with all of the most popular cloud services, is free to use (though you can pay for upgrades), and helps keep your data safe.

BoxCryptor is basically a virtual hard disk that encrypts files on the fly using 256-bit AES encryption. Unlike TrueCrypt, another popular on-the-fly encryption tool, BoxCryptor encrypts individual files, not an entire volume or container. Consequently, your BoxCryptor-encrypted files sync with your cloud storage service immediately after you save them, whereas TrueCrypt syncing occurs only after you finish encrypting an entire volume.

BoxCryptor encrypts and decrypts your files locally, and it doesn't transmit your password to third parties. As a result, your files remain unreadable to outsiders even if hackers manage to steal your password or otherwise breach your cloud storage provider's defenses.

Setting up BoxCryptor is fairly painless, but the service has a few subtleties that could throw you for a loop. I'll get into those after discussing the differences between the various BoxCryptor offerings and outlining how to get the encryption software up and running.

BoxCryptor is available in three editions: a free version, a $40 Unlimited Personal version, and a $100 Unlimited Business version. Free Android and iPhone apps are also available.

It's hard to argue with free.

The free version, which should suffice for many people, permits you to operate a single virtual hard disk for encrypting and decrypting files. Upgrading to the Unlimited Personal version introduces multiple virtual drives, so you can access several encrypted folders simultaneously; it also lets you encrypt file names, not just file contents. The Business license is the same as the Unlimited Personal license, but it includes a legal clause that allows you to use it in the workplace.

The first step in setting up BoxCryptor is to figure out how to download the right program from the BoxCryptor website. The row of gray icons at the top of the download page looks like a simple informative image, but you must click the icon of your operating system to snag the installation file.

Passwords: You just can't live without 'em. 

Once you have it, double-click the file to start the installation wizard, and then choose Create a new BoxCryptor folder. The next screen will ask you to choose a location for the encrypted folder. You can choose an offline local folder as the destination if you like; but BoxCryptor's big draw is that it works with any cloud storage service that creates a local directory on your PC, including the desktop clients for Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, and Sugar Sync. Most cloud storage services create a local directory in C:/Users/*UserName by default. After you choose the destination folder, enter a name for the BoxCryptor folder that you're creating.

Next, you'll need to choose a drive letter designation for the virtual disk. Be sure to pick one that you aren't already using. (I chose S: for SkyDrive.) Finally, create a password, and you're good to go. I strongly recommend creating a backup of your BoxCryptor configuration file when prompted to do so, since you'll lose the ability to descramble your data if you accidentally delete the config file and don't have a spare copy handy.

To complete the installation process, reboot your PC after closing the wizard. The virtual drive will appear alongside your physical drives when the computer restarts.

If you simply drag files into the BoxCryptor.bc folder that the software creates in your cloud storage directory, the files won't be encrypted. Instead, deposit your files in BoxCryptor's virtual drive (S:, in my case). Doing so will also make them appear in your cloud storage folder in encrypted form.

BoxCryptor creates a virtual drive that resides alongside your physical drives. 

Similarly, the only way to unencrypt your files is to withdraw them via the same virtual drive. If you try to snag your files directly through the BoxCryptor.bc folder they'll remain encrypted, and you won't be able to read them.

This arrangement makes accessing your files on the road a bit of a hassle, but even the free version of BoxCryptor allows you to reach cloud-stored encrypted folders, assuming that you have both BoxCryptor and your cloud service's desktop client installed on your PC. BoxCryptor also offers an Android app for accessing encrypted SkyDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox files after you enter your BoxCryptor password. An iOS app is available as well, but it works only with Dropbox.

Since both the encrypting and the decrypting occur on BoxCryptor's virtual drive, you'll likely have no reason to wander into the BoxCryptor.bc folder stored in your cloud drive. If you do, however, be careful not to move or delete the encfs6.xml file. That file holds the configuration key for decrypting your files. If you move or delete it, you won't be able to decrypt your files.

Anyone who purchases BoxCryptor Unlimited can run multiple BoxCryptor virtual drives simultaneously, whereas users of the free version are limited to a single virtual drive. Does that mean you can encrypt or decrypt files at only one cloud storage service or offline location? Not at all. It just means that you can have only one virtual drive operating at a given time. Though you can create several encrypted folders, you can encrypt or decrypt files for only one of them at a time.

To create another encrypted folder in a second location, right-click the BoxCryptor icon in your system tray and select Preferences. Next, enter Advanced Mode—ignoring the warning that the program displays—and click the icon for your encrypted virtual disk. The Remove option will turn red and become active; click it. Poof! Your drive will disappear from the list. Don't worry, the actual files (and their encryption key) won't be deleted.

You can use the Advanced mode to add and remove BoxCryptor virtual drives, allowing you to juggle encrypted folders on multiple cloud services at once.

Now, click the New icon. The installation wizard will pop back up. This time, create another encrypted folder for a different cloud service or offline folder than you did originally. For example, I created an encrypted folder in my Dropbox account to complement the BoxCryptor folder I'd already created in my SkyDrive account. Complete the creation process as you did before, by creating a password and selecting a virtual drive designation. Advanced options will pop up during the process, but you needn't worry about those unless you're curious about the software's niche uses. Bonus: You don't have to reboot the second (or later) time you create a BoxCryptor folder.

When you're done, a BoxCryptor.bc folder will appear in the new location, and a BoxCryptor virtual drive will appear on your computer, just as before. Use this second encrypted folder just as you did your first one, adding and removing files via the virtual drive, not via the BoxCryptor.bc folder itself.

What if you need to access or add a file in the encrypted folder you created the first time around? That virtual drive—though not the folder itself—disappeared when you removed it from the BoxCryptor list to create your second encrypted folder. But reconnecting to your previously created BoxCryptor folders is easy.

First, remove your current virtual drive in the Advanced Mode, as you did before—only this time click Add instead of 'New' when you're done. When the program asks you to choose the location of a BoxCryptor folder, select your originally created BoxCryptor.bc destination. (That's the one in SkyDrive, in my case.) Next, choose a letter for the virtual drive you're creating, ignore the advanced options, and enter your password for the encrypted folder when prompted. Immediately, a virtual drive connected to your original BoxCryptor folder appears on your computer, allowing you to encrypt and decrypt your files to your heart's content.

Deselecting and reactivating virtual drives in order to jump between multiple encrypted folders will get the job done, but repeatedly running through the reactivation process gets very tedious if you bounce between different services frequently. If you want to maintain several encrypted folders and you plan to use them often, I highly recommend upgrading to the $40 Unlimited Personal license—both to reduce activation headaches and to support the developers of this excellent piece of software.

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Review: Glipho makes blogging social

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AppId is over the quota
Glipho Glipho offers easy to use blogging tools and options for boosting your audience, but the site is limited by the size of its own audience.

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If you took a dash of WordPress, added a sprinkle of Twitter and a tablespoon of Facebook, you just might end up with Glipho…or, at least, what Glipho hopes to become. Billed as "the social publishing engine," Glipho is a cloud-based service that aims to build a social community of writers and help those writers increase their visibility.

To begin using Glipho, you sign up with an existing account: The available choices are Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You build your Glipho feed by picking writers to follow, though you have to select them based on a wide topic area (such as "technology" or "sports") and without seeing their writing at first. You can fine-tune these selections later, though, as you browse the site.

Glipho's home page displays the blogs in small blocks that show an image from the post as well as a snippet of the content. And Glipho's site has plenty of content to browse. The site posts content from trending writers—those whose posts are getting attention from other users—on the home page, as well as other posts the Glipho team chooses to highlight. You also can search for specific content, or browse by interests, topics, writers, and more. The overall layout is attractive and easy to browse.

Writing content is just as easy, thanks to Glipho's attractive layout. The blogging tools allow you to compose posts directly on the site, and you can import posts from Blogger, Tumblr, and Wordpress. Unfortunately, you can't automate the import process so that every new post is imported to Glipho from your existing blog. You'll have to import each new piece of writing individually.  Glipho also restricts what types of posts you import. You can't, for example, import photo-only posts from Tumblr, as Glipho requires that any content you import contains at least 150 words.

Glipho also provides tools for promoting your work and your profile as a writer. You can create a social profile that displays next to your writing, showing your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin and Google+ accounts for readers to find. And the Glipho team promotes some of the work on the site through their own social media accounts.
Glipho offers plenty of tips as you begin to write.

Posting your work on Glipho could gain you a new audience for your work, and it could help your standing in search engine results. Certainly, the site will allow new readers to discover your work…but it's limited by how many people visit the site. Until Glipho's audience grows to a critical mass, the site's social reach is naturally limited.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use the latest version of this Web-based software.

View the original article here

Review: Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery now handles RAID and Outlook

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AppId is over the quota

There's nary a media type that some edition of Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery 6 won't handle: hard drives, memory cards, optical discs...all covered.

One of Stellar Phoenix's best features is its colorful, mostly easy-to-use interface.

The program comes in three flavors: the $49 Home, which recovers from all the above media except optical; the $99 Professional, which does optical as well and adds support for creating images and recovering from Outlook .pst files; and the $299 Technician edition, which also handles RAID 0, 5, and 6 volumes and remote network recovery.

While Stellar Phoenix WDR 6's interface is colorful, and largely easy to use, I would like to see larger lists for the drives. I have quite a few partitions on my system when I'm testing, and being able to see only six at a time (and only one when searching for lost volumes) is confusing and forces a lot of unnecessary scrolling.

Stellar Phoenix WDR 6 did well with the two hard drives I tested it with, as well as an SDHC card with photos. It recovered the .mov portions of movies on the card as well, but not the forked headers that Canon uses. It didn't show these headers either, which need to be recovered and pasted into the movie files for them to work properly. Also, Stellar only came up with one recoverable file on my test flash drive, where R-Studio came up with hundreds.

The interface doesn't allow enough room for the user to see all the drives in a system with a lot of partitions.

By and large, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery 6 works quite well, and as with all recovery programs, you can download the demo and see if it works for your particular recovery problem (you can see, but not recover, data). Alas, the advanced features will cost you, and it was less than stellar at recovering data from my test flash drive. R-Studio Data Recovery ($80), which has been my workhorse for years, and IsoBuster ($40) are worthy competitors.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can compare the three editions of the software and download the latest version of your choosing.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Juilliard, and now he power-mods his car for kicks.
More by Jon L. Jacobi

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Webinar: Simplifying your Excel Data

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AppId is over the quota

The webinar is over. A video of the webinar will be posted shortly .

In this week’s webinar you’ll learn how to make a massive sheet of numbers something that can tell a story with just a few clicks. We’ll also show you a better what to show data in a presentation. We start our Office 15-Minute Webinar at 9:15 am Pacific Time, with a Q&A to follow.

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar

Cut the clutter with Conditional Formatting and Sparklines Excel 2013’s Quick Analysis tool A better way to present numbers to a crowd

References for this webinar

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

--Doug Thomas

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Skitch brings markup tools to Evernote PDFs

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AppId is over the quota

Many business users rely heavily on Evernote for managing documents and other information, but the service's Achilles' heel has long been its lack of markup capabilities.

That's where Skitch comes in. Now owned by Evernote, this desktop/mobile app provides a simple but effective set of tools for annotating documents, the idea being to get your point across visually when communicating remotely.

And it just got a much-needed feature boost: Skitch for iOS (and Mac) now supports PDF annotation.

That may not sound like a big deal, but for anyone who uses Evernote to store and especially share PDFs, it's welcome news indeed. Now you can mark up PDFs with text, arrows, shapes and highlighter tools, then sync them back to your account and/or share them with co-workers.

The new Skitch 2.5 also adds something called Summary, which assembles all added mark-ups into a single view. Evernote describes it thusly:

When you share an annotated multi-page PDF, Skitch lets you add a new first page to that document. This page is made up of previews of each piece of feedback contained in the PDF. Click on one and you’re taken to the annotation. This summary makes it a snap for your recipient to scan over all of your feedback, understand it, and take action without needing to go beyond the first page.

Other additions to Skitch 2.5 include a stamps tool used to add color-coded, at-a-glance feedback (approve, disapprove, question, etc.) to specific areas, and tool tips to help you learn the new features.

Although Stamps is available to all Skitch users, the PDF and Summary functions require an Evernote Premium account (though you can try them free for 30 days even if you're not a paying Evernote customer).

There are, of course, lots of PDF apps that offer markup tools, and a few that can even sync with Evernote. But if you're looking to keep everything in the Evernote ecosystem, as it were, now you can.

For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow.
More by Rick Broida

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Free Project 2013 quick start training available on demand

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AppId is over the quota

Whether you are a novice user of Microsoft Project 2013 or you want to learn about IT Professional or developer topics, please consider our new quick start training for Project 2013--it's free and available on demand!

You get over 9 hours of content divided into 13 modules. Don't have much time? Don't worry, each module is broken down into individual videos so you can go at your own pace.

Modules 2 through 4 provide an overview of the new capabilities of Microsoft Project 2013 while modules 7 to 13 go deeper into IT Professional and developer topics. Please find below the detailed description of individual modules.

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

View the original article here

Thanks a million

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AppId is over the quota

Today, thanks to you, the new Office is officially the best-selling Office edition yet, with more than one sold every second on average since it launched.

And if that wasn't enough, in just over 100 days, you've made Office 365 Home Premium a hit with more than 1 million subscribers, putting it on pace with some of the most popular services around.

  

However, the numbers are only part of the story. At its core, Office exists to help people get things done, and people tell us they are choosing the service because it delivers full Office, it keeps them always up-to-date and it's a fantastic value.  

What's truly exciting is how people are using the service and their newfound flexibility to do great things. From entrepreneurs who are realizing their dreams to families who are finding more time to connect. One of these people is Suzanne, a mom of 6 (gulp) and full-time support manager. She writes on the Office blog about how Office 365 Home Premium is working for her family. 

 "I feel like Office 365 Home Premium helps me be a better mom overall and more focused on the relationships in our house, not keeping up with schedules, schoolwork and the mountain of paper."

--Suzanne Emberton

At the end of the day, that is what technology should do for us--give us time for the things that matter most. For Suzanne, that's spending time with her amazing family. 

We'd love to know your story too. Tell us how you use Office to make your life and family run better on our Facebook page. We'll publish a few of our favorites on the Office blog to help inspire others. 

Thanks for inspiring us and for being part of our story.

--John Case

Editors Note:

 John Case is the corporate vice president of marketing for the Microsoft Office Division. In this capacity, John's responsible for product management, pricing, packaging and advertising as well as sales and partner strategy for Office, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer, Project and Visio. "The new Office" refers collectively to the Office 365 subscriptions, including Office 365 Home Premium, Office 365 University, Office 365 ProPlus, and the Office 2013 suites, including Office Home & Student 2013, Office Home & Business 2013, Office Standard 2013, Office Professional 2013.The new Office sales figures are for sales to organizations and individuals.

View the original article here

Chip In for higher ed success

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AppId is over the quota

Today, we launched Chip In, a crowd-funding site to help students get a new PC for college. Just like a wedding registry, students sign up for the PC of their choice at www.windowschipin.com. Then, they can ask mom, dad, grandma, (Facebook) friends, and (Twitter) followers to chip in to fund the new PC.

Even better, we'll chip in too. Microsoft will contribute 10% of the purchase price on select PCs, and for the first 10,000 people who get their PC fully funded, we'll throw in a 4-year subscription to Office 365 University.

That's right, future (and current!) college and university students...no more pen sets or successories from Aunt Jo. Now, you can ask for something you actually want and need to set yourself up for higher education success.

Go to www.windowschipin.com to get started.

View the original article here

Apple sieht die chance, im Wettbewerb mit Office im Web

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Apple on Monday, almost as an afterthought, announced it was working on browser-based versions of its iWork productivity applications, a move one analyst said challenged Microsoft’s Office behemoth.

For a few minutes during Monday’s keynote of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Roger Rosner, who heads iWork development, spun through a quick demonstration of iWork for iCloud, a second attempt by Apple to move its Pages word processor, Numbers spreadsheet, and Keynote presentation maker into the Internet age.

That first attempt, dubbed iWork.com, ended miserably last July, more than three years after its launch, when Apple pulled the plug. iWork.com was intended to complement the locally installed suite by the same name, but offered no Web-based document creation or editing, and instead made do with document viewing, downloading, and commenting.

iWork for iCloud, on the other hand, is to be a full-featured trio of applications that run in a browser on either OS X or Windows, and allow document creation and editing on all a user’s devices. They are, essentially, Pages, Numbers and Keynote ported to the Web.

Those apps support just three browsers in the beta available as of Monday to iOS and OS X developers: Apple’s own Safari, Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). Mozilla’s Firefox or Opera Software’s Opera are not supported.

But the fact that it runs on IE at all—or Chrome for that matter—marks the first time Apple has offered iWork of any kind on Windows. That was also apparent when Rosner proclaimed that iWork for iCloud could edit existing Microsoft Office documents created by that suite’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

“We know we live in a world of Microsoft Office documents,” said Rosner, before demonstrating how the in-browser Pages opened Word documents and saved them in that same format.

Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, noting the cross-platform capabilities of iWork for iCloud, saw Apple’s online maneuver as a combination of catch-up and the realization that productivity software now requires an online component to stay competitive.

“This is a recognition that productivity apps have to be online,” said Gottheil. Local-only applications, whether iWork on OS X and iOS, or Office on Windows and OS X, isn’t enough. “Apple’s saying [iWork for iCloud] validates their platforms and keeps them up-to-date.”

But most of all, iWork for iCloud meshes with Apple’s long-running strategy of trying to tempt consumers and small businesses now in the Windows camp to defect to OS X, iOS, or both. “I see this as building a bridge from Windows to the Apple platforms,” said Gottheil of the entry into Microsoft’s turf, the first such move since Safari for Windows, which launched in 2007 but was unceremoniously dumped last year.

iWork for iCloud won’t reach public beta until “later in the year,” Rosner said, but he didn’t breathe a word about what, if anything, the online apps would cost.

Gottheil said Apple would not look at iWork for iCloud as a revenue generator, not a direct one anyway, since the competition, Google Docs and Microsoft’s Office Web Apps, are free. If Apple, as Gottheil expected, offers iWork for iCloud free of charge, the revenue opportunity would be in sales of its devices, as iCloud is pitched as a side benefit of owning an iPhone, iPad or Mac.

So why is Apple bothering, especially after many of its online efforts have been busts, like the little-used Ping, a social network add-on to iTunes, and MobileMe, whose 2008 debut was a disaster? Gottheil, who has regularly criticized Apple for poorly executed online initiatives or failures to keep up with rivals in Internet services, said it could be a defensive-offense strategy.

“All of the platforms, Apple, Google, Microsoft, are in constant conflict. They’re all trying to build their own on-ramps [to customers] while putting road blocks on [rivals’],” Gottheil said.

In other words, if Microsoft touts Office Web Apps as the solution for iPad owners who want productivity tools—something that the company’s CEO Steve Ballmer did last year—iWork for iCloud could be seen as Apple’s tit-for-tat response, both trying to hold on to their own customers and entice some of the opposition’s.

There are other ways of reading the tea leaves. With Microsoft’s hesitation to pull the trigger on native Office apps for the iPad, perhaps Apple saw an opening to further lock its customers—Gottheil described it as “putting road blocks on your own off-ramp”—into its own ecosystem before Microsoft made its move.

But it was Microsoft’s mixed feelings about its online apps that Gottheil made central to his argument that, notwithstanding the seemingly insurmountable odds of denting its Office business, iWork for iCloud was a legitimate threat to Microsoft.

“Microsoft seems very ambivalent about Office on the Web,” Gottheil said, pointing out that the company has done little to publicize Office Web Apps or that they’re free to use. The ambivalence should not be a shock, since Microsoft loses an Office sale for every customer who realizes they can get by with the limited-function, limited-feature online versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

But with PC sales lagging, tablets more than taking up the slack, and Microsoft’s mobile strategy just getting off the ground, Apple has an opportunity. It can bang the drum about a free iWork for iCloud without risking much, since sales of iWork on OS X and iOS are a puny fraction of its revenue. Microsoft may hesitate to follow simply because Office provides such a big chunk of total revenue, 31% in the first quarter.

“Microsoft has to be worried about Office, not its enterprise [customers] but those who just buy it to be able to read Office file formats and create small documents,” said Gottheil. “iWork for iCloud is a threat there,” he maintained.

Rosner also said that Apple would update the native OS X and iOS iWork apps—the desktop versions were last refreshed in 2009—this fall.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news.
More by Gregg Keizer, Computerworld

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Another chance to watch Garage Series Live!

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AppId is over the quota

Five shows into the series, we've looked at what your options are, what's changed and what's new with the new Office. We threw skydiver Fully Sik out of a plane to test if Office 365 ProPlus could be installed during 90 seconds of free fall; we took a look at the new Office telemetry to help you optimize your Office configuration; and we've explored identity and data access with the new user-based Office and caught up with Zero Day and Trojan Horse Sci-Fi author and industry renowned cyber-security expert, Mark Russinovich on the security model for online services. We even performed the great race of Office installs.

We've received a lot of your questions along the way so, for our sixth show, we changed gears to present a live 60-minute episode of the Garage Series Live! on real world adoption tips and tricks with live Q&A. If you missed the show you can see it again here.

For one, our guests. We were joined by friends from our early Office adopters program: Marvin Correa from Sephora, Patrick Wirtz from Walsh Group and Sebastian Stein from HhpBerlin. Journalist, author and blogger Paul Thurrott from winsupersite and our Lead Test and Deployment engineers, John Hoegger and Jefferson Criddle also joined in the conversation. This was one of the first times that we've had early adopters of Office 365 latest technologies, as we have only really been in market with them for a little over a month. Paul, Patrick, Marvin and Sebastian were awesome to work with and brought a wealth of adoption experience to the show. They were all looking to deal with the trends of users bringing in their own devices, multiple devices per user, high demand for touch capabilities with the introduction of tablets, evolving mobility requirements, providing Office services to seasonal workers and improving communication services across Windows and non-Windows devices.

Paul challenged himself and our hosts to have him appear as a skydiver or in a clown suit in an earlier winsupersite.com post. This was to pay homage to our first ever XStream install, where we install Office within 90 seconds of free fall. You can see the result, which provided one of the more comic moments of the show and our favorite tweet:

"World, I can die now. For I have seen everything. @thurrott+jumpsuit@office garage" -Travis Lowdermilk

Paul also arranged for a special recording of Windows Weekly where he quizzes Leo Laporte to see if he can provide the right answers to the most commonly misunderstood questions about the new Office as a service with Office 365 ProPlus. We didn't quite capture the true outcome as we introduced Paul on the show, so watch to see how Leo really scores out of 5.

If you caught the show or watch it now, you'll see that we ended with a lightning trivia round to challenge the knowledge of our guests in an East versus West coast trivia fight. Part of the fun of live broadcasting was that because we were running overtime we didn't manage to declare the winner of the competition - the East couch. Congratulations Paul, John and Patrick!

We have a bigger special in store, where we subject co-host Yoni Kirsh to high-G aerobatics in Australia to see whether Office can install before he loses his lunch. Join us next episode to see what happens.

Be sure to mark your calendar for new episodes and learn more at www.microsoft.com/garage where you can discover additional resources and check out the complete archive of all previous Garage Series shows.

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Was ist neu in SharePoint-Online–top-10

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Mark Kashman(@mkashman) is a SharePoint Senior Product Manager on the SharePoint team, focused on SharePoint Online.

SharePoint Online (SPO) has a gaggle of new innovation and welcome improvements. The premier sharing service is updated with a new, fluid user interface, active personal file sharing, higher storage limits for both personal and team sites, a high-end cloud app development model, and more robust tooling for admins to more easily and effectively control their SPO environment. Everyone benefits from the new SharePoint Online!

Users benefit with new ways to share internally and externally and anonymously, in how they search and discover the right information and people and how they build sites and experiences in a more self-service fashion. Project managers now have better ways to organize documents, project details and timelines.Developers are no longer limited on the types of solutions they can deliver to the Office 365 cloud. IT Professionals can more easily manage sites and permissions on behalf of their entire company.

This article will cover the top 10 new SPO innovations with a pointer at the end to the new SPO service description - home to all SharePoint features across all offerings (online and on-premises).

The entire UI across Office 365 on down to SharePoint Online has been reimagined. It's easy on the eyes, easy to navigate and easy to accomplish common tasks. And it's snappy performance will delight! Let's take a look at a few examples of the new UI improvements:

A sample site showing the UI of a rich team site template with an embedded PowerPoint Web App, a rollup Top-Rated Doc list, a KPI chart and the new surrounding navigation and share/follow/sync buttons.

Drag and drop.
Now you can upload documents, pictures, and other types of files to your site by dragging them from your computer to a library on your site, such as Documents or your SkyDrive Pro library.

Dragging and dropping a file from the desktop straight into a document library in the browser.

On-hover. Use this new callout feature with any document in a library or from within search results to see a set of rich commands and contextual information. You can open, share, or follow documents, view a document preview, and use Deep links to jump directly to content inside a document.

On-hover from a document library showing a preview into a Word document using the embedded Word Web App. Note the ability to Share and Follow from the same on-hover card.

Touch. A key investment area across all of the products in the new Office, large touch targets make it easy for you to filter, navigate, and work with documents--increasing accessibility across devices, big and small.aSyncronous calls. Refresh the content you want to focus on. List and library navigation and filtering means fewer full-page refreshes--less time waiting, more time doing.Office Web Apps edit. Now available to everyone--even those you invite via External Sharing can edit Office documents on your behalf in the browser. You can know with confidence that your collaborators have the best tools to help you build your business. Universal Office 365 top navigation. Now you can find your way without having to remember (or bookmark) how to get there. And it's all in a simplified, single browser experience--no pop ups, no feeling lost.

The new Office 365 top navigation makes it simple to navigate from your Outlook email into SkyDrive Pro, your new cloud storage for work.

SkyDrive Pro is cloud storage for employees that is now a core part of SharePoint Online.  SkyDrive Pro is intended to  meet your usage criteria and provide organizational control. Everyone who has use rights to a Personal Site (what used to be called "My Sites") gets SkyDrive Pro, along with 7GB of personal storage quota--that's increased from 500MB. Personal sites are available within more Office 365 plans than before (review the new Office 365 plan comparison site). 

A view of the SkyDrive Pro library within Office 365, when accessed with an Internet browser.

With SkyDrive Pro, employees can:

Sync and share documentsCollaborate on documents with individuals both inside and outside of their organization Access content and information anywhere and from a multitude of devices

... while admins can:

Control content lifecycle and versioningProtect against data loss and perform eDiscoveryManage access permissions

Learn more here today about SkyDrive Pro.

And by the end of June 2013, you will be able to access your SkyDrive Pro in even more places with native mobile client apps for Windows 8 and iOS. SkyDrive Pro access is already embedded within Windows Phone in the Office Hub.

We are very excited about Yammer! Yammer is becoming the social layer across many Microsoft products. This is most prevelant with SharePoint and CRM today--it's our big bet for enterprise social. Office 365 is our next step - Yammer will be included with a SharePoint Online or Office 365 investment (compare plans). We recently announced more details on what will be available and when.

As you start to see deeper and deeper connections, you'll discover all the Yammer goodness:

Unique adoption model appeals directly to end users and makes it easy for organizations to become social "instantly" Utilize the power of Groups (internal and external) and FeedsCreate notes and discussions around your filesUse powerful administration tools to help brand, analyze and manage your company's social intellectual property (IP). Access Yammer across multiple browsers, operating systems and devicesDiscover all the features Yammer offers

 

A view on the Yammer home page. You see the main feed with posts, files and discussions, plus navigation to people and groups.

In the short term, the SharePoint Newsfeed will continue to be the default social experience in Office 365, but the option to replace it with Yammer will be a valuable first step.

The Newsfeed page provides quick access to the lists of people, documents, sites, and tags you're following. If you're familiar with popular social networking sites, you'll feel right at home using the new microblogging features, which allow you to engage in conversations in your Newsfeed. 

 

A user view of the Newsfeed shows the people Garth is following and their activities within SharePoint.

The most common actions you can perform within the Newsfeed are:

Post information and ideas to the company newsfeed or site newsfeed@mention colleagues and include #hashtags"Like" posts, include pictures, videos, links to documents, and web URLs Learn more on Office.com about all the Newsfeed offers.

No matter which service you select, you can access Yammer or your SharePoint Newsfeed on the go with native client apps:

External Sharing just got better. Now you can share sites, folders, and individual documents with the new Guest Links feature that enables users to invite others from inside and outside the company to collaborate on individual Office documents. To share and collaborate, guests enter a username and password, or they can use  anonymous co-authoring.  In addition, you can control the contributions by the permission level you choose to grant. You might want some users to have Read permission, while others have permission to Write. You can also revoke sharing at any time.

For fun, try out this Guest Link I created - it'll take you to a Word document I put together with one of my favorite cloud jokes. @mkashman if you know the answerJ.

 

Sharing a single document, showing the new Sharing dialog to invite new users to collaborate. You can also control whether they can view or edit, and whether you require sign-in.

Note: Based on direct customer feedback, we also simplified the new external invitee sign-in experience so your invited external users do not get lost in the process.

The public website in SharePoint Online includes a new design and new features for customizing the site and individual pages. Because the website is built on the SharePoint platform, you now get publishing capabilities, more Web parts (social media add-ins, blogging and commenting, new Apps for SharePoint from the Office Store), SEO property options and advanced design options. Now you also can disable the public website so that it's not visible on the Internet until you choose it to be. This is useful when the site is under construction or in rare cases when the website must be taken offline. Simply enable your website when you're ready for it to go back online.

If you want to completely redesign the website from scratch or use a design you already have, you can use the Design Manager. This set of features lets you turn a conventional HTML web page into a SharePoint master page with page layouts, mobile views, cascading style sheets, and more. You can use your own website editing tools (like Adobe DreamWeaverTM) to do the design work before uploading the files to SharePoint Online's Design Manager--no need to be a SharePoint expert.

 

Sample website designed and hosted in SharePoint Online - check this sample live now: http://www.contosobistro.com/

To learn more, view the Get Started with your public website video and read the Get started with your public website article.

SharePoint Online brings improved ways to help you protect your business with eDiscovery. From a single eDiscovery management site, you can add sources and create queries to discover content across sites and document libraries, mailboxes and discussions and keep them in-place --in SharePoint Online, in Exchange Online and in Lync Online. For example, you can conduct your legal case or audit with powerful search-driven tools from within the SharePoint Online based eDiscovery Center. You can then preserve all items in-place, retain items that matched the queries, and export items to the industry standard format--the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) specification. Each legal case or audit is a collaboration site that includes a document library that you can use to store documents related to the management of the case. For information about working with cases, see Plan and manage eDiscovery cases. When the case is closed, all of the holds associated with the case are released. For information about eDiscovery queries, see Create and run eDiscovery queries.

 

An eDiscovery site showing query results from SharePoint Online and Exchange Online, plus the on-hover experience on a discovered item.

When two world-class services come together, you get the benefit of both worlds. Combine SharePoint Online's document management strengths with Exchange Online's powerful email solutions and you get Site Mailboxes - powerful project-based "inboxes" that help teams organize project-related content and email into a single view, while everything is preserved in its original location as documents in SharePoint Online and email in Exchange Online.

You can access Site Mailboxes through Outlook 2013 as well as SharePoint Online. If you don't have Outlook 2013, you can view the same content from the SharePoint Online site that loads in a site-specific Outlook Web App. Only those with permission to the project site can view the Site Mailbox.

 

A Site Mailbox opened from a SharePoint Online project site.

The same Site Mailbox accessed in Outlook 2013 (Note: "SharePoint Reviewer's Team Site" in Outlook's left-side folder pane is the Site Mailbox).

Learn more about Site Mailboxes on Office.com Help.

Quickly identify if you've found the right person or document before investing time "searching beyond the search results." Users can move their cursor over a search result, and with on-hover, they can get a deep, rich look into the item without opening it. The on-hover displays a person's contact card and/or a document preview by using the embedded Office Web Apps (for example, scroll through a Word document or click through slides in a PowerPoint deck). You will also see Deep Links within the on-hover card based on your search keywords - these take you directly to corresponding pages and slides deep inside your content.

At the core architectural layer, SharePoint Online search has greatly improved the relevancy of search results. What you get back is more assurance of finding what you are looking for. And SharePoint Online search is more programmable that ever. You can control the user's experience with powerful metadata-driven results and filtering options. Plus the overall Search center is extensible to your business preferred layout and design.

The more you use the system, Search powers tailored suggestions for people, sites and content you may also be interested in.

 

Rich search experience with refiners, on-hover preview, deep links and more.

Hybrid search
Gone are the days of CRI--content repository isolation. Users working across Office 365 and on-premises environments will be able to obtain search results that include content from both locations. A hybrid SharePoint environment is composed of a SharePoint Server, typically deployed on-premises, and the newest version of Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise which includes the new SharePoint Online. A hybrid environment may be configured to provide one of several levels of interoperability, depending on the purpose  - whether it's one direction or bi-directional in which an on-premises SharePoint Server 2013 farm and SharePoint Online access search results information from each other. And as mentioned above, the search experience is extensible--in relation to hybrid search, you can design the look and feel around the source of where content lives.

The above graphic shows a programmatic result block an admin can configure to distinguish results coming from both SharePoint Online and/or SharePoint on-premises.

Learn more about all the new Search offerings in SharePoint.

Read about the breadth of hybrid scenarios between SharePoint Online and SharePoint on-premises, plus a number of new hybrid whitepapers.

Hello app, nice to meet you. It's so nice that now you can run where apps scale best--on services like Windows Azure. Sandbox Solutions, site collection level custom applications, still apply, but you are no longer limited to them. Now you can build or buy powerful solutions that enable richer scenarios "beyond the sandbox."

The Cloud App Model in SharePoint Online enables you to build apps for SharePoint by using familiar tools and a rich set of features. For the developer and IT Pro audiences, SharePoint Online in Office 365 now includes this new programming model for the development, installation, management, and use of apps. Users can discover and download apps from the SharePoint Store, or from their organization's own Corporate Catalog. The SharePoint Online admin can use the settings in the SharePoint admin center to manage the App Catalog, get apps from the SharePoint Store, manage licenses for apps purchased from the SharePoint Store, and monitor apps in use.

 

App for SharePoint programming model

Visit http://dev.office.com/ to further explore the new Cloud app model.

To get started exploring third-party apps, visit the Office Store and review the Apps for SharePoint.

What's better than doing one thing at a time? That's right: bulk operations. Now, in SharePoint Online, you can chew Chewing gum, walk, AND script with PowerShell all at the same time!

SharePoint Online Administrators now can use Windows PowerShell to manage their subscription. Connect to SharePoint Online from your desktop and remotely create new site collections, perform upgrade activities, add and remove SharePoint Online users and groups, repair sites, and recycle bin management. These kinds of management tasks can be scripted, automated and performed in bulk to save you time and minimize errors caused by common repetition mistakes. For more information, see Introduction to the SharePoint Online Management Shell.

 

The SharePoint Online Management Shell showing results from a Get-SPOSite cmdlet executed against a SharePoint Online tenancy.

To make the new SharePoint Online Management Shell more accessible to power users - people not fluent in deep IT management - we've developed a Web-based companion tool called the Windows PowerShell Command Builder Tool. It helps you quickly understand and use Windows PowerShell cmdlets designed for SharePoint Online. If you want to create a site, use the Command Builder tool to create a cmdlet, and you can create a site from the command line, instead of stepping through several pages in the user Interface.

 

The Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Command Builder showing an example command being generated to perform a New-SPOSite cmdlet.

Limits are made to be exceeded. We received a lot of great feedback during the Office 365 Preview and were able to improve a great number of common requests. Users' storage, SkyDrive Pro, has been raised to 7GB - up from 500MB. Site Collections limits have been raised - 3,000, up from 300. And we've designed for file upload sizes up to 2GB. The complete storage story is shown in the below table across the primary Office 365 plans, plus additional row items to help best plan for your use and migration of SharePoint Online.

SharePoint Online storage table, all maintained here with real-time updates regarding numerous SharePoint Online boundaries and limits.

Office 365 constantly evolves. Microsoft takes feedback seriously and strives to bring you technology that meets and exceeds your requirements - and we hope increases your "wow" experience! For more information beyond these top new features, visit the new SharePoint Online service description where you can compare all new features across all Office 365 plans and SharePoint on-premises offerings.

Try Office 365 today, test out firsthand all that SharePoint Online now offers, and tell us what you think.

Mark Kashman(@mkashman) is a SharePoint Senior Product Manager on the SharePoint team, focused on SharePoint Online.

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