Register now: Office 365 "Get It Done" webcast November 7

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AppId is over the quota

Transform your workplace, enable innovation.

The workplace is changing. Today, over 70% of employees work outside the office. Across your organization, employees need easier access to the right information and insight on any device, anywhere to make fast, informed decisions. Yet over 40% of surveyed workers feel there isn't enough collaboration in their workplaces. Progressive organizations are listening! Social in the enterprise is no longer a nice-to-have but rather a workplace necessity.

Join us for a live session with industry thought leaders and special guests to hear firsthand how Microsoft Office 365 has helped companies harness employee ideas, embrace new workplace cultures and technologies, and spark innovation and spontaneous collaboration in the workplace to accelerate business: getting it done, anywhere. Click here to register today!

Luke Williams: Highly respected thought-leader will talk about how disruption in the workplace can lead to innovation.Adam Pisoni: Cofounder and CTO of Yammer and Microsoft GM of Engineering will share his thoughts on what makes a responsive organization.John Case: Microsoft CVP, Office wraps up by giving a glimpse of what new features will be rolling out in the next 6 months for Office 365.Also hear from Andy Roberts, Head of End User Technology at Telefonica as he discusses how Office 365 has created agility and helped move their business forward. Chat directly with Microsoft Executives and Product Managers throughout the show!

You won't want to miss this event. Register now!

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The Garage Series: Explaining data security and your control in Office 365

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AppId is over the quota

In this week’s show, hosts Jeremy Chapman and Vijay Kumar tackle one of the most common questions asked about cloud services, “How safe is my data?” Security is an important element of trusting the service of any service provider. But even beyond security, they cover related concerns around data privacy, availability and show some of the controls your IT administrators have to configure access policies, lock down clients and build your own control set for data stored in or transferring though Office 365 services.

Jeremy: In last week’s show we rounded up all of Office apps and services to show cross-platform mobile devices coverage – from the core Office Mobile apps on iPhone and Android to new experiences like OWA for iPad. We also put Office VP, John Case, and skateboarding legend, Bucky Lasek, along with Office Mobile to the test as they navigated a rally course using roaming pace notes an Android phone, iPhone and Windows Phone all accessed from a single Office 365-stored document. 

This week, I’m joined by Office 365 security and compliance lead, Vijay Kumar, to address the topics of security, privacy, configurability, availability and overall trust of Office 365 services. We also hear from Office 365 General Manager of Engineering, Kevin Allison, and hear back from Mark Russinovich, then we return to Madrid to hear from European-based security experts and get their perspective about Cloud versus on-premises security and data access. 

Vijay: In fact today’s show we hope to give you the 101 on how we protect and manage access to your data with Office 365, as well as the behind the scenes view on Microsoft’s approach. We explore the topic in two halves. First, the measures that Microsoft has put in place to manage and monitor the Office 365 online service and second we look at what you can do to configure Office 365 for your specific organizational needs.

Jeremy:  So let’s explore the first side of the coin, if you are considering a shift to Office 365 Cloud services, the first thing that you may want to know is who has access to it and how it’s safeguarded by Microsoft?

Vijay: Well we do all the things that you would expect from a physical security perspective in terms of how we lock down our data centers including perimeter and personnel access and replicate your data across data centers to protect from data loss or natural disasters. What many people don’t know is that access to every file is gated based on access permissions with a lock box process. Also, your data has its own unique footprint and is isolated from the data of other organizations.

Jeremy: And speaking of access, a related fear is around overall privacy. Whether or not you sign up with Microsoft as the service provider, you don’t want your data being mined for other purposes such as advertising and you want your data to move with you if in future, you decide not to use the service. 

Vijay: Absolutely, and these measures are a given with Office 365. It’s your data and we simply process it while providing productivity services through email, Office applications, unified communications etc.

Jeremy: So even if a third-party requests access to my data it’s protected? 

Vijay: That’s a great question and very topical given the recent press reports around domestic and foreign government access to stored data and data in transit. Ultimately unless legally obligated, Microsoft cannot fulfill requests to access your data. We have to inform you of third-party requests and require your consent. We even provide reports of non-owner access to email inboxes from the Office 365 Administrator Console.

Jeremy: So let’s talk about vulnerability of the service and how Microsoft mitigates criminal attempts to hack its data centers and your data. What most people want to know is how secure is their data in the Cloud compared to on-premises? One of the points that resonated with me made by Marcus Murray, a European security expert that we spoke to on location in Madrid was that one key advantage of the Cloud is that it’s difficult to hack into a system if you don’t have machine level access as you would do on-premises. The way most malware works is to install software or replace system level services on host machines to access data and mask the existence of the malware, if the host layer is abstracted as with Office 365, it is much more difficult to infect a system.

Vijay: We also take extra measures to ensure that services are sufficiently hardened from external hacking threats. Mark Russinovich discussed are red and blue teaming approach where we have experts on staff tasked with the challenge to penetrate the service. They employ all standard means from automated and code execution to social engineering in order to access infrastructure and service layers. At the same time, the blue team works to detect any successful breaches and block any points of entry. They also review access logs and details from the red team to look for patterns and issues to inform ongoing security hardening work.

Jeremy: And of course, a related point on how Microsoft safeguards data access is what happens if the service goes down? How can I trust that I will always have access to my data when I need it?

 Vijay: We get asked that all the time, and we’ve had a lot of practice in maintaining ongoing application availability with our email and collaboration services that have been around for decades. The first thing to know is that we have a financially-backed SLA of 99.9% - which means the service cannot be down for more than 43 minutes in any given month or we need to compensate you as a customer. 

We want to be transparent and accountable too. In fact, we publish our historical uptimes quarterly on the Trust Center. More than that though we built the code and so we know how to fix it and as Kevin Allison explains, we have a Dev Op process, which means the developer who wrote the code is the assigned operator and is on point to fix – resulting in faster and more agile issue resolution compared to traditional approaches for on-premise software.  

Jeremy: Switching gears to explore the other half the coin has been a continuous topic on the Garage Series shows, that is how you define your own control set for managing Office 365 which is a key differentiator for Microsoft compared to other service providers. This is particularly important if you are concerned about meeting regulatory or company Compliance requirements around access to corporate data.

The good news is that, you have control over where your data resides – you can run Office 365 Services along-side your on-premises environment and keep your most sensitive data within your organization’s walls. Importantly too, can apply the same type of access rules that you would typically use to configure your on premises environment and in many respects they are easier to implement and faster.

Take for example Rights Management Services (RMS) – you can now set up file level access in 5 clicks in a large organization versus setting up and configuring a whole array of servers as you would do in the on-premises world. RMS protects the document and ensures that only those with access rights can view it. It is much stronger than simple password protection, because if the document does leak out of an organization, even employees of the organization where it was created would need to authenticate that A. they are still a member of the organization and B. have appropriate permissions to view or edit the file. For example, if a user were to load a USB drive with documents, then leave the company, then any document with RMS protection would not be viewable until that person authenticates against the Rights Management Service. In this case, since the former employee is no longer with the company, his log in and authentication attempts will fail and he won't be able to access the file.

In addition to RMS, we also have tools like Data Loss Prevention where an IT administrator set up rules for sensitive information like credit card or personal identification numbers. Then Outlook will mount an attached file or scan the email text and warn users or if the information leaves the inbox, transport rules in Exchange will block that information from sending. We saw this in a previous episode as Mr. #DealWithIt (played by Stephen Rose) attempted to send his boss's credit card details in a New Orleans bar. 

Vijay: So today’s show was just an overview, we are just scratching the surface in terms of what’s possible – which is why we have two security show specials coming soon in the New Year 

Jeremy: And, in fact we tackle mobile device control and security with Office 365 on next week’s show, when I’m joined again by all things data management and SharePoint expert, Mark Kashman. I’m also joined by Exchange engineering lead Greg Baribault to discuss the genesis and evolution of mobile device management in the advent of the ‘bring your own device’ trend where more and more people are using multiple devices of choice to get work done and to work from anywhere. 

See you next week.

Jeremy and Vijay

More Resources:

Office 365 Trust Center

Garage Series Video Channel

Garage Series Season 1 Blog Archive

Follow @OfficeGarage on Twitter

 

View the original article here

Office 365 news round-up

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AppId is over the quota

Warren Buffett once said that, "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." Indeed, our goal with Office 365 has always been to provide top value for the money. From building all the important capabilities businesses need directly into the suite to providing an enterprise-class experience, Office 365 is a complete cloud-based productivity solution that offers top value. Don't miss the guest blog post from Christopher Hertz, CEO of Microsoft partner New Signature.  Chris explains his perspective working with customers on  why Office 365 offers top value for the dollar.  Also if you haven't already, please read how businesses of all sizes get value from using Office 365. Also, learn why Office 365 offers an enterprise-class experience.

Below is a round-up of these and other news items from the last couple weeks. Enjoy!

Microsoft Tops Apple as America's Most Inspiring Company; Google 7th, Amazon 8th. Americans rank Microsoft as the most-inspiring company.

Microsoft Customers Can Now Buy Go Daddy Domain Names Directly Within Office 365. Microsoft "has made its Office 365 software even more convenient for enterprises" by integrating it with web hosting company Go Daddy.

Durham University Moves into the Cloud with Office 365.  Durham University migrates the email of 16,000 students and staff to the cloud by deploying the Office 365 suite. Microsoft has made its Office 365 software even more convenient for enterprises by integrating it with Web hosting company Go Daddy.

Office Garage video series demonstrates the Office Mobile capabilities. The latest episode of Microsoft's Office Garage video series takes a look at Office on mobile devices.

SharePoint 2013 Adds Better In-Memory Analytics. Microsoft's business intelligence tools "have arrived squarely on the doorstep of serious big data analytics."

Microsoft Details Updated Mail App for Windows 8.1 with Outlook.com Integration. Microsoft optimizes the Mail app in Windows 8.1 with Outlook.com integration.

Microsoft Details SkyDrive's Smart Files Feature, Prepares To Roll Out Bing-Powered OCR Search. Microsoft announces that its optical character recognition (OCR) feature for searching through SkyDrive files will be rolling out over the coming weeks.

View the original article here

Webinar: Getting Office 365 for your nonprofit

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AppId is over the quota

The webinar is over. A video of the webinar will be posted shortly. You can add the webinar series to your calendar.

Office 365 is now available for qualifying nonprofits through its software donation program. The donation allows nonprofits to get the latest services such as  robust, commercial-free email, calendar, instant messaging, and web conferencing tools. Learn how to get it and ask your questions.

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar

What you get for free with Office 365 for Office 365 for Nonprofits plans and pricing Help protect your data Share a doc, or keep it private 

References for this webinar

--Doug Thomas

View the original article here

Office 365 compliance controls: Data Loss Prevention

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AppId is over the quota

 Shobhit Sahay is a product marketing manager on the Exchange team.

When was the last time you asked your employees to carry your company's handbook containing all the company policies with them? Do your IT workers know whether a particular email message they're sending may violate company policy and run the risk of being noncompliant? Are they sure whether an email they're sending contains sensitive information? Almost every IT worker faces compliance questions like these daily. Learn how you can help your IT workers achieve compliance without disrupting their normal routine or yours.

A recent blog post laid out the two dimensions of Office 365 security, compliance, and privacy: built-in capabilities and customer controls. This post focuses on a key feature under customer controls in compliance: data loss prevention (DLP).

DLP Policy Tips inform your workers in real time

With the new DLP Policy Tips in Office 365, admins can inform email senders that they may be about to pass along sensitive information that is detected by the company's policies-before they click Send. This helps your organization stay compliant and it educates your employees about custom scenarios based on your organization's requirements. It accomplishes this by emphasizing in-context policy evaluation. Policy Tips not only analyzes email messages for sensitive content but also determines whether information is sensitive in the context of communication. That means you can target specific scenarios that you associate with risk, external communication for example, and configure custom policy tips for those scenarios. Reading those custom policy tips in email messages keeps your workers aware of your organization's compliance policies and empowers them to act on them, without interrupting their work.

DLP Policy Tips is supported only in Outlook 2013, but even if your users don't have the latest version of Outlook, you are still protected from disclosing sensitive data through back-end processing. Admins can configure rules and take actions by setting up DLP rules in the Exchange Administration Center (EAC). This ensures that a single DLP policy controls both the client and server endpoints, minimizing the admin administrative overhead.

How do Policy Tips work? Consider a real-life scenario. Contossoplay is a company that has an internal policy to warn its employees any time they include sensitive information like a credit card number in email communications. Sara Davis is a Contossoplay employee composing an email to Dan, who works outside her organization. She includes credit card information in the mail, and immediately a DLP policy tip shows up in the message in Outlook.

When you include sensitive information in an email message, a DLP policy tip alerts you before you send the message.

At this point Sarah can decide to: send the email message with the credit card information, send the message with the credit card information and click Report to report a false positive, or delete the credit card information before sending the message. If she's unsure what to do, she can click Learn more to understand her company's policy, which her admin may have customized. 

Let's  look at another scenario. Contossoplay has recently set up a policy that blocks emails containing multiple credit cards or that need to be overridden with a business justification. Sara starts an email message to book the travel for multiple employees in the company and attaches a document that includes the personal credit card information of the employees. A different policy tip shows up, highlighting the new compliance requirement. In Outlook 2013, the attachment that is the cause of concern is also highlighted, making it easy for her to locate the information being questioned.

A custom DLP policy tip alerts you about an attachment that may contain high-count sensitive information.

As these two scenarios show, data loss prevention empowers end users, making them part of the organization's compliance process and ensuring that the business flow is not interrupted or delayed, because achieving compliance does not get in users' way. At the same time, data loss prevention simplifies compliance management for admins, because it enables them to maintain control easily through the Exchange Administration Center in the Office 365 admin portal.

Policy Tips are similar to MailTips, and you can configure them to present a brief note in Outlook 2013 that provides information about your business policies to the person creating a message. You can configure policy tips that will merely warn workers, block their messages, or even allow them to override your block with a justification. Policy tips can also be useful for fine-tuning your DLP policy effectiveness, because they allow end users to easily report false positives. If policy tips are not available to a user in Outlook, admins can still control compliance behavior by setting up rules in the Exchange Administration Center. For example, admins can set up an action to generate incident reports if a particular DLP event occurs. Such incident reports can help tracks events in real time, because a report is generated in real time and sent to a designated mailbox, such as the mailbox for incident manager account. The figure below shows a sample incident report.

You can generate incident reports for specific DLP events in Office 365.

What does data loss prevention in Office 365 offer?

Data loss prevention in in Office 365 helps you identify, monitor, and protect sensitive information in your organization through deep content analysis. DLP is increasingly important for enterprise message systems, because business-critical email often includes sensitive data that needs to be protected. Worrying about whether financial information, personally identifiable information (PII), or intellectual property data might be accidently sent to unauthorized users can keep a Chief Security Officer (CSO) up all night. Now you can protect sensitive data more easily than ever before, without affecting worker productivity. Admins can easily set up compliance management in email using the Exchange Administration Center (EAC) in the Office 365 admin portal. In the EAC, you can:

Start with a preconfigured policy template that can help you detect specific types of sensitive information such as PCI-DSS data, Gramm-Leach-Bliley act data, or even locale-specific personally identifiable information (PII).Use the full power of existing transport rule predicates and actions and add new transport rules.Test the effectiveness of your DLP policies before fully enforcing them by running the rule in the Test mode.Incorporate your own custom DLP policy templates and sensitive information types.Detect sensitive information in message attachments, body text, or subject lines and adjust the confidence level at which Exchange takes action.Add policy tips, which can help contextually educate your end users by displaying a policy tip in Outlook. This can also enable users to provide feedback via false-positive reporting.Review incident data in message-tracking logs or add reporting by using a new generate-incident report action.Look at the different DLP reports in the Office 365 admin center to drive compliance adoption in the organization.

How do I get started with data loss prevention?

Using the Microsoft-supplied DLP policy templates is an easy way to get started. DLP policies are packages of transport rules with new features that you can customize. These rules include classification types that define the type of content you are looking for in the DLP policy. You can use the Exchange management shell, the Exchange Administration Center (EAC), or even your own XML file editor to start incorporating DLP policies into your messaging environment. The screenshot below shows the data loss prevention management interface within EAC.

You can manage DLP from the Exchange Administration Center in the Office 365 admin portal.

DLP is accomplished through what is called "transport rules" in Exchange. The new transport rules include a significant new approach to detecting sensitive information that can be incorporated into mail flow processing. This new DLP feature performs deep content analysis through keyword matches, dictionary matches, regular expression evaluation, internal functions such as validate checksum on credit card numbers, and other content examination to detect specific content types within the message body or attachments. Here is a screenshot for the policy tip rule that triggered the policy tip above in the second screenshot.

You can configure policy tip rules to trigger specific alerts about sensitive content in email.

How do I establish policies that protect  sensitive data?

You can start using DLP in one of these three ways:

Apply an out-of-the-box template supplied by Microsoft. The quickest way to start using DLP policies is to create and implement a new policy using a template. This saves you the effort of building a new set of rules from scratch.Import a prebuilt policy file from outside your organization. You can import policy templates that have already been created outside of your messaging environment by independent software vendors. In this way you can extend the DLP solution to suit your business requirements.Create a custom policy without any preexisting conditions. Your enterprise may have its own requirements for monitoring certain types of data known to exist within a messaging system. You can create a custom DLP policy to check and act on your own unique message data.

Sensitive information types in DLP policies

When you create DLP policies, you can include rules that include checks for sensitive information. The conditions that you establish within a policy, such as how many times something has to be found before an action is taken or exactly what that action is, can be customized within your new custom policies in order to meet your business requirements. Sensitive information rules are integrated with the transport rules framework by introducing a condition that you can customize: If the message contains...Sensitive Information. This condition can be configured with one or more sensitive information types that are contained within messages.

To make it easy for you to use the sensitive information-related rules, Microsoft supplies policy templates that already include some of the sensitive information types. Here is the inventory of the sensitive information types supplied out of the box.

Data loss prevention in Office 365 is one of the major customer compliance control features offered to customers. Other compliance features under customer controls are available, such as in-place eDiscovery and in-place legal hold. We'll discuss these customer controls more in-depth in future blog posts.

So get started today and make your organization more compliant, without impacting your users' or your productivity, using data loss prevention.

--Shobhit Sahay

View the original article here

Office 365 news round-up

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Warren Buffett once said that, "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." Indeed, our goal with Office 365 has always been to provide top value for the money. From building all the important capabilities businesses need directly into the suite to providing an enterprise-class experience, Office 365 is a complete cloud-based productivity solution that offers top value. Don't miss the guest blog post from Christopher Hertz, CEO of Microsoft partner New Signature.  Chris explains his perspective working with customers on  why Office 365 offers top value for the dollar.  Also if you haven't already, please read how businesses of all sizes get value from using Office 365. Also, learn why Office 365 offers an enterprise-class experience.

Below is a round-up of these and other news items from the last couple weeks. Enjoy!

Microsoft Tops Apple as America's Most Inspiring Company; Google 7th, Amazon 8th. Americans rank Microsoft as the most-inspiring company.

Microsoft Customers Can Now Buy Go Daddy Domain Names Directly Within Office 365. Microsoft "has made its Office 365 software even more convenient for enterprises" by integrating it with web hosting company Go Daddy.

Durham University Moves into the Cloud with Office 365.  Durham University migrates the email of 16,000 students and staff to the cloud by deploying the Office 365 suite. Microsoft has made its Office 365 software even more convenient for enterprises by integrating it with Web hosting company Go Daddy.

Office Garage video series demonstrates the Office Mobile capabilities. The latest episode of Microsoft's Office Garage video series takes a look at Office on mobile devices.

SharePoint 2013 Adds Better In-Memory Analytics. Microsoft's business intelligence tools "have arrived squarely on the doorstep of serious big data analytics."

Microsoft Details Updated Mail App for Windows 8.1 with Outlook.com Integration. Microsoft optimizes the Mail app in Windows 8.1 with Outlook.com integration.

Microsoft Details SkyDrive's Smart Files Feature, Prepares To Roll Out Bing-Powered OCR Search. Microsoft announces that its optical character recognition (OCR) feature for searching through SkyDrive files will be rolling out over the coming weeks.

View the original article here

Cloud Services you can trust: Security, Compliance and Privacy in Office 365

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AppId is over the quota

 When you make a decision to place your trust in a cloud services provider for productivity services, security, compliance, and privacy are top of mind. With over a billion customers on Office and decades of experience running online services, we understand what it takes to earn and continue to maintain your trust and confidence in Office 365.

Our construct for security, compliance and privacy in Office 365 has two equally important dimensions - Built-in capabilities that include service-wide, technical capabilities, operational procedures and policies that are enabled by default for customers using the service and Customer controls that include features that enable you to customize the Office 365 environment based on the specific needs of your organization.

We will look at Built-in capabilities and Customer controls for each of the key pillars of trust - Security, Privacy and Compliance - in more detail below.

Security

Security of our customers' information is a key trust principle. We implement policies and controls to safeguard customer data in the cloud and provide unique customer controls that you can use to customize your organizational environment in Office 365.  

As an Office 365 customer, you will benefit directly from in-depth security features that we have built into the service as a result of experience gained from years of building enterprise-grade software, managing a number of online services and billions of dollars in security investments. We have implemented technologies and processes that are independently verified to ensure high security of customer data.

Some key aspects of our built-in security capabilities are:

Physical security - We monitor our data centers 24/7 and we have technologies and processes to protect our data centers from unauthorized access or natural disastersSecurity best practices -We use best practices in design like Secure Development Lifecycle and operations like defense-in-depth to keep your data secure in our data centersData encryption - Every customers' email content is encrypted at rest using BitLocker Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryptionSecure network layer - Our networks are segmented, providing physical separation of critical back-end servers from the public-facing interfaces at the same time our Edge router security detects intrusions and signs of vulnerabilityAutomated operations like Lock Box processes - Access to the IT systems that store customer data is strictly controlled via lock box processes. This access control mechanism is similar to a system where two people have to turn the key for an action to be allowed.

As a result of Office 365 offering productivity services to a wide range of industries, we have built both features and choices that you can control to enhance the security of data based on the needs of your organization. 

Some key aspects of our customer controls for security are:

Exchange Hosted Encryption - Enables delivery of confidential business communications safely, letting users send and receive encrypted email directly from their desktops as easily as regular email.S/MIME - Enables encryption of an email messages and allows for the originator to digitally sign the message to protect the integrity and origin of the message. As part of our continued investment in security technologies that Government and Security conscious customers care about, we are adding support for S/MIME for Office 365 in the first quarter of Calendar Year 2014.Rights Management Services - Enables a user to encrypt information using 128-bit AES and use policies on email or documents so that the content is appropriately used by specified people.Role based access control - Allows administrators to enable access to authorized users based on role assignment, role authorization and permission authorization.Exchange Online Protection - Allows administrators to manage your company's Anti-virus and Anti-spam settings from within the Office 365 administration console.Identity Management - Provides organizations with various options for identity management such as cloud based identity, identities mastered on-premises with secure token based authentication or hashed passwords to integrate into the Office 365 identity management system based on the security needs of your organization.Two factor Authentication - Enhances security in a multi-device, mobile, and cloud-centric world by using a second factor, such as a PIN, in addition to the primary factor which is identity.

Another key principle of Office 365 trust is Compliance.  It is expected that commercial organizations have regulations and policies that they must comply with to operate businesses in various industries. These policies can be a mix of external regulatory requirements that vary depending on industry and geographical location of the organization and internal company-based policies.  Office 365 provides built-in capabilities and customer controls to help customers meet both various industry regulations and internal compliance requirements.

Office 365 stays up-to-date with many of today's ever-evolving standards and regulations, giving customers greater confidence.  To bolster this and to continue earning your confidence, we undergo third-party audits by internationally recognized auditors as an independent validation that we comply with our policies and procedures for security, compliance and privacy.

Some key aspects of built-in compliance capabilities are:

Independently Verified - Third party audits verify that Office 365 meets many key world-class industry standards and certificationsControl framework - We follow a strategic approach of implementing extensive standard controls that in turn satisfy various industry regulations. Office 365 supports over 600 controls that enable us to meet complex standards and offer contracts to customers in regulated industries or geographies, like ISO 27001, the EU Model Clauses, HIPAA Business Associate Agreements, FISMA/FedRAMP Comprehensive Data Processing Agreement - Our Data Processing Agreement comprehensively addresses privacy and security of customer data, helping customers comply with local regulations

We provide Compliance controls within the service to help our customers comply based on the policy needs of their organization. 

Some key customer controls for compliance are:

Data Loss Prevention - Helps customers to identify, monitor and protect sensitive data through content analysisArchiving - Allows organizations to preserve electronically stored information retaining e-mail messages, calendar items, tasks, and other mailbox itemsE-Discovery - Permits customers to retrieve content from across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, and even file shares

Privacy is our third trust principle.  As more and more customers are relying on online service providers to keep their data safe from loss, theft, or misuse by third parties, other customers, or even the provider's employees, we recognize that cloud services raise unique privacy questions for businesses.   

To meet your needs, we are continually developing technologies to enhance privacy in our services. We call this privacy by design - which is our commitment to use best practices to help protect and manage customer data. 

Key built-in capabilities and principles of Privacy in Office 365 are:

No Advertising - We do not scan email, documents, build analytics or data mine to build advertising products. In fact, we do not use your information for anything other than providing you services you have subscribed for.Data Portability - As an Office 365 customer, your data belongs to you, and you can export your data at any time with no restrictions. We act only as a data processor and provider of productivity services, not as a data owner Notice and Consent - When we act upon your data, we let you know why and we ask for permission in advance or redirect any enquiries to our customers unless legally prevented to do so.Breach Response - We have strong, tested and audited processes to inform you if there is a breach and remediate issues if they occur.Data Minimization - We strive to minimize the actual amount of customer data that our internal teams have access to.

In addition to built-in capabilities, Office 365 enables you to collaborate through the use of transparent policies and strong tools while providing the distinct ability to control information sharing.

Some examples of customer controls for privacy are:

Rights Management in Office 365 - Allows individuals and administrators to specify access permissions to documents, workbooks, and presentations. This helps you prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people by applying intelligent policiesPrivacy controls for sites, libraries and folders- SharePoint Online, a key component service of Office 365 that provides collaboration functionality has a number of privacy controls. One example is that SharePoint Online sites are set to "private" by default. A second example is that a document uploaded to a SkyDrive Pro is not shared until the user provides explicit permissions and identifies who to share with.Privacy controls for communications - In Lync Online, another key component service that provides real time communications in Office 365, there are various administrator level controls as well as user level controls to enable or block communication with external users and organizations. One example is blocking access to federation in Lync. Similarly there are controls throughout the service for the admins and users to ensure privacy of their content and communications.

At Microsoft, we have been building Enterprise software for over two decades and we run over 200 online services. We bring all of this experience to Office 365 to give you industry leading capabilities in security, compliance and privacy. In addition, we take the advantage of scale and continuous feedback from providing services to a diverse customer base across industry and geography to constantly learn and improve the Office 365 services. Security, Compliance and Privacy are the key pillars of the Office 365 Trust Center (the other two pillars being Transparency and Service Continuity). Customers can have confidence that Microsoft is a thought leader and will continue to make deep investments to protect customers in the cloud.

Learn more about security, compliance, and trust in this weeks Garage Series: Explaining data security and your control in Office 365.

Learn more about recent compliance agreements with the announcement for the state of California and Microsoft signing the CJIS security policy agreement.

-- Vijay Kumar

View the original article here

Office 365 now available in 38 new markets

Office 365 builds commercial availability in 38 new markets, 3 new languages, and 5 new currencies.  Office 365 is now available worldwide on 127 markets, and it is easier for customers to pay with their method of choice.  All Office-365-plans are now available for customers in the Philippines and Thailand to the subscribe.  The other new markets can now start a 120-day trial before a paid subscription will be made available.

The new languages are Turkish, Arabic and Dutch. This increases the number of Office 365 languages up to 36, including English.

New markets are: Philippines, Thailand, Viet Nam, Lebanon, Jamaica, Bolivia, Brunei, Nicaragua, Honduras, Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Georgia, Ghana, Mauritius, Macao SAR, Iraq, Bermuda, Rwanda, Belize, Cameroon, Nepal, Moldova, Mongolia, Zimbabwe, Barbados, Cape Verde, Fiji, Kyrgyzstan, US Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Angola, Libya, [1] Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, Yemen.[2]

New payment are accepted currencies: Brazilian real (BRL), Mexican peso (MXN), Malaysian Ringgit (MYR), Hong Kong dollars (HKD), Indian rupee (INR).

We are pleased to bring you the Office 365 for more customers around the world.  You can see, hereis the complete list of markets Office 365.

[1] Five markets later this year offering no academic calendar: Virgin Islands, United States, Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Angola and Libya

[2] Three markets will have academic offerings, but not to later studies: Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, Yemen.

View the original article here

Webinar: Office Mobile for iPhone

Dave Ludwig is a content developer for Office.com.

The webinar is over. Go to http://aka.ms/offweb for more information, how to join the series.

This week Webinar to learn about Office Mobile for the iPhone. We move on to start and the accessing, viewing and editing Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations.

What do you learn in Tuesday's webinar

How can I have Office Mobile for iPhone to get how to open e-Mail either from the cloud or MessagesHow to read and navigate FilesHow to edit files, Word, Excel and PowerPoint--and add to save CommentsHow and share

References for this webinar

--Dave Ludwig

View the original article here

Webinar: Getting things done with Office Web Apps

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AppId is over the quota

You can access and share Office documents with browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. Learn some of the basics and the latest features of these free tools.

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

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar

Yes, Office Web Apps are different than Office 365 Storing docs with SkyDrive New features customers asked for Working on a doc with someone else at the same time

References for this webinar

Office Web Apps:

SkyDrive:

NEW! Download free Office Webinar Apps: Windows 8 App and the Windows Phone 8 App.

Go to http://aka.ms/offweb to join us live every Tuesday for an Office Webinar and a Q&A session.

--Doug Thomas

View the original article here

Office 365 news round-up

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Diese Woche Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) erinnert mich an John Donne's Gedicht "Niemand ist eine Insel." Microsoft hat ein ausgedehntes Netz von Partnern in allen Größen, von die alle eine entscheidende Rolle spielen bei der Herstellung unserer Produkte und Dienstleistungen ein Erfolg. Donnes Worten ausgedrückt, ist jeder unserer Partner "ein" Stück des Kontinents, ein Teil des Mains." Ich bin gedemütigt durch die unglaubliche Kreativität und das Engagement, die jeder unserer Partner auf die Mischung bringt.

WPC-2013 wurde ein bemerkenswerter Vorgang. Zu den Höhepunkten: Power BI für Office 365haben wir angekündigt, eine neue Self-Service-Business Intelligence (BI) bietet, ermöglicht Unternehmen an leistungsstarke neue Möglichkeiten in Excel und Office 365 Erkenntnisse aus ihren Daten gewinnen. Wir erleichtert nach Partnern für ihre Kunden den Übergang zwischen verschiedenen Versionen von Office 365. Windows 8 Partner Gelegenheitbesprochen. Wir veröffentlichten Untersuchungen, die belegen, dass Partner mit mehr als 50 Prozent ihres Umsatzes mit Bezug zu der Wolke haben Genuss höheren Rohertrag. Und wir unsere Top-Performance-Partner geehrt.

Wenn Sie noch nicht, sendet bitte lesen Sie in der Gast-Blog von Palmetto Technology Group, Wortell, SkyKick, CDW Corporationund Sapienta Holdings--einige der vielen Microsoft-Partner, die Kunden, die Migration zu Office 365 helfen. Bitte siehe auch unsere Ankündigung über die Verfügbarkeit der Office und SharePoint-Speicher in 22 neue Märkte.

Hier ist eine Zusammenfassung von einigen von diesen und anderen wichtigen Nachrichten aus den letzten paar Wochen:

Microsoft: It's Time to Pounce auf Cloud-Markt mit den richtigen Tools. Mit der großflächigen Einführung von Office 365 und Windows Azure ist der richtige Zeitpunkt für Partner in dem Reich Markt Cloud-Ready Kunden zu erschließen.

Microsoft COO Turner sagt, dass noch mehr Innovation kommen in diesem Jahr ist. Rede auf der Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft-COO Kevin Turner verspricht, dass Microsofts Geschäftsjahr 2014 werden seine größte Jahr der Innovation aller Zeiten.

Microsoft-Intros macht BI für Office 365. Microsoft kündigt Power BI für Office 365, eine neue Self-Service Business-Intelligence bietet gelieferten durch Excel und Office 365.

Microsoft Spreads Office Store für 22 neue Märkte, Intros Business-Intelligence-Tool. Die Microsoft Office und SharePoint-Speicher ist in 22 neue Märkte mit zusätzliche Sprachunterstützung für Französisch, Deutsch, Spanisch und Japanisch jetzt offen.

Microsoft bietet nahtlose Bewegung zwischen Office 365-SKUs #WPC13. Microsoft machte es möglich, nahtlos von einer Office-365-Kunden-Plan, oder SKU, auf einen anderen verschieben.

Poste Italiane zielt auf Cloud-Computing mit Office 365 binden. Poste Italiane, der staatlichen Postdienst in Italien, hat einen deal mit Microsoft-Italien, um seine digitalen Dokumenten-Services mit Office 365 integrieren.

Windows 8.1: neue Chance für Microsoft-Partner. Windows 8.1, die zur Fertigung Ende August veröffentlicht wird, bietet neue Möglichkeiten für Partner mehr apps auf weitere Geräte für Kunden zu bringen.

View the original article here

OneNote updated Windows store app for touch and Office 365

Today we release another update for OneNote for Windows Storage , which will add two things. First of all, you can now login with your Office 365 account so that you can easily open your work notes. Secondly, we have facilitated to dismiss the keyboard on your touch device.

If you already the app, just tap the store -Kachel in Windows 8, and then tap or click top right on updates . You have not the app yet? You can download it here.

Has your work or school Office 365? It's great to keep your working notes in the cloud with Office 365, and OneNote. With the update, now can you just login with your Office 365 and see all notebooks that you have recently used.

Here is how:

1. Tap on more notebooks.

(2) On the lower left tap the plus button, the more notebooks to see Add a work or school accountsays.

 

3. Sign up with your work or to the school account.

4. That's it! Now, you see a list of the most recently used notebooks. Tap a just to open it.

One of the best things about OneNote is that you can enter anywhere only. You want to record something from the page? Go ahead. OneNote is your way out and lets you concentrate on your notes.

But sometimes you want to omit. Can now dismiss you, the onscreen keyboard, so you can see the whole screen to read.

In Windows 8 you don't have to usually the keyboard thinking. It is evident, when typing in the text box type you and it goes way when you tap outside. It works great. Like so typing "out there" in OneNote? Just tap an empty area and the keyboard goes away.

If the keyboard is down, touch anywhere to bring and take notes to start.

We use better to make your feedback OneNote. So let us know what you think. We are looking forward to hear from you.

-------------------------

Download OneNote: onenote.com
Follow OneNote: twitter.com/msonenote
Like OneNote: facebook.com/MicrosoftOneNote

View the original article here

Review: LibreOffice 4 liberates you from Microsoft Office

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AppId is over the quota
LibreOffice 4.0 If your needs don't include macro and programming compatibility, this office suite might just wean you away from Microsoft.

Download Now

If you're feeling like an overtaxed and unappreciated serf in Microsoft's kingdom, LibreOffice 4 might just offer the freedom you seek. An extremely capable office suite, LibreOffice 4 is also highly configurable, extensible, and cross-platform. It supports OS X and Linux in addition to all flavors of Windows. It's also free—not an insignificant attribute for most of us.

I'm writing this article using Writer and enjoying every moment of the process. For pure writing and editing, it's simply more in tune with my methods than anything else I've tried. I don't miss Microsoft Word's pitiable grammar checking one bit. Writer's grammar checker is better, and the spell checker and other tools are also top-notch.

Writer is enough like Word that the transitional learning curve is minimal, and I've yet to find an important feature missing. Indeed, it has some of its own, such as the predictive word assistance similar to the one Microsoft has on its phone software, but has never bothered to implement it in Word. It offers only one word—not a choice of several, as Microsoft's does—but it is handy on occasion.

LibreOffice Writer is a stellar word processor and highly compatible with Microsoft Word.

The one thing that's truly held me back from Office alternatives over the years was lack of support for Word's Track Changes feature, which is a mainstay for many writers and editors. Writer fully supports revisions and presents them in more tasteful default colors. One feature I do miss is the Word's formatting paintbrush, but I don't miss it enough to go back.

Bloggers and website writers take note: Writer supports HTML, and if your content management system supports the CMIS interoperability standard, you can user Writer to edit your CMS entries and articles as well.

Calc proved a very pleasant surprise by loading every Excel spreadsheet I have and mimicking the formatting perfectly. I'm heavy on the conditional formatting and Calc does it better than Excel, extending it and recalculating automatically when I copy in another row. Excel requires manual intervention.

The one disappointing area of Calc is macros. Calc has its own capable macro and programming language, but it's largely incompatible with Office's VBA, so I had to redo the range names and macros for my hardware ratings sheets. But from there it was easy to attach them to the button objects I employ for sorts and the like.

Note: Calc retains VBA macros when it saves files in Excel format, unless you tell it not to.

Base is capable enough that I'm seriously considering moving my invoicing system over to it from Access. It has all the basic features, including forms, reports, SQL, and relational multiple table support.

LibreOffice Base is a relational database.

It can connect to external databases, including those from Microsoft Access. Base doesn't import Access forms and reports, but its form design wizard and editor are good enough that recreating them is a not an unduly tedious task. Subforms are supported so you can display multiple tables in a single form.

LibreOffice Base easily connects to Access tables.

Base requires Java for its own databases. However, as a front end for external databases such as the Access database I used in my hands-on, Java is not required.

My test database had only about a thousand records, so I can't say how well Base scales. Feature-wise, it's strictly an end-user database. There are no means to make a database run as a standalone.

Impress didn't display some portions of PowerPoint presentations imported, so in that regard it was one of the less successful modules in LibreOffice.

LibreOffice Impress has impressive presentation creation capabilities, though PowerPoint compatibility isn't quite 100%.

However, Impress is quite facile at creating presentations, and it exports to PDF, which is the format I see most often these days. PDFs don't require proprietary software, namely PowerPoint, to render. A design wizard and a decent collection of nice-looking templates help to get you started.

Both the Math (formula rendering and shaping) and Draw applications are capable. I found the Draw program and its myriad shapes and objects particularly useful and easy. You can also use the Draw app to create presentations.

LibreOffice's interface is enough like Microsoft Office's that few users will have trouble adjusting to it. It also give you complete control over the contents of menus and toolbars, as well as the actions invoked by keyboard shortcuts. This makes it easy to emulate a program you might be more familiar with, or to streamline your workflow by hiding features you don't use. Personally, I decidedly do not miss Office 2010's window-obscuring menu, poor organization of options, and too-many-clicks interface.

The only time you'll see LibreOffice's launch app is when you first open it. Subsequently, you can open any module from within any other module by selecting New File.

As much as I like LibreOffice, I do have some minor gripes. I do not like the mixing of document types in the recent files list in all the modules. When I'm in Writer, I want to see Writer documents, not the database files and spreadsheets I've been working with. At the very least, they should be divided by type. On the other hand, I like it that LibreOffice provides other types of documents under the “New File” heading. Yes, some reviewers are just hard to please.

Note that the inline help is a separate download. There are also a lot of very nice guides available for download as well as extensions that add capabilities to all the modules.

Where Microsoft seems focused on changing the look of its products and optimizing them for tablets, LibreOffice is improving basic functionality and efficiency with an eye for the desktop. It's not perfect, but neither is the competition. Document compatibility with Office and just about every other standard is so good that the average user can make the switch without qualms in that regard.

On the downside, macro and programming incompatibilities in Base and Calc will be a problem for some, and there will undoubtedly be a feature missing here or there that some user just won't be able to live without.

But put aside those years of disappointing alternatives to Office and take a look at LibreOffice 4. Really. I mean really as in click on the download button and install it. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

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

View the original article here

Announcement makes BI for Office 365

At the worldwide Partner Conference, we have today announced a new supply-makes BI for Office 365, power BI for Office 365 is a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) solution, which enables our customers, easily gain insight from their data in Excel analyze and visualize data in a self service way work. It works with Office 365, customers share knowledge, find answers and stay to assist you in connecting to their data from their favorite mobile devices.

Business data continues to grow at an exponential rate and a prerequisite for a flourishing industry now is a sense of all incoming information. Success can literally be determined by the tools that a company employee is available, because they affect the flood of data.  People love Excel for analyzing data, so that we make BI for Office 365 right in this experience have built so that an even more powerful tool. You may have already seen the power pivot and power-view functions in Excel and today we continue, to enhance our BI. Power BI for Office 365 now consists of:

Power query, the customer to easily search and public data and your company data, all within Excel (formerly known as "Data Explorer").Power card, a 3D data visualization tool for mapping, to explore and interact with geographical and temporal data (formerly known as code name "Geoflow").Power pivot for create and customize flexible data models in Excel. Power view for the creation of interactive charts, graphs and other visual representations of data.

We know that not only important for people the possibility to easily new insights identify it from their data, but also to operate and provide access to this data in a trusted environment have. Therefore makes BI stretches for Office 365 is existing premise systems about your deliver value within an already trusted service to provide:

Power BI pages dedicated to community BI workspaces in Office 365 for the exchange of data and knowledge with colleagues. Power BI sites also keep up-to-date with connectivity and refresh customer data back to their on premise data sources. New natural language query capabilities allowGet customers to ask questions and answers. Simply enter your question in a dialog box, and the system interprets and generates automatically interactive charts and graphs, on the basis of available data.Native apps for Windows 8, Windows RT experience BI connected, stay dedicated and iPad with your reports and data connected, where you, as well as HTML5 indicate support for browser are based on any device.

To learn more about how you hide the insights in your data unlock makes BI for Office 365 can help, check out these two blog posts: what powers makes BI for Office 365? and introduction of power-BI for Office 365. And go here for the preview, coming later this summer to register!

--Julia White, General Manager, Microsoft Office Division

View the original article here

Die Garage-Serie für Office 365: Touch und der neuesten Immersive Erfahrungen überall

This week comes out of a six-part series on location in New Orleans, and covers the enhancements to touch and immersive experiences in the new Office. Jeremy Chapman is along with Valley Krzypow and Tim Bakke Office experiences across screens of all sizes - from cell phones to large panel displays show. On the way they put some lesser known features in PowerPoint, tour the GeoFlow preview for Excel and show the capabilities of the 82 "Perceptive Pixel (PPI) display.

Jeremy: This week we are from the TechEd New Orleans comes to you and takes the garage series on the journey. We have infused the local culture and scenery, such as Office to put to the test. In the coming weeks you will see real-time implementation, using Office Web apps, we will test whether Office can be productive in Louisiana and we take another turn on providing online and offline racing-. But this week, we discuss with Office.

Valley: Devices take more and more shapes, sizes, and input methods. Accordingly holds office on desktop applications, Web apps, the best experience delivers everywhere developed apps for Windows 8, and across other platforms. Yoni demonstrates some of the capabilities in the garage series live in April, but we decided, a bit deeper under the hood in this episode go. The combination of Windows 8 investments in touch APIs, and met up with Office investment in fluid and intuitive touch experience, unlocks new experiences and scenarios. If you use new OneNote for Windows 8 and the radial menu or the Outlook Web app on a touch screen, even simple actions touch feel like scrolling, the they built were with a surface, which sticks to your fingers and a fluid movements throughout.

Jeremy: So it was great to welcome Valley, as the host team in the Office product to show some of the new and existing features, touch, as trigger can use to touch icons and create the new animation, merge forms, Slide Navigator and zoom slide. Watch the show for some awesome recipes, that Valley found with local delicacies.

A question that we hear is much like the perceptive pixel (PPI) display, which we, in the garage series use when compared to other large-screen devices. So we brought Tim Bakke PPI team to the talk about the capabilities of the device and showing how it used to 3D renderings, visualize the GeoFlow preview for Excel, OneNote app for Windows 8 and the new PowerPoint.

Next week we will the next functions show back from New Orleans as we Office Web apps and test, whether one can write local Blues Band song in real time, offline use of various devices, browsers, and even the word desktop application.

See you then!

Jeremy and Valley

Additional resources:

Garage-series-video channel

Touch-Guide for the new Office

Perceptive pixel from the Microsoft homepage

Use the new Office with a twist (next Office blog)

Garage Series season 1-blog archive

 

About the garage series hosts:

During the day Jeremy Chapman at Microsoft, is responsible for optimizing the future of Office client and service delivery as a preliminary deployment starring. Jeremy's background in application compatibility, building automation was deployment tools and infrastructure reference architectures for the prioritization of new Office Enterprise features like the latest click-to-run installation of fundamental importance. At night, he is zealous and serial linguist a car modding. Valley began his path at Microsoft as the product planners PowerPoint and graphics. Today, he serves as the technical product marketing manager for Word and PowerPoint. Valley persistence with PowerPoint through different roles is no coincidence. A passionate, enjoys Valley design, news, stories and pictures. His creations include a collection of over 200 icons in PowerPoint and its very own handmade PC Messenger bag.

View the original article here

What powers makes BI in Office 365?

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Ari Schorr and Seayoung Rhee are product marketing managers in the Microsoft Office Division focused on Excel and Business Intelligence, respectively.

Power BI for Office 365 is a new self-service business intelligence (BI) offering enabling businesses to gain insights from their data in powerful new ways within Excel and Office 365. Customers now have the ability to easily search, discover and access data inside and outside of their organization and, with just a few clicks, shape and transform that data. They can also analyze and create stunning interactive visualizations that uncover hidden insights to share and collaborate from virtually anywhere, on nearly any device.

Key features are:

Powerful Self-Service BI in Excel 2013: We are taking our most powerful BI solutions and building them directly into Excel. These solutions package the data discovery, analysis and visualization process into one self-service BI solution, which is essential for business customers who are looking to get bigger returns on their data. Features include:

For data search and discovery, we're introducing Power Query, formerly "Data Explorer." We've created a data search engine so customers can query data from within their business and from external data sources on the Internet, all within Excel. We're also working with partners to provide an internal version of this search engine so businesses can customize the engine and index the data sources they commonly access. Power Query also cleans and merges data sets from multiple sources, enabling IT and BI customers to focus on data insights rather than data management.
For analyzing and modeling data we will continue to offer Power Pivot. Power Pivot enables customers to create flexible models within Excel that can process large data sets quickly using SQL Server's in-memory database. Customers can customize the model as needed all within Excel - no extra coding needed.
For visualizing and exploring data we're introducing Power View and Power Map, formerly project codename "GeoFlow." Using Power View, customers can manipulate data and compile it into charts, graphs and other visual means - great for presentations and reports. Power Map is a 3D data visualization tool for mapping, exploring and interacting with geographic and temporal data. Customers can visually plot up to one million rows of data in 3D on Bing Maps, view data in a geographic space, and share findings through screenshot slides and cinematic, guided video tours. 

Collaborate and stay connected with Office 365: While all of these tools enable great self-service BI, asking business customers to work within a BI silo significantly decreases the potential value of their data to the entire organization. That's why we've made all of these Excel capabilities available in the cloud with Office 365, so customers can share and access their BI reports and models across the desktop, Web and devices, all in a trusted, managed environment.

To share insights and help customers get answers quickly, we've created BI Sites. Within their organization's trusted environment, BI customers can quickly create workspaces in Office 365 to share worksheets with colleagues, collaborate over insights and results, and quickly find data and reports. A couple key features of the BI Sites include a natural language query engine and a Data Management Gateway. We've incorporated a natural language query engine that IT can customize to help their users search for specific datasets quickly and easily. Additionally, we've created a Data Management Gateway, which allows IT to build connections to internal data sources so reports that are published to BI Sites in Office 365 will refresh either on-demand or on a scheduled basis, ensuring that customers are always looking at the latest view of their data.
To better manage data, Power BI for Office 365 empowers a business's IT organization to help its users become their own data stewards. This means that customers can grant access to their published data sets based on their colleague's credentials. In addition, customers can then track who's accessing their data sets and how often to better understand what data is of most value to others. 
 To enable customers to stay connected to their data from virtually anywhere they are, we've created a connected BI experience. BI users can access and receive live updates on their reports through their browser with HTML5 or through a mobile application designed for their tablet or touch-enabled device, either Microsoft Power BI for Windows or Microsoft Power BI for iPad.

Business that can rapidly gain insights from their data will lead their peers in the industry in the next decade. The ability to easily access any kind of data, extend existing IT systems, empower users customers with familiar tools to gain insights and quickly deploy powerful self-service BI solutions will become a key enabler for these businesses to differentiate themselves from their peers. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help the enterprise through this transition, and only Microsoft is able to offer these features together in one complete cloud-based offering. 

To learn more about Power BI for Office 365 see below for some Frequently Asked Questions and go here to register for the preview, coming later this summer! 

Q: What benefits will this service bring to customers?

Power BI for Office 365 empowers customers with a powerful platform to address several business needs, including, delivering self-service BI solutions to everyday business users natively within the environment they're already familiar with - Excel and enabling collaboration and accessibility by putting BI in the cloud through Office 365. Not only will business customers be able to easily publish data sets and models to share with their colleagues, but their data will be accessible from virtually anywhere - on their desktop at work, over the Web at home, and on their mobile device while traveling. We will also be equipping IT with a set of management tools that enables them to safely leverage on-premise and external data sources within their organization's trusted environment and monitor employee collaboration around this data. This is a crucial step for organizations looking to take their data insights to the next level and will enable IT to open up new doors for business users.

Q: What business intelligence features will be available in Excel?

Microsoft is taking our most powerful business intelligence tools and building them directly into Excel. These solutions package the data discovery and presentation process into one self-service BI solution, which is essential for business customers who are looking to get bigger returns on their data.

Q: How does the connection to Office 365 work? What features are available?

Power BI for Office 365 enables customers to collaborate and stay connected virtually anytime/anywhere through the cloud. The connection to Office 365 allows customers to share and access their BI models across the desktop, Web and devices, all in a trusted, managed environment.

Q: Can you talk more about the mobile BI offering? What is it and what devices are compatible? Will this work across non-Microsoft devices and platforms (including Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.)?

Power BI will provide touch optimized access to BI reports and models stored in Office 365 through the browser with HTML5 or through the Windows or iPad mobile app. Within the application, customers can find Excel and Power View content, interact and present that content on their device, and then share that content via email. We will offer support for other widely adopted platforms at a later date.

Q: How does Power BI for Office 365 differentiate from other offerings currently in market?

Power BI for Office 365 is the first cloud-based business intelligence service that brings together Microsoft's full suite of self-service BI solutions and essential IT management tools that allow businesses to leverage on-premise and external data in a singular, secured environment. Our goal is to provide technology that enables employees to practice the art of analytics wherever they are, while providing IT with management technologies that increase collaboration in a trusted environment.

Q: Will on-premise Office customers be able to access these features?

Customers using the Excel 2013 application can create BI reports with features like PowerPivot and Power View. We provide the option to either utilize their on premise SharePoint and SQL Server BI infrastructure, or they may choose the Power BI for Office 365 service for publishing and sharing their reports.

Q: When will Power BI for Office 365 be available? How do I get it?

Customer can go here (http://www.office.com/powerbi) to register for the preview, coming out later this summer. Regarding general availability, we have no further information to share at this time. 

Q: How much will Power BI for Office 365 cost?

We have no further information to share at this time. We'll communicate pricing information at a later date.

View the original article here

Simpler email aliases for Office 365 Small Business

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AppId is over the quota

Katie Kivett is a program manager in the Microsoft Office Division, focused on the Office 365 small business customer experience and administration.

Using email aliases is a simple way to have messages sent to different email addresses, but into the same inbox. Today we're excited to announce we've listened to your feedback and made email aliases even easier to create, edit, and delete and streamlined all of these tasks in the Small Business admin portal.   

So, why would you want to use an email alias? As an example, you have an employee who is a jack-of-all-trades performing multiple roles, such as sales and support. This would be the perfect time to create two aliases: sales@contoso.com and support@contoso.com. With these two aliases, the employee can receive mail to both addresses right in his or her inbox, while maintaining a very professional-looking, public email address.

Sometimes, aliases can serve as the perfect "throwaway" email addresses when signing up with accounts that might send spam (e.g., promotional mailers, newsletters, etc.). You can use rules to manage unwanted messages from a "throwaway" alias or delete the alias altogether. In the end, you will know your primary email address is not compromised.

It's pretty easy to create an alias for users in Office 365 for Small Businesses. Check out this video for a quick overview.

Read more about how to assign email aliases. Please let us know what you think in the comment section below. 

FAQs:

Q: Does creating an alias use up one of the user licenses that come with my Office 365 Small Business subscription?

A: No, creating an email alias does not require an additional license since the alias must be attached to an existing licensed user in order for the email to go to the user's inbox.

Q: I have Office 365 Midsize Business or Office 365 Enterprise (or equivalent), how do I manage aliases?

A: You can manage email aliases in the Exchange admin center (EAC), see this help topic for additional information.

Q: How many aliases can I assign to a user?

A: We do not currently impose a limit; however, it would be difficult for a user to keep track of too many email aliases.

Q: How can I use aliases and have multiple users to be able to see the same inbox?

A: When you need multiple users to view and manage the same inbox, you should use a Shared Mailbox or a Site Mailbox.

Q: How do I change the send-from alias so that the send-from email address appears as alias@yourcompany.com?

A: Aliases work for incoming mail only. If you need a send from address to appear for the message recipient you need to use a Shared Mailbox.

-- Katie Kivett

View the original article here

Office 365 news round-up

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AppId is over the quota

It's been another remarkable couple of weeks for Office 365. Thanks to our customers, 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, Office 365 Home Premium has become a hit with more than 1 million subscribers, putting it on pace with some of the most popular services around.

We also announced the availability of Lync-Skype connectivity for Lync customers around the world, marking our first important step in extending Lync's unified communications capabilities to the hundreds of millions of people who use Skype.

Notably, a recent Computing survey found that Microsoft is about to surge ahead, with 37 percent of IT decisions makers reporting that their organization is likely to adopt Office 365 against just 15 percent for Google Apps. We hope you enjoyed the recent blog post describing why Office 365 offers the most value, and the most complete vision for businesses of all sizes. We also hope you had a chance to read the three Q&As with executives from SEPCOIII, Arysta Lifescience, and Sensia Hälsovård AB explaining why they chose Office 365 over Google Apps. Here is a round-up of some of the key news from the last couple weeks:

Microsoft Office 365 Hits 1 Million Users. Office 365 Home Premium has surpassed the 1 million subscribers mark in just over 100 days.

Office 365 and Google Apps Fight for Supremacy. Microsoft is about to surge ahead, with 37 percent of IT decisions makers reporting that their organization is likely to adopt Office 365 against just 15 percent for Google Apps, according to a recent Computing survey.

Microsoft Announces Skype And Lync Interoperability With IM & Audio To Start, Video Soon. Skype and Lync now interoperate, meaning users can access their Lync contacts via Skype and vice versa, and then message them or place an audio call.

Microsoft Cloud deployed by AGL. Energy retailer AGL Energy sees significant improvement in employee satisfaction after deploying Office 365 across its entire operation with 3.6 million business and residential customers.

Microsoft: Social at Work is Not a Time Waster - If Done Right. Forty-six percent of workers feel that their productivity and greatly or somewhat increased because of social tools, according to a Microsoft-commissioned survey.

68% of Organisations to Adopt Hybrid Cloud Model in Two Years. Research commissioned by Microsoft finds that more than 52 percent of organizations believe that the cloud adoption will help their business growth, with 68 percent turning to the hybrid cloud model in the next two years.

SkyDrive Pro for Windows Now Available. The SkyDrive Pro client is now available as a standalone version.

View the original article here

Office is a life skill for graduates on the job hunt

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AppId is over the quota

A recent survey* conducted by Telefonica and the Financial Times caught our attention this week, revealing that 83% of millennials say technology makes it easier to get a job. We couldn't agree more. Computer skills, and proficiency in Microsoft Office in particular, are fundamentals most employers expect.

In fact, a search for "Microsoft Office" on Indeed.com, a popular job site, returns 133,000+ job openings in a variety of fields, including media, business and finance. (Note: a search on "Google Apps" yields less than 800, while "Apple iWork" returns less than 20).

With this in mind, we wanted to share resources that will help the class of 2013 - and beyond - brush up on Office skills and stand out from the crowd:

The same Office skills that pop on a resume will also help you create one that stands out. Instead of starting a resume from scratch, Office.com has tons of free templates for the head-start you need. From traditional to more modern options, you can make it your own with fonts and formatting that reflect your personal brand.

Office knowledge stands the test of time because we continue to reinvent our products around people and business' ever-changing needs. As you go about your job hunt, keep in mind that many of the organizations you may have an eye on use Office 365, and Office is the suite of choice in most of the Fortune 500, S&P 500 and beyond.

Are there other Office skills you need to land your dream job? Talk back to @Office using the hashtag #OfficeReady and tell us what Office skills are critical for you or what new Office capabilities you'd like to see.

--Clint Patterson

*Survey was conducted on 12,000 people, age 18 to 30, across 27 countries with a margin of error of less than one percent.

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The Garage Series for Office 365: Stop that smoking gun! The latest in eDiscovery and data loss prevention

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Episode 3 out of a 6 part special filmed in New Orleans, our intrepid host Jeremy Chapman is joined by Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange experts Mark Kashman and Bharat Suneja to share an overview the very latest in integrated Enterprise Search, eDiscovery and Data Loss Prevention to harden your data protection. See how these technologies work across both Office 365 Cloud implementations and your on-premises Office stack to help save users and organizations proactively and reactively from themselves while helping to reduce the complexity of discovery and high costs of legal review due to compliance audits.

Jeremy: So our last show got quite a reaction by way of offering an exclusive first look deep dive on the upcoming real-time co-authoring capabilities with Office Web Apps which we demonstrated in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This was the first time that we had showed the pre-release code capabilities. You can continue to catch that show here or by visiting the Garage Series show channel.

For our latest New Orleans show special, I’m joined by SharePoint and Exchange experts Mark Kashman and Bharat Suneja to take a look at another important topic, the very latest in data protection with eDiscovery and Data Loss Prevention across Cloud and Hybrid environments.

Mark: That’s right, data lives everywhere and the foundation to any data hardening and compliance strategy is to be able to locate key sources of data wherever they may be and you’ll see that not only are we making it so you can quickly discover content through key word searches across the Office stack with integrated enterprise search (formally FAST), but we’ve also greatly enhanced your ability to preserve content versions with eDiscovery and the new eDiscovery Center in SharePoint which allows you to perform in-place holds on SharePoint content, email in Exchange, saved Lync conversations etc.. This means users cannot manipulate or change data from an earlier point in time, and while we can put a document version on hold, we can do this without impacting the ability for the user to continue to be productive.

SharePoint eDiscovery Center showing unified search, filters, statistics, on-hover previews, and tabs for the various sources and content type – from an example “Northwind Traders” case.

Jeremy: This is pretty game changing – I know that for a typical audit it could previously take months to discover the data sources and then you were at risk of the data source being obscured or changed.

Mark: Yes we can now get a real-time response but the other thing that is significant is when you go to export documents and assets we aim to help reduce the footprint. If you consider that the cost of legal review is sometimes $10,000 per GB, these advances mean you can now minimize the volume of what gets reviewed without having to first export everything, saving a ton of time and money in lawyer’s fees wherever there is a suspected issue.

Once you discover data in an audit and use an in-place hold, the original file is preserved in that state in the preservation hold library. Even a SharePoint Site Administrator cannot modify the file and edits made in the Preservation Hold Library will result in another instance of the file. That is why you see two links to what appears to be the same file in the demo on the show. Then once you narrow in on the required content, you export it in a standards based EDRM XML format once from across the entire Office stack – not multiple time from various silos. 

Jeremy: So we had a bit of fun showing how this all works with SharePoint online and the eDiscovery center on the show. It was great to see what you can do reactively from a data compliance/protection perspective, so then we looked at what you can also put in place more proactively from a data protection perspective with the new Data Loss Prevention capability in Exchange. 

As we were in New Orleans we did this New Orleans style and tested whether or not Exchange Online could stop a smoking gun email leaving the organization as our test study Mr. #dealwithit tried to send out his boss’s credit card details.

Before you get too trigger-happy in the comments section with other ways to communicate the credit card number, we all know he could have used a plethora of other means to succeed in his task – but this is an example of how Data Loss Prevention rules can be set up to work to prevent the worse from happening within the corporate domain. It not only helped train our user, but it also blocked the offensive message at the backend using the new transport rules enabled via Data Loss Prevention. 

Bharat: Yes that guy definitely needed to be saved from himself, and in this particular case, he was behaving a little drunk and malicious and not using his best judgment.  Most users on the other hand, don’t try and send stuff out maliciously. That’s why we have Outlook Policy tips to focus users on going the right thing. But we can also set up custom policies which we demonstrate on the show. 

This is pretty powerful as you saw it means that even where Outlook tips are overlooked by the user we can forcibly stop data leaving the organization by email via the Exchange back-end, by setting up custom rules, which are like transport rules but a lot more sophisticated and allows for deep content inspection. Exchange now in fact ships with thousands of templates to assist with this.

When you create DLP policies, you can include rules that include checks for sensitive information. The conditions that you establish within a policy, such as how many times something has to be found before an action is taken. Sensitive information rules are integrated with the transport rules framework by introduction of a condition that you can customize. Exchange also supplies policy templates that already include some of the sensitive information types. A list of what is supplied in-box is provided here.

Jeremy: So eDiscovery and Data Loss Prevention are two major advancements with the new Office, to help with data hardening and compliance. But there’s also a lot more to it such as Windows Azure Active Directory Rights Management Services for file-level security, and Exchange Active Sync for device management and security, both of which we’ll cover more on future shows. So what are next steps that our viewer/readers can take?

Mark: If you want to go deeper into eDiscovery, dive into this “What’s new in eDiscovery” article, and then I would suggest beginning to Plan for eDiscovery to understand how it can best serve the needs and compliance requirements of your organization. 

Bharat: TechNet's library for Data Loss Prevention is a great place to start – the important point though is that with templates and such we are making it a whole lot easier to implement policy and so this should be mostly a no-brainer for both seasoned and new Exchange administrators out there.

Jeremy: Great, thanks Mark and Bharat, I look forward to having you back on the show as we cover more topics on SharePoint and Exchange in future. Data Loss Prevention and eDiscovery along with Windows Azure Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) provide excellent proactive and reactive security for data. We'll dig a bit deeper into Windows Azure AD RMS in a future show. Our next show will take a look at the new Fasttrack tools and process for speeding up time to value for Office 365 inside of your organization. If you think that it is slower or more complex to get the new Office tenant deployed inside of your organization – think again!

Bye for now, 

Jeremy Chapman, Mark Kashman and Bharat Suneja

Garage Series Video Channel

The Exchange Team Blog

SharePoint Blog

Garage Series Season 1 Blog Archive

 

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. Mark Kashman is a Senior Product Manager on the SharePoint team focusing primarily on SharePoint Online & SharePoint Mobility. He lives in the Redmond, WA area and enjoys kayaking, biking, hiking, ballet/soccer/science club/swimming (all the Dad duties), and quiet-bird-chirping moments for reading books on his #WP8 Kindle app when not playing that darned addictive Bejeweled LIVE+. Follow Mark on Twitter @Mkashman. Bharat joined Microsoft on a mysterious day between the end of March and beginning of April 2008. He's a Senior Technical Writer in the Exchange Customer Experience (CXP) team, responsible for content related to Compliance (Archiving, Retention, eDiscovery, In-Place Hold), Security, and Search. Bharat is a former Exchange MVP, current MCT, MCSE (+Messaging +Security), MCITP. He is the coauthor of Exchange Server 2007: The Complete Reference (Osborne McGraw-Hill), and publishes Exchangepedia blog.

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