Welcome to the Office 365 technology blog

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Welcome to the new Office 365 technology blog!  Office 365 is a continuously evolving online service and we, the Office 365 team, want to help you stay up-to-date with all of the new features and services through our new official team blog.  With cloud services, we have the ability to provide you with new features and capabilities on an ongoing basis.  As we update Office 365 every month, we want to make sure you have insight into what is coming and the new capabilities.  

Through this new blog, you can expect to learn about new monthly feature updates as well as get insight into how we've designed the service directly from the Office 365 team. We will pull back the curtain to show you a behind-the-scenes perspective in operating one of the largest cloud services in the world and connect you to the engineering teams that build and run the service every day. You'll have the opportunity to meet some of the team through our video show, the Garage series for Office 365.  The Office Garage series is already well known for its exciting stunts and thorough Office client content, and we're expanding the coverage to the entire Office 365 service. This blog complements the existing Office 365 Community forums and blog, which focus on helping customers with common issues and more in-depth how-to documentation.

If you have a question on something we've shared, we encourage you to comment and ask your question in the comments below and we'll do our best to answer them.  If you are an existing Office 365 customer today or even just considering the move to Office 365, this is the place for you.

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Interview with Bo Burlingham - author small giant of technology and the development of interaction

Next week the Office 365 be a sponsor for Inc. events GrowCo Conference in New Orleans, La. On Wednesday, 7 March, 1: 40 CST, we delighted to take part in a Twitter interview (on the @ Smallgiantsbuzz;) @ office365 (Ch) with Bo Burlingham, author of the small Giants: companies choose, be great instead of big during the session "Networking with purpose" by the little giant communityplace. We thought it would be a good opportunity to talk with Bo and his take on how technology affects relations between small business owners, customers and colleagues to get. Check out the interview below just remains for more information on what in the business, how technology marching forward.

Office 365 : how see you change the value of the technology network, like people?
Bo Burlingham: Technology has indisputably made it possible, much more networking with a lot more people do, but I don't think it necessarily raised the value of networking at all. Networking the value - online or offline - depends on two things: the quality of connections that make and learn the importance of what. Honestly I don't see a lot of time Twitter wasted on trivial networking via Facebook, etc. I'm skeptical that the connections that learned it can be there and things have nearly the impact on your business or your life as what by networking in person man. Which online networks can do is to opportunities remind you, that you can track offline.

Office 365: How you think the development of technology will affect small businesses in their interactions with customers?
Bo Burlingham: The new tools open opportunities and means of communication which are not of course. But technology changes not the basic dynamics of the business. Great customer service is now, since always and forever about the development of large, close, long-term relationships with customers. Torn businessmen use the new tools of technology, to make that better. Not-so-smart business-people will use to bombard customers with information to which they want neither does not care.

Office 365: how have emerging technologies and interfaces (everything from Twitter to tablets) your readership to reach small business affected you?
Bo Burlingham: Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and simple old E-mail, I have much more contact with people who read what I write and say a better feel for its effect than I, 1995 previously. I hear from many people in many different countries, I would have never even given never before. So my earlier answers error examples not. I am a big fan of the new technology. I can not say I help full use of the possibilities offered by it which but it has to touch me more people and help, allows more people, and makes it possible, to touch more people and me.

Office 365: what advice do you have for small business owners to increase their networks or their networks increase in value?
Bo Burlingham: I would advise advice from someone get knows them much more about these technologies and their use as I do. I know just enough to be dangerous. Seth Godin is the person I look for wisdom on this topic. I recommend also Phil Simon book, the new small, so very convincingly, the new technological tools bigger allow small businesses and give them decisive advantages in competition with larger companies.

Sure to follow @ Smallgiantsbuzz and @ office365 Twitter feeds on Wednesday, 7 March for his live Twitter interview at 1: 40 pm CST. Can your own at Bo questions during this time, you will receive an immediate reply and you closed Conference in the powerful discussion instead of Inc GrowCo 2012 are on. You can also use the # growco Hashtag for all kinds of great content and insight from the Conference.

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Bringing more technology – including Windows 7 – to nonprofits!

Microsoft currently has a nonprofit software donations program set up to help nonprofits gain access to the latest and greatest software from Microsoft. This program is available in over 100 countries across the world and since 1998 over $3.9 billion worth of software has been donated. Of that, Windows has accounted for nearly $450 million worth of donations.

Today, we are announcing some updates to this program that further benefit nonprofits seeking Microsoft software products and I’d like to talk through those updates.

The number of Microsoft software products (e.g. Windows, Office, etc.) that can be requested has been expanded from 6 to 10. This means that nonprofits can now request up to a total of 10 different Microsoft products. 50 licenses of each product can be requested. A maximum of 500 licenses total can be given to a nonprofit of Microsoft software.

What these means is that any nonprofit that is eligible for the program can upgrade 50 PCs to Windows 7, order 50 copies of Office 2010, 50 CALs for Exchange Server and so forth and outfit their entire organization with the latest Microsoft software. That’s pretty slick!

3 new categories of nonprofit organizations are now eligible for the nonprofit software donations program. These are medical research organizations, private foundations, and amateur sports and recreational organizations.

If a nonprofit belongs to these new categories they can now take part in our program and request software for their organizations.

To help nonprofits ensure their existing PCs are running genuine versions of Windows, the nonprofit software donations program now includes a Get Genuine offering. We want to help make sure nonprofits are legal and of course keeping their software up-to-date.

Nonprofits with existing PCs that meet certain Get Genuine requirements can request full copies of Windows for those PCs to “get genuine”.

These are exciting changes to the program we hope nonprofits will enjoy! For more on these changes, see this blog post from the Microsoft Unlimited Potential Blog! I also recommend watching the below video!

Let your favorite nonprofit organization know about our program! We’ve also created some text that you can use to reach out to nonprofit organizations to let them know of our program!

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Helping people around the world with our technology

Our friends over at Microsoft Citizenship have numerous programs running worldwide designed to help create social and economic opportunities for people and businesses (such as nonprofit organizations) through the use of Microsoft technologies. To help tell stories of success and impact from these programs, they have created the Local Impact Map (LIM). LIM is an interactive map of the world that lets you pick choose different regions to see stories.

This week the LIM has been updated with several updates and improvements. When the LIM was first launched 2 years ago, it featured only 200 stories. But with 1,400 stories as of today, they had to make changes to the LIM that improves the organization of all those stories. The new LIM uses Bing Maps where little dots are used representing regions where you can discover stories. For example with the United States, dots represent the states. For other countries, dots represent regions within those countries. They even got things down to a specific region like Silicon Valley where a lot of activities take place through our programs.

So why am I blogging about this here? Well, as I mentioned above – these programs from Microsoft Citizenship use our technologies to help people around the world. That of course includes Windows! I thought I would share a few stories with you that serve as good examples of just how we’re helping people:

Helping Teleton Serve the Children of Mexico

Teleton is the largest private children’s rehabilitation system in the world serving over 113,000 children with disabilities in Mexico. When Teleton hosted their annual 24 hour telethon to raise funds for their network, Microsoft made a contribution of US 8.9 million U.S. dollars to the organization and Windows outfitted a number of the centers with Windows 7!

Boys & Girls Clubs Offer Camps on Technology and Leadership

In North Carolina, the Boys and Girls Club of America worked with Microsoft to host Technology Camps to help boost the skills of 11th graders who were looking to study in the IT field. Microsoft donated 100 copies of Windows 7 and Microsoft Office which were installed on laptops given to students.

Upgrading Family Support Centers

Nestwarme is an organization that provides technology support for families with disabled and chronically ill children. In order to streamline its employee and volunteer communication without raising overhead costs, the organization needed an upgrade in technology – and Microsoft helped!

These are just a few of many stories featured on the Local Impact Map highlighting how Microsoft made an impact with our programs to help people and businesses out. I am extremely proud of our company’s ongoing commitment to helping people around the world! For more information on the new Local Impact Map, I suggest reading this blog post from Jean-Philippe Courtois, President of Microsoft International.

One more thing…

The new LIM includes a new “Snapshot” feature. By clicking the little camera icon at the top right of the site, you can take a snapshot of your favorite stories. A URL is then created that you can share out to anyone you want who can then see your collection of snapshots of your favorite stories from the LIM. Click here to see the collection of stories I mention above from the LIM.

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Screencasts - effective training of technology in business

We had the rapid development of technology for new mobile devices and platforms, virtualization, cloud computing and more. But we also met the severe financial crisis in 2008. In enterprises, more people are upgrading their products with new technologies and systems of OA. Of training and our days of high-quality low-cost of new technologies is what companies are looking for. When a company will adopt the new product of software or a new system to give them a higher productivity and greater functionality, training is the essential element before the technology is widely used. The

traditional send your employees or users at a cost of training a mass of money and time and it means that you lose the productivity of your employees. And the truth shows that generally they learn in training classes. When they start to use the new software application, they encounter difficulties everywhere in the world. At this time of recession, labor markets, good solutions that can achieve the effective result are the choice for most companies. As e-learning and knowledge management come to be popular in the formation of the company, the presentation-oriented task screencast is a good solution for the training of the technology in the business. A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. It is a powerful tool to demonstrate the technical tasks, or to illustrate technical concepts that are difficult to explain in terms of recording screen and slide shows.

There are two ways to do the screencast training: someone is or do it yourself with screencasting tool. There are some professional companies such as AotoDemo, which makes the demo software and demo of website for the company, but the cost is non-budget of some companies in these difficult times. To make it yourself, there are many applications of software available to produce a screencast. What software you need depends on your computing platform and the content you want to do. Screencasting tool I am suggesting is DemoCreator for Windows. Some free solutions

as TipCam or Camstudio can also be your option. The main drawback is that free applications are almost no editing features. To make a screencast with DemoCreator, you 4 steps to go: prepare your script, record the activities of the screen, change your record and publish your movie. Here we will take a look at some features of DemoCreator:

Record the activity on the screen as slides for easy Edition DemoCreator Records with audio video tutorials by screenshot and show exactly how the application (such as the PoDokusbinational, Photoshop and Web site) or the system works. The recording of the screen is registered as the slides. This allows users to save the desired slides and discard unwanted for their presentation slides.

Edit the tutorial for registration with interactive objects for explicit illustration is a library of objects to decorate the registration, such as Flash animation, highlight boxes and clickable buttons to direct users to a different slide or a URL of the page. Users can improve the presentation by adding objects to explain the illustration. And it allows users to re-record the narration or audio training conattemptsto import. In addition, several projects tutorial can be integrated as one.

Publish the presentation of online training to interactive training presentations, publishing output media type used primarily in DemoCreator is Flash movie and Html. trainers can provide compatible with SCORM or AICC video tutorials. Screencasts are available through commercial and open source for learning in school education and training of enterprise management systems.

The formation of screencast is clearer and more interesting than the traditional teaching; of training tutorials can be played as many times as necessary; the demonstrative videos are for "at any time and anywhere" learning... These benefits are screencast an outstanding training method, especially in this difficult economic period. For the company, con trainingtent can be the

As SharePoint knowledge management system or management system like Moodle Learning for the sharing of knowledge and technology training. Then, students and employees can learn Internet technology fcoily.

Software Sameshow E-learning is dedicated to providing ideal presentation and learning content authoring tools for trade shows, learning line, business, Conference, presentations and business etc. To learn more about the training of screencasting.

Adward Chan, Sameshow E-Learning software provider, a regular writer on software.

Corporate technology: to spend or not to spend?

How do you make the call through investment in new technology versus maintaining the status quo?

Every year in January IT analyst firms deliver output in predictions for the year. While the last few years were a little dark, looking up with technology is planned expenditure this year to grow between 5% - 7% according to Forrester and Gartner.

It is clear that a priority technology investment will again also for customers who want to restore from the hard lost only a few years into the recession ground - at the same time it can an internal minefield for leaders succeed. Executives regularly ask expenditure below stall and make with what they already have. This means that some companies use technologies that several generations are old.

Hit the auto industry blues
During the recession one was on the automotive industry and its suppliers and partners of sectors on the strongest hit all over the world. In 2009, a major customer in automatic production by massive changes wanted as companies navigate the bankruptcy proceedings, led in the formation of a new society with new owners. The company delayed a desktop update how many customers had during this time, to stay on Windows XP and to avoid, the costs and the interruption update select.

In the summer of 2010, most of the staff of the company were still use Office 2003. While it would be a time of corporate restructuring to suppress deployments, but the contrary chose the executives of the company do a typical action. Many want to transition from the Lotus Notes and cloud based technologies, move in the direction of an aggressive has completed enterprise-wide adoption of Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010. The company almost 30,000 capacity deployed in just two months!  A bold move for a company is in his position, some might say.
Why did they do it? The execs told us that they believed that by update, it would achieve higher productivity gains as your stay on older technology.  A to study economic impact of Microsoft Office 2010, conducted by Forrester, agrees. The study found a payback period of five months and a net productivity of $1,483 per information worker over three years. That's millions of dollars savings for medium-sized to large enterprises.

The company also knew that his workers require a modern software experience were. Workers demand was an important driver for its rapid deployment. When people are able to work faster, collaborate more easily and produce better documents with technology, who want to actually use them, is a company more likely to achieve bottom line benefits from your investment.

Designing the most innovative technology strategy for your organization against budget constraints and objectives is no light Unterfangen-- and I do not pretend to be on the answers. But I will be the case for keeping your employees on current technologies, when possible make.

A 2011 Forrester Consulting study of 240 it leaders in Europe and North America found that this company the latest productivity software, say that they are even more effective in integration in team collaboration, document management, business intelligence and other applications. Participants reported, the cost of software implementation, integration with applications, remote access and security to manage new software makes it easy.

Lately despite these advantages have I some CIOs tell me that their entry-level and mid-level employees need not the latest tools. This observation always leaves me my head scratching. These information workers are finally, produce most of the documents which seep to the Summit of the Organization for decision making. Should they not the right tools to help, they work with maximum efficiency and effectiveness?

Whether you Microsoft technology or not, check which current technology can do for your human - and the potential impact of maintaining older systems. The answer may not be as cut and dried as it seems. Perhaps you can not afford not to improve.

-Takeshi Numoto, Vice President of corporate office

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How does CEM look as a technology platform?

How does CEM look as a technology platform? « Experience Delivers function clearSearch() {document.search_form.s.value = "";} .avatar {vertical-align:middle}.credit {font-size: 50%;}adobe.com      Experience DeliversTransforming customer experiences by designing processes from the customer-in, enabling rich, meaningful interactionsAdobeCEM (2)Analytics (1)CEM (30)Content (1)context (2)Process (1)Social (1)  

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