Are you ready for Office 2016?

Office 2016 will come chock full of new features

You can preview the new version of office here.  Office365 Business premium and professional users get it free! Here's a few new features to whet your whistle:

• Outlook overhaul - Outlook will look more like it's web-based cousin, in addition one-drive will be integrated more fully. When you send a document you can choose to store it in OneDrive and send a link instead.
• Real-time editing in Word - like OneNote works now, new content and edits can be applied to a document by multiple people and their changes will show up in real-time - no more locking the document out from editing when you go in.  Other documents like Excel to follow.
• Data Loss protection features - File level encryption and the ability to support corporate DLP policies allow all Office documents to be less vulnerable to security leaks
• Click to run features targeted at the enterprise - Administrators will be able to allow employees to install and click-to-run Office on the fly from a central install point behind their firewall, reducing network traffic.
• Better Clutter Control - exercising the ability for Microsoft to apply big data analysis to your inbox and your activities on email, allows Microsoft to intelligently sort out the wheat from the chaff, putting important emails in your inbox, and stuff that isn't spam but isn't important in a separate clutter folder.
• Help improvements - They moved the help to the top center of the application and made it easier to access and use.
• Groups, Collaboration and Skype for business integration - you can now create - in outlook - groups for collaboration, conversation and status sharing and shared files and OneNotes.  this allows you to more logically manage shared storage and better update each other on the status of information in those shared stores.  You can even set up group meetings quickly with Skype for business.
• Better menu options - some still lament the days when Microsoft removed the menu from the top of our office apps in favor of the ribbon strip. Not everyone finds the ribbon strip intuitive. Well good news! The menu is back. In keeping with the return of the start menu in Windows 10, Office 2016 will feature the return of the menu as a star attraction, with better menu integration, better file browsing to more easily support multiple file sources, and smart menus that adapt as you use the product to present the right context information depending on what you want to do.
• Sway your audiences - Powerpoint is so old-school, and Microsoft knows it - so while keeping the old powerhouse in the library they're adding a new presentation app called Sway.  Featuring a much more free-form drag and drop presentation authoring process, Sway is like many other "break the borders" presentation platform.

To find out more about Office 2016, or to find out how you can convert your old office licenses into the new cloud based-office licensing model contact me via private message, phone or email at OS-Cubed, Inc.

More changes in features and licensing for Office365 - November Update

Microsoft has been aggressively pushing along new updated to Office365 features - all free - to help it compete against Google and other offerings.  In addition to the license changes in my last article, here are some of the recently announced or released changes:

• Unlimited storage  (Currently 1TB) planned for OneDrive personal and OneDrive for business - soon you will have no limits on how much you can store in your OneDrive in the cloud. This is interesting and potentially useful and valuable.
• Video Channels - To go with unlimited cloud storage, Microsoft has also announced a platform for creating video channels in the cloud to share with your organization (and one assumes eventually with the public).  Again interesting because it means that organizations can create video channels for training, information sharing etc.
• Groups - Microsoft is aggressively integrating their YAMMER social communications platform into Office365.  Users can now create "Groups" of employees that can share a communications platform including persistent chat, files specific to the group, and a calendar. This will I think gradually replace the existing cumbersome SharePoint Sites for most casual group interaction. Think of a group as a shared mailbox, a chat log, a shared calendar and a shared SharePoint document repository - all under a single banner and available from the web.
• Clutter - Microsoft has rolled out a new mail management tool called "Clutter".  It's available now for early adopters and for everyone soon. Clutter can be turned on or off for a particular user. It creates a clutter folder that learns from your activities. Marking an email as "clutter" in the inbox or dragging and dropping it to the clutter folder in outlook will "train" the clutter algorithm what stuff you still want to see (haven't marked as junk) but "clutters" up your inbox. This is similar to tools from Google that try to categorize incoming mail and from Inbox that tries to hide "junky" looking mail in favor of actual communications.  The tool will learn from your behaviors and what things you consider clutter and apply those algorithms as it goes along.
• Delve - Delve allows you to search across documents and emails - organization wide - for information (dependent on permissions).   Delve is in it's early stages but eventually could be key to sorting through tremendous amounts of information that are generated in a typical oneDrive/Yammer/Exchange/SharePoint environment.
• Skype/Lync integration - announced but not yet active Microsoft is going to merge the popular Skype program (and it's ability to make VOIP calls to other Skype users and even to normal cell and POTS telephones) with Lync (a free messaging app included in office365) to provide a more integrated universal messaging platform.  Hopefully they will take the best of both worlds and improve them - merging Skype's ubiquitous and easy to use client with Lync's excellent web conferencing and presentation capabilities and integrate them all into the new Skype for Business.

All of these improvements are FREE and added automatically to your system - they are either there already and just need to be activated or - if you turn on "early adopter" mode will be there.  OS-Cubed is a Silver Cloud Partner in the Microsoft Cloud partner program with several hundred mailboxes under management and dozens of implementations and migrations under their belt. If you're interested in what it would take to migrate to office365, contact us!

What would you say to $2000 worth of software for $150/year?

Microsoft Office365 will give you $2000 worth of Office licenses for $150/year. 

With their Small business Microsoft Office 365 premium plan you pay no upfront licensing costs, $150/year and get 5 copies of Office 2013 pro (or whatever the current version of Office is).  You also get 1TB of storage for files, and a 50GB mailbox with full calendaring, web mail, mobile mail and outlook support.  You get the equivalent of GoToMeeting in a professional web meeting format, with audio, video, screen sharing and session recordings (Lync).  You get secure instant messaging.  You get online web versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote.  It works in IE, in Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox.  It works with your full Outlook, or with third party email clients.  For $150.   You get your OWN email domain with your own domain name. You get sharepoint online for internal communications. You get a website in the cloud if you don't already have one.  All bundled into ONE product at a ridiculously low price.  To put this in perspective for the full retail cost of 5 copies of office professional 2013 you could instead get all of this for the next 13 years and 4 months.  And that's not even counting the mailbox and mail, the web enabled versions, the 1TB of storage or the 50GB mailbox.  Did I mention all your mail will be virus and spam filtered?  No? Well it will be.

Seriously if you use Office AT ALL this is a no brainer deployment.  Don't need more than the 5 copies of office?  You can mix and match with $60/year mailbox and web only accounts.  Over 25 mailboxes - the same thing is $15/month/mailbox for midsize businesses (though midsize business doesn't have a mix and match option).. 

Need even more flexibility for licensing and email options for $20/month/mailbox you can mix and match enterprise plans that range from $2/month for limited email only to the full $20/month for Office365 Premium.

Contact OS-Cubed today to learn about how to get Office365.  I seriously want to save you tons of money, and we are experts at deployment/conversion.

Microsoft License Compliance....

If you are like many small business customers you probably have wondered - am I in license compliance with Microsoft?  Do I legally own all the software I am using?  If you are NOT wondering these things - you should.  One of my clients got an audit notice the other day from Microsoft requesting that they update them on Microsoft licensing status.  Fortunately this client was good to go - they'd been aggressively being sure that all their machines were compliant, and all we had to do was document some OEM licenses and send a report on to Microsoft for the rest.  But not everyone is in that boat.  One company came to me after they'd received that audit notice in the mail - they had 6 licenses for Microsoft office - and 26 installs.  Not good. Turned out 5 of them were OEM, so that was ok - but the other 16 licenses were illegal.  Bringing them into compliance represented a one time purchase of 16 licenses for Office Professional.  Not an inexpensive day for them at nearly $8000.  The problem with post-install compliance is that you have to retroactively buy the licenses for the most current version of the software (Because you typically can't buy say office 2010 once office 2013 has been released) and you must buy the downgradeable Software Assurance licenses - the most expensive way of upgrading Microsoft has.  There are lots of options but it's almost always better to assess and upgrade or become compliant BEFORE Microsoft Audits you.

So how do you assess your risk?  Fortunately Microsoft has a standalone tool (That's right it does NOT phone home and tattle on you about your licenses) that will assess your Windows Active Directory network and tell you exactly what licenses you have, and which machines or operating systems can be upgraded. It also helps you plan out several scenarios for virtualizing or moving to a private or public cloud install for your existing infrastructure.  The product is called MAPS - Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit and you can download it here.

We use MAPS when planning out office365 migrations to assess the number of office licenses a client might need, versions we're migrating from, etc. 

MAPS is self installing and self contained - you can run it on any server or workstation in your network.  If you need help planning a migration, assistance with becoming compliant, or help in assessing your systems for upgrades or licensing, please give us a call.

Access Apps in Office365 - this is huge!

For years migrating applications from desktop databases like Microsoft Access to the web has been an expensive and time consuming process.  Typically these apps need to be ported to SQL Server, custom forms and reports developed, and tons of translating between "stuff you can do on a desktop database" and "stuff you can do on the web".

Microsoft has now released, free to all Microsoft Office365 users, the ability to port an Access application, complete with forms, database tables, reports, etc. directly to the web.  This lets them begin using a shared web-based database almost instantly, without coding.  It lowers the threshhold for office-accessible secure web based databases.

This series of videos shows how simple it is to create tables, add reports, and port the entire thing to the web in a matter of minutes.  You can create Access apps directly on the web, or in Access offline and move them to the web.

There are limitations to the online version of Access, especially when it comes to imports.  This chart from the Microsoft Learning center shows what you can do with online and offline access:

External data operations available in apps and desktop databases

This table gives you a quick reference of which kinds of files you can import or link to Access apps or desktop databases.

	ACCESS APPS CAN IMPORT…	ACCESS APPS CAN LINK TO…	DESKTOP DATABASES CAN IMPORT…	DESKTOP DATABASES CAN LINK TO…
Microsoft Excel				(read-only)
Microsoft Access
ODBC Databases
Text or comma-separated value (CSV) files				(add new records only)
SharePoint List		(read-only)
XML
Data Services				(read-only)
HTML Document
Outlook folder

These databases aren't suitable for everyone - you need to figure out the best solution for your needs.  But this is a new, surprising development, offered free to Office365 pro users, that will push your database requirements online faster.

OS-Cubed is a Microsoft Cloud Accelerate partner, and are experts at Office 365 database development and design.  Contact us to chat about your requirements.