Weekly #WhyMSFT Round-Up 7/1/2011

Each week, we round up industry news and articles that you may have missed. Enjoy this week’s selections.

Office 365 Launch News

This is What Office in the Cloud Looks Like
“It looks good; as you can see, the whole Office suite translates rather seamlessly into the cloud. The focus here is clearly collaboration, and each demo of Word, OneNote, Outlook, and so on shows a careful consideration for how consumers already expect to work together online. The mobile demo was particularly cool—and shows Office 365's real strengths. Windows Phone 7 collaborates in real-time with Office's desktop incarnation, while iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices will be able to as well (mostly likely via webapps). “

Microsoft Office 365 Debuts With Small-Biz Focus
“With Office 365, employees can collaborate on a Word document online, reading and editing it at the same time. They can share PowerPoint presentations, updating them from a browser on mobile phones. Users can see from inside an e-mail which recipients are online and quickly launch a video conference to include them.”

Microsoft Office 365: Office 365 News
Read what others are saying about Office 365 in this collection of selected top news stories.

Office 365 Customer Focus

Curtin Begins Office365 Migration
“Curtin University has begun rolling out Microsoft's cloud-based Office365 suite to 10,000 staff in the first public move by an Australian customer ahead of the product's official launch… Curtin CIO Peter Nikoletatos told iTnews that once implementation was completed, staff would be given the option of using the Office 2010 software deployed last year or the web-based productivity applications. "We think that the richness of the Office online experience in the cloud will naturally take its course," he said. "We're starting to see that already with Live@edu where students are already using a lot of the function points in the Office products online. We think staff will naturally go down that path as well."”

Familiarity, Improved Features Draw Users to Office 365
“Quizzed why the car distributor chose Office 365 over alternatives such as Google Apps, Cheng said that the company had given Google’s productivity tool a month’s trial but found it to be a “consumer-grade product”. Tools such as Docs and Chat, he explained, are not as “advanced” and enterprise-friendly as Microsoft’s Office and Lync communication offerings. He pointed out that there is also a “learning curve” that needs to be overcome by the employees while the IT department will have to manage “another island of applications”. Comparatively, Office 365 offers a “seamless integration” from the standpoints of both user experience and technology, he said.”

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