Weekly #WhyMSFT Round-Up 2/3/2012

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

RIM Releases BlackBerry Service for Office 365
RIM's BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365 enables synchronization and management, using Microsoft ActiveSync to connect a BlackBerry device with hosted Microsoft Exchange. Contacts, e-mail and calendar application data can be synched up via Microsoft's cloud.

American Red Cross Chooses Courion’s Access Risk Management Suite as Part of Transition to Cloud Computing Platform
When the project is complete, the Red Cross will have a single, global communication system for reaching staff and affiliates quickly. The Red Cross is currently one of the largest Office 365 implementations.

B2B Technologies Helps <its>First Higher Education Institution Adopt Microsoft Office 365 Exchange
“We worked very closely with Microsoft to ensure that shortly after Microsoft Office 365 was released on June 28, 2011, we were able to migrate more than 5,000 GSU faculty and staff to Exchange over the July 4th weekend,” said Tonya Smith, Consulting Director at B2B Technologies.

Microsoft Office 15 Technical Preview Testing Begins, Public Beta Live This Summer
The technical preview release of Microsoft Office 15 will go out to select customers under non-disclosure agreements. The company will then launch a public live beta “later this summer.” ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley says Microsoft is targeting a release for Office 15 by the end of 2012.

Microsoft Malaysia Wins the Brand
The world leader in cloud computing was rewarded for its commitment to transform Malaysian SMEs with cloud computing technology and solutions through its Office 365 productivity suite.

Can Firms Get a Good Return on Investment From Flexible Working?
"Now, along with flexible working, greater mobility is being enabled through platforms like Windows Phone, which integrates with workers' Outlook as well as apps on Office 365, such as SharePoint Online.” -- Martin Cullin, Microsoft

Microsoft Woos Disgruntled Google Users in Full-Page Newspaper Ads — Here’s the First One
Shaw adds in a blog post this morning, “The changes Google announced make it harder, not easier, for people to stay in control of their own information.”

Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software
Azure still runs on proprietary Microsoft software. But to the surprise of many, the service is offering developers a wide range of open source tools they can use to build their applications, including not only Node and Hadoop but open source languages such as Java and PHP.