News

  We’re moving!   This marks our last post to the Office 365 Product Marketing blog in this location. We have moved the blog to the Office Blogs located at:   http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft_office_365_blog/   Please bookmark the new location and look for continued coverage on Office 365 product news, customer stories, events, insider looks and helpful tips for getting the most of Office 365.   We hope you’ll follow us.   You can also follow the Office 365 conversation on these social networks:   LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Microsoft-Office-365-3724282 Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/Office365 Facebook – http://facebook.com/Office365     For all of your questions on getting started, performing advanced tasks or troubleshooting common issues, be sure to visit the comprehensive content on the Office 365 Community across blogs, forums and wikis.   See you on the new Office 365 Blog.   read more...

  We always feel terrific when new customers join the Office 365 family, and today we are thrilled to announce that JetBlue, the American Heart Association, and Patagonia have picked Office 365 as their productivity service of the future.  These companies are now part of an illustrious group as over 40% of the Interbrand Top 100 global brands use Microsoft’s cloud productivity services.   These new Office 365 customers are some of the latest companies to join the likes of Campbell Soup Company, Marie Claire, Roush Enterprises, Hersing Corp, UL (formerly Underwriters Labs), and Wunderman in recently choosing Office 365 to power collaboration for their workers.  With customers like these, it’s no wonder Office 365 is on track to be one of the fastest growing offers in Microsoft’s history.   This news highlights the diversity of customers using Office 365 – from leading airlines to global consumer companies, not to mention the small businesses we’ve talked about before.  Global brands are not the only ones choosing Office 365—more than 90% of our customers have less than 50 employees, making it clear that Office 365 is right for businesses of all sizes.   Each customer is unique, different in size, mission, and industry, yet all have a common technology mission—to foster greater collaboration and communication, enhance productivity, and realize the efficiencies associated with the cloud.   For example, Patagonia, a leading provider of outdoor gear, is using Office 365 to drive real-time communications and decision making throughout its organization.  Patagonia expects to save $300,000 in future upgrades and infrastructure improvements, and $15,000 a year in savings by moving to the cloud-based e-mail system that is part of Office 365. Additionally, Office 365 supports the company’s “drive-less” program, providing the flexibility for more employees to work from home, so they can reduce their carbon footprint.  Each customer typically has their own goals around efficiency and productivity when they select Office 365.  Companies like Campbell Soup and Group Marie Claire have chosen Office 365 to better connect mobile employees and to foster better teamwork across the company, and we look forward to hearing and sharing their success stories in the future.   We want to thank our customers and the thousands of others who have helped make the last six months a great start for Office 365.  Has your business joined the Office 365 family? If so, we’d love to hear your story and welcome your feedback on how to make Office 365 even better. If you’re interested in trying Office 365, you might look into our free trial to decide if it’s right for you.   read more...

  Last Thursday marked the 10 year milestone of Trustworthy Computing. Two years ago when Steve Ballmer said about Cloud Computing that “We’re all in” - that signaled almost as big a change at Microsoft for security as the original Bill Gates memo launching Trustworthy Computing. For the first time, we would not only need to design and maintain products and software with the right security, but we would be responsible for actually hosting our business customers’ data in a trustworthy way.   In Cloud Computing, it’s not enough to build security into services. We have to run them in a secure way, and have external auditors verify we are doing so, while meeting our customers’ requirements to adhere to privacy and security regulations around the world. Many of us had been working on security, privacy, and compliance for several years already with the launch of Office 365. Right now, over 50 people work full time on security, privacy, and compliance on Office 365 alone. In addition to ensuring a set of security best practices in service design and operations, we also meet the requirements of independent audits and regulatory requirements of tough standards like ISO 27001, SSAE-16, the EU Model Clauses, HIPAA, and FISMA. Our challenge is not just good security, but doing so for the broadest set of customers in the world, with all of their varying expectations and needs. For more information about security, privacy, and compliance in Office 365, please see the Office 365 Trust Center—not only will you find out a lot about security in Office 365, you’ll get to meet some of us in our videos as well: http://trust.office365.com/.   read more...

  Remember what it was like on your first day of work? For many knowledge workers, a new job means endless training sessions, new software to learn, and a huge learning curve as they come up to speed on the company computer system. Complicated processes can spell unnecessary downtime and lost revenue—and they don’t exactly make a good impression on the talent you’ve worked so hard to attract.   A key advantage of Microsoft Office 365 is that it makes it easy to onboard new employees. No longer do IT administrators need to install and configure software on each new employee workstation. Because Office 365 is hosted within Microsoft data centers in the cloud, administrators just go to the “Admin Overview” page and add the new user to their Office 365 subscription. It’s that simple! Employees can then sign onto their account and start working. What’s more, they can do so with minimal training since they’re using productivity software most employees are already familiar with.   Among the companies that have improved their onboarding process with Office 365 is Konica Minolta Business Solutions Denmark a/s, a leading provider of image information products. The company, which relied on Lotus Notes, had been incurring significant monetary and time expenses preparing new workstations for employees. For every new employee, IT staff spent three to five hours installing software and configuring systems. Altogether, the IT department spent about 80 hours a month setting up and troubleshooting local systems.   Not only did these challenges cut into the company’s profitability; they also frustrated employees. “We offer an annual employee satisfaction survey, and our results in the ‘Very Satisfied’ category were not what we wanted them to be—only around 50 percent,” says Sune T. Perlman, IT Manager for Konica Minolta Business Solutions Denmark a/s.   To improve efficiency, Konica Minolta implemented Microsoft Exchange Server for enhanced email access along with Microsoft Office 365 for improved communication, knowledge sharing, and remote accessibility.   With Office 365, new employees simply sign in to their account and begin working. The only training IT staff now offer is a brief, one-hour orientation session on how to set up a new user account. “We used to spend up to five hours setting up each employee’s laptop,” Perlman says. “With Office 365, setup time is down to as little as one hour. The employee simply signs in and everything is ready to use.”   By moving to Office 365, IT administrators have reduced by 80 percent the time they spend configuring and troubleshooting local hardware and software. What’s more, employee satisfaction rates are improving. “Employees are the backbone of our business, and happier employees mean a better, more profitable business,” Perlman says.   To learn more, please check out the full Konica Minolta Business Solutions Denmark case study. Also, please share your experience. Has Office 365 improved the onboarding experience for your organization? If so, how?   read more...

  By Kevin Miller, Founder and President, BlueEdge Consulting   I run a consultancy, BlueEdge Consulting, which specializes in implementing IT cloud solutions for small and midsize businesses. I’ve spent more than 20 years setting up IT infrastructures for Fortune 500 companies, so I understand the work involved in caring for infrastructure services like email.   Many of my customers are frustrated with technology. They don’t have the time to stay abreast of new technology or the money to keep their technology up-to-date. When I launched my business in 2003, I focused on helping customers set up and care for internal systems. But when cloud computing entered the picture, I shifted my efforts completely in that direction.   When I first learned about Microsoft Online Services back in 2008, I knew that I wanted to be part of it. I was one of the first resellers of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS), and today I am a member of the Microsoft Cloud Champions Club.   Microsoft Office 365 takes BPOS to the next level by offering some great improvements. It provides a single logon and portal for doing everything. It combines instant messaging and conferencing in one service: Microsoft Lync Online. Microsoft SharePoint Online has the familiar Microsoft Office interface and much more storage space. With Microsoft Exchange Online, email archiving is built in. And with some subscriptions, customers can license the full Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 suite. Office 365 builds on the rich experience of Microsoft Office 2010 and extends it to the cloud.   When I tell customers what Office 365 includes—and that it has built-in backup and business continuity for its services—a big light bulb goes on for them. All of their critical programs are included in one service. They don’t even have to license separate spam and virus prevention software—it’s all there.   In my own business, Office 365 will be a lifesaver. All my customer data will be in either Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online or SharePoint Online. I’ll be able to access customer data in Microsoft Dynamics CRM through the Microsoft Outlook 2010 messaging and collaboration client. Pricing spreadsheets, contracts, leads, and all data will be stored in SharePoint Online. And I can access everything from my Windows Phone, including email, calendar, and contacts.   Office 365 will save me a couple of hours a day and help me to be more responsive to customers. When customers ask me to make a change to their SharePoint site, I just enter a user name and password, and I’m in. I probably use the screen-sharing feature in Lync Online at least once a week. When customers call with problems, I just invite them to a Lync session and look at their computer screens to see the problem. My customers are all over the Philadelphia area, so this really saves time traveling to customer sites.   Office 365 is also a terrific value. I understand what it takes to get these services in place, and it’s amazing that I can have the same services that a Fortune 100 company has and only pay as little as $6 per employee a month.   I’m expecting Office 365 to double my business, and my customers are just as excited about it as I am.   # # #   read more...

  The latest productivity tools are not reserved for workers with a desk or an office. Businesses need to connect their shift and retail workers to the rest of the enterprise. As such, we are adding new capabilities to our kiosk worker plans. These plans enable improved communication and collaboration for ‘deskless’ workers, shift workers or retail store employees who use shared PCs.   These new capabilities include: Adding Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) for mobile devices to the Exchange Online Kiosk plan and Office 365 Kiosk Plan. Virtually all smartphones support EAS including Windows Phone, iPhone, Android, and Nokia.  A full list of EAS supported phones is available here. Doubling email storage from 500 MB to 1 GB in both the Exchange Online Kiosk plan and the Office 365 Kiosk plan.  Offering Exchange Online Archiving (EOA), including legal hold and unlimited storage, as an add-on to any Exchange Online plan, including Kiosk and ”E” plans. The pricing for the Exchange Online Kiosk plan ($2 per user/per month) and Office 365 Kiosk plan ($4 per user/per month) will remain unchanged. EOA will now be offered as an add-on to any Exchange Online plan, including Kiosk and Exchange Plan.  Pricing for Exchange Online Archiving add-on is $3.50/user/month.  For example: An Exchange Online Kiosk user can add Exchange Online Archiving to get legal hold functionality where the costs would be $2 + $3.50 for a total cost of $5.50/user/month We will provide updates about the general availability of these new capabilities as they become available. For more information on how the various Office 365 plans can be tailored to meet your online productivity needs, please visit here. Or learn more here about the additional services that can be added to an Office 365 plan.   read more...

  Based in Seattle, Washington, findwell is a startup real estate company that strives to deliver exceptional service through the smart use of technology and a progressive business approach. The company implemented Microsoft Office 365 in 2011 for cloud-based email and document sharing. We recently sat down with Kevin Lisota, Chief Executive Officer at findwell, to discuss his business and technology plans for the coming year.   Are you making any New Year’s resolutions for your business?   Lisota: We’d love to resolve that the real estate market will improve, but unfortunately don’t control that. I do anticipate modest improvements in the market this year, but the difficulties in real estate aren’t totally over yet. In terms of our own resolutions, we’ve done a lot of work to have a really strong online presence. We’d like to put more quality content on our website, better track customers through our web properties, participate in more social networks, and do more email marketing. That’s what helps our business to succeed, and there’s a lot more that we can do on that front.   Do you have specific goals for the growth of your business in 2012?   Lisota: The short answer is yes. There are two ways to expand our customer base. The first one is out of our control, which is the health of the real estate market. The second is by making a significant investment in getting our name out there, which is what we plan to continue.  By providing outstanding customer service, our reputation and client base will continue to grow through referrals and word of mouth. However, we are still a young company, and we need to pair that with an expanded online presence and marketing effort to make sure that we can gain more mindshare in our target markets.   Jumping back to 2011, what were the major technology improvements you made this year?   Lisota: One of the biggest improvements we made was implementing electronic signatures, which has increased our efficiency and really reduced our paper use. Migrating our email and team portal to Office 365 was probably the biggest technology move that we made. It’s been a huge win for us in terms of being reachable at all times and having the answers our customers need. It has also made it easier for us to collaborate internally and provide training to new and existing employees.   How will Office 365 support your growth?   Lisota: Office 365 provides the foundation for the quality service we provide. It enables us to communicate in a timely and consistent manner, ensures our agents are well-informed, and gives us quick and easy access to timely market data we use with our clients. Office 365 enables us to take that extra step and host online meetings with clients when it is more practical. It also allows us to access information from our portal when we’re out in the field. It really gives us a professional, tech-savvy image.   Has this new professional image helped you to land new clients?   Lisota: Absolutely. When someone comes to you as a prospective home buyer or seller, they want to know you’re responsive and knowledgeable and that you are looking out for their best interests throughout the transaction. Being perceived as a tech-savvy real estate company has been a major differentiator for us and helps us win new clients from competitors.   How important is customer communication to your business?   Lisota: Communication with the public is the most important aspect of our business. People have really short attention spans. If they’re shopping for a Seattle real estate agent and it takes us a day to get back to their initial inquiry, we’re going to lose that customer. Once we land a new customer, they expect us to be available pretty much at all times. There’s an expectation when a home come up online that they want to see it tonight. We need to be able to communicate with them quickly and effectively to meet those expectations.   How has technology improved the way you communicate with clients?   Lisota: It helps us to communicate instantaneously with our customers, which is a big differentiator for our company. When we’re out in the field, we need to be able to respond quickly by email or phone, and connecting up from a huge variety of devices and locations is mission-critical. To give a tangible example – we just successfully negotiated a purchase offer for a client on a home that had been on market just 1 day with 7 competing offers. Technology most definitely played a role in being able to act quickly for our client, and for them it means they get to move into their dream home!   Do you have plans to add technology in the coming year?   Lisota: Yes, we want to improve our consumer-facing technology—how we communicate with prospective customers online, how we use email marketing, and the quantity and quality of market data we provide to customers. On the internal side, we’d like to build a better process for onboarding new real estate agents so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we bring someone on. If I can point new employees to a central resource that shows them how we do things, it will improve our onboarding process. We also have loads of data that we track about the health of our market and our business. We need to do a better job of surfacing that data to our agents on a day-to-day basis. We plan to implement using our internal SharePoint sites.   Looking ahead toward the New Year, what are you excited about?   Lisota: I’m cautiously optimistic that the real estate market will improve a bit. I don’t think it’s going to be anything dramatic, but hopefully it’ll recover somewhat. I continue to be excited about our business—our reputation is growing and I’m proud of that. I’m also super-excited about the quality of service we offer. The customer testimonials we receive continue to validate our approach. We’re always looking for new ways to differentiate our business through the smart use of technology, and we’ll continue that focus in 2012.       read more...

  By Andi Li, Teacher, Salesian School of Hong Kong   I am a teacher at the Salesian School of Hong Kong, part of a worldwide network of Salesian schools. The Salesian School of Hong Kong was established in 1951 by the Roman Catholic Salesian Congregation of Saint John Bosco. A key tenet of the Salesian method is cultivation of the whole person—academically, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. To achieve this, Salesian schools emphasize relationships between students and teachers outside of the classroom, and class time often extends beyond the regular school day.   Until Office 365, we had been limited to email messaging for maintaining contact with students and helping them with homework and their personal lives. We really want to create a true e-learning environment, where teachers and students can communicate and collaborate by using technology both in and outside of the classroom. But money is always an issue in education; we cannot afford expensive hardware and software. We wanted a web-based solution that would not require extensive training for staff and students and that would last us for awhile.   I joined the Office 365 beta program to learn more about this new cloud communications solution. Even though I serve as the IT coordinator in my school, in addition to my teaching duties, I do not have a technical background. I found Office 365 very easy to use. Another staff member and I have been using it for a few weeks now and would like to license it for the entire school.   With Office 365, I can sign in once and turn my PC into an online office. I can use Lync Online to talk with multiple students at the same time over a videoconference. Our teaching staff could also use Lync to have after-hours meetings from home, where they are more comfortable and less stressed.   Teachers could use SharePoint Online to share assignments with students and better monitor their progress. Our class periods are only 35-minutes long, which is very limited. We could use Office 365 to restructure our class time and extend learning beyond the school day. Teachers could point to content on SharePoint Online that students could access and learn by themselves. Teachers could be available by Lync to answer questions and stay in touch with students over vacation breaks. And of course they could still send email messages when appropriate by using Exchange Online.   Another benefit of Office 365 is teachers’ ability to access documents after hours, which they currently cannot do because of security concerns. Our documents and exchanges are safe and sound in Microsoft data centers. Also, there are no document compatibility problems using Office Web Apps; moving documents between the desktop and the cloud does not alter document formatting.   Office 365 gives us all of these new capabilities without requiring staff and students to learn anything new. They are already familiar with the Microsoft Office interface, which is also used in Office 365, so they would save time that they can focus on education. Plus, students would be exposed to the latest technology.   Another timesaving benefit that Office 365 delivers is the fact that teachers would no longer need to troubleshoot computer problems. They already spend eight to 10 hours a day at school; they don’t want to spend three or four more hours trying to fix a website or email problem. With Office 365, Microsoft takes care of the whole infrastructure for us and eliminates this extra time drain for teachers. Office 365 would also eliminate the need to buy a server or storage system, add security hardware and software, and organize special training courses.   Office 365 is a great platform for providing the rich e-learning experience our school wants to deliver. It will help us move forward in that direction.   # # #   Learn more about how Office 365 can help your organization or join in the conversation on LinkedIn.     read more...

  By Eugene DeSilva, Vice President, Small and Medium Enterprise Global Products, MasterCard Worldwide   For every small business owner, the holiday season and the start of the New Year brings excitement about new business opportunities and strategies to increase sales. They’re looking for tools and solutions that can have an immediate, real impact on helping their businesses thrive, whether it be saving money or maximizing the assets currently in place. We share a focus with Microsoft to meet these needs, driving real impact for small businesses in two areas that are at core of their businesses – payments and technologies.   That is why we’re excited about a new initiative with Microsoft that enhances our shared commitment to small businesses.  For MasterCard, the heart of our small business offering is the Easy Savings program – and yes, it’s as easy as it sounds! MasterCard small business credit and debit cardholders enrolled in the program receive automatic rebates in a variety of business categories, such as fuel and maintenance, office services, travel and entertainment, and shipping. This translates into immediate cost savings on the essential purchases small businesses need to run their daily operations.   The newest service in the MasterCard Easy Savings program is Microsoft Office 365 – a cloud service that gives small businesses access to email, documents, contacts and calendars from virtually anywhere on almost any device. While Office 365 is already a hit among small businesses, MasterCard is making it even more attractive by offering small business cardholders enrolled in the Easy Savings Program a 10 percent savings on subscriptions to the service.  You can find out more here.   This latest initiative by MasterCard and Microsoft builds on a shared commitment to helping small business grow and succeed. For example, check out the first of several videos of Shwood Handcrafted Wooden Eyewear, the winner of the America’s Favorite Small Business contest that celebrated the entrepreneurial spirit of small business owners. Shwood is a member of the Easy Savings program – utilizing the automatic rebates to save on their in-house logistics – and an example of how a small business can benefit from simple programs that offer value.  We look forward to future collaborations with Microsoft and creating more easy and effective solutions to empower small business success.    read more...

  You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Trust but verify.” While many world leaders have applied this saying to politics – it’s also highly relevant in the world of cloud services.   As an increasing number of organizations consider moving their productivity software into the cloud, safety remains a big concern. People often ask: Can I really depend on my cloud service provider to protect my organization’s information? Will they respect my data privacy rights?   My advice – trust but verify. Trust your cloud service provider to keep your data safe. But before you do, take the time to understand its policies. Does your cloud vendor tell you where you data is stored and who has access? Does it offer the transparency you need about how your data will be used? What practices does it have in place that are independently verified? What guarantees are they willing to put into their contracts? In short, what is it doing to earn your trust?   Today, Microsoft made a number of important announcements about our commitment to security and privacy for Office 365. Office 365 becomes the first and only major cloud based productivity service to contractually commit to a set of stringent European Union wide data protection requirements called the EU Model Clauses. Going above and beyond this, we are including additional requirements from individual EU member states in the Office 365 data processing agreement. Every customer can go here to get this agreement added to their Office 365 contract with Microsoft. We are also announcing that we are offering to sign the Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for any Microsoft Enterprise Agreement customer. The BAA helps to enable our customers to comply with the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) concerning protected health information.   Microsoft has established four Office 365 trust principles that guide our approach to building world class productivity tools: Your Privacy Matters – We respect the privacy of your data Leadership in Transparency – You know ‘where’ data resides, ‘who’ can access it and ‘what’ we do with it Independently Verified – Compliance with world class industry standards verified by 3rd parties Relentless on Security – Excellence in cutting edge security practices These principles grow out of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, a long-term, collaborative effort to create and deliver secure, private, and reliable computing experiences for everyone. As a core corporate value, Microsoft is committed to continually improving its security, privacy, reliability, and business practices.   To help customers understand the details behind these principles as they pertain to privacy, transparency, compliance, and security, we’ve created the Office 365 Trust Center. Located on our Office 365 website, the Trust Center offers in-depth information in plain English. You can also access written information, videos, and a host of resources that discuss Microsoft’s policies.    Take a look at the Office 365 Trust Center, and let us know what you think. We welcome your questions and comments.   read more...