Thirty-three years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh 128k. This launched the pivotal definition of home computing. Flash forward to 2017 and Apple holds numerous records in top technology, computer sales, and “Apple” is more than just a house-hold name; it’s a way of life. Re-live the nostalgic unveiling below: Credit: macessentials YouTube […]
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Microsoft has announced new co-authoring features for users of Office Mobile and Office Online who store their files with cloud services such as Box, Dropbox and Egnyte. Tighter integration with these services means that files can be worked on ‘natively’ as they reside in the cloud service, without users having to come out of their office application.
The new options come nearly a year after the Cloud Storage Partner Program (CSPP) was launched in February 2015, when Microsoft invited cloud storage providers to connect their services to Office Online and Office for iOS. “Today, we’re adding real-time co-authoring with Office Online for documents stored in partner cloud services, extending our Office for iOS integration to all partners in the CSPP and enabling integration between Outlook.com and cloud storage providers Dropbox and Box,” wrote Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft’s corporate VP for the Office team.
Instant co-authoring with Office Online is now available for users with documents stored in Box, Citrix ShareFile, Dropbox and Egnyte. Koenigsbauer also invited all Microsoft’s CSPP partners to integrate their storage services with Office for iOS so that users can designate these partner cloud services as ‘places’ in Office, as is possible now with Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox. The new changes mean that users can browse for PowerPoint, Word and Excel files on their preferred cloud service from within an Office app without having to interrupt their train of thought by coming out of the application.
Box is now used by 41 million consumers and 54,000 paying businesses, including 55% of the Fortune 500. Among the new features offered are real time co-authoring between Box and Office Online and the integration of Box with Office for iOS and Outlook.com. Users can make concurrent, real time edits to content secured in Box including Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Box, an early member in the Cloud Storage Partner Program, has introduced a new application for Windows 10 and integrations with both Office for iPad and iPhone. DropBox and Egnyte both also announced real time co-authoring the ability to collaborate across Powerpoint, word and Excel using documents stored in the cloud.
Office is in the middle of a significant global expansion
Shoe retailer Office is using a private cloud and managed virtualisation services to handle spikes in online ordering ahead of one of its busiest periods.
Office has over 150 stores across Europe and the US and began rolling out its international e-commerce site earlier this year in a bid to expand its presence globally.
The company enlisted e-commerce specialist Envoy Digital to help with its broader digitisation efforts. It is using Rackspace’s private cloud platform to host the e-commerce site, which is built using the hybris platform, and VMware-based managed virtualisation in combination with load balancers to manage and distribute workloads and traffic.
“When working with any cloud provider, it’s critical that they can ensure only a minimal amount of our time is spent overseeing the IT infrastructure so that it operates smoothly,” said Robin Worthington, multichannel director, Office. “This allows us to focus on what we’re best at – helping customers find the right shoes.”
The company said it wanted to migrate its international platform to the cloud and improve the reliability of its multichannel infrastructure in advance of the summer season, which is one of the busiest for the shoe retailer.
Microsoft chief exec Satya Nadella previewed a number of new services at Convergence this week
Microsoft revealed a slew of new cloud offerings and updates to its productivity offerings at the company’s annual Convergence conference this week, including a developer and enterprise preview of Office 2016, a re-branded Microsoft Lync (Skype for Business), and an Azure-based suite of Internet of Things services.
The company was keen to show off Office 2016, which will be available later this year and ship with a few new services – notably Office Delve, which uses machine learning algorithms to surface corporate Office 265 documents and files that are relevant to specific users in a cloud-based collaboration environment.
“You know how Facebook has a newsfeed? Think of this as your work newsfeed,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “It’s about enabling anyone in the organisation to find useful information without having corporate hierarchies get in the way.”
Microsoft also announced the general availability of PowerBI, it’s analytics and dashboarding platform, which will come with new connectors for Google Analytics, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, Zuora, Acumatica and Twilio – with connections for other analytics platforms coming in the near future.
Microsoft Lync, the company’s enterprise collaboration and communications platform, has been re-branded to Skype for Business and been given a noticeable facelift.
The company also unified its Azure-based analytics and machine learning offerings into what Microsoft is calling the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite. The suite combines Azure Stream Analytics and Azure ML (machine learning) and is being aimed at developers creating real-time data services.
“Devices will come and go. But the most interesting thing is the data being collected,” Nadella said, adding that the rapid increase in the volume and velocity of data requires better and more unified tools for developers.
“We’re going to have something like 26 billion internet-connected devices and 44 zettabytes of data in the cloud by 2019,” Nadella said. “How do we make sure that the ability to have access to that data, the ability to act on the insight – those small patterns that, we as humans, recognise in data? The real power comes from our ability to act on those insights.”