Office 365

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Today is the 50th anniversary of National Small Business Week, a week long opportunity to recognize the contributions of America’s entrepreneurs and small business owners.

As part of my role at Microsoft, I work with a lot of small companies and Microsoft partners, so I hear first-hand how important technology can be for them. When talking about Windows use in business, people often focus on 1,000’s of PC deployments in large multi-national corporations; however, I think it’s a huge miss if we don’t look at how Windows 8 is being used by small and medium businesses (SMBs) as well.

For a small business, the mantra is often about stretching dollars to do more with less and this applies to technology budgets as well, ensuring that you are future-proofing technology investments and getting the most value possible. Here’s some examples of small businesses who are making the most of technology – in this case Windows 8 Pro – and how it has made their businesses more efficient, saving them valuable time and money. From a physical therapy clinic, to a Jiu-Jitsu gym, to a political social media app, these SMBs using Windows 8 are great examples of the 27.9 million small businesses in the U.S. today.

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How can you be the spark of change? Today we are excited to announce a contest YouthSpark Challenge for Change which is designed to support youth in changing the world around them. If you are between the ages of 18 and 25 and have a passion for a cause such as literacy, saving the environment, disease awareness, education or anything related to social good and improving your community, you can enter for the chance to win the tools designed to help make your idea into reality.

To enter you need to submit an entry form by May 24th describing your idea and showing how Windows 8 and Office could help bring it to life.

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Springboard Series Windows alum Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsh are on a mission to help people understand the different delivery models for the new Office desktop apps. They decided to break from the tradition of whitepapers and blog posts – instead they opted for weekly video series, packed with demos, diagrams, software engineer interviews and XStream installations in the air, on land and on water.

<A href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/technet/en-us/office/media/video/vide..." target="_new" title="The New Office: Garage Series for IT Pros">Video: The New Office: Garage Series for IT Pros</A>

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Last week Office 365 Home Premium launched and we’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm over the seamless integration of SkyDrive for saving and sharing your docs. Recently we reached a big milestone; our customers are now storing over a billion Office documents on SkyDrive! We’re really excited about the feedback we’ve seen around the new version of Office and the deep integration of SkyDrive. We’re taking it a step further today by announcing a new feature in SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps that allows a more seamless sharing and editing experience for our customers.

This post was written by Sarah Filman, a Lead Program Manager on SkyDrive who helped bring this new editing feature to SkyDrive.

– Omar Shahine

For those of you who have tried the new Office, you’ll know we made it easy to quickly save your documents to SkyDrive and get a link to share with others—earlier today we made it even easier for people to share and edit documents in the Office Web Apps by not requiring them to sign in with their Microsoft account.

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Today over on the Official Microsoft Blog, Steve Ballmer talks about the new Office and what it means for the company.

Starting today, people can now subscribe to Office as a service via Office.com instead of purchasing Office as a piece of software to install.

Click here for more on the benefits of an Office subscription!

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During the past few months, we’ve been talking about how Windows 8 enterprise ready by design. But what does that really mean for organizations? For one of our early adopters, Seton Hall University, it means they’ll be able to give their students the convenience of a tablet with the productivity of a PC. They’ll be able to connect and collaborate across devices – on a desktop, smart phone, laptop or tablet. It means they can give their students and faculty the experiences they want while also having the enterprise capabilities their IT department needs.

Based in New Jersey, Seton Hall University is working hard to create new and dynamic learning environments and wants all of their students to have access to the latest technology to prepare them well for the workforce when they graduate. In 1998, the university began providing full-time incoming freshmen with laptops as part of their tuition and fees. This award-winning initiative, called the Mobile Computing Program, has evolved during over the last 14 years, right along with the definition of what “mobile” means to our society. In less than two decades, the way people – and students – work and use technology has drastically changed.

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For the last several months, we’ve been talking about the importance of migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7. Much of the discussion has focused on the two year countdown for end of support for Windows XP on April 8, 2014, however, we have also pointed out that Windows XP is over a decade old – two generations behind Microsoft’s current product technology and will soon be three generations behind. These two aspects are valid points for demonstrating the risks for customers who stay on Windows XP, and we recommend customers also take a look at the compelling business incentives to develop and implement a migration strategy to Windows 7.

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Back in October we celebrated the anniversaries of Windows XP and Office 2003 and took the opportunity to remind everyone that on April 8, 2014, we will officially end support for these versions of Windows and Office. Today, we want to acknowledge the two-year countdown to the end of Windows XP and Office 2003 support, which was this past Sunday. If you still have some PCs running Windows XP and Office 2003 in your organization, now would be a good time to start migrating them to Windows 7 and Office 2010.

Windows XP and Office 2003 were great software releases for their time, but the technology environment has shifted. Technology continues to evolve and so do people’s needs and expectations. Modern users demand technologies that fit their personal workstyle and allow them to stay productive anywhere anytime, while businesses have an ever increasing need to protect data and ensure security, compliance and manageability. It is in a company’s – and its employees’ – best interest to take advantage of the modern Windows and Office software that is designed with these needs in mind.

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Today at the Microsoft Management Summit, Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Management and Security Division, shared an early look at some of the updates and new features we’re working on for the next release of Windows Intune.

Windows Intune is our cloud-based management solution that provides tools, reports and an upgrade license to the latest version of Windows to help keep organizations’ PCs up-to-date and secure from virtually anywhere. In the next release of Windows Intune, we will expand management and security benefits to cover mobile devices and add people centric management capabilities. We focused on these areas of development for the next release because customers have been telling us that device proliferation is one of the most pressing challenges they’re facing in their business, and we saw an opportunity to help with Windows Intune.