Microsoft Office goes touchscreen friendly

New preview versions of the latest Microsoft Office apps are available for anyone testing Windows 10 Technical Preview. The “universal” apps can be used on any Windows device, from a desktop to a tablet or phone. They come with a host of touch features to make working on a touchscreen (and a smaller screen) more natural, and make the many MS Office desktop-era features more accessible.

When the final version of Windows 10 is released later this year, new systems, Windows Phones and tablets will ship with the apps for free. However, since Windows 10 won’t be free for businesses, we don’t expect enterprises to start getting Office licenses for free either. While usability is one of the key features, pick up and go is another, so users can start a document on their PC, leave the office and continue working on it on their phone or tablet, thanks to OneDrive storage.

Note that these aren’t the productivity apps that will ship as Microsoft Office 2016, which is being developed with standard PCs and enterprise users in mind. The Office 2016 apps will feature easier integration with cloud services and data sources. They will allow for a wider and deeper range of analytics tasks, as the Office suite tries to exist in a world of big data and smart dashboards that are rendering the standard Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint display redundant in many businesses.

The Windows 10 Office touch apps, along with Outlook and Office for iOS and Android are part of Microsoft’s plan to keep Office relevant in an increasingly fragmented device market, where Windows Phones and tablets have a very small market share. The Office anywhere, anytime approach, including Office 365, is part of the plan to keep adoption of Google Docs, and productivity services from Amazon and others at bay.

Key to the success of Windows 10 will be new hardware. Microsoft is likely to unveil the Surface Pro 4, and possibly a Surface Pro mini tablet around the time of the OS launch to tempt enterprise users, while third parties are already producing a raft of cheaper hardware for those not in the executive suite to make Windows tablets more affordable.

Microsoft Office goes touchscreen friendly

Amazon gets into hosted email with WorkMail

Joining the hotly contested hosted email solution market, Amazon is taking on the likes of Gmail for businesses and Office 365 with a new service called WorkMail. There are a few differences to its rival products; for a start, WorkMail allows businesses to choose on which set of Amazon AWS servers their data lies, which will help keep them within their jurisdiction and stay compliant with local data privacy laws. Something that may or may not be an advantage, depending on the level of enterprise security, is that WorkMail lets businesses manage their own sets of encryption keys.

The product is available now across the US and Europe, and is likely to roll out globally soon. This expansion will also help to cut transfer times. WorkMail costs $4 per user per month (pupm), or can be bundled with WorkDocs for document sharing and a collaboration suite for $6 pupm. It can sync with anything that uses ActiveSync, including Outlook on PCs. While Amazon may be dominating in cloud computing services, it is falling behind in adoption by enterprises for the routine tasks of business – especially when it comes to smaller businesses. So WorkMail and WorkDocs are part of a concerted effort to get those users interested in AWS, S3 and EC2, where Amazon has so much power and can offer opportunities for companies to exploit.

The trouble is that users are now happy with vibrant and full-spectrum products, like Google Docs, Outlook, OneDrive and Office 365, which all leave Amazon’s barebones and piecemeal approach looking rather hollow. We’ll find out in coming quarters just how much AWS makes for Amazon, as the company changes its reporting methods, but it is hard to see WorkMail adding more than pocket change to the numbers.

Does WorkMail sound like an option for your business, or are you already happy with your current product and unlikely to move unless there is an obvious and significant advantage? We wonder what Amazon will offer next to attract customers, but we think there’s an uphill battle ahead.

Amazon gets into hosted email with WorkMail

British PM throws his weight behind UK cyber security industry

With instances of cyber crime on the rise, demonstrated in spectacular fashion over the course of 2014; a year defined by DDOS attacks and hacking scandals; an increasing number of organisations and government agencies have vowed to remove the kid gloves and get serious about tackling the rising tide of cyber criminality.

One of the highest profile agencies to step into the ring and start hitting back at the hackers is the UK government. David Cameron, the current British Prime Minister, has vowed to improve computer security in the UK, strengthening the country’s cyber security industry in a bid to prevent future incursions.

While US president Barack Obama is still fine-tuning his plan of action, Cameron has already laid out measures he hopes will aid UK businesses in improving their computer security. His plans do not just include protection, Cameron is also hoping to foster a new crop of UK-based cyber security specialists, turning the country into a world-leading computer security provider that can tap into the bountiful US market.

During a recent stopover in the US for talks with President Barack Obama, Cameron was trailed by an entourage of UK cyber security firms. These firms, in an effort to plant roots in the US and establish connections in the sector, were invited to spend time getting to know their US counterparts.

As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen ties between security companies in the UK and the US, freshly appointed UK cyber envoy Andy Williams will set up shop in the British Embassy’s Washington branch. According to techUK, this appointment will help build on the work done by the Cyber Growth Partnership (a government, industry and academia led coalition that work together to improve the UK’s cyber security sector) in the region.

“The UK has a rich and diverse cyber security sector with many innovative companies being started every year,” remarked Ruth Davis, techUK’s head of cyber, emergency, and justice services at techUK.

“We are very pleased to see the government throwing its weight behind British businesses and helping them to break into the US market. We look forward to working with Andy Williams as he champions UK companies in the US.”

British PM throws his weight behind UK cyber security industry

Public cloud reliability rankings revealed

Cloud computing is on the rise. With more and more of us relying on cloud services for business and personal use, cloud computing solutions are having to adapt to increased levels of use. 2014 saw cloud become more popular, and make lots of changes to its functions, but just how well are the public cloud solutions coping? A survey conducted throughout the year by cloud computing website tracker Cloud Harmony tested the performance of a number of public cloud solutions, arriving at total downtimes, outage incidents and uptime percentages for all those tested.

The survey tested the reliability, performance and consistency of over 30 different public cloud computing options, and came to some interesting conclusions. Out of the 30 different solutions tested, which ranged from major corporations like Google and Amazon to smaller cloud operations like Akamia and Zettagrid, the top two might not surprise you. You’ve probably guessed it already, but Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform topped the list, boasting consistently impressive performance levels and very few major outages. In fact, in the period tested by Cloud Harmony, Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud, which powers its Web Services, recorded only 20 different outages, totalling a little over two and a half hours of overall downtime throughout the year. This means that for the whole of 2014, Amazon Web Services boasted an uptime percentage of 99.074% – rather impressive. Google Cloud Platform’s statistics are even more impressive though. During 2014, users of Google’s public cloud only experienced 14 minutes of outages, giving it an uptime percentage of 99.9996%.

CEO of Cloud Harmony, Jason Reed, said of the survey: “The more established players are fine-tuning their systems and becoming quite stable”. He commented on the performance of AWS, which he said, “has been providing cloud services longer than anyone in the market” and is used by Google to run its cloud services. He praised their “long track record of managing a reliable distributed system”.

If you need advice or information about cloud computing or cloud and remote backup and storage solutions for your business, contact us at Oswin today.

Public cloud reliability rankings revealed

What’s coming to Office 365 in 2015

Now that Microsoft has moved its office suite to the cloud, Office 365 users are a little more demanding about the updates and features, after years of impressive updates to other cloud services. So, here’s what Microsoft has on its raft of rolling out, and in development features, for the suite in 2015.

In the process of currently being rolled out to the general user base, we have:

Declutter your inbox

This is a new Clutter folder that will appear in Outlook online and plays host to low priority emails that you decide aren’t worth dealing with immediately. It learns what you don’t need to look at, and will start automatically moving those messages to the Clutter folder.

Document related chat

Document conversations let users link their Yammer conversations about a particular file to that document, so SharePoint or OneDrive documents, images and videos can be seen with a record of that chat, allowing everyone to remember what was discussed. Editing the document is an in development feature (see below).

Groups in Office 365

With a growing focus on collaboration, Groups will provide a unifying experience for users across Outlook and OneDrive for business, linking people, conversations, calendars, and content for easier and more relevant collaboration efforts across applications.

Still in development, hopefully arriving in 2015:

Compliance for Office 365

Larger businesses love policies, and Compliance Center for Office 365 will allow the implementation of rules and regulations across the apps and services. This will ensure workers follow the rules and don’t access any content or send any messages that they shouldn’t be sending. A different feature, but related to this, is File Deletion Policies, which is also in development.

Improved Excel functions

One of the most asked for functions are pivot tables in Excel Online, and these are coming. Microsoft is hard at work on adding support for the editing and updating of workbooks containing pivot tables and power views, which are currently limited to the desktop version.

Office support in Yammer

You’ll soon be able to open and work on documents from directly within Yammer, again helping to improve collaboration and workflow. The feature, when launched, will enable co-authoring by different users at the same time, while users chat and discuss the document’s content.

Which feature are you most looking forward to from Microsoft Office 365 in 2015?

What"s coming to Office 365 in 2015

Microsoft takes the fight to competitors with free Office 365

In a surprise move, tech-giant Microsoft has announced it is making parts of its Office 365 software available to mobile workers on iPad, iPhone, and Android tablets for free. The new policy will allow users to make edits to documents from the comfort of their mobile offices, without needing to pay for a Microsoft Office 365 subscription. The move is the latest volley in Microsoft’s campaign against Google, Amazon and Apple, as CEO Satya Nadella attempts to win mobile users’ hearts and minds as part of the company’s ‘mobile first, cloud first’ strategy.

There is a slight catch; free users won’t have access to the full suite of services open to paying subscribers, but it’s still an encouraging move and one that shows Microsoft may finally be taking the threat posed by Google and Apple a little more seriously. Nadella has long been a proponent of making Microsoft 365’s applications available to mobile users; one of the first things he did upon taking office as Microsoft’s chief executive was to scrap the company’s previous, unwieldy mobile apps and replace them with bespoke new apps that took the needs of mobile users into careful consideration.

Former Ovum man and current employee at Jackdaw Research, Jan Dawson, welcomed the move, saying Microsoft are right not to charge mobile users, arguing that paying for the basic Microsoft Office services the app provides is unreasonable in many cases.

“Think about the kind of Office-related work you might want to do on an iPad,” he wrote on his blog, before going on to highlight that your average user will use the service to fix the odd typo and finesse a spreadsheet during their daily commute, not embark on the next great American novel, or write a TED talk.

“Is that functionality worth $70-$100 a year for most users?” he argues.

It is also worth considering that revenue for Microsoft’s consumer Office software has tracked much lower than business revenue. Not much of a surprise in itself, but interesting in that it shows Microsoft is willing to take a financial hit if it means staying on top of the technological heap.

 

Microsoft takes the fight to competitors with free Office 365

Lizard Squad’s DDOS tool is a threat to all websites

Having managed to take down and disrupt the gaming network services of both Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Consoles over Christmas, the perpetrators known as Lizard Squad are now selling the tool it used to carry out these attacks to online criminals. This massively increases the likelihood of random attacks that could affect any and all businesses, creating a major computer security issue.

While they might not target you directly, any future assault on a major web concern such as Microsoft’s, Amazon’s or Google’s services could result in wider disruption across the web and affect the cloud computing tools that we all use. The members of Lizard Squad have created, or refined, common DDOS (distributed denial of service) tools that flood a web server with requests, so legitimate users can’t get through. This now means that any malcontent or web hooligan can deploy it, so expect a spike of these attacks in early 2015.

Larger businesses can employ anti-DDOS tools to limit and work around the damage, but for the humble user, until the attack subsides, we just have to sit and wait to access the service or data. To prepare for any potential DDOS attack, you must look at all the services you use, ensure you have local copies of any data that is stored on them. This could be downloading contacts from a cloud service, your emails from Google Gmail and any documents held in Microsoft’s Cloud or other service.

While the FBI and other agencies are hunting down the members of Lizard Squad, since their tool is now out there in the wild, available for a modest fee, even if they are arrested, the threat will not end until the bot net behind all the attacks is dismantled. We can only hope that there will be an easy way for Internet security teams to take down the net and remove the threat. However, even after Lizard Squad and its tool is consigned to history, more will spring up, so always make sure you have an alternative service to use should a DDOS attack hit your business.

Lizard Squad"s DDOS tool is a threat to all websites