If you’re not up on the latest from Microsoft in the business intelligence space, check out this quick 2 minute video. It’s amazing the amount of innovation that is going into analytics and visualizations. Many people have said Excel is “one of the best, most critical BI tools we have”. Microsoft is now taking BI to the next level.
Here’s a account of a 30 day experiment I did using only Office Online. For clarification, I will refer to the Office installed locally as (desktop) and Office products in the browser from Office 365 as (online).
Parameters of the experiment were pretty simple: unless jeopardizing my job or customer, I was only going to use Office (online) – no Office (desktop). This means I authored, edited, shared and presented content all from Office 365.
I’m kicking off 30 Days with Office 365 experiment with a Day 1 post on my Outlook experience today. Being one of the more critical tools of my work day, I thought I’d start here and see how it goes. I definitely wasn’t new to OWA (Outlook Web Access), and felt fairly confident I would be ok for awhile working via the browser.
Login/Launch – I found the initial login/launch incredibly quick. The web page was responsive and I was in to my Inbox in seconds.
Touch Mode – On first login, the website asks me if I want to switch to desktop mode (instead of touch mode), and kindly asks me if I want to remember this setting. Since I’m on a touch-enabled laptop, I decided to stick with desktop mode for the first day.
Creating/Replying/Deleting – Creating a new message and replying were fast as expected. Same as with Outlook 2013, if I navigated away from a message (new or reply) a draft would be saved for me automatically.
Moving Messages – No issues moving messages into other folders. Right-click exposed a context menu just like in Outlook 2013 and drag-and-drop worked as well.
Browser Tab – There wasn’t an easy way to open a second tab for things. A fairly easy work-around, I simply created a second tab and navigated to the Calendar.
Threading – Every once and a while, this still throws me off. Threading works as expected, but if you fork a message, the threading does not portray this like it does in Outlook 2013. It just shows the messages in chronological order, which can give the impression that they were replies of one another, when in fact they just share the same subject. There are some dots to the left of the threads, but without an authoritative answer, I’m only guess what they mean.
Signature – I am also missing the ability to store multiple signatures, but this is very minor and hasn’t been an issue for me.
Multiple Email – Since I’m in the context of one user account, I don’t have the ability to view/send email from multiple accounts like I would in Outlook 2013. Easy work around was to have another tab open for my personal accounts. I didn’t actually do this method, and found myself using my phone more for this scenario.
Meeting Preview – With that out of the way, the Calendar functionality really is good. The single click preview is awesome.
Single Pane – The general ability to do almost everything in a single window is really productive.
Personal Calendar – The biggest downfall for me was the inability to overlay personal calendars. I have several calendars that I use and having multiple windows open for them is a bit of a hassle. However, this won’t be the case with everyone and my phone still does an excellent job of aggregating appointments so I can see free/busy across all of them.
I will cover the “People” update under the Lync overview, Day 5
Task Lists – Like Outlook 2013, Tasks are shown from Exchange, but can also be linked from SharePoint Online. With that, the same great “merged” view of different task lists
Message Followup – I rely on Tasks a lot for following up on email requests and a simple right click allows me to set a follow up flag for emails.
I really couldn’t find any thing that didn’t work.
The email search works as good as Outlook 2013. However, the filters aren’t easily identifiable. Here is a list of the filters that work:
| From | Searches the From field. |
| To | Searches the To field. |
| Cc | Searches the Cc field. |
| Bcc | Searches the Bcc field. |
| Participants | Searches the To, Cc, and Bcc fields. |
| Subject | Searches the subject. |
| Body or Content | Searches the message body. |
| Sent | Searches the date sent. You can search for a specific date or a range of dates separated by two dots (..). You can also search for relative dates: Today, tomorrow, yesterday, this week, next month, last week, past month. You can search for the day of the week or month of the year. |
| Received | Searches for the date received. You can use the same search terms as for Sent. |
| Category | Searches the Category field. |
| Attachment | Searches for the specified attachment by title. For example, attachment:letter.doc will find any message with an attachment named letter.doc. |
| Has | Use has:flag to find items that are flagged.Use has:attachment to find items that have one or more attachments. |
I found Touch Mode great for tablet like scenarios (triaging email, quick responses, managing calendar, etc). Though, I did have a little bit of trouble initially finding the option to switch back to desktop mode.
| Touch Mode On | Touch Mode Off |
 |
 |
All in all – it was a seamless transition for the day. No challenges navigating or working with the Outlook in the browser. I definitely did not experience any productivity loss, which was most important. I don’t think I would have any issues converting over to Outlook (online) long-term, especially with the anticipated release of Office 365 Groups, which will integrate with Yammer.
Follow this on Storify: http://storify.com/erickraus/30-days-with-office-365
I’m kicking off an experiment where I’ll use only browser-based applications via O365 for 30 days. You can follow the story on Twitter with #30daysO365 or on Storify: http://storify.com/erickraus/30-days-with-office-365.
There is also an embedded feed for Storify on the lower right of the front page of the blog.
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Enterprise Social Sessions (recorded) | All Session Recordings (Channel 9)
Menchie’s productivity case study
Success Center – for training, case studies, guidance for planning your enterprise social journey
Microsoft + Yammer: Transforming by Working Social
http://blogs.office.com/2014/01/31/update-on-infopath-and-sharepoint-forms/
{more to come}
Sharing and Collaborating in Project 2013 – free webcast
Microsoft and DocuSign recently announced a partnership to bring electronic signatures to Office 365.
Among the features first being delivered:
Both organizations have agreed that this is only the start and they will continue to collaborate on bringing new innovations to the Office 365 offering.
More details:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/feb14/02-17docusignpr.aspx
Microsoft just announced that Multi-factor Authentication will be added to Office 365 Midsize Business, Enterprise, Academic, Nonprofit, and standalone plans: Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.
http://blogs.office.com/2014/02/10/multi-factor-authentication-for-office-365/
Benefits
For applications like Office, that don’t current support MFA, the platform will support App Passwords can be generated to leverage the added security. MFA support in Office client is on the roadmap and is schedule for later 2014.
For a technical understanding Multi-factor Authentication for Office 365, please visit the following technet article.
Please visit the Office 365 Trust Center for more information on security in Office 365.
Remember the Office Home Use Program (HUP) ? It’s now even better with Office 365.
Benefits
How To Install Office Pro Plus with Office 365
1. From a browser on any device type in http://portal.microsoftonline.com
2. Put in your corporate credentials/email address.
3. In the upper right, click on the Settings icon that looks like a gear.
4. Click on “Office 365 Settings”
5. Click on “Software” tab.
6. You can see what devices you have it installed on, how many installs you have left and then a one-click install of Office.
7. In about 5 minutes, you will have a fully functioning version of Office 2013 deployed to your machine. Further installation will continue in the background (for approximately 20 minutes), but you can work on documents while that happens.
Another perfect example of the value of Microsoft’s SaaS (Software As A Service) and Cloud Services: continuous innovation. Microsoft recently announced that SkyDrive Pro (on Office 365) will increase the default amount of storage for users as well as add a few other valuable features.
Each user will now get 25 GB of SkyDrive Pro storage space (up from 7 GB). Additionally, administrators can increase users’ storage beyond the default 50 GB and 100 GB limits. The team also added a new “Shared with Me” view to easily find documents others have shared with you.
Read more here: http://blogs.office.com/b/office365tech/archive/2013/08/27/skydrive-pro-increases-storage-and-ease-of-sharing.aspx
Wanted to share a couple exciting updates related to Office and Office 365.
As part of the Windows 8.1 update, Outlook 2013 will be coming to Windows RT (joining Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote).
more information: http://blogs.office.com/b/office-news/archive/2013/06/05/outlook-2013-rt-coming-to-windows-rt-tablets-as-part-of-windows-8-1-update.aspx