Microsoft boosts the intelligence of Office with Zoom for PowerPoint, Focused Inbox for Outlook, and more
Microsoft today announced a series of updates for its Office apps which help to make the suite more intelligent than ever. There's a strong focus on workflow and efficiency, and things kick off with the Researcher tool. This provides context-sensitive research materials that can be accessed from within Word and quickly added to a document complete with properly formatted citations.
Microsoft says that Researcher will continue to expand to include "sources like national science and health centers, well-known encyclopedias, history databases and more". But this is far from being the only new tool to be added in the latest monthly update.
Facebook's 13,000 employees will use Microsoft Office 365
Facebook has signed a deal with Microsoft to use some of the software giant’s cloud-based productivity tools.
Facebook’s 13,000 employees will use some of Microsoft's Office 365 services, such as email and calendar, while other services, like Skype for Business or Yammer, will not be used as directly compete with Facebook’s own.
New solution offers one-stop cyber security for SMBs
For smaller organizations, managing their systems can present enough of a challenge without the additional need to worry about different aspects of security.
Now a new three-way collaboration between underwriters Victor O Schinnerer & Company, SaaS data protection company Spanning, and Microsoft, is designed to help small and mid-size organizations safeguard their business and data.
Microsoft cloud changes are overwhelming its customers
Microsoft partners are witnessing Office 365 technology updates, refreshes and changes outpacing their customers' ability to keep up with them.
This is according to a new study by customer experience specialist harmon.ie which surveyed more than 200 Microsoft partners worldwide. Thanks to the complexity and rate of change, partners are seeing new opportunities to step in and provide the much needed bridge to help companies keep up.
New ransomware targets Office 365 users
A new zero-day malware has been discovered in Australia that affects all of Microsoft’s Office 365 products including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
The malware was discovered by the cyber security company Check Point and comes in the form of an invoice sent by email. The attack is designed to catch unsuspecting victims according to security analyst Raymond Schippers who said: "The email sent to Office 365 users via Outlook gives the appearance of an invoice in the form of an Office document. When they go to open it, a message will appear telling people the document was created with a previous version of the software, so they will need to click something to enable the content".
Abracadabra! Microsoft acquires Wand Labs to conjure up some chat bot magic
Continuing the spending spree that started with snapping up LinkedIn earlier this week, Microsoft today announces that it has acquired Wand Labs. The mobile developer has a chat-centric focus, and will help Microsoft to build on the Conversation as a Platform ideas Sayta Nadella has been championing of late.
Neither Wand Labs nor Microsoft has shared details of the amount of money that is changing hands, but the acquisition will assist Microsoft in developing its Bot Framework. Wand Labs' natural language technologies will extend the capabilities of Windows, Bing, Microsoft Azure and Office 365, particularly with intelligent agents and chat bots.
Microsoft introduces project management tool for Office 365
To help its users stay on task and manage their assignments more easily, Microsoft has just launched a new project management tool for teams using Office 365 called Planner.
The company initially released a preview of its new tool in December 2015 and now it will begin rolling it out worldwide to all Office 365 users including those using Office 365 Enterprise E1-E5, Business Essentials, Premium and even its Education subscription plan.
Microsoft stops you from using weak passwords
Having a good password can make the difference between your account being hacked and receiving a notification informing you of a failed login attempt. Even though this should be common knowledge, it seems that many folks are in the dark about this. You do not need to look hard to find evidence of this, as there are many reports that reveal passwords like "1234567890" to be very popular still.
Since it is clear that it cannot rely on its users to make the right decisions about their account security, Microsoft is taking a proactive approach by "dynamically banning commonly used passwords". So, if you think that "qwerty123" is good enough to keep all your emails private, luckily you will not have to find out whether you are right or not.
Spanning launches backup for OneDrive business users
Just because your data is stored in the cloud is no reason to stop backing it up. While cloud service providers are responsible for making your data available, they’re not responsible for managing and protecting customers' data from accidental or malicious behavior.
As a recent survey showed accidental deletion by users is a major source of data loss from the cloud. Now the company behind that survey, Spanning, is launching a solution for Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive for Business users.
Microsoft takes just 7 hours to patch colossal Office 365 vulnerability that exposed companies' data
Companies are often criticized for the length of time it takes them to patch security problems found in software. But this week Microsoft exceled itself, taking just 7 hours to patch a serious security hole in Office 365 that made it possible to gain unrestricted access to businesses' cloud accounts.
A problem with the SAML authentication system meant that it was possible to gain access to just about any Office 365 account, including accessing connected services like Outlook, OneDrive and Skype for Business. More than this, the exploit allowed an attacker to infiltrate companies and organizations such as Verizon, Georgia State University and British Airways who use Office 365. The researchers who unearthed the issue have praised Microsoft for dealing with it so quickly.
Weak Lumia sales prove Microsoft should put an end to Windows 10 Mobile
It is hard to take Windows 10 Mobile seriously when Microsoft announces sales of just 2.3 million Lumias in a whole quarter. If you ever thought that the platform can actually be competitive in today's market, now is the time to wake up. This year, smartphones sales are expected to reach 1.5 billion units. If Microsoft manages to move 10 million Lumias in 2016, Windows 10 Mobile's market share would likely be around the one percent mark.
Microsoft is not the only Windows Phone/Windows 10 Mobile vendor, but it is the largest by far. It sells about 90 percent of the smartphones running the tiled operating system, so its performance has a major impact on the platform's popularity.
Google's Single Sign On adds support for Microsoft Office 365, Facebook at Work, Slack and more
Besides being the super poplar search engine, email provider, work and collaboration services provider, Google is also used, by a number of different services, as an identity provider.
It allows people to register and log into different online services using their Google account. Now, the company announced it’s expanding the feature to add a number of new services, some of which are direct competitors.
Microsoft wants to make Windows 10 and Office 365 more accessible
Making its products accessible to as many people as possible is clearly in Microsoft's best interests. Today the company outlined how it plans to improve accessibility in Windows 10 and Office 365, setting out a roadmap built on three key principles.
Transparency, accountability and being inclusive will be the company's cornerstones for 2016. Microsoft wants to "to think about all of our customers and all of the ways we can empower them with technology". But what does this actually mean.
A 7 step security checklist for migrating from on-prem SharePoint to Office 365
Microsoft Office is the tried and true solution for work, so it’s no surprise enterprises moving to the cloud look to a familiar face in Office 365. Despite the cloud services’ significant adoption numbers -- 87.3 percent of organizations have at least 100 employees using Office 365 -- the vast majority of companies have yet to migrate all users to the cloud: 93.2 percent of employees still use Microsoft on-premises solutions.
The transition to cloud leaves companies puzzled on how to safely and effectively migrate extensive on-premises SharePoint environments to SharePoint Online. Once content is successfully migrated, companies must have controls already in place to properly enforcing security, compliance, and governance of sensitive data. Microsoft has significantly invested in the security of Office 365. According to Gartner, however, 95 percent of security incidents involving cloud will come from customer vulnerabilities rather than the service provider. Companies need to worry less about Microsoft suffering a breach and more about their own users’ high-risk activity within Microsoft applications. It is ultimately up to the enterprise to secure their data in Office 365, and the greatest threats frequently come from within.
Microsoft opens up FastTrack to more SMBs to sweeten the Office 365 deal
Microsoft today unveiled a measure designed to attract more SMBs to Office 365. The new scheme sees Microsoft's FastTrack customer service operation expanding so that it is now available to organizations with as few as 50 users; the previous minimum was 150 seats.
Microsoft says that many SMBs who have opted to use Google's App instead reach a "breaking point" when they hit 50 users. The company aims to capitalize on this by offering enterprise-grade services to businesses that would otherwise not be able to take advantage of features such as centralized management capabilities.
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