SMB Roll-up: Microsoft Gets Busy with Office 2011 and Aurora, Gmail Gets Extended Search

A number of product enhancements that have been in the pipeline at Microsoft were given a lot more visibility this week with the preview launch of the new Small Business Server (Aurora) and the unveiling of new features for Office 2011 for Mac.

Microsoft Previews Aurora

Microsoft  (news, site) has also been busy this week enabling SMBs move to the cloud easier with the –finally – preview of the Windows Small Business Server (Aurora) , which is designed to give SMBs access to all kinds of Microsoft services in the cloud.

Described by the company in a recent blog post as “a significant departure” from the traditional on-premise model, Aurora will be able to deliver both on premises and cloud computing capabilities for small businesses.

Designed for businesses who have less than 25 users and who are using a peer to peer network,  or for those that have no network at all, it provides advanced backup and file restoration features to users who will also be able to access data on Aurora from anywhere using personalized web address.

It is also designed to integrate between on-premise and online services and to use pay-as-you-go online services to extend the server functionality without increasing workload and maintenance needs.

Aurora is available for download for those who want to test drive it, while those interested in developing add-ons for “Aurora” will also be able to download the SDK.

Office 2011 Compatible with Office 2011

The latest news from the Office for Mac 2011 camp came earlier this week, this time with the announcement that it has made a number of enhancements to Office 2011 to make it more compatible with Office 2010 (for PC), that it has tweaked some aspects of Excel and that it has added photo editing functionality.

The first and probably most important of these from a sales point of view is that output from both Office 2010 and Office 2011 will be of exactly the same quality, Office 2011 evangelist Kurt Schmucker said it a video released this week.

"What we've been able to do in Office for Mac 2011 is to bring a lot of power to bear to produce a professional-looking document that's still compatible with Office for Windows.

In fact he adds that if the two are not absolutely identical they would consider this a bug and have to go and fix it.

The second is the addition of Sparklines for Excel 2011 where users can create a quick visual summary of large amounts data using tiny charts that fit within a cell near its corresponding values.

Finally, they have also added new Photo Editing features that will enable users to do have the basic photo editing tasks in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2011without having to leave the application you're working  in. Check out the video for more on this, or you can go to the Office for Mac blog.

Mac for Office 2011 will be released in October. The main interest here for SMBs will be the Office for Mac Home & Business Edition 2011 (Word for Mac, PowerPoint for Mac, Excel for Mac, Outlook for Mac and Messenger for Mac 8) US$ 199 for one install and multi-pack, or US$ 279 for two.

comments

Useful article?

 Email It      

Follow @cmswire

Related Articles:

• Alfresco Enterprise 4: Social, Collaborative, Mobile, Cloud Connected Content Management
• Is There A Business Case For Using SharePoint as an Enterprise CMS?
• Liferay Releases Dropbox Style Synchronization for Enterprises

Tags: cloud computing, computhink, document capture, document management, gmail, google, kodak, microsoft, smb, smb tech roll-up, viewwise

A number of product enhancements that have been in the pipeline at Microsoft were given a lot more visibility this week with the preview launch of the new Small Business Server (Aurora) and the unveiling of new features for Office 2011 for Mac.