Office News & Articles

After years of will they/won't they, Microsoft has finally released an Office app for the iPhone (usable, but not optimized for the iPad), finally bringing its platform agnostic play to Apple devices. 

It may be a newbie, but already Office 365 Home Premium Edition -- also known as Office 2013 -- has gained considerable traction in the productivity suite space, and has just announced that it has passed the 1 million subscription mark.

After the announcement that SharePoint Online is coming out of Preview, Microsoft has also announced a number of upgrades to Microsoft Office Web Apps, which, when all the upgrades become available, will come with support for Chrome on Android tablets and co-editing in real-time.

This week in the realm of Document Management, Microsoft finally cleared up one of the big questions surrounding Office -- the subscription model and where it is going in the future. In other news, EMC is holding its annual show and hosted a lot of interesting developments with Documentum, while NetDocuments opens an app store and dtSearch upgraded.

If IBM’s figures were disappointing for investors, then those of Google and Microsoft will reassure them and offer some optimism around the IT industry. Google, which was concerned over lower mobile ad prices, appears to have shaken it off and has posted profits of US$ 3.35 billion, up 16% on the last time.

If you actually believe that there is any such thing as a leak from Microsoft, then the most recent one should annoy quite a lot of people. It seems that according to a leaked roadmap, Office for iOS and Android won’t be available until the fall of next year.

There were a number of interesting releases in the document management space that are definitely worth a look. Among them are the new Service Pack 2 beta releases for Office and SharePoint 2010, WatchDox apps for mobile-desktop collaboration and sharing, and Docstocs new link-up to the Microsoft store. We also revisited the paperless office through EchoSign.

You can say what you want about Microsoft, but one thing you can’t accuse it of is not listening. You may recall the storm of protest across the Web a couple of weeks ago when it became clear that the licensing agreement on the new Office 2013 release limited each license to a single machine. Well, according to a blog post from Microsoft, it has caved in to consumer pressure.

Microsoft started the roll-out of the updated version of Office 365 for business users earlier this week. The upgrades are present in all elements of the suite and reflect a changing work environment that is now more mobile, social and collaborative than it was when the suite was originally launched 18 months ago.

Way back when, in the days when Microsoft starting talking up Office 2013 critics of the Redmond giant made some pretty pointed comments about slow-coach Microsoft and the cloud. There may have been reasons to suggest that the company was behind the times with a desktop office suite, but the recent issues around licensing of Office 2013 shows exactly where it is putting its money.

 Having been available through beta, enterprise releases and free upgrade offers, the latest collection of Office 2013 products from Microsoft becomes generally available this week with a launch party announced for Tuesday in New York. 

Anyone hoping that the information supplied at Microsoft’s Q2 earnings announcement last night would answer some of the questions hanging over the Redwood giant are going to be disappointed.

It’s still not clear when exactly Microsoft is going to release Office 2013, but at this point the leaks are so prolific, it may as well make a clean breast of it. In the last few days alone, more about the pricing has been ‘leaked’, and now word that some home users will also be able to get their hands on the new suite.

Still no official date for the full release of Office 2013, but Microsoft has really been building up a head of steam. Last month, it announced it was making it available to business users in volume with home users to follow this quarter. And now, it has just announced that it has localized it into three more languages, with interface packs for 13 more.

It’s Christmas so a lot of people will be expecting iPads, even if it’s only one of the older versions. While that’s all well and good, what will really make this Christmas special are the apps that go with it. One of the biggest problems to date has been the inability to use Office and Office documents on the iPad. This week however, Google has announced that it will be making Office users’ Christmas dreams come true with iPad access.