Office 365 News & Articles

Microsoft is showering Office 365 with upgrades, wider device support and new markets, plus a new Lync app for smartphones is likely to increase its unified communications play.

A mixed bag of document management news this week with SpringCM offering free content management to Salesforce.com customers, PDF finally arriving on iOS, Accusoft Pegasus has bought Adeptol, CenterBeam offers Office 365 challenger and Westbrook makes FortisBlue mobile.

Last week was a busy one for conferences, but it was also a busy week for document management. BlackBerry users will be able to have access to Office 365 documents in beta, Colligo offers document management for SharePoint, eFileCabinet heads to the cloud, LibreOffice celebrates its first birthday and Version One partners with Intuitive.

Yesterday was the final day of the SharePoint conference. I chose to attend a morning session lead by Jeff Fried, CTO & VP of Engineering at BA Insight and Guy Mounier, Co-Founder & CEO of BA Insight. This session is a vendor-sponsored session, which means that the vendors are free to discuss their specific products and tools. I have worked in the past with previous versions of BA Insight and I was curious to see what they had in mind for working with Office 365.

Yesterday at the SharePoint conference I got to attend a session on using Visio Services to build dashboards in Office 365 (#SPC289). This was one of the seven different sessions that focus on Visio during the SharePoint conference, and it focused on what all you can do with Visio Services out-of-the-box (OOTB) configurations.

With a bicoastal relaunch event planned for next month, Microsoft has some big plans for Hotmail to better compete against the likes of Gmail and Yahoo.

This week, Microsoft warns against shifting from BPOS to Office 365 off you own bat, Recommind introduces collaborative and mobile email management, PSIGEN links data and documents in SharePoint, ICG upgrades its redaction software and NextDocs gets a big slice of Series A financing.

Looks like vacations in document-management land are coming to an end. This week alone, Box enhanced its mobile document management offerings, Metalogix offers content migration from SharePoint to Documentum, PSIGEN offers Office 365 scanning, Cabinet NG upgrades CNG-WEB, and Fijitsu offers scanning for Laserfiche.

Sometimes I am skeptical of Microsoft evangelists who love their job too much. Such is the case with Mary Jo Foley, blogger at All About Microsoft and Microsoft groupie. Foley came prepared with acronyms and Microsoft key messaging, ready to give us a high-level perspective of Microsoft’s new Office 365.

With a product that reaches into as many parts of the enterprise as Office 365 potentially does, security was always going to be a problem. MetaVis (news, site) has released Security Manager for SharePoint and Office 365, which enables enterprises to analyze and manage security permissions across multiple SharePoint sites and farms, as well as permissions in Office 365.

The runup to the release of IBM’s (news, site) LotusLive Symphony has been a long one and we’re still no closer to being offered a release date other than sometime in the second half of 2011. However, Big Blue has been working on the project, and has now released its third technical preview of the product.

It has also been busy this week in the GRC space. For Lotus Notes, Daegis has announced functionality on its e-Discovery platform that enables enterprises to preserve collaborative application data throughout the e-Discovery process, Iron Mountain and GimmalSoft get together for SharePoint 2010 records management, there’s new archiving abilities for Office 365, OpenPeak secures Android, and BIA offers e-Discovery on iPads and iPhones.

Microsoft (news, site) is making inroads into the SME market for cloud-based productivity and document management services with the recently-launched Office 365. The company is rumored to be including more Microsoft products and services in the cloud-based Office suite, in order to expand functionality on an add-on basis.

While we have talked a lot over the past six months about Office 365, its potential and problems, one of the things that no one seems to able to answer is where and who is going to use it. Microsoft itself is hoping for interest from the SMB market, while vendors have been working to develop integrations for it. The release of Bloomberg’s (news, site) Office 365 Cloud Archiving this week is one such product.

Even with everything that has been done to SharePoint 2010 since its release last year, including its incorporation into Office 365, migration of content and applications remains a problem. Binary Tree has taken a new approach to the problem with the release of their Application Transformation Framework (ATF) that supports the transformation of applications from Lotus Notes to Microsoft SharePoint.