Office News & Articles

Just about a year since the release of the 2010 range of office applications, Microsoft has announced the release of its Service Pack 1 (SP1) for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 that gathers all updates to the products so far, as well as adding new ones.

After all the hype, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer finally unveiled Office 365 in New York. For those who were expecting, or even hoping, for something new, it would have been a disappointment. If, however, you were to count the number of times he used the words "collaboration" and "SMB," you get a clear idea of where Microsoft is hoping to go with it.

After months of squabbling between Google and Microsoft over Office 365 and Google Docs, things finally came to a head today with the official, general release of Office 365 by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in New York.

With the general release of Office 365 expected less than a week away, cloud-based enterprise collaboration is about to go mainstream. While there has been a good deal of talk about Office 365 -- probably because everyone likes to talk about Microsoft -- others have been developing their collaboration abilities too, and with the announcement that Box (news, site ) and Google Docs are providing deep integration, another major challenge to Office 365 is now available.

Seems likes like there’s nothing Google won’t do to spoil the Office party. With a major announcement due next week on Office 365 where Steve Ballmer "will share the news," Google already this week has announced integration with Box, and now has made it easier to use Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office.

Normally, we wouldn’t pay much attention to birthdays, because that’s the way we are. However, there was such a frisson of excitement around the release of Office2010 last year, and because Microsoft says it is the bestselling version of Office it has ever made, let's have a look at what Microsoft is saying one year later.

This week, Microsoft announced that it will be enhancing the security of Office with the acquisition of Prodiance, kCura upgrades its e-Discovery platform, Autonomy closes acquisition of Iron Mountain’s digital assets and gets DoD certification for Records Manager, while Aveska offers governance for unstructured content in SharePoint.

This week, Kofax decided to enhance its SDK with the acquisition of Atalasoft, Nuance upgrades to OmniPage 18, Microsoft tells us why Office 365 is good for Mac, First to File extends patent document management reach and Google looks set to introduce Google Docs Offline this summer -- again.

Microsoft has finally set a (approximate) date for the release of its Service Pack 1 for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, which, according to the Office Sustained Engineering and Release blog, will support Chrome once it is released.

On May 24, Microsoft will preview its upcoming Mango update for Windows Phone at a special event in New York, but the company is already starting to reveal details about the next version of its mobile operating system.

Zoho's (news, site) range of cloud business apps continues to knit itself tighter together and offer more to its growing army of users.

In the world of office productivity suites, where content and collaboration professionals aim to make users as efficient as possible, Microsoft Office is still way ahead of the pack when it comes to deployment. But there are many alternatives on the market now, which, according to new research by Forrester, are being tried out by companies, if not fully deployed -- not yet, that is.

This week, Forrester answers one of the questions we have been looking at for some time, notably, whether enterprises are taking to MS Office alternatives; Cabinet NG releases v7.0 of CNG-SAFE; Workshare releases an upgrade to its collaboration solution Workshare Compare; eGistics adds to its cloud storage capabilities and CloudMagic searches Gmail and Google Docs.

This week, there were a number of additional document management capabilities for SharePoint from Kodak and Access Innovations, we took an in-depth look at Office Professional Plus Beta in the new Office 365 suite, SamePage released v4.4, while IntelliChief upgraded its paperless process management software for the IBM I Enterprise series.

Following the release last December of its content migrator for Microsoft’s BPOS, it was inevitable that Metalogix (news, site) would also release a migrator for Office 365. It has done that with the public beta of its Office 365-Ready Metalogix Migration Manager for SharePoint.