Office News & Articles

Finally, Office 365 has arrived in beta. Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud-based online business application subscription service that comes in two packages: One for enterprises with 25 employees but can go as far as 50 users, the other for enterprise users that can be scaled to as many seats as necessary.

Productivity tools are a mainstay for every organization and Microsoft wants to ensure that everyone has a set of tools that both work well and are inexpensive to deploy. Today, Office365 has opened to public beta and based on what we've seen, there will be many lined up to the cloud to try it out.

This week, Microsoft has announced details of its upcoming Service Packs for Office on PC and Mac, Perceptive’s ImageNow integrates with Dynamics AX, Motive’s Cloud Vault is launched on Azure, Kofax releases Express 2.5 and Nuance releases its new PDF Connector.

This week, the SMB space has produced a mixed bag of goodies including the addition of document discussions to Google Docs, email archiving from HyperOffice and email security from M86 Security, while Microsoft could end up competing with itself in the cloud office space through SMB Suite.

HyperOffice (news, site) has added another cherry to the icing of its cloud-based collaboration suite with the addition of email archiving promising easy email retrieval without the expense of investing in on-premise software like Exchange 2010.

An underutilized approach to encourage user adoption and enhance the collaboration experience in SharePoint 2010 is by using the Microsoft Office suite for creation and distribution of content. The integrated nature of the Office suite and SharePoint 2010 offers a familiar, alternative interface to a new platform that can be leveraged in many ways.

This week, a number of companies have started taking the SMB cloud market seriously, with Parallels launching an aggressive campaign to corner a market that will be worth US$ 50 billion, KnowlegeTree offering Outlook access in the cloud and Motive expanding its partner channel with US Analytics. Twitter also appears to be doing better in this space, but not as well as Facebook.

One of the big stories this year in the document and document management software space is going to be office suites in the cloud. This week alone there have been at least three developments in this area, from Microsoft, IBM and Google. In the document collaboration space, Workshare document comparison software now integrates with Open Text’s eDocs.

This week, IBM held its Lotusphere get together, offering Big Blue a chance to highlight some of its recent releases -- two of which target the SMB market specifically, Google and Verizon got together to offer SMB bundled apps, HubSpot goes social and CMSWire goes to the White House.

Open source document management vendor, Logical Objects (news, site), has announced an upgrade to both the community and commercial addition of its LogicalDOC software, which comes with a completely redesigned interface and a new Drop Spot feature for pulling content into the system.

After four months in beta, Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM 2011 has finally been released worldwide.  The new online CRM is now available in 40 countries and 41 languages, while the on-premise edition is due to be released on February 28.

Microsoft is still teasing the market with its Dynamics releases. This time, it’s the announcement that it will be releasing a technical preview of its enterprise resource planning software (ERP) at the beginning of February, with a full release scheduled for the third quarter of this year.

This week we catch up on Oracle, which has just upgraded Documaker EE, Google Docs has added video sharing capabilities, SharePoint 2010 gets e-signature and Confidela will secure Salesforce documents after a US$ 9.25 million venture funding round.

At the end of 2010, it is hard to make any simple analysis of document management in the enterprise. By its nature, it is closely related to enterprise content management and as a result reflects many of the problems afflicting the ECM industry.
 

That Google wants a very large piece of the enterprise pie is widely known, so the Internet giant's last 2010 attempt at romancing a portion of Microsoft's fan base comes as no surprise. Still, updates are handy. Meanwhile, Google gave cloud computing another boost with the release of Shared Spaces, a collaboration environment made possible by Wave technology. And, speaking of spaces, Big G has a new one. 2.9 million square feet of Manhattan, to be exact.