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As we prepare for Office 365, I am still amazed at the number of Partners and Customers that are not aware of our Free consumer offerings marketed, or rather under-marketed as “Live”.  Specifically I wanted to remind you of SkyDrive.  SkyDrive is not only a free 25gb cloud based storage area, but it is much more, as the best place to get access to your content from Anywhere, as well as, work across the many devices we each now have.  

SkyDrive was recently updated with some pretty cool changes and built on HTML5. – Check out the announcement here.

Some of the changes include:

• Improved file Directory – New ‘Windows like’ user interface, & less advertisements
• Photo Album screen – Photo browsing can now be done faster taking advantage of hardware and HTML/CSS updates.  Make sure you check out infinite scrolling.
• Faster – Browser modernization, as well as, performance investments make tasks move from seconds to milliseconds.
• Office Web Apps – don’t forget about free browser based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.  Remember these are to compliment on-premise versions of Office, giving you the ability to work anywhere, on any device.

Our Live offering is targeting the “Consumer”, but it is a great example of how Microsoft has delivered in the Cloud.  As we prepare for Office 365, this is a great conversation for all our Partners to be aware of, as well as, having the Cloud conversation with your customers.  It is a great starting point to show the difference between “Consumer” based ‘Windows Live’ offerings and “Business Class” ‘Office 365’ offerings.