Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s selections.

SharePoint 2013: 7 Features Users are Going to Love
SharePoint 2013 is “a significant release with a ton of great new features to talk about.” Here are seven from CMSWire.

OneNote MX: First Take
OneNote MX is an application that “does one thing, and does it well. It's a powerful tool for notetaking,and for organizing information.”
 
Verizon Teams Up With Microsoft On Office 365
Verizon is the newest big partner to bring Office 365 to small businesses.
 
Microsoft Office 365 Gaining Small Business Cloud Momentum?
Just one year old, the Office 365 cloud brand is “incredibly well known in the IT channel, and rapidly gaining mind share with small businesses.”

Microsoft opens Office Store to add new features to Outlook, SharePoint, & more
Microsoft opened its new Office Store, an app marketplace that adds new capabilities to Office and Office 365.
 
Microsoft Lync Enables Remote Health Care Counseling for Cancer Patients
An Idaho-based health system is using Lync to allow rural cancer patients to communicate with genetic and nutritional counselors 30- to 40-miles away.
 
ANU rolls out Office 365 to staff
Australian National University plans to roll out Office 365 on 10,000 desktops within the next few months.

As part of the Real World with Microsoft Online Services series, we spoke to John G. Pedersen, Editor-in-Chief at Mobilsiden.dk, about why, after years of challenges with performance and IT support while working with Google Apps, Mobilsiden.dk switched to Microsoft Office 365. Here’s what he had to say:

Q: Can you tell us about Mobilsiden.dk?
Pedersen: Based in Copenhagen, Mobilsiden.dk is a prominent Internet media site that offers the latest news and analyses about the world of mobility. With 860,000 visitors per month, we are one of the most visited sites in Denmark. We provide news, analyses, and a forum for debate about mobile, remote, and portable electronic devices.

Q: What led Mobilsiden.dk to initially adopt Google Apps for its infrastructure?
Pedersen: We have a big focus on getting the most for our money. We needed to keep costs low. That was why we chose to use a cloud-based solution for our productivity and communications environment. We selected Google Apps because it was competitively priced and seemed like a good solution at the time.

Q: Why did you switch to Office 365?
Pedersen: After we adopted Google Apps, at first we experienced no issues. Then we discovered that product changes had been made that resulted in our Danish spellchecker no longer working. As time passed, we found the applications to be unstable. We began to have problems with stability across several different computers and browsers. The applications froze or simply broke. We also were not pleased with technical support. When we submitted queries to support personnel, we felt ignored. By 2011, we determined that we had to find something more effective. We evaluated Microsoft Office 365 when it was released and quickly signed up, abandoning Google Apps. With Office 365, we found the solution that we needed.

Q: What kinds of benefits are you experiencing by using Office 365? 
Pedersen: When we switched to Microsoft Office 365, we achieved our goal of finding a solution that provides a working environment that is stable for employees and offers professional, enterprise-level IT support that we can rely on. Today, we have a fully functioning email solution, central file storage on Microsoft SharePoint Online, and communications using Microsoft Lync Online. It only takes two or three minutes to create a new user account for an employee. We now have improved productivity and fewer miscommunications. Everything functions smoothly with Office 365, which has a rich feature set and is easy to use. Office 365 is light-years ahead of anything else on the market.

Read the full story online. For more success stories like John G. Pedersen’s at Mobilsiden.dk, read other real-world testimonials on the whymicrosoft website.

At the Worldwide Partner Conference last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer predicted that this will be “the most epic year in Microsoft history.” 

I couldn’t agree more. And, in my opinion, one of the key products and services that will contribute to the epic year that lies ahead is Office 365. As the cloud-based service enters its second year, it’s on track to become one of Microsoft’s most successful offers in history. As Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Office Division, put it: “The magic of the service is in its flexibility, familiarity and breadth of options.”

As Office 365 begins year two of serving customers of all sizes, it’s admittedly still a startup, yet an incredibly successful one. Like a champion first-year baseball star, Office 365 has already racked up a whole wall of awards, successes, and distinctions that separate it from the competition. So what exactly are those first-year successes? While there are many, here are seven we’re especially proud of:

1. Adoption: Since its release a little over a year ago, organizations of all sizes have flocked to Office 365. More than 90 percent of our early Office 365 customers are coming from small businesses. Yet global companies are also implementing Office 365 in large numbers as well. In fact, over 40 percent of the global Interbrand list of the 100 top brands use Office 365 or related cloud productivity services from Microsoft.
2. Customer wins: This year, JetBlue, Campbell Soup, WellPoint, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and Patagonia joined DuPont, Starbucks and major cities like New York and San Francisco in using Microsoft’s cloud productivity services. And today, Origin Energy, The Hilti Group, Hallmark Cards, Japan Airlines, Burger King and Renner are the latest to join the Office 365 family.  Leandro Balbinot, CIO at Renner S/A, said his company chose Office 365 because Microsoft was a technology partner with a strategic vision: “We found that the competition couldn´t deliver all our requirements to the same level as that offered by Microsoft," he said.
3. Awards: Office 365 won several awards in its first year on the market. For example, CRN named Office 365 among “The 15 Best Products of 2011” for the cloud services category, calling it “uber-flexible and compelling.” “It’s the real deal, and it blows away Google Apps,” CRN wrote in December. More recently, Office 365 won the “Best Cloud Service” award at the Cloud Computing World Series. The award was judged by an independent panel of industry experts, which said Office 365 delivers “powerful productivity and collaboration tools for businesses of all sizes.”
4. Time-to-market: With the hard work and commitment of the Office 365 team, Microsoft built Office 365 from the ground up. Office 365 went from a limited beta into a formal release that was ready for prime time in less than nine months. By comparison, Google Apps took a full two years to move out of beta, and Gmail remained in beta for a whopping five years. I guess Google must have had other priorities.
5. Market Penetration: Office 365 has spread into numerous markets very quickly. In the first four months after its release, we made Office 365 available in more than 22 markets. Today, Office 365 is offered in 88 markets and 32 languages and reaches over 4 billion people around the globe. What’s more, customers adopting Office 365 span a wide variety of industry sectors including government, education, professional services, consumer goods, retail, and others.
6. Partner Ecosystem: The partner ecosystem for Office 365 has more than doubled from 16,000 to 42,000 from July 2010 to July 2011. That’s 10 times the size of Google’s partner program for Google Apps. Some examples of our partnerships: Computer Sciences Corp. is deploying Office 365 for the Federal Aviation Administration; Quest Software has been positioning itself as a Microsoft Office 365 cloud migration leader for customers that need guidance; and Infinity Technology Solutions has been promoting how value-added resellers can profit from Office 365.
7. Certifications: Office 365 has already obtained several important national and global security certifications. Among them is the authority to operate under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), which creates a process for federal government agencies to certify and accredit the security of their information management systems. Office 365 has also earned the IS 270001 international standard certification for security, and is compliant with the U.S.-mandated Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). In addition, Microsoft has the ability to incorporate EU Model Clauses into individual agreements it holds with Office 365 customers. 

While our first-year successes have been many, like any startup, the first year of Office 365 has not been without its hiccups. Customers have been slower than expected to migrate to Office 365 from Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS), due to individual customer requirements.

We’ve also steadily improved the reliability of Office 365 after customers experienced some service interruptions with our old service, BPOS. As one blogger put it: “To Microsoft’s credit, the Office 365 cloud suite seems to have gotten more and more reliable since launching in June 2011. Initially, Office 365 — the successor to BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) suffered multiple outages. But more recently, chatter about Office 365 reliability concerns seems to have quieted down in the IT channel.”

A Long-Term Marriage to Our Customers
As with migration and reliability, we’re continually working to improve Office 365 to make it even more productive for our customers. And as Office 365 enters its second year, we’ve also been thinking about our long-term relationship.

It’s been said that the secret to a good marriage is to understand that “it must be total, it must be permanent, and it must be equal.” Microsoft has 20 years of expertise in the enterprise arena, and the release of Office 365 a year ago only extends that commitment. Our commitment to our customers is both total and permanent. What’s more, it is equal, meaning that we’re always listening and will continue to evolve to meet our customers’ needs and desires.

By contrast, it’s hard to determine whether Google’s commitment to its enterprise customers is either total or permanent. Google Apps for Business (GAFB) grew out of a consumer offering and does not generate a significant portion of Google’s overall income. Not surprisingly, Google once again showed a lack of innovation and investment in Google Apps for Business at its recent Google I/O conference.  

As for Office 365, we’re in it for the long haul, and we look forward to a long and prosperous marriage to our customers. As Steve Ballmer declared more than two years ago when discussing Microsoft’s commitment to cloud computing, “We’re all in.”

Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s
selections.

Q&A: Microsoft's Roskill Outlines Office 365 Opportunities, Cloud Incentives For Partners
Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Group, discusses Office 365 opportunities for partners.

Microsoft's Outlook.com scores 1 million users
Microsoft's new email service, Outlook.com, has been hailed a success.

The newest Microsoft Office 365 family member: Project Online
Microsoft to add Project Online to Office 365, with the coming rollout of Office 2013.

Dell Offers Microsoft Office 365 to Small Businesses
By making Office 365 to Dell customers, Microsoft and Dell aim to make small- and mid-sized customers “more mobile, more secure and more productive.”

Sprint Adds Microsoft Office 365 to SaaS Portfolio
Sprint plans to bundle Office 365 with value-added services to create more complete solutions that increase productivity and give a boost to the capabilities of mobile workers.

Bang & Olufsen Hears the Sound of Savings With Office 365
Luxury audio systems maker expects to save 82 percent in IT operations with Microsoft solution.

Microsoft finalizes Perceptive Pixel purchase
Multitouch-display maker Perceptive Pixel is now officially part of the Office family.

Governments wondering if Google Apps would meet their security requirements need look no further than the City of Los Angeles. Last December, the city pulled its police department out of a planned move to Google Apps for Government after concluding that it did not meet the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) requirements. The result is that the City of Los Angeles now uses two incompatible email environments: 17,000 city employees have moved to Gmail, while the 13,000-member police department continues to use Novell Groupwise.

With Microsoft, governments concerned about security and compliance have a better option. They can put some of their data in the cloud with Exchange Online, while keeping other workloads on-premise using Exchange Server. The advantage is that both versions of Exchange are seamlessly connected. This means that all employees, whether their data is stored in the cloud or on-premise, can access each other’s calendars to set up meetings. In addition, IT administrators can conduct searches and centrally manage mailboxes whether employee email is in the cloud or on-premise. It all adds up to higher productivity.

And with Microsoft’s commitment to meet the CJIS standard for Office 365, governments that eventually want to move all of their productivity software to the cloud will have the opportunity to do so.

A Lot at Stake
Los Angeles isn’t the only city for which security is a priority. Indeed, in a survey by the firm KPMG, nearly half of government respondents cited security as their no. 1 concern.

Governments are the gatekeepers of some of the most sensitive data in existence. Many need to safeguard citizens’ personal information, and some are charged with protecting national security interests. To make things even more complicated, governments are often the target of hackers. “We are regularly under attack,” Ron McKerlie of the Ontario Ministry of Public Services, said in the KPMG study. “We have to make certain that whatever we implement in security terms is incredibly robust.”

Especially for governments, there’s a lot at stake. As Iain Gravestock, partner with KPMG in the UK puts it: “In the public sector, if you take a risk and succeed, you might get a pat on your back but not much more; but if you fail – if your pensioners don’t get their checks, or if you botch privacy protection – you will be in a world of trouble.”

Securing Your Data with Microsoft
So what makes Microsoft the best choice when it comes to protecting data? Consider the following:

A hybrid environment – Legal or compliance reasons or complex auditing requirements may warrant some content staying on-premise. Rather than putting everything in the cloud, Microsoft gives you the option of moving some data into the cloud while keeping other, more sensitive data on-premise. By contrast, Google Apps is an all-or-nothing cloud solution.

Information Rights Management – Information Rights Management (IRM) technology, available within on-premise versions of Office, prevents authorized recipients of restricted content from forwarding, modifying, printing, copying and pasting the content. With Google Docs, the security settings are limited. For example, users can specify with whom email is shared. But one the email is sent, these people may print, copy and paste the document as well as share it with unauthorized users.

Privacy of information – There’s no ambiguity in Microsoft privacy statements as to the usage of customer data. With Google, ads can be served to users with a simple selection in the IT admin control interface. In addition, Google maintains the right to your information even after you’ve deleted it, creating privacy risks down the road.

Global and regional standards – Office 365 holds the U.S. Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification, and complies with U.S.-mandated Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). In addition, Office 365 is the first, major cloud productivity service to earn the ISO 27001 international standard certification for data security. It can also incorporate the EU Model Clauses, restricting the transfer of personal data outside the European Economic Area, into sales agreements with Office 365 customers. Google just recently received ISO 27001 certification, five years after Google Apps was released.

Email archiving – Unlimited email archiving is included with the Office 365 E3 subscription plan. Email archiving is both automatic and legally-compliant. With Google Apps, users must purchase an add-on service, creating additional cost and complexity.

Records retention – SharePoint Online includes built-in records retention capabilities that make it easy to determine what documents are declared records, who can access records, and how long to keep them. With Google Apps, governments must turn to third parties such as CloudLock for this functionality at additional cost.

The Importance of Robust Security
Issues like these lead many governments to Office 365. One city for which security is important is the City of Augustine Beach in Florida. In the end, however, city officials concluded that Office 365 provides better email security than their legacy system. “Our City Clerk was concerned at first that there would be some way for a third-party to access our email, but that concern has been pretty much dispelled,” says Anthony Johns, an IT specialist for Augustine Beach.

Security is also a priority for the State of Minnesota, which examined data protection before moving its entire executive branch to Office 365. Says Tarek Tomak, Assistant Commissioner for the State of Minnesota: “The robust security and reliability that Microsoft was providing with Office 365 was essential—we would not have agreed to a hosted solution without making sure that the state’s data would be secure.”

Likewise, security is paramount for the State of Michigan. Officials evaluated Google Apps, but concluded that a Microsoft environment provided the best security. “The security of our communications is paramount,” says Mike Binkley, Director of Office Automation Services for the Michigan Department of Information Technology.  “Google couldn’t guarantee that security … Google Apps weren’t ready to handle the state’s business.”

Indeed, when there’s so much at stake, why take the risk?

Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s
selections.

Three Reasons You Should Switch to Office 365
Office 365 is “a solid service providing tremendous bang for the buck … it won’t be easy to beat the value it brings to the table.”

Office 2013/365 may be Microsoft's most pervasive software package yet
The new interface design and cloud-centric features could make Office 2013/365 Microsoft's “most pervasive software package to date.”

Sharepoint 2013: These Are a Few of My Favorite Things
Microsoft enhances social and cloud capabilities with SharePoint 2013 preview.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2013: Hands On
With PowerPoint 2013, Microsoft does an admirable job of thinking about the features and capabilities PowerPoint users need.

Microsoft Quarterly Results: Lync Software Revenues Skyrocket
Microsoft’s unified communications platform, Lync is “super-hot for partners.”

Microsoft's acquisition of Yammer is complete, now a part of the Microsoft Office Division
Microsoft has completed its acquisition of Yammer, the leading provider for enterprise social networks.

Seton Hall University Students Powered by Windows 8
Seton Hall will provide Windows 8, Windows Phone devices and Microsoft Office 365 for education to its students.

Coles taps Office 365 for staff portal on the Cloud
Coles supermarkets will roll out Microsoft Office 365 to its 100,000 employees throughout Australia.

Microsoft recently completed its acquisition of Yammer to bolster its enterprise social networking capabilities. While it’s too early to share details about the impact on your business productivity in the workplace, I am very excited about its potential! In the meantime, there are a lot of social features Office 365 customers can take advantage of with SharePoint Online.

Do you want to maximize teamwork and talent while having a protected dialog when information is sensitive to your business? Great! You’re in the right place to learn how the community capabilities of Office 365 go beyond what Google delivers.

With SharePoint Online, you can share information and exchange ideas with colleagues. What’s more, you can collect information when you need it without interrupting others or waiting for them to respond in email. You can also tap into your organization’s talent, contribute to wikis and blogs, and subscribe to information, discussions and documents. I’m sure you’ll appreciate the fact that no one in your organization has to search out these capabilities.  Unlike Google users, who need a consumer product such as Google+,  which is not supported within the Google Apps Service Level Agreement, for key social networking tools,  Microsoft includes and supports each SharePoint capability I am describing here, through Office 365.

Sharing Ideas and Expertise
Like a coffeehouse culture, SharePoint brings communities of employees together around common ideas and interests. For example, SharePoint Online My Sites lets you create your own personal site to share information and professional expertise. You can use “my profile” to create your professional biography that includes projects you have worked on, interests, education, and skills. The “colleagues” feature of My Sites suggests co-workers you might want to connect with. This provides a way to collaborate with colleagues that you may not otherwise realize have similar interests and activities.

SharePoint Online makes it easy to find specific talent within your organization. The SharePoint “organizational browser” and “people search” features help you locate peers, find managers and the people who report to them, and view each person’s profile information.

Using the “organizational browser,” employees can see an organizational chart with each user profile. They can also search for people based on attributes stored in their My Sites profile. In the screenshot above, for example, Erika identifies her expertise at improving organizational processes, a skill others in her company may want to tap into.  SharePoint and the suite of Office 365 tools also display presence information, so you can see if specific people are available. From a SharePoint site, for example, you can easily start an IM conversation just by accessing a user’s name.

Keeping Information Protected
For those wanting to gather in-depth information or have information sent to them in a streamlined way, SharePoint offers the ability to schedule RSS feeds for specific topics or content. In addition, employees can craft or contribute to wikis and blogs.

No matter how they use SharePoint Online, users don’t need to worry about sharing sensitive information like they do with Google+. SharePoint gives IT administrators the security tools they need to protect company information including permissions and Information Rights Management.

Google+ a Minus for Businesses
By contrast, Google punts social networking capabilities to Google+, which wasn’t built for business users. For one thing, Google fails to provide a service level agreement for Google+, which defines the level of service enterprises can count on.  Google+ also lacks the administrative features that give IT managers control over sensitive information.  Google+ provides nothing like the Microsoft Exchange global address list or the SharePoint organizational browser. And if that’s not enough, Google+ is still a beta experience.

Google has built Google+ as a central hub that encourages traffic to the company’s ad-funded technologies like search, Android, Picasa and YouTube. It requires Google+ users to sign and comply with its consumer terms of service. If an organization wants to administer Google+ within a business, Google provides no option to disable its games. It provides only “yes” and “no” access privileges with no other administrative controls and no privacy settings.

There are no centrally built and deployed sharing circles, and Google+ delivers no warnings when a user shares information externally. Instead, the company has designed a service built for consumer scenarios like watching videos on YouTube, playing games online with friends, and sharing thoughts and links with circles of friends.

That might be sufficient if you’re a consumer. But it certainly doesn’t meet the needs of today’s enterprises. If your business wants to improve collaboration and maximize your talent, SharePoint Online and Office 365 are where it’s at socially.

Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s
selections.

Microsoft Unveils New Cloud-Friendly Version Of Office
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer previews new version of Office; it’s “no ordinary upgrade.”

Microsoft Office 2013 to include social, cloud features
The next version of Office software will include social and cloud features that work with touch-screen devices.

Microsoft Office 2013: 10 Best Features
Is Office 2013 the right productivity suite for an increasingly mobile workforce? Click through the slideshow and draw your own opinions.

Microsoft Office 2013 preview: details, screenshots and impressions
The Microsoft Office 2013 preview is “fast, polished and painless to use.”

Qantas Chooses iPhone Over RIM's Blackberry and Microsoft Office 365 Over Google
Qantas Airways, one of the biggest airline companies in Australia, selects the Microsoft Office 365 platform over Google’s offering to power its upcoming hybrid cloud computing environment.

SharePoint 2013 Public Beta Hits the Streets, Have You Downloaded Already?
SharePoint 2013 includes two new social templates that take the concept of discussions a lot further.

It’s here! Speaking at a press conference in San Francisco, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has unveiled the highly anticipated customer preview of the new Office. The next release brings the familiar Office applications to a wide range of devices including Windows 8 tablets, PCs and phones. It also makes it easy to access your content and Office applications from the cloud. The new Office is also social – Yammer, Skype, activity feeds, people card, and more. You can download the preview at www.office.com/preview. 

To learn more, please check out the press release.

Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s
selections.

Microsoft Starts Slamming Office 365 Door on Google Apps
There are soon going to be tens of millions of people regularly using Office 365 in the cloud who in the past might have only used Google Apps.

Enterprise Applications: Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference 2012 Highlights Windows 8 Release
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer highlights key product milestones and opportunities for partners at annual Worldwide Partner Conference. 

1bn people now use Microsoft Office, says DelBene
One billion people globally now use Microsoft Office, with someone buying a copy of Office 2010 every second.

Microsoft intros Office 365 Open, Advisors Program Updates
Microsoft announces Office 365 Open, a new way for partners to sell Office 365.

Microsoft Bringing Multi-Touch Screens to the Big Time
Microsoft plans to bring multi-touch screen technology to the desktop and beyond, with the acquisition of Perceptive Pixel.

Microsoft's Kevin Turner rallies partners to push Office 365 sales
Microsoft discusses successes in the past fiscal year and plans for the current one with partners at the Worldwide Partner Conference.

Microsoft Recognizes Accenture and Avanade with Three 2012 Partner of the Year Awards
Microsoft honors Accenture and Avanade with three Microsoft Partner of the Year awards for 2012.

Cloud computing can help governments increase productivity and improve collaboration while reducing IT costs. But which cloud productivity solution should you choose?

Microsoft has years of experience working with governments at all levels. After weighing the options, governments from the State of Minnesota in the United States to the Northern Ireland Assembly in Europe to the Western Bay of Plenty in New Zealand have decided that Office 365 is the right solution for them. With Office 365, government workers use familiar tools to maximize their productivity, take collaboration to a new level, and better serve citizens.

With Google Apps, staying productive isn’t as easy. They waste time looking for familiar email features. Their ability to collaborate is compromised. And staying productive without Internet access is difficult.

The infographic below shows what a day in the life of a government worker is like using Office 365 versus Google Apps. Check it out for yourself!

Download the infographic.

As the English philosopher John Locke once said: “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.” If Google’s actions at the recent I/O conference are any indication, its enterprise customers just aren’t a priority.

The Google I/O developer conference is supposed to be the main event that showcases Google’s innovations. But once again, Google showed a lack of innovation and investment in Google Apps for Business at the conference. From Android to Chrome to Google+, the vast majority of company sessions were consumer-focused.

What conclusion are we to draw from this? Simply put: I’m sorry, Google enterprise customers, but you’re not the company’s main focus. As InfoWorld reporter Galen Gruman noted about the Android after the I/O conference: “Certainly, Google has largely ignored the specific needs of business in the last year, and now it seems to be even more focused on the consumer electronics side.”

Short-Shrifting its Business Customers
So what were Google’s so-called “innovations” for business customers at the I/O conference? Google released a version of its Google Drive service for Apple’s mobile devices. So if you’re using an iPhone, iPad, or iTouch, you can “see” your documents. But that’s about it. You can’t edit documents from the iPad or iPhone in the Google Drive app for iOS. You can’t create documents. Nor can you organize and sort your documents. As Eric Zeman of InformationWeek wrote: “That’s pathetic.” The interesting thing is that the Safari browser can already do all of this, so what’s the point of the announcement?

After another year of innovation, Google also announced that it has made offline editing available for Google Documents in Chrome.  Note that it only works with the Chrome browser. So, if you happen to use Internet Explorer or Safari, for example, you’re out of luck. And if you want to edit presentations or spreadsheets offline, consider yourself out of luck, too.

The limitations don’t end there. You can’t insert an image or a drawing when working offline. Nor can you print your document. Even more alarming, when an online collaborator deletes the text you edit while offline, his or her changes will override yours.

The bottom line is that 18 months after de-investing in Gears and leaving customers in the dark, Google announced limited offline capabilities, again! As Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, told Computer World: "Offline access is something that Google should have made a priority and delivered before now. Web access isn't nearly as ubiquitous as some might think and being able to do useful work offline is critical to most business people."

Advertising Über Alles
Google’s lack of business focus at the I/O conference isn’t anything new. Again and again, Google sends the message that its enterprise customers just aren’t a priority. Notably, when CEO Larry Page issued his one-year State of Google update earlier this year, Google Apps for Business wasn’t even mentioned.

The fact is that Google continues to derive 96 percent of revenue from advertising, and that’s where the company’s focus lies. One can learn a lot simply by observing the company’s actions. As the Huffington Post reported in April: “When he took over as CEO, Page quickly made his top priority clear by moving Google's executive offices into the same building as the team working on Google Plus. Page also tied a portion of employee bonuses to the success of Google Plus."

Google is fixated on using Google+ as a way to compete with Facebook for advertising customers. If you have any doubt, just ask James Whitaker. A former engineering director at Google, Whitaker left the company for Microsoft earlier this year because of Google’s preoccupation with advertising: "The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate,” he wrote in a blog post. “The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus."

Indeed, there’s a large disconnect between what Google promises its business customers and what it delivers. Google can make all the promises it wants. But in the end, it’s the company’s actions that matter.

Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s
selections.

Riverbed Steelhead Cloud Accelerator Wins Best of Tech Ed Award
A first-of-its-kind solution developed by Riverbed in partnership with Akamai Technologies is Best of TechEd Award winner in the Cloud Computing category.

Vodacom SA, Microsoft SA in Office365 alliance
South African mobile network operator Vodacom announces an exclusive syndication partnership with Microsoft South Africa to offer Office 365 to South African businesses.

FOXit, Office365 – all-in-all great investment for Aurik
South African-based Aurik Business Incubator, enlists the services of FOXit, to improve communications and collaborations efficiency by implementing Microsoft Office 365. 

Wipro Enhances Employee Collaboration With Microsoft Lync Server 2010
Wipro Technologies migrates to Microsoft Lync Server 2010 for its ease of use and its single, simple-to-use user interface for real-time communication and collaboration needs

Windows Phone 8 May Be The Most Developer Friendly Phone On The Market
Windows Phone 8 Team details developer features needed to make apps for Windows Phone. 

Microsoft Shares Upgrade Details for Windows 8
Users running Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 will be able to download an operating system upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for US$39.99 in 131 markets.

Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s selections.

Microsoft Launches Office 365 Free for Education
The education edition, identical to the commercial version, is being offered free for schools, colleges, and universities, covering teachers, students, and administrators. It incorporates several of the features of Live@edu, along with additional tools found in the commercial version of Office 365, such as the Microsoft Office apps, Lync Online, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online.

Microsoft Announces Move into Cloud Services for Schools
Teachers can use it to build web pages for their courses, communicate with students, teach lessons virtually, and manage documents.

Microsoft Adds New Markets, Languages to Office Cloud Service
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is expanding the availability of its cloud-delivered Office 365 suite of software to 46 new markets and 11 additional languages, part of the company's efforts to better compete with Google Inc. (GOOG) and VMware Inc. (VMW).

Office 365 a Winner for Rental Franchise
An important reason for picking Office 365 rather than an alternative such as Google Apps was that staff was already familiar with Microsoft's user interface. The company thus enjoyed fewer change management or training issues.

Microsoft Office 365 wins Best Cloud Service Award at Cloud Computing World Series Awards
Having been judged by an independent panel of industry experts, the awards were presented at the 4th Annual Cloud Computing World Forum on the 12th June, Earls Court, London.

Microsoft Agrees to Acquire Yammer for $1.2 Billion in Cash
The software gives companies a private way to help employees communicate. For example, supermarket chain Supervalu Inc. (SVU) uses it to let sales people talk and share ideas.

Microsoft Unveils New 'Surface' Tablets
Surface will offer the all-important “killer app” at launch: namely, a touch version of Microsoft Office 15.

Microsoft Is the Most Exciting Company in Tech, Hands Down
The Surface, and now Windows Phone 8, merely feel like the culmination—or maybe the fulfillment—of what Microsoft has been poking and prodding at for the past six years when it first introduced the Xbox 360.

Whether a university student is in Ireland, stateside or elsewhere, students need to prepare wisely to appeal to employers. People studying in business colleges and universities are gearing up to work in a global marketplace, where companies work cross-culturally, across time zones. Educators at National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway and the University of Massachusetts (UMASS) Amherst found that cloud technology can make a strong impact in helping to prepare students for today’s business world. Not only does Office 365 provide students skills to help them to be productive and marketable in the workplace, it provides them with new confidence in collaborating online. Watch the video to learn more.

Format: wmv
Duration:

So, how do business students benefit?
In the video, I’m particularly excited about what UMASS student, Sarah Langlais, has to say.

“I feel more prepared now after being in the class given that I have not done much international travel. Having this, I feel,  has kind of brought me up to par with some of the other students. They might know another language but I feel like I understand the technology now.  I have that in my toolkit.”

Murray Scott, Lecturer in business information systems at NUI talks about his experience. 

“Having used a range of virtual conferencing technologies over the years, Microsoft Office 365 has been, by far, the easiest experience I've had.  Office 365 makes communication between students who are geographically distributed very, very easy.  And, indeed, I couldn't imagine running a course without it.”

NUI student, Bryan Lalor, keys into the blend of skills and knowledge needed in our global marketplace. 

“Working with our peers in America has certainly opened my eyes to new experiences.  We actually develop skills-- teamwork that's outside of-- sometimes outside the basic business and IT skills that we've gained here in NUI Galway.”

Gino Sorcinelli, Faculty Member of the Commonwealth Honors College at UMASS concurs.

“They understand teamwork. They understand virtual teamwork. They understand communications better because of the use of Lync. They understand portal in the cloud because of SharePoint Online… My experience shows that Office 365 for education helps my students prepare for what they're going to encounter when they graduate and they enter the world of business.“

Students must be creators.
As Microsoft’s Vice President of Worldwide Education, Anthony Salcito highlights in Office 365 for education – a game changer for teaching and learning: “Students must be more than consumers. They must be creators.” They must bring fresh, new ideas to their work as students, and do so later in the workplace. Not only are people studying business at NUI Galway and UMASS Amherst working in creative, virtual teams with Office 365, now that the service is available, more students and schools can benefit from the teamwork and innovation that Office 365 enables. I am happy to learn that after evaluating cloud services from Microsoft and from Google, the University of Dundee selected Office 365 over Google Apps for its students and staff, including for its distance learners!

As graduation caps flew into the air last week, other students earned a long, summer break from studying and raced their bikes to the corner store, or headed down to the lake. The luckiest students will return this autumn to schools that choose Office 365 for education. I’ll tell you why. Schools which choose Office 365 over Google Apps are more able to improve student outcomes, work together without boundaries, and prepare students for the workforce.

What are the top, 3 reasons schools choose Office 365 for education over Google Apps?

Number 1
With Office 365, educators can improve outcomes, by providing students with resources and tools that reinforce how they learn best.
Educators can personalize learning with Microsoft’s tools, addressing a variety of learning styles. In fact, learning is interactive and engaging with Office 365. For example, students can use an online whiteboard, unavailable with Google Apps, to share ideas with others.

One student takes notes in all of her classes and organizes her notes, assignments and schedule in a single, digital notebook. Another organizes his work in the way that best suits him. When schools choose Google Apps, students take notes with no ability to tag, catalog or search within them. The school might turn to investigating unsupported, third party tools.

Not only that, while Google earns poor grades in accessibility for its tools, students can excel when using Microsoft’s accessible technologies in Office 365 for education.

Number 2
Teachers and students work and learn without boundaries, online and offline, in and outside of the classroom with Office 365. 
Both educators and students are productive when offline. On a class field trip to a history museum, using a SharePoint Workspace while offline, a teacher easily accesses the lesson plan she created earlier, and reviews the history of the period with her students. Returning to school by bus without Web access, the student begins her assignment using Word. However, teachers and students using Google Apps cannot create Google Docs offline, and are unproductive.

Today, with Office 365 teachers can record lessons and make them available for students to access outside of the classroom when they need to grasp difficult material, catch up on missed work, or reinforce learning in studying for a test. Google provides no capability for students or teachers to make recordings. Once again, schools must investigate unsupported, third party tools. 

Number 3
Office 365 helps teachers prepare students for the workforce, building skills in using familiar Office tools, in ways people work today.
With Office 365, both teachers and students use familiar, Office tools and the latest technologies. When it comes time for students to enter the workforce they are better-prepared than students using Google Apps. Displaying writing skills using Word and analytical skills using Excel is essential compared to having skills with tools like Google Apps and Google Docs, where needs are negligiable in the workplace.

Today, people work in social groups. Educators use SharePoint in Office 365 to interact with colleagues, collecting ideas and feedback, and students use Office 365’s presence information to locate fellow students online, initiating chats and video chats when working on group projects. Google Apps has nothing close to the capabilities available through Office 365’s Lync Online and SharePoint Online.

Learn more about how students are engaged in learning, and teachers are productive and inspired using Office 365, instead of facing daily frustration using Google Apps. See the day in the life of a student and day in the life of a teacher infographics!

Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s
selections.

Infographic: 16 Ways Microsoft Office 365 Trumps Google Apps For Teachers
More than ever, a modern education depends on technology in the classroom. Excellent teachers work to engage, educate, and challenge their best students and prepare them for the 21st-century workplace.

WellPoint Collaborates in the Cloud With Microsoft Office 365
When associates can communicate in a collaborative, efficient manner, customers receive prompt, efficient service.

Experts' Advice on the Best Exchange Infrastructure for Office 365
The flexibility of the solutions - Exchange Server 2010, Exchange Online and Hybrid - means that the model you choose will be dictated by the business you run.

Microsoft Appoints Comztek to Launch Office 365
We're seeing a new breed of partners emerging in the local market - the 'born in the cloud' partner, who understands intimately how to develop services on top of a software-as-a-service offering.

Programming Microsoft's Clouds: Windows Azure and Office 365
After an introduction to cloud computing, you'll discover how to prepare your environment for the cloud and learn all about Office 365 and Azure.

Microsoft Launches Own Windows 8 Tablets, One a Full PC
Microsoft launched two 10.6-in. tablet computers dubbed Surface on Monday, built on Windows 8, with two versions of unusual, attachable, Touch Covers that double as keyboards.

Microsoft's Surface Tablets Raise the Bar For PC Pals
The keyboard/cover combo is a fantastic idea that immediately makes you question future laptop purchases.

Whether you are a school’s IT leader, an educator, a parent, or someone who values learning, you know students and care about their success. Successful students are excited about learning, are well-organized and make good use of their time.

With Office 365 for education, this secondary school student works anywhere. He prints an assignment at home without worrying about formatting issues, and reviews a presentation without Web access on his way to school. At school he jumps right into learning, taking notes in all of his classes and organizing them in a digital notebook. He welcomes group projects, because the entire group is excited in using the latest tools, sharing information from their Office 365 desktops, brainstorming with an online whiteboard, and keeping a strong pace in video call discussions.

Working with Google Apps is frustrating and limiting. The student can’t review his latest work without Web access. Working with Google Apps, he captures notes in separate documents and cannot tag or search among them to find critical facts he needs for his term paper. He doesn’t have today’s capabilities to work seamlessly in group projects with online whiteboards and video calling.

Learn which tools you would want your favorite, hard-working student to use. See what this student’s experience is like using Office 365 versus using Google Apps.

Download the infographic.

As part of the Real World with Cloud Services series, we spoke to Myles Kaye, Director at Atominx, about why Atominx stopped using Google Mail to manage its messaging and collaboration environment, and switched to Microsoft Office 365. Here’s what he had to say:

Q: Please tell us about Atominx.
Kaye: In 2009, I founded a one-man web design shop in Manchester, United Kingdom, that I called Atominx. The business has grown steadily from the very beginning, and now Atominx is a 10-person studio offering a broad range of design services for websites, mobile applications, and graphic media.

Q: Why did you want to switch from using Google Mail?
Kaye: When I started Atominx, I adopted the basic Google Mail service because it was easy and it was free. But as we hired more people, developed new offerings, and served more customers, Google didn’t keep pace with our collaboration needs and business goals. Once we had four employees and six freelance designers trying to collaborate with just the very basic email and chat tools in Google Mail, it began to feel restrictive. We pieced together other collaboration solutions, such as Windows Live Messenger and the Dropbox document-sharing web service, but we were working from too many IDs in too many different places. I realized that we were outgrowing Google and that we also needed to develop a single, communication domain and a more professional identity. 
 
Q: Why did you choose Microsoft Office 365 to replace Google?
Kaye: I wanted to consolidate all our collaboration and productivity tools in a centralized environment. While evaluating several solutions, I discovered Microsoft Office 365. We were already using Microsoft Office 2010, so we had a lot of trust with Microsoft, and Office 365 offered all the features we needed. As soon as I started to use Office 365, I could tell it was a solid, complete solution.

Now my employees and designers send and receive email messages from a single Atominx domain, and they can use all the functionality in Microsoft Outlook to manage their email, calendar, contacts, and tasks; Lync Online for instant messaging; and SharePoint Online to share documents. By using Office 365, we are working with a common set of tools, so we can all send, open, and work together on documents, presentations, or spreadsheets.

Q: What benefits are you experiencing by using Office 365? 
Kaye: With Microsoft, we got all the features we wanted—and more—in a completely integrated service from a provider we trust. It's just so easy to communicate and share information using Office 365. Now, when I send an instant message asking somebody for a file, they just drag it to their Lync Online window and I have it instantly. By communicating from a central domain, we can project a single business identity, which positions us more competitively. Google couldn’t support our growth, but Office 365 helps us give customers the right impression—that we are business professionals, equipped and ready to meet their needs. I started using Google because I wanted an easy ride, but I wound up spending five to ten hours a week helping my team change user settings or download attachments. Using Office 365, I spend less than an hour a week on maintenance and troubleshooting. It has freed up my time so I can focus on building my business.

Read how this design studio finds room to grow with Office 365,or see the full story online. For more success stories about people like Myles Kaye at Atominx, learn from other, real-world testimonials on the whymicrosoft website.

Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s selections.

FAA Picks Microsoft Office 365 Private Cloud
The FAA has opted for a private cloud implementation, rather than Microsoft's recently announced Office 365 for Government, a multi-tenant cloud platform, said Susie Adams, CTO of Microsoft Federal, in an interview with InformationWeek.

Microsoft Will Beat Google in All Markets: Steve Ballmer
“One of the things I'm very proud of is that we are a company that is prepared to be bold, prepared to drive in new areas. I like to invent all new categories and all new things.” –Steve Ballmer, Microsoft

MigrationWiz Launches Cloud-Based Migrations from Lotus Notes to Exchange and Office 365
High-fidelity migrations from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 can now be managed directly from the MigrationWiz web site.

Configure Office 365 for Exchange Online Using Packt's New Book and eBook
Packt is pleased to announce the publication of the Microsoft Office 365: Exchange Online Implementation and Migration book, a practical, hands-on tutorial that shows small businesses and enterprises how to implement and migrate to Exchange Online in Office 365.

Microsoft Launches 20th TechEd With Cloud and Tools Push
Windows Server 2012 is a cloud-optimized, server OS for customers of all sizes, and Windows Azure, updated with new services and features, delivers both infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities, Microsoft said.

Microsoft Delivers Version 3 of Windows Intune PC Management Service
Microsoft's latest version of its PC management and security service adds more mobile-device management and Active Directory integration.

Microsoft Stress-Tests Windows Server 2012 With Bing
Microsoft is using its own, massive online services as proof-points for its next generation of cloud and data center technologies, it announced in TechEd 2012 opening address.

My favorite secondary school teacher helped me look forward to each class. I wish she had Office 365 tools to help her. Teachers using Office 365 are empowered, productive anywhere, and use the latest tools. Using Office 365, teachers can develop lesson plans offline to post on a class website. They can create and share a digital notebook to pass onto their students as a study guide, and they can record lessons in class or elsewhere. -- None of these capabilities are available or supported with Google Apps for education. Next, teachers share recorded lessons on their class site and also with other educators, reaching and inspiring more students in new ways.

Competition for jobs among young people is particularly strong, yet teachers using Office 365 foster skills that students will use in the workplace, such as using Word and Excel, and collaborating on group projects with the latest messaging tools.

With Microsoft Office 365 for education teachers spend more time doing what they care about most – teaching, because Microsoft’s reliable tools help educators work together, prepare for class, and support students’ learning.

See what a teacher’s experience is like using Office 365 versus using Google Apps.

Download the infographic.

Outages will happen, whether we use applications managed by a supplier in the cloud, or use applications managed by in-house, IT staff. Some of the news lately has been about Google Apps' service outages. Yet, if we have tools to be productive in our workday, cloud service outages aren’t as painful, unless we are inconvenienced by a particularly severe, recurring service lapse. -- One from Google last affected about 4.8 million users. When Google service is down, its users can be frustrated, “down and out”.

Source: Google Apps Status Dashboard, 11 AM PT, June 11, 2012

Like me, you need productivity applications to communicate, analyze information, share and present it. As a professional, you use email, spreadsheets, and word processing and presentation tools. You use some tools daily and some weekly or monthly, and you depend on them.

Access to Email
Last week, email availability was an issue for many, and like it or not, we need to use email every workday. Those inconvenienced by lack of Gmail access travelled a rough road compared to those who have missed online access to Office 365. Office 365 customers can access 25 GB of email history offline. – That’s years of email capacity for an individual; it’s certainly years of capacity for me. In the event of a Microsoft service interruption, Office 365 users can manage their email and refer to it, but customers waiting for Gmail to come online had access to only about 500 messages, or about one week of capacity in the outages, and were restricted in working with email as a result.

Accessing Productivity Tools Offline with Office 365
Office 365 customers who elect plan E have Office desktop software for up to five devices. That’s two laptops for me, and I still have three more licenses so that I can compose, analyze and create with Office tools anywhere, any hour of the day. Other Office 365 customers choose to retain desktop licenses so they can be productive offline. Internet access isn’t ubiquitous, after all.

When I am offline, I look at past email to find information to create my team’s monthly report. I pull up an existing chart, update it, insert it into a presentation, create a new table, select and insert an image, create a summary slide and complete the report in Power Point.

Constrained with Google Apps When Offline
So, what do you need to do if you want to try to be productive in an offline mode with Google Apps? Stock up with candles, wood and matches, or fire up the generator... It’s that kind of inconvenience.

If you haven’t got a Chrome browser installed, you’re out of luck, because to use Gmail, Google calendar and Google Docs offline, you’ll need Chrome. If you’re lucky, your IT staff had the foresight to see that Chrome was installed on your machine, or at least the machine you’re using now. IT certainly keeps busy, while it spends money in configuring the patchwork of tools needed to make Google Apps work for users.

Imagine that you’re a Google Apps user who, like me, needs to compile information for a monthly report for your manager, but Google Apps is down. It’s impossible to assess your progress since you can’t see three-quarters of the progress reports your team sent via email over the course of most of the past month, given that you have access to only about a week’s worth of Gmail offline.

When using Gmail and Google Calendar offline, your user interface is different from the online interface, causing confusion. When offline, Google Docs are read-only, so you can’t take a table from a document and edit it to begin this month’s report-writing. Since you have no access to Drawings, or Forms, you can’t browse and source information with those tools to build pieces of your report, either. Since you have no access to Google Presentations, you cannot insert items into a presentation to compile the report. Frustrated in realizing that you can’t create your report, you now see that you cannot edit or create appointments to plan ahead.

Options to Remain Productive
Business users not only need offline access to tools, but need support for a set of use scenarios. They use a range of browsers and a selection of both cloud and desktop applications. When offline, I access my address list and queue email. I create presentations, spreadsheets and documents, and I access and update existing documents. I plan ahead, too, creating appointments as needed, when offline. I need options to be productive online or offline, so I use Microsoft productivity tools.

Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s
selections.

FAA Chooses Office 365 for Email, Collaboration
The FAA will deploy the solution, provided by Computer Sciences Corp., to some 60,000 FAA employees and 20,000 Department of Transportation employees, according to a Microsoft news release.

Microsoft Touts Cloud Security in Office 365 for Government Launch
Koenigsbauer informs that the multi-tenant service is hosted on a segregated cloud across high-security, geographically dispersed data centers. Furthermore, IPv6 support for Office 365 is expected to go live in September to accommodate the shift to the next-gen networking standard.

Alfalak introduces Microsoft Office 365 in Saudi Arabia
Microsoft and Alfalak’s objective is to drive the customers to fully realize the business benefits of the cloud and to develop a greater business future with more environmentally advanced products in terms of efficiency, productivity and reliability.

Quest Simplifies the Management Of Microsoft Office 365 Environments
Recovery Manager for Exchange – Discovery Edition facilitates email discovery for legal inquiries or internal investigations and recovers lost or corrupted emails during an Exchange or Office 365 migration, or post-migration.

Webcast: Getting to Microsoft Office 365: The Right Migration for Your Business
Jeff Medford, Office 365 Technical Product Manager at Microsoft, will share the key resources and checklists to get your organization prepared for the move. He will also discuss the different types of migration available, and which one is right for you.

Microsoft Agile Cloud Working
The key way to approach these tools is with ‘Social Computing’ in mind, simply meaning the use of social media web sites, like those of Facebook or Linkedin, for your own corporate purposes.

Microsoft Does the Right Thing with Default "Do Not Track"
IT admins should also welcome Microsoft's decision to enable 'Do Not Track' by default. Businesses don't want the online activities of users monitored or tracked.

Top 6 New Features of Windows 8 Release Preview
You can check out Window 8 Release Preview for yourself by downloading it from preview.windows.com. For a deep dive into what Microsoft's next operating system holds, see PCMag's Hands on with Windows 8 Release Preview.

With a higher than average amount of severe weather predicted for 2012, governments need to be prepared. Whether it’s something as simple as an electrical outage or as disastrous as a hurricane, government agencies need to keep their systems up and running. They also need to quickly notify the right people and continue to update them as events unfold.

One of the benefits of the cloud is that it better prepares governments for natural disasters and other emergency situations. Why? It’s because the cloud isn’t where you are. A disaster may strike your city, county or state, but with your information stored off-premises in the cloud, your critically-important data remains safe.

Why Office 365 for Emergency Preparedness?
While both Office 365 and Google Apps store your data in the cloud, Office 365 is the best choice during times of emergency. Some factors to consider:

Experience and support – Microsoft has been providing productivity software to businesses of all sizes for more than 20 years, and has a proven track record of reliable support. In comparison, Google is a newcomer to working with enterprises. The company adapted a consumer offering for business use with the introduction of Google Apps five years ago and continues to depend on advertising for more than 96 percent of its revenue. The company’s reputation for customer support has not been stellar.

Security – The security of customer data is a top priority for all Microsoft products. Accordingly, Office 365 was designed right from the start to comply with the most rigorous security practices. It is the first, major, business productivity public cloud service to obtain ISO 27001 certification, the international standard for information security management. The certification affirms that products have the necessary controls in place to ensure that their design and operation are secure. Google, on the other hand, five years after releasing Google Apps, finally obtained the certification last month.

Communication during emergencies – Office 365 makes it easy for government officials to keep employees up-to-date in emergency situations. Using “dynamic distribution groups” that automatically update as employees move offices from building to building, government officials can quickly email employees about emergencies and rest assured their emails reach the right people. With Google Apps, employees must be manually added and removed from email distribution groups.

Continued productivity offline – With Office 365, employees can continue to work even when there’s no Internet access. With Google Apps, offline access is very limited.  Employees can’t create new documents or spreadsheets offline from their desktop using Google Docs. And they can only work offline with the Google Chrome browser. For governments using other browsers, there’s no offline solution for Google Apps. 

Better Prepared for Emergencies of All Kinds
Among the governments that have improved their emergency preparedness with Office 365 is the Tualatin Valley Water District, which provides drinking water to a population of about 200,000 near the City of Portland. Having email operations in the cloud provides the water district with higher assurance that service will remain available during earthquakes and other catastrophes, according to Jim Ure, IT Officer for the water district. 

“As a water utility, we have to be prepared for earthquakes, and still be able to respond,” Ure says. “Having a cloud-based – off-premise – solution increases our emergency preparedness. It’s one aspect of disaster recovery that’s off our plate … our email communications will still be intact.”

Likewise, Office 365 has better prepared Klamath County in the event of electrical outages.  “Before, our IT organization was losing out in multiple ways when there was an outage,” says Randy Paul, Director of Information Technology for Klamath County. “Not only was everybody without service, but I was also forced to pay more money and allocate more resources to figure out how to bring the service back online.”

For officials in Summit County, Utah, it used to take days to restore and recover data when a hard drive or other system went down, says Ron Boyer, the county’s director of IT.  But with Exchange Online, IT staff can “literally fire up a new machine, point it at the cloud, and all their mail comes right back.

“It is just good to know that – when you have a hardware failure – your content can be recovered and reestablished quickly,” says Boyer. “That’s how disaster recovery works in the cloud.”

Government officials at the State of Minnesota say Office 365 helped them prepare for a different kind of emergency – the state government shutdown during the summer of 2011. With 70 agencies that employ 35,000 workers, the state quickly updated its employees by sending email through a distribution list to all state employees in one, easy step.

“If an emergency or another situation happens that requires an organization-wide communication, for the first time leadership can send an email to all employees in the executive branch, without IT staff having to spend significant time to piece together multiple lists,” says Tarek Tomes, Assistant Commissioner for the State of Minnesota. “The state government shutdown in summer 2011 is the most recent example where we needed to update all employees on information that was changing so rapidly.”

We can’t control if and when an emergency strikes. But we can control how well we’re prepared. As one legislator put it, “Despair is most often the offspring of ill-preparedness.” One way governments can prepare for emergencies is by moving to the cloud with Office 365.

Critical, confidential information like your customer list is your lifeline in business. You would do everything you can to safeguard it. Yet, in our increasingly social, Web-connected world, keeping your information private goes against Google’s interest in indexing everything for search. After all, 96% of Google’s business is advertising and the Google Apps Service Level Agreement for its business users cites only eight of Google’s online services as “Google Apps Covered Services”.

While Google Apps for Business can turn off ads and has a different privacy protection than some of Google’s other services, business users often find themselves using Google “freeware”. They may use services that are not part of Google Apps, using Google Plus, Gmail Voice or Google Video Chat to reach people, and use Google Cloud Connect to accomplish tasks, while Google collects and shares information about them in the process.

In fact, the “Privacy and Terms” link at the bottom of the Google Apps for Business Web page leads prospective business customers directly to Policies and Principles. Under a Google Plus icon it cites:

“Easy to work across Google. Our new policy reflects our desire to create a simple product experience that does what you need, when you want it to. Whether you’re reading an email that reminds you to schedule a family get-together or finding a favorite video that you want to share, we want to ensure you can move across Gmail, Calendar, Search, YouTube, or whatever your life calls for with ease.”

The user experience that the company advocates for Google Apps for Business customers brings them to services such as Google Plus and YouTube, where the company collects information about activities that they can then use to serve ads.

Google can use your content freely.
Why do I say that?  According to ZDNET and Google’s terms of service which also applies to Google Plus:

“When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.”

According to Neowin in “Comparing Skydrive and Google Drive's privacy policy”:

“There is one notable difference, with SkyDrive, Microsoft will only use your content "solely to the extent necessary to provide the service" which means that it is used to maintain the product, not for advertising purposes. When you upload your content to Google, you are giving them access to use your work however they see fit. It should be noted that neither service is claiming ownership of your content. It is a small but notable difference. Google already uses your content in many ways to deliver targeted advertising and Microsoft has a position of letting you decide what to do with your content. Which is best for you? That's a personal decision.”

You Are the Judge for Your Business.
In the news, Google May Face Further U.K. Action After FCC Privacy Report, Bloomberg cites:

"While Street View cars photograph buildings and homes to provide street-level mapping to Google users, they went beyond that to using wireless connections to gather people’s personal communications.”

Is a company which is under scrutiny in two continents for such actions, one you would trust with your business information?