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SEPCOIII boosts employee productivity with switch from Gmail to Office 365

May 22, 2013 by

Energy company SEPCOIII had been using Gmail for external communication but found it unreliable and cumbersome. The company eventually switched from Gmail to Microsoft Office 365. We recently spoke to Pradeep Parmar, Director of Management Information Systems at SEPCOIII, to learn why:

Q: Please tell us about SEPCOIII.

Pradeep Parmar: SEPCOIII originally was the electric utility company for the Shandong province of China, and eventually shifted into designing and building power plants across China. In 2011, we decided to take the business global and opened up a regional office in Dubai to lead our international expansion.

Q: Why did you investigate a cloud services solution to manage your messaging and collaboration?

Parmar: We had been using a combination of IBM Lotus Notes for internal communication and individual Gmail accounts for external communication, but it wasn’t meeting our needs. We started investigating cloud-based solutions because we were growing quickly and IT is not our core business. We needed a single solution that required minimal capital investment, could be deployed very fast, and would offer world-class capability, reliability, and availability. We also wanted a solution that easily scaled up as we grew internationally.

Q: Why did you choose Office 365 over Google Apps?

Parmar: Gmail was very unreliable, and employees were losing email. Most found the calendar feature cumbersome and weren’t even using it. Employees were frustrated that the company didn’t have a stable, reliable email solution. The fact that Gmail provided limited offline functionality was also a problem. At project sites, where there was often no Internet connection, employees weren’t able to transfer files by email. This meant tasks that should have taken a few hours to complete were taking days and even weeks.

Given employees’ negative experiences with Gmail, we immediately ruled out Google Apps as we explored a new solution. Instead, we compared an on-premises Office solution with Office 365 in the cloud. We chose Office 365 after our analysis showed we could save an estimated 80 percent in IT hardware and administrative costs over a six-year period. In June 2012, we hired LiveRoute to deploy Office 365 in our Dubai office. Our goal is to move all 5,800 employees to Office 365 by the end of 2013.

Q: What benefits are you experiencing by using Office 365?

Parmar: By moving to Office 365, we now have a robust and reliable email and collaboration solution that’s improving our productivity. Employees are no longer worried about losing email and have begun using shared calendars to quickly schedule meetings. They’re also using the offline capabilities of Office 365 to stay productive when there’s no Internet connection. In addition, we now use SharePoint Online as a central portal to store company documents, which means employees can access company information wherever they are, from nearly any device. If an employee leaves the company or loses his or her laptop, no problem; the information stays with the company. We’ve also replaced the majority of in-person meetings with Lync Online videoconferences, reducing our travel requirements. We are so relieved to be using Office 365. It’s a great platform that we can rely on.

Read the full story online. For more success stories about people like Pradeep, read other real-world testimonials on the WhyMicrosoft website.

Filed Under: Microsoft Office 365 Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Arysta LifeScience replaces rollout of Google Apps for Business in favor of Microsoft Office 365 to build a more productive global organization

May 21, 2013 by

Arysta LifeScience wanted to standardize on cloud-based communication and collaboration services. It chose Google Apps for Business. However, employees in the pilot group were unhappy with the user interface and IT struggled with compatibility issues. Arysta LifeScience replaced the Google deployment and introduced Microsoft Office 365. We recently spoke to Dustin Collins, Head of Global IT Infrastructure at Arysta LifeScience to learn how the company is benefiting:

Q: Please tell us about Arysta LifeScience. 

Dustin Collins: Arysta LifeScience is one of the largest privately-owned agrochemical companies in the world. We have sales and services in more than 125 countries. We develop and register formulations for crop health. Our business model covers the entire value chain: product development, registration, formulation and packaging, and marketing and distribution. We stay flexible through varied distribution methods: working through distributors, retailers, crops, or directly to the growers, depending on the market.

Q: Why did you want to move to cloud-based services for messaging and collaboration?

Collins: Arysta LifeScience wanted to promote seamless global communication and collaboration; however, we had 34 different email environments. IT staff spent an inordinate amount of time maintaining this complex environment. Arysta decided that migrating communication and collaboration technologies to the cloud would be the least expensive way to standardize email service and promote better global communications. Originally, we chose Google Apps for Business, but employees in the pilot were unhappy with the UI [user interface] and they lost the ability to share calendars with colleagues using Exchange-based email and IT had more compatibility issues to deal with.

Q: Why did you choose Microsoft Office 365?  

Collins: Arysta employees had never experienced a global collaboration platform, with online collaboration sites, document versioning, presence awareness, IM [instant messaging], seamless desktop videoconferencing; that sort of thing. Office 365 gave us email plus all these other tools in one package. It has a familiar UI, so change management wouldn’t be an issue. It has better offline functionality. It has a better mobility story. Our IT staff is familiar with Microsoft technologies. With Office 365, we could easily consolidate our Active Directory environment, another major project we needed to complete. And the support we got from Microsoft and InfraScience, our deployment partner, was fantastic. They demonstrated a real interest in helping us achieve our goals. We wanted to partner with a vendor that understands the needs of a global enterprise: Microsoft was the natural choice. 

  

Q: How has Office 365 changed the way people work at Arysta LifeScience?

Collins: Today, employees have a whole suite of tools that they can use to connect with each other in ways they never could before. The tools are available on their desktops, laptops, or mobile devices. They are easy to use and require no training. Employees are intuitively integrating email and shared calendars, IM and presence services, and web conferencing, into their everyday work lives. They can find and connect with colleagues around the world. They can stay in touch with the office while they are on the road, or work from home. Office 365 is helping us build a global corporate culture. There’s a sense of excitement that employees have around being a part of a global organization: they are telling us that Office 365 has really changed their work lives.  

Q: What other benefits are you seeing from Office 365?

Collins: We’ll be saving money. Decommissioning our complex email infrastructure will enable a significant annual savings in IT costs. We’ll be retiring 10 instances of Exchange Server and many file servers around the globe, saving on IT maintenance and avoiding future hardware replacement costs. We’ll save approximately [US] $50,000 annually in WebEx licenses and usage. And we will retire service contracts with 20 ISPs around the world, saving a further $100,000 annually.

The efficiency with which we operate our business depends on the speed with which we collaborate. Using Office 365 tools, we can collaborate and communicate in real time. That’s a huge leap forward in building a more responsive, agile global team that can respond more quickly to new opportunities. In the end, this is one of the most valuable, long-term benefits of choosing Office 365.

Read the full story online. For more success stories about people like Dustin Collins, read other real-world testimonials on the whymicrosoft website.

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Sensia Hälsovård AB chooses Office 365 over Google Apps, cuts travel costs by 30 percent

May 20, 2013 by

Healthcare provider Sensia Hälsovård AB needed a single communication and collaboration platform to accommodate its rapid growth. About 30 percent of its employees had been using Google Gmail, but found it cumbersome and unintuitive. The company eventually chose Microsoft Office 365. We recently spoke to Anders Franzén, IT Strategist, at Sensia Hälsovård AB to learn why:

Q: Please tell us about Sensia Hälsovård AB.

Anders Franzén: Sensia is a private healthcare provider with 35 locations across Sweden. We offer services in wellness, occupational health, primary and specialized care.

Q: What issues were you facing that led you to adopt Office 365?

Franzén: We made a series of acquisitions over a two-year period, and were experiencing tremendous growth. As a result, we had seven different IT systems, which made communication a big problem because it was impossible to maintain a distribution list for all of our employees. To communicate with our employees, we had to send an email to each manager, who would then forward it to his or her employees. We wanted to establish a single communication and collaboration platform so that we could communicate with all 600 employees at the same time.

Q: Why did you choose Office 365 over Google Apps?

Franzén: Before we moved to the cloud, about 30 percent of our employees were using Gmail, but the feedback we got is that they didn’t like it. Gmail wasn’t intuitive to use, and when employees got stuck, it was difficult for them to obtain support. Google isn’t a support company-that’s just not their focus.

In comparison, Office 365 feels like a more professional service. Many of our employees were already familiar with Office, and found it easier to use than Gmail. In addition, the built-in scalability of Office 365 was an important feature as we continue to grow. We can easily add 50, 100, or 600 new email accounts from one day to the next and easily federate these accounts using Active Directory. Few other solutions can handle that growth so seamlessly.

Q: What benefits are you experiencing by using Office 365?

Franzén: Although we migrated seven different email systems, the process was quick and easy-it took less than a month and with Office 365, the support has been excellent. I’ve contacted Microsoft a couple of times, and I’ve gotten quick responses from very good support personnel. I’m very happy with it.

Our communication has improved tremendously. Employees can send email to anyone, we can chat using Lync Online, and we can see when users are online and when they’re in a meeting. It really feels like we are one company now.

Rather than traveling around the country, we now hold videoconferences using Lync Online both internally and externally. Our goal is to cut our traveling costs in half, and we’re already at  30 percent. Over time, we expect our doctors to use Lync Online even more to share information and obtain second opinions. Already, Office 365 is increasing staff productivity, which means less time sitting at the computer and more time serving patients.

 Read the full story online. For more success stories about people like Franzén, read other real-world testimonials on the WhyMicrosoft website.

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With Office 365, there’s no reason to compromise

May 13, 2013 by

A lot is said these days about the choices people and organizations are faced with when adopting technology. In the end, it’s all about productivity. All of these decisions are made with the aim of optimizing your productivity — whether you’re a stay-at-home mom, accountant, student, or business person. 

As people navigate these decisions, their ability to do great work revolves around having the right mix of capabilities delivered by a company they can trust. Why? Because there’s an actual cost to compromising our productivity. There’s a cost to the time and money spent retraining workers to use unfamiliar applications and applications that don’t do what people need them to do or that require workarounds.There’s a cost to having to purchase add-on technologies to gain the capabilities you need to be successful. And there’s a cost associated with the inability to access the information that’s  important to you simply because you don’t have an Internet connection.

Office 365: A business-class solution

After more than two decades of delivering the world’s most highly utilized productivity tools, we know businesses require rich capabilities and solutions that go beyond consumer needs. We understand that one size does not fit all and that choice, flexibility, and administrative control are essential to organizations around the world. 

At Microsoft, we have the broadest vision of productivity, which is inclusive of capabilities like enterprise content management and business intelligence with SharePoint, electrifying data analysis and visualization with Excel,and rich applications that enable people to do their best work. We understand that, in the face of an evolving technology arena, what it takes to maximize productivity has evolved as well.

We recently shared our vision and roadmap for Office Web Apps, but people and businesses demand even more. They require flexible web conference solutions that provide immersive, collaboration experiences with presence and instant messaging capabilities integrated at every step using solutions like Lync. Productivity requires enterprise social networking that integrates with email and calendaring but also extends the conversation by connecting static and real-time communication. And for some, it means moving some workloads to the cloud while keeping others on-premises.

Productivity is more than code in a browser. Much more.

Office is the defacto standard for making people more productive at work, at school, and at home. We are humbled that more than 1 billion people on this planet use Office to do their best work and get great results. It has been rewarding to see customers discover the same familiar experience and the same enterprise-class IT tools and business capabilities in the cloud with Office 365.

With Office 365, we’ve combined the world’s most familiar desktop experience and enterprise-class server tools with robust security and privacy.  The result is an experience that lights up social, is optimized for pen, touch, mouse and keyboard, and is recognized as a market leader in eight Gartner Magic Quadrants.

Customers are choosing Office 365 over Google Apps

An increasing number of businesses are choosing Microsoft Office 365 over Google Apps. Why? They tell us they can’t afford to compromise.

With Office 365, they don’t have to. They get the familiarity of Office + the capabilities they need + a cloud service they can trust. The result is a cloud-based service that enables businesses to meet customer needs and gain a competitive edge.

Among the recent companies that have switched to Office 365 after deploying or piloting Google Apps are Arysta LifeScience,  SEPCOIII, FHI 360, and Sensia Hälsovård AB. These companies join numerous other organizations that tried Google Apps only to switch to Office 365.

Dissatisfaction with Google Apps

Again and again, companies that deploy Google Apps say they are frustrated by the experience and want a cloud-based service they can count on. Take Arysta LifeScience, for example. An agrochemical company with sales and service in more than 125 countries, Arysta LifeScience until recently supported 34 different email solutions around the world. The company wanted to standardize on a cloud-based email service and initially chose Google Apps for Business. However, employees were unhappy with the user interface, and IT struggled with compatibility issues. 

After deploying Google Apps to 300 of its 3,400 users, the company reversed its decision and instead went with Office 365. “If we had moved everyone to Google, the ability to work offline would have been very limited,” says Dustin Collins, the company’s Head of Global IT Infrastructure. By contrast, “Microsoft meets the needs of an enterprise, with the right levels of privacy and data security better than Google, which is more consumer-oriented,” Collins says. ”And, with Office 365, you get a complete suite of collaboration services including IM, so everyone was enthusiastic about the decision.”

Likewise, the China-based energy company SEPCOIII initially used Gmail for external communication, but employees found it undependable and cumbersome. “Gmail was very unreliable, and employees were losing email,” says Pradeep Parmar, Director of Management Information Systems for SEPCOIII. “Employees were frustrated that the company didn’t have a stable, reliable email solution.”

The company decided to standardize on Office 365 for its Dubai regional office, and plans to move all 5,800 employees by the end of 2013. “We are so relieved to be using Office 365,” Pradeep says. “It’s a great platform that we can rely on.”

Office 365: A top value service

Companies that switch from Google Apps to Office 365 say they now have an enterprise-class solution that offers top value for their money. For example, when the Academy for Educational Development (AED) and the nonprofit FHI came together to form FHI 360, the approximately 2,000 AED employees were using Google Docs and Gmail, while the 2,000 employees within FHI were using on-premises Microsoft solutions.

After analyzing both Google Apps and Office 365, FHI 360 eventually decided to deploy all of its employees on Office 365. The company chose Office 365 based on several factors including the ability to work offline, robust calendaring, support for mobile users, and the “superior” level of support offered.

“Using Microsoft Office 365, we are a more cohesive, efficient organization,” says Michael Mazza, Head of Information Solutions and Services for FHI 360. “Empowered with tools that work the way we work, FHI 360 can achieve a greater impact on human development around the world.”       

Similarly, the Swedish-based private healthcare provider Sensia Hälsovård AB implemented Office 365 even though 30 percent of its workforce had already been using Google Gmail. As a result of a series of acquisitions over a two-year period, the company had seven different IT systems, which made communication a big problem because there was no common distribution list. The company wanted a single communication and collaboration platform and decided on Office 365 over Google Apps. “Gmail wasn’t intuitive to use, and when employees got stuck, it was difficult for them to obtain support,” says Anders Franzen, IT Strategist for Sensia Hälsovård AB.

 With Office 365, communication has “improved tremendously” and the support “has been excellent,” according to Franzen. “Already, Office 365 is increasing staff productivity, which means less time sitting at the computer and more time serving patients,” he says.

Productivity without compromise

Like Arysta LifeScience,  SEPCOIII, FHI 360, and Sensia Hälsovård AB, numerous companies around the world have concluded that it doesn’t make sense to compromise when they can power their organizations with Office 365.

As J. Peter Bruzzese put it his recent InfoWorld column, How to make the move from Google Apps to Office 365, “Now that Office 365 is available, it may be time to move to Microsoft’s cloud.

Filed Under: Microsoft Office 365 Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Office is a team player

May 10, 2013 by

It’s amazing to think how far Microsoft Office has come since we first launched Microsoft Word 1.0 in 1983. Word has moved well beyond replacing simple typing functions to a rich set of tools that produce an array of highly formatted documents. Excel has grown from simple ledger functions to become an interactive and mission critical analysis and reporting application. And PowerPoint now provides a rich set of tools to make highly visual, customized, professional-looking presentations. 

While you may not use all of the features of Office every day, it’s likely that someone you work with does. And even if you didn’t create it yourself, much of the content you use was probably developed by someone who does rely on the breadth of those features. Having a broad set of features that support the entire spectrum of productivity use cases, from the most basic to the most advanced, helps connect teams with a common communication platform. And those who embrace all that Office has to offer have a powerful set of tools that can set the work they do and the content they produce apart. 

Now let’s see what happens to team productivity when you choose a productivity suite that has deficiencies:

“Guys … I’ve got deficiencies”

Google Docs has deficiencies when compared to Microsoft Office. Google publicly admits Google Docs is deficient, stating: “We know the gaps between our features and theirs.” Google also states that it only intends to target 90% of the user base of Office. Google’s gaps are not just advanced features used by a few people. Many basic features are missing from Google Docs like grammar check, support for columns, custom date formats, slide numbers, and mail merge. Add to that the many more advanced capabilities missing from Google Docs like Power Pivot, SmartArt, watermarks, master slides, image editing, slicers, and information rights management – and you watch your productivity start to decline.    

“We quickly realized Google would not meet our needs, so asking our employees to put up with less functionality was not an option for us.” Read more

– Sean Maisey, Director of Operations, Colonial Williamsburg

Working harder

As we continue to improve Office, we look for changes big and small that help people do more with less effort. Some improvements are small, like the new paste options we introduced in Office 2010. Other features reduce the amount of time it takes to accomplish a task like Flash Fill and Quick Analysis in Excel. The breadth of capabilities Office can lead to significant gains in what people can accomplish. With Google Docs, on the other hand, people have to find ways to overcome feature gaps by working harder, spending their time finding workarounds, or potentially using third-party tools to overcome the gaps.  

“When we switched from Google Apps to Office 365, we freed our people to work together in synergy, and it has produced good results in every area of our business.” Read more

– Andy Springer, Director, Rookie Recruits

Working well with others

Like I said in the introduction, we work to provide the breadth of capabilities from basic usage to advanced features. With the same toolset, teams have a basic trust that they can easily communicate back and forth. Another goal of Office is to provide the tools that help people be more productive anytime, anywhere. You get a consistent and familiar Office experience no matter what device or platform you’re using, be it a PC, a browser, a smartphone, or a tablet. By contrast, to get a full Google Docs experience, Google customers must use the Google Chrome browser. In addition, Google has no plans to support the Windows Phone.  If you use an Android or iOS and want to edit your Google Docs, you use the Google Drive app on your device.  If you want to edit Microsoft Office files, you either must convert these files to the Google file format or use Quickoffice, which also has a only a small subset of features compared to Office, along with some file compatibility issues. 

Another issue that can make it difficult to work with Google is the company’s choices about which document standards to support. Microsoft Office supports both the OOXML and ODF ISO standard file types. By contrast, Google Docs stores these files in something other than these standards, converting these file types in and out of Google Docs. With both standard file formats, when you convert your Office files to use Google Docs, you gamble with data and format loss. 

“We tried to use Google Docs, but it didn’t work reliably and often skewed the formatting.” Read more

– Tamara Walker, Public Relations Consultant for Naturally Me

I’m taking the net with me

Unfortunately, even today you can’t always take the net with you. When you’re in a location without reliable Internet access, there are times when you need a great offline experience.  Microsoft Office was built to live in both the online and offline worlds, with features like document merge, track changes, and conflicting change controls in SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro when working on shared documents. With Google Apps, the offline experience is limited. When you lose Internet access, you can still create and edit documents and presentations, but you can only view spreadsheets. You also lose more features in Docs and Slides like sharing, inserting images, help, printing, non-standard fonts, and more. Google also warns you not to work on shared documents offline or risk data loss:  “Try to use offline editing for documents that you own and that won’t be deleted without your knowledge.”

“Google Docs is not really suitable for business use due to limited functionality and the lack of offline capabilities.” Read more

– Paraic Nolan, Finance Director, Big Red Book

More innovation to come

In the timeframe Google is playing catch up, Office is not standing still.  We will continue to innovate and provide the tools to help people work better together. Just this week, we announced some exciting new capabilities coming to Office Web Apps. These features bring more core Office features to the browser including real-time coauthoring, editing on Android tablets, and much more. By the way, congratulations to Office Web Apps on recently being named one of Time Magazine’s top 50 best websites for 2013. 

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Google Docs isn’t worth the gamble

May 10, 2013 by

When you open a Microsoft Office application, you know what you’re going to get. Whether you’re working from a PC, a browser or a smartphone, the way the software functions is familiar and consistent. You don’t have to fret as to whether you’re seeing the Office document as it was intended. Productivity software is built to help people communicate. It’s more than just the words in a document or presentation; it’s about the tone, style and format you use to convey an overall message. People often entrust important information in these documents — from board presentations to financial analyses to book reports. You should be able to trust that what you intend to communicate is what is being seen.

Converting Office files into Google Apps is a gamble. See what happens below when our friend is given the opportunity to take the gamble.

On the web:

Why take the gamble on converting your Office files to Google Docs when you can use Microsoft Office and the Microsoft Office Web Apps to create, share and edit your Office files with your content intact? Converting Office files into Google Apps is a gamble. Don’t take our word for it; see for yourself. Below is a document created in Microsoft Office 2013 that we opened in both Google Docs and the Office Word Web Apps so you can see the difference:

 

 As you can see, you can lose quite a bit when opening Microsoft Office files in Google Docs including text boxes, columns, graphics, image placement, watermarks, charts, text, spacing and more. The experience with both Excel and PowerPoint files is similar. Check out live side-by-side demos showing some examples here:

Power Point Web Apps vs. Google Presentations

Excel Web App vs. Google Spreadsheets

Word Web App vs. Google Documents

On a tablet:

Consistency and trust are really important when you choose a set of tools to help you communicate. Given the importance of mobile devices in our lives, that consistency and trust now extend to our phones and tablets. That is why we recently announced that we are bringing more of the Office experience to the Office Web Apps including the ability to edit and create Office files using the Office Web Apps on Android tablets-in addition to mobile devices in the Windows ecosystem and the iPad. Soon you will have the same consistency and familiarity of Office Web Apps on your tablet of choice. Google, on the other hand, only supports Android and iOS mobile devices. It provides you with two different experiences depending on whether you want to edit Google’s proprietary format, Google Docs or Microsoft Office files, Quickoffice. Each has separate compatibility issues. Our goal with the Office Web Apps is to provide people a reliable familiar experience to create Office documents from start to finish, all from the web and to deliver the tools that customers need to be productive anytime and anywhere.

Below is a screenshot of a document created in Microsoft Word 2013 and opened with QuickOffice on an iPad next to the same document opened with the Word Web App on the iPad.

 

Google Quickoffice does not convert Office files well due to its extremely limited feature set. As you can see, Quickoffice has different yet equally significant formatting and data loss issues compared to that of Google Docs.

With a viewer:

The last gamble with Google is how the company helps you view Microsoft Office documents using their file viewers. Even this is a gamble that may be too risky to take. Google has two Office file viewers: one is embedded into Google Drive, and the second is a new beta application that is part of the Google Chrome browser.

 

 As you can see, even these simple viewers fail to provide you with an adequate picture of the content in the Office file even to the extent of merging two separate pages of the document in the Google Drive Office preview application.

Why gamble with your time and Office content? When you build and share compelling, accurate, and impactful information, make sure you get what you bargained for.

Keep an eye out for more to come on whether Google has the features and skills to play the productivity game…

Filed Under: Microsoft Office 365 Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Getting work done without workarounds

April 30, 2013 by

Nothing is more exciting for me than talking to Microsoft Office 365 customers. This experience is more special when they tell me Office 365 provides the features they need to stay organized and productive, rather than having to find workarounds in other products they’ve tried.

I recently hit the road to talk to customers who had tried using Google Apps for Business, but switched to Office 365 because they experienced too many workarounds to get work done. I could completely identify with the customer who was told she could not use “folders” in Gmail to organize her email, like she can with Microsoft Outlook. Instead, she had to use “labels” as the workaround.

Outlook Folders: Organize Email the Way You Expect

Each week, my third-grader brings a red folder home with his homework. We use blue and green folders to keep the Math and English homework packets separate as we work through his homework during the week. When the homework is completed, the folder goes to school for submission. In the same way, I use a red bin to keep all my invoices and bill payments and a green bin for personal subscriptions to magazines and deals that I sort on a weekly basis.

Folders in Microsoft Outlook are intuitive containers that can hold email similar to how you’d use folders for your own mail at home or homework at school. As you sort your inbox, you can move email to the relevant folder for future use.

Categories: A Colorful Way to Organize Email in More Ways

Outlook users who need to manage email that belongs in more than one place, can use “categories.” Categories help you classify email into various buckets that you can color code to spot them easily. You can define multiple categories and assign them to different email. You can assign more than one category to an email if you need it to be tagged as such. You can even assign these same categories to other items in Outlook such as “events” and “tasks” to keep all related items organized.

For millions of users worldwide, Outlook folders help keep email organized. The power of inbox rules helps them take organizing to the next level. Inbox rules help users automatically sort email into specific folders, categorize email, and get notified proactively as to when they need to break their routine to look at important email.

Unlike Outlook folders, Gmail “labels” does not follow the container approach. You are expected to categorize all your mail with labels. Sometimes I wonder whether these labels were designed to help users stay organized or to help improve Google’s search algorithms.

To think we all pile all our email in one place and only use labels to search and find is a crazy idea. It is as crazy as expecting a department store to only sell black shoes!

Searching Email: Several Ways to Find What You’re Looking For

With Outlook, finding email stored in folders is easy. It’s as easy as opening the folder you filed the email in and looking for it. The email in the folder can be sorted using various attributes of email. You can sort the email by sender’s name, subject of the email, date which the email was received, email with attachments, email with categories, and many more.

Search FoldersFor those of you who prefer to search for email rather than organize email in folders, searching for email in Outlook is easy. You can search using the “search box” at the top, choosing whether to look in the current folder, current mailbox, subfolders, all mailboxes, or all items in Outlook. You can even search based on sender’s name, subject of the email, whether or not the email has attachments, whether an email was flagged, whether an email was marked important,  and by many other attributes. Search capability is not just limited to email; you can even search for calendar events and tasks. Those of you who are looking for advanced options can also dig into some of the advanced search capabilities around Indexing as well.

And for those who get excited by the power of folders and search, “search folders” in Outlook is the perfect feature for you. Search folders are virtual folders that contain the view of email items that match a specific criterion that you define. You can easily create a search folder by clicking on search folders in the navigation pane in Outlook. For those who use categories for their email, the “categorized mail” search folder helps you locate the email that you had categorized previously. Similarly, for those of you who had flagged emails for follow up, “for follow up” search folders will help you find them all in one place.

With a feature-rich Outlook, every one of you can get your work done without using workarounds.

Filed Under: Microsoft Office 365 Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Why government agencies choose Microsoft Office 365

April 22, 2013 by

Javier VasquezToday’s guest blogger is Javier Vasquez, Senior Director of Productivity Sales, State and Local Government at Microsoft. For the past 15 years, Javier has helped public sector customers implement solutions that help them realize value in their technology investments.

As government agencies prepare for this week’s Lean Government Virtual Summit, cloud innovation will surely be a hot topic. So why should governments choose Microsoft Office 365 as they consider moving their productivity software to the cloud?

The infographic below highlights the advantages of Office 365 versus Google Apps for government agencies. As you can see from the infographic, the benefits of Office 365 are many:

  • Office 365 offers governments substantial cost savings.
  • Governments can rest assured their information is protected and their tools accessible to people with visual and hearing impairments.
  • Office 365 makes it easy for governments to meet email retention policies and fulfill legal discovery requests.
  • Governments have the tools they need to be highly responsive to the citizens they serve.

As Todd Kimbriel, Director of E-Government for the Texas Department of Information Resource, puts it: “No other solution provides the rich capabilities of Office 365, including web conferencing, real-time collaboration, and document and calendar sharing.”

We hope you find the infographic helpful! Also, please note that officials from the City of Kansas City, Missouri and the U.S. Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board will be discussing their experiences with Office 365 at the Lean Government Virtual Summit. It’s not too late to register! To learn more, click here.

 

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Office 365: A customer-centric service experience

April 18, 2013 by

A teacher would never be satisfied with her performance if she discovered that the entire back row of her classroom was unable to hear her lecture. In the world of cloud services for business, we see things the same way. With Office 365, every user counts!

Google has a different approach. It starts counting downtime only after at least 5 percent of users are affected. Imagine if 100 of your 2,000 users had no access to email. Would you, as an IT professional, be satisfied with your performance? Would your business hold you accountable for your performance? The answers to these questions are clear. Calculating downtime only after 5 percent of your users cannot access email, as Google does, makes it more difficult for you to assess impact to user productivity. Google’s approach doesn’t help your business with meaningful performance metrics.

With Office 365, every affected customer and every service counts when we calculate downtime. Downtime means the total minutes in a month during which service is unavailable, excluding scheduled downtime. For services like email, there is no scheduled downtime, an experience that our many Exchange Server customers have long been accustomed to-system maintenance while they continue to be productive in their Outlook inboxes.

In addition to the way it calculates downtime, Google also  combines consumer and commercial service availability when reporting the availability of Gmail. This means if you are considering Google Apps for Business, you cannot get accurate information regarding the availability of the commercial service that you need.  On the other hand, Microsoft’s approach to calculating downtime, which includes every user minute, helps you understand whether your users’ productivity is being impacted by downtime of email.

Google takes a “use at your risk” approach around Google+, Hangout and Google Voice. These services are not part of Google Apps for Business and are excluded from the SLA. Excluding these services from the SLA while promoting them as part of the business experience further underscores how Google simply doesn’t understand enterprise requirements. By contrast, Microsoft’s financially backed SLA is not merely a numbers game; it’s an agreement to provide enterprise-class service. This agreement is scoped to all services that are included within Office 365. Businesses expect that of an enterprise-class service.

Working proactively to earn your trust

Along with the topic of service continuity and the promise of enterprise-class service, data privacy and security always come up in conversations. You have told us, particularly those of you in regions with data residency rules, that you must feel confident and in control of your data. As more of you are considering cloud services, we have stepped up our efforts around the Office 365 Trust Center to address these questions broadly. Being transparent with you is core to how we run the Office 365 business.

Office 365 Trust Center

Figure 1: Office 365 Trust Center

Microsoft is consistently and proactively working toward earning your trust by focusing on what you have told us matters most-privacy, transparency, independent verification, security, and service continuity. We understand it’s your data-you own it and should direct how it’s handled. Office 365 customers know who can access their data and for what purposes. IT administrators can stay updated on changes to the data center as well as information regarding security, privacy, and audits. Customer data is always made available across multiple, redundant datacenters, spread across regions and optimized for user performance and availability. The region used to select those multiple datacenters is based on customer requirements, which in addition to performance, is also critical for customers in regions that have data residency rules.

Transparency requires consistent communications. In addition to communicating via email and RSS feeds, the Office 365 Service Health Dashboard is a key mechanism that gives customers visibility into the service.

This dashboard is the window into the health of the service for your specific organization. As an Office 365 customer, you get a detailed view into the availability of services, tailored to your business, and not a peanut butter approach showing the availability of services the world over. For example, customers can view the current status of all their services and their components, view upcoming planned maintenances, and see when they need to renew licenses for their Office subscription. Here is an example of the dashboard from my Office 365 account that I use for demos. You have told us that you require this level of detail about your organization to be in control of the service you provide to your users, and we have responded by delivering the capabilities that meet the needs of your business.

Office 365 Service Health Dashboard

Figure 2: Office 365 Service Health Dashboard

Striving for 100 percent availability

Over 56 percent of European decision-makers estimate that the cloud will be a priority in 2013 and 2014[1] and cloud budgets will reach 30 percent of the overall IT budget. Despite the momentum, customers rightfully want to know if the service is reliable. Will their data be secure? Can they trust that privacy will maintained?

We strive for 100 percent availability of the Office 365 service. The security of your data is a constant and primary engineering focus. Our goal is to be transparent when incidents happen and give you the information you need in a timely manner. If you’re impacted by a service incident, you’ll be able to see relevant information about the incident via your dashboard. We provide detailed incident reports that include the root cause and remediation plan to help address your concerns. We understand that we must re-earn your trust every day.

Many of you have told us that you will not wake up one day and decide to do everything in the cloud. Instead, it is a journey as you evaluate the risks and rewards of adopting cloud service for your business. Office 365 was designed for the cloud from the ground up to meet your business’ needs. We are drawing on our years of experience working with enterprises, maturity around technology, and running infrastructure at scale to help you make this journey to the cloud successfully.

[1] Challenges & Opportunities for IT partners when transforming or creating a business in the cloud. compuBase consulting. 2012. p. 77.

Filed Under: Microsoft Office 365 Blog Tagged With: , , , , , ,

dmg Events excites workers, managers, and IT staff with move from Google to Office 365

April 2, 2013 by

International events producer dmg Events Middle East & Asia moved from an on-premises email system to the cloud-based Gmail system, and the move proved frustrating for employees and IT staff. When the Google contract came up from renewal, dmg decided it was time for a new email system. We recently spoke to Gehan Madhanayake, Head of IT at dmg Events Middle East & Asia, to learn why.

Gehan Madhanayake photoQ: Please tell us about dmg Events Middle East & Asia.

Gehan Madhanayake: dmg Events is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Daily Mail and General Trust, which is one of the largest media companies in the United Kingdom. We produce and manage conferences, exhibitions, publications, and online events for companies around the world in a variety of industries. We have 150 employees, and our Middle East & Asia headquarters is in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Q: Why did you move from on-premises email to a cloud-based solution?

Gehan: We were using an on-premises instance of Microsoft Exchange Server, which was running at our parent company’s data center in the UK and caused some logistical problems for us. Because of the time zone difference, and because our work week runs from Sunday through Thursday, it was difficult to get timely support for email problems.

Q: Why did you choose Gmail as your first cloud email solution?

Gehan: When we made the transition in 2011, I’d had an opportunity to try out Microsoft Office 365, and I was very impressed by it, but it was not yet available in the Middle East. We didn’t want to put off our move to the cloud, so we felt that Gmail was the best option at the time.

Q: Why did you end up replacing Gmail with Office 365?

Gehan: We had troubles with Gmail right from the beginning. Our users were losing mail, and they were not at all happy with the interface. It was too cluttered, and users had difficulty finding the features they were looking for. The email editor in the Google Chrome browser was also missing some of the robust HTML formatting we were used to in Microsoft Outlook. Our managers noticed that employee productivity was down as a result of email frustrations, and on the IT side, we were frustrated by difficulties we encountered getting support from Google to solve our problems.

By the time our Google contract came up for renewal in 2012, Office 365 had become available in our region, so we decided to adopt Office 365 and move our email to Exchange Online. LiveRoute, our technology partner for the project, was a tremendous asset. LiveRoute is an Office 365 specialist, and they provided the experience and tools needed to complete the migration with no lost email and no downtime for the business. We completed the entire migration in two weeks, and it went very smoothly.

Q: What benefits are you experiencing by using Exchange Online and Office 365?

Gehan: Our users love the email system and Outlook Web App. Our managers have seen productivity go up, and on the IT side, our support call volume is way down, so we can devote more time to other projects. That includes building a new company intranet with SharePoint Online, which is a great tool. We are also using Lync Online for messaging, and people love it. It’s easy to log on from anywhere and see who is online and send them a message. All in all, Office 365 is a brilliant solution that is easy to use and full of great features.

Read the full story online. For more success stories about people like Gehan Madhanayake, read other real-world testimonials on the whymicrosoft website.

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