Skype for Business great potential

This is a really interesting post and video showing the potential for Skype for Business

http://blogs.office.com/2015/03/18/skype-for-business-is-here-and-this-is-only-the-beginning/

Worth a watch.

Microsoft Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview

IT Pro and Developer Preview of Office 2016 for the Windows desktop is here.

This is the first step in the journey towards general availability later this year.

The preview is available to commercial Office 365 customers, and includes significant technical improvements to Data Loss Protection, Outlook, and Click-to-Run Deployment, as well as improved Accessibility across the suite, and Information Rights Management Protection extended to Visio files. 

To learn more and download the preview, IT Pros and Developers should visit the Office 2016 Preview Program on the Microsoft Connect site.

The Office 2016 on-premises Preview program has very limited availability and is still under NDA, so should be offered to customers on a reactive basis only. Visit http://aka.ms/joinoffice for more information.

Microsoft by the Numbers - Some interesting reading

Microsoft by the Numbers

A collection of statistics about Microsoft products and services.

• There are over 1.7 million registered Windows Insiders. Together they’ve installed Windows 10 over 3 million times on a broad range of devices. (Source: Microsoft)

• The Office for iPad and Office for iPhone apps have been downloaded more than 80 million times. (Source: Microsoft)

• There are more than 2 million Visual Studio Online users. (Source: Microsoft)

• Microsoft’s fiber optic network could stretch to the moon and back – three times over. (Source: Microsoft)

• Two hundred and forty-six million people with sight loss face daily challenges getting around. Microsoft is developing technology to help change that. (Source: Microsoft)

• SharePoint is now a $2+ billion business. (Source: Microsoft)

• Microsoft Azure is available in 140 countries. (Source: Microsoft)

• Bing for Schools brings ad-free search to classrooms across the country. (Source: Microsoft)

• There are more than 585,000 apps in the Windows Store. Hundreds more are added every day. (Source: Microsoft)

• There are more than 6 million .NET users. (Source: Microsoft)

• Microsoft opened the first data center on its Redmond, Washington campus in 1989. (Source: Microsoft)

• Microsoft donates an average of $2.6 million a day in software to more than 86,000 nonprofits around the world. (Source: Microsoft)

• Researchers interviewed six real celebrity personal assistants to help identify the most essential traits for Cortana, Windows Phone’s digital personal assistant. (Source: Microsoft)

• Office 365 Home and Personal have a combined 9.2 million subscribers. (Source: Microsoft)

• Bing indexes more than 2 billion Facebook status updates and half a billion tweets every single day. (Source: Microsoft)

• More than 20 percent of Azure virtual machines run on Linux. (Source: Microsoft)

• One and a half billion people use Windows every day. (Source: Microsoft)

• Eighty percent of the Fortune 500 are on the Microsoft Cloud. (Source: Microsoft)

• Seven of the top ten Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Dynamics. (Source: Microsoft)

• More than 1.2 billion people use Office. That’s one in seven people on the planet. (Source: Microsoft)

• Skype users make an average of 50 billion minutes of calls per month. (Source: Microsoft)

• Microsoft’s employee Giving campaign has donated $1 billion to more than 31,000 charities. (Source: Microsoft)

• More than 1 million people are victims of cybercrime every day. Microsoft’s Cybercrime Center helps them fight back. (Source: Microsoft)

• Xbox Live has more than 48 million members in 41 countries. (Source: Microsoft)

• If you were to line up pixels from all the aerial imagery within Bing Maps, you could make four round trips to Venus with pixels to spare. (Source: Microsoft)

• Forty percent of Azure revenue comes from startups and ISVs. (Source: Microsoft)

• Enterprise social network Yammer has more than 8 million registered users. (Source: Microsoft)

• Outlook.com has more than 400 million active users. (Source: Microsoft)

• Microsoft’s YouthSpark program has helped more than 227 million young people. (Source: Microsoft)

• Microsoft spent $1.9 billion working with suppliers that are minority-, disabled-, veteran-, and woman-owned businesses in fiscal year 2013. (Source: Microsoft)

• More than 1.65 million students from more than 190 countries have participated in Imagine Cup, the world’s premier student technology competition. (Source: Microsoft)

• Microsoft employees consume about 4 million cups of tea each year on campus. Green tea is the most popular, with more than 1.1 million packets used annually. (Source: Microsoft)

• Internet Explorer’s usage share on desktop devices was more than 58 percent worldwide in October 2014. (Source: Net Market Share.)

• Microsoft Research scientists have won more than 320 major awards, including the Turing Award, MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, MIT Technology Review’s TR35 Award, the Draper Prize, IEEE John von Neumann Medal, IEEE Piore Award, the Kyoto Prize, multiple Oscars and a British knighthood. (Source: Microsoft)

• 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Yammer. (Source: Microsoft)

• The Microsoft Art Collection includes 4,728 pieces, including a chandelier by Dale Chihuly and a piece of the Berlin Wall. It’s one of the largest corporate art collections in the world. (Source: Microsoft)

• The Microsoft Partner Network includes over 430,000 organizations with more than 160 million mutual customers worldwide. (Source: Microsoft)

• Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM business now serves more than 3.5 million users and nearly 40,000 customers. (Source: Microsoft)

• Fifty-seven percent of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Azure. On average, more than 1,000 new customers sign up for Microsoft Azure every day. (Source: Microsoft)

• Microsoft employees eat about 1 million sandwiches each year in campus cafeterias. The most popular sandwich is the turkey club – 225,000 are eaten annually. (Source: Microsoft)

• Microsoft’s modular data centers consume 50 percent less energy than traditional data centers. (Source: Microsoft)

OneDrive vs OneDrive for Business

We are often asked to explain the differences between the two Microsoft OneDrive services.

The following video provides a overview of both and highlights the differences clearly.

Office for iPad success - topping the charts

As predicted last week, Microsoft released Office for iPad app, and to less fanfare, updated their Office for iPhone app too.

iPad
Looking at the UK charts, the iPad apps have been a huge success, current filling the top 3 spaces on the 'Top Fee iPad Apps' chart

Which is great news, but the free app only provides view access on the iPad.  The better news is that they seem to be doing well on the "In App Purchases" too.

To get the unlock the full functionality for these apps you either need an existing Office 365 subscription, or sign up as a new user through the app @ £79.99 for Office 365 Home.

On the "Top Grossing iPad Apps" charts, which tracks the "in app purchases" Microsoft Word is ranked 7th.  Considering that places 1 - 6 are given to gaming behemoths such as the Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans, this is a great result.

Excel ranks at 22 and PowerPoint does not appear on this chart, however this is misleading as subscribing to any one of these unlocks all three.

iPhone

It has been less well publicised, but the update to the Office application on the iPhone, Microsoft Office Mobile, has also had a major change.

Previously this required an Office 365 subscription to use, however the update has fully unlocked this for all users, for free.  Combined with a free OneDrive account, this is a great way to access, view, edit and create content on the move.  

Again, looking at the UK charts, the Microsoft Office Mobile app is place 3rd, which can only be more great news for Microsoft.

This all shows a clear need for a top quality, consistent, productivity solution for all devices, if only we could have had it last year.

Best Windows XP cashback deals

With the End of XP date fast approaching, Microsoft estimate that as many as 20-25% of all enterprise PCs are still running Windows XP.

One contributing reason will of course be the cost of upgrading these systems and the planning involved. If you’re still running any Windows XP machines then I’m sure you are aware of the security risks that may present themselves after April 9^th or driver issues for new peripherals. However, you may not be aware of some of the offers available to you for the purchase of replacement hardware.

HP are offering up to £150 cashback when you trade in your old XP machine for an eligible HP system.

Dell are offering up to £200 cashback when you trade in for an eligible system.

Lenovo have a variety of cashback deals on notebooks and desktops, as well as a trade-in program.

Toshiba are offering up to £100 cashback when you trade in your old laptop for a qualifying Toshiba.

If you would like to discuss the options available to you in order to get those last XP systems replaced and up to date before April 9^th then do get in touch. We can assist you in getting the best deal that works for you, and even advise on the software licensing if you need to only make this investment rather than hardware.

We would also love to help with any other IT procurement requests that you may have, from just pricing advice, to sourcing those difficult items.

Office365@tridentgroup.co.uk

The cloud explained.... by Stephen Fry

First of all, this is an advertisement.  but stop the video a few seconds from the end and you would never know.

This is simply a brilliant explanation of the history, present and future of IT delivery.

To be clear, we are in no way affiliated with Databarracks, but this video is too good to ignore.