Microsoft - Office 365

[Jorge-Vieira]

Microsoft OneNote 2013 free users to get premium features

The Microsoft OneNote Team recently announced that it is adding several key features that will be available to users of the free 2013 edition of OneNote, for no extra charge. The main restriction remaining appears to simply cover where a user can save their notes, free users must use Microsoft's OneDrive.
"Today we're happy to share that we're adding even more to the free edition. We're removing all feature restrictions from OneNote 2013," OneNote team program manager Brad Corob said in a blog post. Five of the previously restricted features that were reserved for the paid version have been unlocked, bringing the free "personal use" version of the program much closer in line with the premium paid edition.

The now-unlocked features in the updated free edition of OneNote include:

• Password protected sections—Add a password to protect sensitive information.
• Page history—Easily see or go back to prior versions of a page.
• Audio and video recording—Take notes while recording, and easily jump to the relevant section later.
• Audio search—Search for a word in a voice or video recording.
• Embedded files—Insert Office documents or other files directly in your notebook.

The move was motivated by the positive feedback from users who enjoyed the free features but who wanted more, Corob said. The free edition of OneNote comes with 15GB of cloud storage space through Microsoft's OneDrive service, with no limits on the number of notes each user can create or sync. If you want to save your notebooks to a local or network drive, SharePoint, or OneDrive for Business account however, it will require a subscription to the paid premium version of OneNote.

OneNote is available on a wide range of platforms including Mac, Windows (and Windows Phone), Android and iOS. However, with the experience being most complete on Windows, making more features free could potentially help Microsoft drive up enterprise demand for Windows tablets against rival Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy tablet ranges. The change could also be in anticipation of the upcoming revised version of OneNote for both Office 2016 and the universal Office for Windows 10 apps that are expected to come out later this year.
Windows PC users can download the updated free edition of OneNote 2013 from here, links to other versions are also provided on that page.

Noticia:
http://hexus.net/tech/news/software/...mium-features/

[Jorge-Vieira]

Microsoft Grants Free Office 365 Access To Students And Teachers Worldwide

American companies tend to reserve their best promotional offers for their U.S.-based customers, and if they’re lucky, to our northern neighbors in Canada. Microsoft has offered Office 365 free to students in the U.S. since September 2014.
Microsoft announced this week that millions of students and teachers around the world will now be eligible to sign up to receive Office 365 for free — there’s a rather extensive list of supported countries and languages that you can view here. There’s just one catch, however, and it’s a pretty big one. Schools first need to buy Office 365 subscriptions for faculty and staff. Only then will teachers and students be granted access to their free subscription to Office 365.

image: http://hothardware.com/ContentImages...icesurface.jpg

To take advantage of the offer, students and teachers are required to enter their school-provided email address at Microsoft’s offer page — students visit this page, while teachers can go here. Once signed up, teachers and students who qualify can access:

• Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access and Publisher (can be installed on five PCs/Macs and five mobile devices)
• 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage
• Access to Office Online

Be sure to check out Microsoft’s offer page to see if your institution qualifies.

Noticia:
http://hothardware.com/news/microsof...krXJKoXGt68.99

[Jorge-Vieira]

Office 365 Video rolls out worldwide

Microsoft has announced the global rollout of its Office 365 Video platform. The goal is to provide organisations and enterprises with "a secure, company-wide destination for posting, sharing and discovering video content". Sharing video in the workplace is becoming as important to IT users as sharing diagrams, charts and photographs. Having this facility in Office 365 meets both user and IT department requirements, says Microsoft.
Company videos such on topics such as training, demonstrations and policies can now be shared in Office 365 without the use of external services such as YouTube. The Office 365 Video service allows precise control of sharing and viewing permissions and more. It supports both Flash and HTML5 so should work in any modern browser on desktops, tablets or even smartphones.

Office 365 Video offers up a familiar web interface showing curated content, popular, and other pinned categories. Channel pages can include sections such as; community, Meetings, Marketing, Training and so on. Microsoft takes care of all the background processes for businesses; Azure Media Services takes your uploads and automatically generates video files of different bitrates optimised for different devices/connections, it also provides thumbnails and metadata that it passes back to SharePoint Online, content is discoverable and sharable in Office Graph and Delve and users can discuss the videos in the integrated Yammer side panel.

Microsoft has produced a brand spanking new Office 365 Video iPhone app to offer the service on mobile. The new mobile app even includes video recording and uploading of existing smartphone videos. In the embedded Office Mechanics video you can also see the responsive Office 365 Video webpage working slickly in the Safari browser on the iPhone and we are assured it will work just as well on Android Chrome mobile or other HTML5 savvy apps and devices.




To qualify for Microsoft 365 Video your organisation must be a subscriber to Office 365 enterprise (E1, E3 and E4 ) or Academic plans (A2, A3 and A4) and have SharePoint Online (in SharePoint Online administrators can toggle the Office 365 Video functionality). Government plans are coming soon. The ability to embed videos outside of the portal and let users select their own video thumbnails is coming in the near future. The possibility of native apps beyond the iPhone app will be considered periodically.

Noticia:
http://hexus.net/tech/news/software/...lls-worldwide/

[Jorge-Vieira]

Microsoft putting Wi-Fi into Office 365

Rebadged Skype Wi-Fi to Microsoft Wi-Fi
Microsoft is making some sweeping changes to its wi-fi set ups.


According to Techradar Redmond has changed the name of Skype Wi-Fi to Microsoft Wi-fi and is baking Wi-Fi services to Office 365 users.
Microsoft will launch a business version of the service for Office 365 Enterprise customers, allowing firms to ensure that their employees are connected .
The idea is that if you are not a business customer, the service is likely to be PAYG (pay as you go) - one similar to Skype Wi-Fi - where you can either top up online or via a scratch card.
Microsoft Wi-Fi will likely allow customers to connect to more than 10 million hotspots compared to just 2 million for the current Skype Wi-Fi service; more than 130 countries and territories are listed in Microsoft's hotspot database.
The service will soon be available on all major mobile and desktop platforms even MacOS which would be a little amusing.

Noticia:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/...nto-office-365

[Jorge-Vieira]

Office Universal Apps require Office 365 for PC

Microsoft had removed the 'beta/preview' tag from its Office Universal Apps and, now the company has provided more details on the future of its touch-centric productivity suite. Starting off, Microsoft has once again repeated the fact that editing on PCs and large tablets - except when using OneNote - still requires an Office 365 subscription, while the functionality is free for smaller tablets and phones.

Similar to what we announced in March, viewing and most editing will remain free for non-commercial use on devices of 10.1inch or less. Otherwise, you will need a qualifying Office 365 subscription. If you don't have an Office 365 subscription, you can sign up for a free trial at www.office.com/try. You can also always edit your documents for free in Office Online at www.office.com. The full featured OneNote Universal App will come installed with Windows 10 and similar to OneNote on all other devices, editing is free.

Microsoft has also clarified how it will name the apps. The Word, Excel and Powerpoint apps for the desktop Store will be referred to as Office Mobile and have an extra 'Mobile' in their name to distinguish them from the desktop, x86 version of Office. On the mobile side, they are simply called Word, Excel and Powerpoint. While their names are slightly different, these are still Universal Apps and only the name differs between the two stores.

Noticia:
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/off...65-for-pc.html

[Jorge-Vieira]

Azure AD outage takes out Office 365 for Europe

Microsoft's Office 365 service is down for most of Europe, following a configuration issue with the company's Azure-hosted Active Directory service.

Microsoft's subscription-based Office 365 servicve has been knocked offline for much of Europe, apparently thanks to a flaw in the company's Azure cloud platform.

Offering access to Microsoft's popular productivity suite and a chunk of cloud-based storage, Office 365 has been a big success for the company - thanks in no small part to its decision to give away a year's subscription with low-cost Windows-powered tablets. The platform is heavily integrated into the company's latest Windows 10 operating system, but European users are struggling to access the service this morning thanks to an apparent crash in the company's Azure cloud computing platform.

While the Office 365 servers for the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region are working fine, the company's European access points went down this morning without warning. Checks from London, Edinburgh and Dublin confirm that access to portal.office.com, the main access point for Office 365's authentication service, is unavailable through the UK, and the same issue has been tested throughout Europe from Amsterdam to Leipzig.

Microsoft had not issued a statement on the Office 365 issue at the time of writing, but the company's Azure status page confirmed that the cloud platform powering Office 365 is experiencing issues relating to Active Directory which may account for the downtime.

Those relying on Office 365 access today are advised to switch to a VPN with an end-point in an APAC region to bypass the affected servers. If you are already authenticated, you may find that Office 365 is working normally - in which case, don't log out.

Noticia:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/20...ice-365-down/1

[Jorge-Vieira]

Microsoft pushes Office 365 Planner preview to First Release testers

As announced recently, Microsoft has now pushed out a preview version of its new Office 365 Planner to members of the First Release program, designed as a simple project-management tool set for release in the mainstream Office 365 package in the future.

Previously codenamed 'Highlander', this addition to Office 365 has currently been added to the following users: Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E3, Office 365 Enterprise E4, Office 365 Enterprise E5, Office 365 Education, Office 365 Education E3, Office 365 Education E4, Office 365 Business Essentials and Office 365 Business Premium, as explained by ZDNet. If you haven't received the Planner yet don't stress, Microsoft expects a the rollout of this program to be completed over several weeks.

Designed to meld with Office 365 groups, this Planner will enable companies to streamline some business processes, sitting alongside the additions of SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, also set to be added firstly for Office 365 First Release program subscribers.

Noticia:
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/48986/...ers/index.html

[Jorge-Vieira]

Outlook to get smarter address book, flight reminders

The web version of Outlook will be updated in the coming weeks and months with some neat features.

First up is a smarter address book that suggests contacts based on usage. It's familiar behaviour for anyone that's used other clients, except for the part where it asks you if you want to include a given person on a multi-person email, if that's something you normally do. The address book won't be picky about spelling names correctly either, so you'll be able to find Kathryn if you typed Catherine, for example. This functionality will roll out to Office 365 users in mid-January, then to everyone by early March. These features will arrive in early January for First Release users and early March for everyone else. Outlook.com will be available to everyone around then as well.

If you fly much, Outlook will prove a handy tool once this update goes live, automatically adding flight information to your calendar based on your emails, and will send you email reminders three hours before your flight. Expedia, Southwest Airlines, American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Airlines and Alaska Airlines will be supported at launch; many more airlines will be supported quickly afterward. In the future, other types of events will support this functionality. All of it can be disabled if you like. The new features will go live for First Release folks in early January and everyone else sometime in March.

As for those who prefer to use the desktop or mobile client, these features will arrive for you sometime in the first half of 2016. Mac users are on Microsoft's radar, but they don't have a timeline for you as of yet.

Noticia:
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/49131/...ers/index.html

[Jorge-Vieira]

Microsoft launches pilot program for Outlook Premium, a $3.99 per month version of its email service

Earlier this year, news leaked that Microsoft was testing a new version of its Outlook email platform that introduced new, premium features for a $3.99 per month fee. While there is still no formal launch date for Outlook Premium, the company has now started an invite-only pilot program for the service.
Signing up for Outlook Premium will let you create five personalized email addresses with your own custom domain names, which is good news for those users who prefers something other than a @outlook.com, @live.com, or @hotmail.com address.
Sign-ups will also get better calendar, contact, and document sharing features, as well as an ad-free inbox. Additionally, you won’t be charged for the first 12 months of using Outlook Premium, and it’s free to Office 365 subscribers. The subscription only starts at the end of the first year, giving you plenty of time to decide if it’s worth the monthly fee.

It's Microsoft's partnership with GoDaddy that allows Outlook Premium users to customize their email address domains. After the year’s free trial has expired, however, these domains aren’t automatically renewed with Premium or Office 365 subscriptions; keeping them will require customers to visit GoDaddy.com, according to the FAQ.
While having no ads in Outlook Premium may sound appealing, Microsoft already offers an ad-free version of the email service for the lower price of $19.95 a year. It doesn’t come with any of the other features offered in the Premium package, though.
Microsoft hasn’t said anything else about the program, other than issuing the following statement:

Outlook.com Premium is currently a small pilot program. We’re always investigating new features based on the wants and needs of our customers, and we have nothing more to share at this time.

Noticia:
http://www.techspot.com/news/64336-m...399-month.html