Follow Us:
Love 'em or hate em, it can’t be ignored that Microsoft has been making some big splashes lately. I was reading some Office blogs the other day, and it caused me to start to reflect on how the software giant has been putting out some pretty cool stuff. I’ll be the first to admit, they can definitely miss, and miss hard. I mean seriously, do you remember Windows Me, or Vista? How about Microsoft Bob? I do (how can I forget, the trauma burned into my memory). But, in a perfect world these bumps are lessons learned the hard way that help shape the future of their vision and level they put into their products. I believe they try to listen to customers (far from perfect) and use that feedback to give the community at large what it wants. Looking out at what’s out there today, Microsoft really has some pretty cool tools and technology, and a lot of it is free. In years past thoughts of TerraServer and Microsoft PixelSense (Surface 1.0 table style) come to mind. But cool doesn’t necessarily have to be “drop your jaw eye popping coooool”, but to me it’s something that is truly improves someone’s daily life or job.
Having said all of that, let me share some Microsoft tech that impresses me. These aren’t in any particular order of importance or awesomeness:
I don’t know about you, but at C5 Insight OneNote has become an almost indispensible tool for capturing and collaborating on notes and ideas. OneNote has been around for awhile (since Office 2003), but there have been some recent changes that I believe elevate it to a whole other level. If you haven’t heard of it (or have but not checked it out), now you have no excuses:
Right along with OneNote, Office Lens started as a Windows Phone app but now is integrated into Windows 8 and iOS OneNote apps that helps to capture, trim and enhance images of whiteboards and documents. Microsoft says it’s like a OneNote scanner for your pocket. Say you have a single page document in print, but you want to have it electronically in OneNote and searchable with OCR. Or you just spent an hour brainstorming with a team on a whiteboard and need the image. You take the picture, but Office Lens crops and transforms the image, and in whiteboard mode converts it to a high-contrast view to make the board writing much easier to see. Nice! There are modes for Whiteboard, Document and Photo. You can read more on the latest updates here, where it will convert document images into actual Word documents, and whiteboard images to PowerPoint files!
On a side note, if you’re a Windows Phone user I’d recommend you check out another Microsoft app called Office Remote. It allows your phone to connect via bluetooth of your PC, and be your Office document remote tool, especially useful for controlling PowerPoint Presentations (advance, see your slide notes on your phone).
Part of the Office family, I got in on the preview for Sway before it was publicly available, and I really like it. What is it exactly? In their own words:
“Office Sway: Re-imagine how your ideas come to life.”
Sway is a blank canvas to create and share a web-based expression of your ideas optimized for your phone or web browser. What I love is that on one platform, you can express your ideas with text, images and videos in an easy to create but web-friendly format. Take a trip recently you want write a story and share images and videos? You can read the entire launch announcement here. On December 17th 2014, it was announced that the preview is no longer on a wait list, and is open to the public for business. Not only that, it already had some nice updates.
Go to Sway.com, sign up (again, with Live ID) and check it out! I’ve got a couple in the works, my favorite so far is sharing my experience in the life cycle of the Monarch butterfly that I got to experience first hand (photography images copyright Doug Allen).
I just can’t enough of this. I demo this and tell everyone who cares about it every chance I get. By itself, Excel 2013 can do a lot in the form of pivot tables, charts and graphs to make some pretty visuals. But what about when you have larger data sources from multiple locations (Excel files, a SharePoint list or SQL database)? You would have to turn to Access, or if you’re lucky enough to have a data warehouse / BI staff, you would go bake them some cookies and ask nicely for an SSRS report or new SQL cube. Ewww right? Well have no fear, Excel 2013 has your back sorry Excel 2010 users, you’re not really getting the love)! Enter the new set of “Power” free add-ins for Excel 2013 that bridge this gap, and provide the tools for the non-uber technical of us to turn our complicated data into super cool-looking visuals. The evolution is really about moving away from flat static charts, tables and reports, and making it interactive. You create the data model as needed and high level visualizations, but the consumer of the information can slice and dice the data however they see it. They include:
There is WAY too much cool stuff in here to give it due credit, so to get a good feel for all of these features and what they can do, I’d highly recommend you go through the free Excel 2013 Power BI Fundamentals course on Microsoft Virtual Academy. I wrote a quick simplistic example of merging related table data using Power Pivot in this blog. Oh, and if you have Salesforce, Microsoft now is including 2 connectors in Excel 2013 to import Salesforce Objects and Reports.
UPDATE! Only a few days after I completed writing this, there was a new post on the Power BI blog announcing a new feature - Power BI Dashboards. While still in preview, this looks to shape up to be a powerful new feature in the Power BI arsenal of functionality.
Jazz up that plain boring PowerPoint slide deck with polls, quizzes, videos and other apps with Office Mix. I see this as really helpful for teachers, educators, trainers, or anyone that wants to produce a more media-rich learning platform for consumers. You can annotate your voice over a presentation or with video, even while you write or draw on the slides. So it’s just a much more interactive learning experience than just flat slides and a laser pointer. You can read the whole release announcement here.
Now Skype users can opt-in to the preview program for Skype Translator (currently providing Spanish and English) but 40+ languages coming. Via a live skype call, people who speak different languages can have almost real-time conversations with their speech translated for them on the fly and kept in a on-screen transcript. You can sign up here.
This is app development for the person who doesn’t write code. Currently in beta (beta 3 I think currently), Project Siena is a Windows 8 app that basically allows those of us who don’t write code to make a Windows app! You had me at no code. While currently light on the output part in my opinion, it’s got a ton of flexibility and data sources even at this stage (Office 365, Bing, handwriting and speech, SharePoint on-premise or Online, RSS feeds, REST web services, XML, Excel, etc, etc, and etc). The Project Siena team provides a good array of examples and tutorials and decent documentation on the provided functions. Here are some links to get you started:
No one knows everything (shocker I know), and there’s always been a time when you didn’t know something that now you’re an expert in. While Microsoft doesn’t offer all training for free, they do have a site called the Virtual Academy more geared at folks starting out (young or old) to get a leg out, to give you that initial push or rundown of a topic to help you over a hump whether for knowledge or certification. Over time I had ear marked one or two courses that looked interesting, then I started poking around the site more. There’s a lot of really good stuff there! Not only that, but they’re not just 30 minutes either. They can range from 1 hour that to over 13 hours. Here are a few I liked:
Check it out, you just might learn something!
If you’re reading this blog (and made it this far) I would be surprised if you haven’t heard of Office 365. Providing various different subscriptions with different services, Microsoft’s hosted platform continues to grow in momentum and subscribed users. In a recent a recent article in Windows IT Pro, they estimated there are now 29.76 million paid subscribers accounting for a 2.5 billion run rate that Microsoft announced at this year’s WPC conference, which amounts to 1.32 million new subscribers per month. Wow! If you bought any of the lower end 7 or 8” Windows 8 tablets this season, it likely came with 1 year of Office 365 personal so you can get Office 2013 plus some OneDrive for Business storage. Starting back in 2012, Microsoft started to merge their Dynamics CRM business to the Office 365 platform, and new services are being added routinely. You can get a la carte options like Project Online (hosted Project Server) and Power BI, and emerging technologies like Delve (formerly Oslo) with Office Graph, Yammer, and others. Microsoft has really made it clear that they will be putting their time, money and efforts in their cloud technologies before on-premise tools, but those won’t go away any time soon either. Here’s a quick link to the plan price list.
If you want to stay up with the latest updates and releases, you can follow the Office blog here.
Obviously this is not a comprehensive list, but seem to bubble to the top for me recently. Windows Phones are cool but the lack of apps… SmartGlass for my Xbox One is pretty slick. Windows 8.1 is growing on me, and the last few months it seems has been the season of the sub-$150 Windows 8 tablet. If you made it this far, congratulations! You get a gold sticker . I hope you learned something new, or heard about something you haven’t before. Use your holiday vacation to do a deep dive into your favorite cool tool, and see what can be accomplished! If you think there are others, please drop a comment.
For more information about C5 Insight or this blog, please Contact Us.
The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.
Request Download
This 60-second assessment is designed to evaluate your organization's collaboration readiness.
Learn how you rank compared to organizations typically in years 1 to 5 of implementation - and which areas to focus on to improve.
This is a sandbox solution which can be activated per site collection to allow you to easily collect feedback from users into a custom Feedback list.
Whether you are upgrading to SharePoint Online, 2010, 2013 or the latest 2016, this checklist contains everything you need to know for a successful transition.