Editor’s Note:
The video calling with Lync requires Skype for Windows desktop client version 7.0.x.100.  We are experiencing issues with some browser versions where an older client is downloaded.  If you’ve downloaded at the link below, and the version is not 7.0.x.100, please download using a different browser.

In 2013, we enabled Lync users to contact people on Skype using instant messaging, presence, and audio calling right from your contact list. I’m happy to say that we’ve now taken the next step by adding video calling between Lync 2013 and the latest Skype for Windows desktop client, available for download here. Now Lync users can conduct everyday business and collaboration “face-to-face” with customers, partners and suppliers who use Skype.

The screenshot above shows a video call from the Lync perspective. Whether you’re using Lync or Skype, it’s an easy, familiar experience—you make the video call the same way you make any other call, with the same options for starting, stopping, re-sizing and maximizing video. (As you can see from the picture, Elaine and Sean are pretty excited about the update; Elaine blogged about it on Skype.com.)

The best of both

What’s not obvious from the screenshots is the work we’ve done in the underlying media stack to enable the connectivity. Lync and Skype have always delivered phenomenal voice and video experiences to business and consumer users across a wide range of environments and network conditions. Now, we’re taking the best of both to make both even better.

This includes built-in security, with enterprise class encryption of both media and signaling using TLS and SRTP, enabled by default. It includes connectivity, with standards-based traversal of personal and corporate firewalls using STUN, TURN and ICE. It includes high quality, scalable video using the industry standard H.264 SVC codec. Finally, it includes the SILK audio codec as the default choice for Lync to Skype calls. SILK is used for billions of minutes of audio calls every day, and provides a phenomenal balance between audio quality, bandwidth utilization and power consumption.

The provisioning guide for Lync-Skype connectivity includes instructions for both Lync Online and Lync Server 2013 customers to enable the capability, and the end user guide shows how to add contacts and make calls. The video calling requires an up-to-date Lync 2013 client on either Android, iOS or Windows. It works today with the latest Skype for Windows desktop client only, and requires that the Skype user sign in with their Microsoft account.

What’s next

As excited as we are about this, we know we have more work to do. We will extend support to the Skype clients on additional platforms, starting with Android and iOS in the coming months. We will add support for SkypeIDs and make it easier to find and add contacts from the worldwide Skype directory when the next version of Lync becomes Skype for Business in the first half of 2015. These planned improvements to Lync Skype connectivity are just one example of how Skype for Business will keep and improve on all of the capabilities of Lync.

Stay tuned for more updates on Skype for Business, by following our social channels (Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn) and talking your Microsoft sales specialist or partner. We’d also love to see you at one of the worldwide Office 365 Summit events, where, starting in mid-January, we plan to share more details on Skype for Business.

— BJ Haberkorn

The post Video calling between Skype and Lync available now appeared first on Office Blogs.

Office 365 is built for collaboration—across the web and across devices—making it easy for you to work with other people and get things done, even when you and your colleagues are separated by time or distance, or you’re all using different platforms and devices. Office 365 combines the power of world-class productivity tools, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Lync and Skype, with the social capabilities of Yammer and the ability to discover the right information at the right time with Office Delve. That’s why millions of people worldwide have already decided that Office 365 is the best choice for collaboration.

During the past couple of weeks, there have been some interesting developments with Office 365 and related products that have made it even better. We added Skype document collaboration to Office Online, for example, so when you are co-authoring a document with colleagues in real time, you can chat with everyone involved as you collaborate. We also improved the spam filter to give you more control over incoming bulk mail messages, and we added more search capabilities and more intelligence to Sway. In addition, we partnered with edX, a non-profit online initiative created by founding partners Harvard and MIT, to make it easy to create online courses authored with Office Mix and experienced through edX.org.

And speaking of education, we also made Office 365 ProPlus available at no extra cost to students, faculty and staff at eligible education institutions in the Asia Pacific region.

Below is a round-up of some key news items from the last couple of weeks. Enjoy!

Office 365 digs deeper into lucrative government market – Find out why Microsoft is particularly well-positioned to succeed in the government market with Office 365.

Microsoft 365 first cloud email to gain FedRAMP approval – Find out why Office 365 is the first cloud email service to receive FedRAMP authority—and what that means in terms of serving government customers.

Office 365: Is it right for the enterprise? – Discover how Office 365 meets the needs of enterprise organizations.

HP to provide Microsoft Office 365 business services, support – Learn how HP will now offer enterprise services tailored for Office 365, and how Microsoft will use HP datacenters to host some of its services

Interview: Microsoft’s Brent Combest on the cloud – Listen in as Brent Combest, Microsoft’s worldwide director of sales and strategy for cloud in SMB, talks about the future of cloud computing.

Microsoft says Office 365 helps companies stay compliant with laws and regulations – Find out how Office 365 provides outstanding privacy, security and compliance.

Office 365’s spam filter gets smarter at sorting bulk mailings – Learn how the Microsoft spam filter does a better job of weeding out unwanted bulk mail messages.

Universitas Gadjah Mada to boost students and lecturers’ productivity with Office 365 for Education – Discover why one of the largest universities in Indonesia is adopting Office 365.

The post Office 365 news round-up appeared first on Office Blogs.

Holiday gift lists

Keep track of everyone you’re buying for with organized wish lists in OneNote. (Even convert handwriting to text with OneNote 2013 to make a child’s list legible.) To simplify, categorize each list by person, store, or discount deals. When you’re shopping on the go, save time with the recently updated OneNote Clipper. Just clip a product you’re interested in and automatically save the most important information to your notebook for later. You can also choose to send the clipping to your inbox with the Email to OneNote feature.

Wish list ideas

If you’re stumped on what to buy, we’ve teamed up with The Gift Insider to bring you creative gift ideas for the special people in your life, even the most difficult to shop for. For gifts that keep on giving, @thegiftinsider suggests welcoming dad into the Hamptons Wine Club while mom gets pampered with a home spa of the month package. When shopping for a more personalized gift for her, show how you feel with unique soundwave art. For him, make this holiday a memorable one with a once-in-a-lifetime experience he’ll never forget from Cloud9Living. Get all of The Gift Insider’s holiday gift suggestions in the OneNote Gift Notebook.

Share the shopping duties

If multiple people are shopping for the same lucky person—divide and conquer by sharing a notebook and updating from anywhere on your phone, tablet or computer. Tag-team shopping is a great way to save time in a pinch or work together even if you’re thousands of miles apart. Include images, links and notes to guarantee you’re both on the same page. Don’t forget to cross off each task upon completion—it helps to avoid confusion, but even better is the rewarding sense of accomplishment.

OneNote can help keep you organized this holiday season. And don’t forget to scan and save your receipts with Office Lens in case of returns.

Follow us on Twitter for more tips on how OneNote can simplify the holidays!
Get OneNote       |     Follow OneNote     

The post Organize your holiday with OneNote appeared first on Office Blogs.

Download the podcast.

Weekly updates

• Introduction to the Access panel - Microsoft Azure
• Using SharePoint Permissions to manage Access to SQL data by Scot Hillier
• This is how I think Autohosted Apps for Office 365 and SharePoint should work by Andrew Connell
• 6 hours of free training by Steve Walker and Vesa Juvenon online at Microsoft Virtual Academy

Show notes

• Jumpstart AngularJS app development for O365 & E2E testing using Protractor
• http://spbreed.github.io/index.html#/presentable
• https://github.com/spbreed/spangularapp 
• http://angular.github.io/protractor/#/tutorial
• http://jasmine.github.io/1.3/introduction.html
• http://mochajs.org/
• http://docs.seleniumhq.org/download/

Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network.

The podcast RSS has been submitted to all the stores and marketplaces but takes time, please add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast.

About Karthik

Karthik Ramamoorthy works a senior consultant for Greystone Solutions, a Boston based Microsoft Gold Competency partner. He is originally from Coimbatore, India. He has been working in SharePoint Server for the past seven years and is involved in wide range of projects including SharePoint installation automation, integrating SharePoint with LOB applications such as SAP, CRM, Documentum, performance tuning SharePoint farms, deploying .NET based workloads on Azure. Karthik is enthusiastic about App model and client side development ever since the release of SharePoint 2013 RTM. He is also passionate about adopting test driven development patterns and bringing open source technologies inside Office 365 and Azure App development workspace. You can find Karthik blogging at SPBREED’S BLOG and tweeting at @spbreed.

About the host

Jeremy is a newly appointed technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft.

You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.

Useful links

• Office 365 Developer Center
• Blog
• Twitter
• Facebook
• StackOverflow
  • http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev
  • http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev
  • http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev
• Yammer Office 365 Technical Network
  • O365 Dev Podcast
  • O365 Dev Apps Model
  • O365 Dev Tools
  • O365 Dev APIs
  • O365 Dev Migration to App Model
  • O365 Dev Links
• UserVoice

The post Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 024 on testing AngularJS Office 365 apps with Protractor appeared first on Office Blogs.

It’s a big deal. This year, ModelOff, the Financial Modeling World Championships, caught the attention of over 3,700 Microsoft Excel users and financial modelers from the U.S., Australia, Russia, India, China and other countries across the globe. After two intense preliminary rounds of solving both financial and Excel-focused problems written by top institutional experts, 16 finalists are making their way to the Microsoft Time Square offices to compete in front of a live audience. For these finalists to be recognized by their peers around the world, the honor and the pressure could not be higher.

And the Excel team is going to be right there in the action! As an ongoing commitment to learning from our users, we have partnered with ModelOff throughout the year to engage with people in the finance and financial services industry who use Excel in powerful and creative ways to address real world, mission critical problems. As a celebration of this partnership, we are flying members of our team to welcome the 16 finalists and the ModelOff community to our new Times Square offices for this year’s showdown!

If you are an Excel power user or use Excel for financial modelling, check out the live broadcast, Sunday December 7th @ 3 P.M. EST and see what it takes to be crowned world champion! You can also sign up to learn more about participating in the 2015 annual competition.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, as we provide photos and up-to-date status on what we see in hear in New York, leading up to the finals event throughout the weekend.

The post Who will be crowned Financial Modeling World Champion in New York? appeared first on Office Blogs.

More search

Currently in Sway Preview it is easy to collect your content from a variety of cloud-connected sources already built right into Sway. Simply navigate to a source, tap or click your content, and then drag and drop it into your Sway. It’s what being part of the ‘cloud’ really means. We’ve already seen a great response to the built-in sources we started with, which include OneDrive, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and your device’s local storage.

We also promised to expand that list of built-in sources over time. We’ve been listening to your feedback from UserVoice and directly through Sway via the “+Add Source” survey option in the content sources drop down.  In response to requests from users (particularly in the education space) about wanting to be able to search for Creative Commons licensed images directly from the Internet, we’ve integrated Bing Image Search functionality into Sway! Now you can search for images tagged with Creative Commons licenses within Sway.

 The list of sources from which you can add content directly into Sway is growing with the rollout of Bing Image Search built directly into Sway and Suggested searches. It also includes a “+Add Source” option where you can give feedback on other services you’d like to see us add.

Simply click the source dropdown and select Bing.  Type anything into the search bar, press Enter and get back the results for a Bing Image Search. A URL to the source of the image is provided, which allows you to navigate to the original image and review the license terms to make sure your use is permitted. You are responsible for respecting others’ rights, including copyright. Learn more here.

Just like with Sway’s other sources, you can simply drag and drop any image from the Bing Image Search results right into your Sway. No need to first download an image to your hard drive and then upload it to Sway.

You can expand your search by clicking the “Show all results” button, but you are still responsible for respecting the rights of others.

It’s easy to drag and drop images from Bing Image Search results directly into your Sway.

Once you’ve included an image from Bing Image Search, any viewer with whom you’ve shared your Sway can see the source of that image and applicable license terms. They can simply click or tap the image to view it in full-screen mode, and the attribution will appear as a URL in the lower right corner. As an author, while editing your Sway, you can still see what this viewing experience will look like when you enter Preview mode (click “…” and then “Preview”).

Integrating Bing Image Search is just the first step in our continuous journey to expand the value that Microsoft’s search platform can add to Sway. We’ll also bring more of Microsoft’s connected consumer and business services into Sway, along with other sources of content you are authorized to use (please continue to provide feedback on additional sources through UserVoice, or in the “+Add Source” option in the content sources dropdown in Sway). This way, Sway will continue to make it easier than ever for you to incorporate your content to bring your ideas to life.

More intelligence

With Bing integration, we are also expanding Sway’s ability to assist you in the creation process by anticipating what content you might want to incorporate. Sway continuously analyzes what you’ve written and suggests terms for related Bing image searches, which you can initiate with just a tap or click. After initiating a search, you’ll see results for images tagged with Creative Commons licenses that you may be able to use.

When you first open the Add Content pane, Sway defaults to the “Suggested” option. From the first word you add to your Sway, Suggested searches uses natural language processing to begin showing tags for related words and phrases you might be interested in, based on what you’ve already written. When you see a tag you like, tap or click it to perform the Bing Image Search based on these words or phrases. After you confirm your use is permitted, you can just drag and drop any desired image result right into your Sway! Your viewers are able to click the image to see its attribution (described earlier in this blog).

By continuously analyzing the content you’ve already included, Sway can now suggest related Bing image searches you can choose to perform even if you never use those specific terms in your text. 

Just tap or click a word or phrase tag from Suggested to perform a Bing Image Search!
Then, just drag and drop any image result right onto Sway.

As you add or change your content, Sway continues to re-evaluate which search terms and topics you might find relevant. You’ll notice that in addition to picking out relevant topics from your text, Suggested is also using the power of Bing to find related concepts you may not have thought to search for. Additionally, Sway weights its suggested search terms towards the specific content in the card you’re currently working with in the Storyline. That way, you get suggested search terms that are particularly relevant to you in real time. For example, if you’re writing about Italy, but you’re working in a section about history and philosophy, Sway will tailor its suggested searches to related topics such as Venice, Thucydides, Baths of Caracalla, Giorgio Napolitano—even if you didn’t specifically mention them by name.

At any point, while Suggested is open, you can initiate a manual Bing search of Creative Commons images in the “Search Bing” box at the top of the Add Content pane. This saves you the extra clicks of selecting Bing from the dropdown menu and ensures that you’re only one step away from the great content you want.

When we unveiled Sway Preview, the built-in design and layout engine was the first example of the powerful machine learning and intelligence platform we’re building to make it easier than ever for you to bring your ideas to life. The addition of Suggested searches expands that platform, so Sway can now function not only as your digital design assistant, but your content gathering assistant as well. We’ll continue adding more intelligence capabilities that help you quickly and easily create awesome Sways. Using our machine learning platform, Sway will become an even more personalized content creation assistant: learning your preferences, anticipating your needs, and working for you to help you get more done, more quickly.

We hope you find these features to be a great new addition to Sway!

—Sway Team, @Sway

Get Sway     | Follow Sway    

The post Bringing more search and more intelligence to Sway appeared first on Office Blogs.

Course instructors are experts in the topic and include Paul Andrew, senior technical product manager; Joshua Maher, senior content developer; Alice Appleton, business planner; Zach Rosenfield, principal PM lead; Ed Fisher, senior consultant; Paul Collinge, senior premier field engineer,  Philip Newman , senior program manager

Watch this course to learn how you can plan for great performance for a new deployment and manage performance post deployment of Office 365.

The post Microsoft Virtual Academy course—Office 365 performance management appeared first on Office Blogs.

We are pleased to announce the inaugural entry for the OneNote in Education blog!  With the growing momentum of OneNote in education, we wanted to start this blog to have a dialog with the education community, as well as share ideas, resources, and gather feedback from teachers, students and faculty.  We also hope to point to examples of unique ways educators and students use OneNote in education.  There are also so many of you out there with great stories to tell and share.  We plan on having regular guest writers, including teachers, faculty, principals, heads of school, students, partners and a host of others who are doing amazing things with OneNote in education and the classroom.

In addition to the education space, there are great things happening in eLearning, corporate training and on-boarding, which we will discuss on this blog.  Many companies, including Microsoft, are delivering eLearning solutions using OneNote, but we want to further explore the potential of how companies can do more effective training and learning, while also getting rid of expensive binders and related materials.

In terms of my background, my name is Mike Tholfsen, and I’m back on the OneNote team as a program manager focusing on OneNote in the education space.  I worked on OneNote from 2004-2010 and spent a lot of time exploring how OneNote could be used in education and classrooms—as well as the related area of eLearning and corporate training.  During that time, I had the pleasure of meeting many teachers, students, faculty, trainers and schools from around the United States and world, and was able to learn, share and collaborate with many people who were also exploring OneNote in education.

One other “note” (pun intended) that I’ll share. I had the opportunity to work on the OneNote Class Notebook Creator tool over the past year, as well the new OneNote for Teachers site we launched in October, which includes interactive bite-sized training aimed directly at teachers.  The reaction to the OneNote Class Notebook tool has been nothing short of amazing—we’ve seen an explosion of interest from people around the world.  We are going to keep working on this tool and improve it based on your feedback, so please keep it coming. Please share your feedback with us in the blog comments, @msOneNote, or Facebook.

We look forward to the conversation with everyone to build a community of educators and learners across the world.

—Mike Tholfsen @mtholfsen and the OneNote team
http://blogs.office.com/onenote/education/

Get OneNote       |     Follow OneNote     

The post Welcome to the new OneNote in Education blog! appeared first on Office Blogs.

Jeremy: We’ve done quite a few shows describing what the apps for Office model is, the differences between existing models, and what’s new in apps for Office. This week we wanted to move away from what is possible and how we think it should work and talk to a real developer and see what it took to embrace the new model. I’m joined by Ryan Duguid from Nintex to talk about their experience.

Ryan, the apps for Office model involves change, and change can be hard, so can you share your thoughts on what’s involved and how people should think about the journey?

Ryan: There’s certainly no shortage of discussion about the new app model, but for the most part, its people wondering who’s moved their cheese. Sure, there are new patterns and practices, but at the same time, you’re going to get to accelerate your development time with a whole new world of cloud services, you’ll get real-time insights in to how people are using your solution, and you can push out new features as soon as their built. Put simply, once you get there, the cheese tastes better!

Jeremy: Can you tell us some of the gotchas, and what you’ve achieved to date?

Ryan: The biggest gotcha is trying to do things in the same way you’ve always done them. Sure you might be able to re-use some of your code, but at the same time there is a whole new world of possibilities open to you.

If you think about it, the old model was about shipping code that ran locally on a SharePoint box. Now you are effectively running a site that interoperates with the SharePoint box or the online service. For Nintex that meant we had to focus our time on getting the right processes in place to manage frequent service updates, and ensure the privacy of data. The upside is that we are now in a position add or tweak the app from one central location without having to rebuild, service or reinstall our app.

Jeremy: At the end of October, we announced new Office 365 extensibility for Windows, iOS, Android and web developers, including new APIs linking directly into Office 365 services, mobile platform SDKs and better app visibility using the new app launcher. Were you able to take advantage of all this?

Ryan: It was cool to see these new capabilities. The standout feature for me was the new app launcher. It gives users immediate access to the apps they need to get their jobs done. From an ISV perspective, it was easy justify the R&D investment as we know that those capabilities are already available to every Office 365 user in the world – we don’t have to wait for critical mass to migrate to a new SharePoint version.

Jeremy: Thanks for sharing your experiences. To see Ryan explain the architectural shift firsthand and a demo of the Nintex Workflow app, check out the show.

Thanks for watching and see you soon,

Jeremy Chapman | Ryan Duguid

More Resources

Dev.office.com

Nintex Workflow for Office 365 and direct link to app store

Nintex Homepage

Garage Series Video Channel

Garage Series Season 1 Blog Archive

Follow @OfficeGarage on Twitter

Office 365 Garage Series Apps for Windows Phone and Windows 8

The post Garage Series: A developer’s view of transitioning to the apps for Office model appeared first on Office Blogs.

Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home, and Office 365 University updates:

Office for iPad and iPhone now support Dropbox – With the next updates to Word, Excel and PowerPoint on iPad and iPhone you’ll be able to connect to your Dropbox account, so you can access, edit and share your Dropbox files right from your Office apps. Once you’ve added your Dropbox account to Word, Excel or PowerPoint, you can navigate folders and files on Dropbox for viewing and editing in the native Office apps. And accessing Word, PowerPoint and Excel from your Dropbox app is just as easy. Navigate to the file you want, and the Dropbox app will open the Office app you need.

Office for iPhone and Office for Android tablet Preview – The new Office for iPhone apps for Word, Excel and PowerPoint offer the same beautiful iPad experience, optimized for the iPhone. We are bringing the productivity of Word, Excel and PowerPoint to Android tablet customers with the Office for Android tablet Preview.

Excel Power Map November update – You can now play a tour directly from any scene, instead of always having to start playing a tour from the beginning. This is super helpful when you’re editing a tour and want to see how the changes you’ve made to a scene will appear. No more starting from the beginning and fast forwarding through to the scene you just changed. To use this feature, simply hover over a scene in the Tour Editor and click the Play button that appears.

Office Mobile for Android update – This update makes sharing OneDrive documents easier, and adds support for Dropbox so you can view, edit, and share your Office files stored on Dropbox.

Access 2013 web apps update -Download in Excel is available to all Access 2013 Office 365 customers, when viewing any datasheet views in your browser for your Access web app on Office 365, you’ll see the new Download in Excel button on the right side of the Action Bar.

Office 365 for business updates*:

Office 365 now available in 140 markets – Office 365 is now commercially available in the following nine new markets: Afghanistan, Botswana, Ethiopia, Namibia, Nepal, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.

– With the next updates to Word, Excel and PowerPoint on iPad and iPhone you’ll be able to connect to your Dropbox account, so you can access, edit and share your Dropbox files right from your Office apps. Once you’ve added your Dropbox account to Word, Excel or PowerPoint, you can navigate folders and files on Dropbox for viewing and editing in the native Office apps. And accessing Word, PowerPoint and Excel from your Dropbox app is just as easy. Navigate to the file you want, and the Dropbox app will open the Office app you need.

Office for iPhone and Android tablet – The new Office for iPhone apps for Word, Excel and PowerPoint offer the same beautiful iPad experience, optimized for the iPhone. We are bringing the productivity of Word, Excel and PowerPoint to Android tablet customers with the Office for Android tablet Preview.

Skype for Business – For our business customers, we are bringing together the familiar experience and user love of Skype with the enterprise security, compliance and control from Lync to create the most loved and trusted communications platform for doing things together.

Clutter – Clutter brings the power of Office Graph to your inbox. Clutter is designed to help you focus on the most important messages in your inbox. It uses machine learning to de-clutter your inbox by moving lower priority messages out of your way and into a new Clutter folder.

Multi-factor authentication and SAML support – We will release an update to the Office 2013 Windows client applications that enables new authentication flows, including support for Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). These new authentication flows are enabled by the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL).

Use your Office 365 credentials to sign in to Yammer – As users sign in to Yammer, they will be redirected to your organization’s Office 365 log in page. After entering their email address and password, they’ll notice the Office 365 suite navigation bar (pictured below) at the top of their Yammer network. With a single click, users can quickly toggle between Yammer, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint and more to get work done.

Excel Power Map November update – You can now play a tour directly from any scene, instead of always having to start playing a tour from the beginning. This is super helpful when you’re editing a tour and want to see how the changes you’ve made to a scene will appear. No more starting from the beginning and fast forwarding through to the scene you just changed. To use this feature, simply hover over a scene in the Tour Editor and click the Play button that appears.

Office 365 Video – Office 365 Video provides organizations with a secure, company-wide destination for posting, sharing and discovering video content. Powered by Azure Media Services—the same service used during the Olympics (6,000 plus hours of video in 18 days)—Office 365 Video benefits from adaptive smooth streaming technology optimizing video playback for the device it’s being viewed on.

Office Mix + Office 365 Video – Soon, you’ll see the Publish to O365 Video button on the Mix tab on the PowerPoint ribbon. When you click it, the Office Mix pop up wizard will walk you through the publishing process.

Sync Information Rights Managed documents with OneDrive for Business – You can sync your IRM protected documents on OneDrive for Business. The IRM protection stays in place whether you open file on Office Online or on a local folder and continues to apply the settings even if you make edits to the file in both locations.

Office 365 receives FedRAMP Authority to Operate – We are pleased to announce that Microsoft Office 365 has been granted FedRAMP Authority to Operate (ATO) by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General (HHS OIG).

Office Mobile for Android update – This update makes sharing OneDrive documents easier, and adds support for Dropbox so you can view, edit, and share your Office files stored on Dropbox.

Access 2013 web apps update -Download in Excel is available to all Access 2013 Office 365 customers, when viewing any datasheet views in your browser for your Access web app on Office 365, you’ll see the new Download in Excel button on the right side of the Action Bar.

Enhanced bulk mail filtering – We significantly increased EOP’s bulk detection and assigned Bulk Complaint Level (BCL) ratings to email from bulk senders to indicate the likelihood it would generate a complaint. A low BCL indicates the sender generally uses good sending practices and the email is not likely to generate a complaint while a high BCL indicates the opposite. This update uses these BCL ratings to enable you to quickly configure the level of bulk email filtering your organization needs.

Power Query November update – This update includes: SQL Server Analysis Services connector, Salesforce Reports and Objects connector, Expand Columns—Ability to disable and customize column prefix, Improved File menu options in the Query Editor, and Entry point for Advanced Editor in the Queries pane inside the Query Editor.

Please note that some of the updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide.

– Andy O’Donald @andyodonald

——————————————————————————–

*Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics.

The post What’s new: November 2014 appeared first on Office Blogs.

The IBM Global CIO Study, found that 49 percent of an individuals’ work is the result of “network contribution” by fellow employees and partners. Yet 80 percent of employees are ineffective at collaboration, according to a CEB survey. That’s why it is so important for organizations to have the tools they need to collaborate effectively.

Microsoft offers the most complete set of productivity services currently available, which spans messaging, conferencing and telephony, social collaboration, content management and compliance, big data analysis and visualization.

Collaborate seamlessly in real time

Office 365 is built for collaboration. Office 365 offers the ability to get the optimal experience regardless of your location or device by delivering improved productivity with low training costs. Today, more than 1 billion users choose Office, Skype, Yammer and OneDrive every day to communicate, collaborate and get work done. Office 365 helps organizations improve collaboration by transforming the corporate intranet into a social network that cuts through hierarchies to improve executive-employee connections and eliminate barriers created by physical distance, time zones and workers using multiple devices.

When the Carlsberg Group, a family-owned Danish brewing company with a global business was choosing productivity and collaboration tools, it evaluated Google Apps for Work as well as Office 365, but employees wanted to work in the familiar Office user interface and the IT group valued the level of integration built into the Microsoft cloud-based communication, collaboration, and social networking services. The company also felt that a Microsoft offering better met its security and availability requirements.

Etienne Dock, vice president of IT Architecture and Sourcing for Carlsberg Business Solutions

“Coming from a position where we had disjointed email services, inconsistent web conferencing tools, and isolated web portals for different countries, integration was important to us,” says Etienne Dock, vice president of IT Architecture and Sourcing for Carlsberg Business Solutions. “The more we grew, the more obvious was the need for a single, consistent, reliable collaboration platform.”

Using Yammer, you can crowdsource answers or draw on the knowledge of the whole team. This improves the speed and accuracy with which you can respond to a customer or complete a sales proposal, and OneDrive for Business lets you easily upload files to the cloud and share them with your colleagues across devices. Office 365 subscriptions come with a full terabyte of OneDrive storage, where users can store and share individual files as large as 10 gigabytes.

As a leading international provider of integrated communication solutions, Telefónica found that the integration of Microsoft Translator with Yammer offered even more opportunities for efficient collaboration.

“With operations in 24 countries spanning eight languages, we are looking forward to the ability to instantly translate conversations among our employees — a massive benefit for Telefónica,” says Adrian Steel, European production hub lead and global director at Telefónica. “By automatically converting conversations to a person’s native language, Yammer will help our people work more efficiently than ever and focus on delivering superior value to our customers.

Real-time co-authoring is another important collaboration feature that lets you and your colleagues edit and contribute to documents simultaneously in all of the Office Online applications:  Word Online, PowerPoint Online and Excel Online. And because Office Online saves as you go, everyone on your team can see changes to text and formatting as they happen, so you can all stay on the same page as your work evolves. Best of all, it doesn’t matter whether you and your teammates are working on the web, a desktop or laptop computer, a Windows tablet or iPad, or another mobile device. Every change will be synced in the document, automatically saved on OneDrive, and made visible to the team.

Using Office Online for real-time co-authoring and collaboration also means you don’t have to worry about losing full file fidelity or document formatting and being forced to reformat. It’s a different story if you try to use Office documents in Google Drive, because Google Drive converts the Office file to a non-standard document format and you often lose the formatting. Fonts, spacing, the whole layout of the document may be different, and much of your previous work is often undone. With Office Online, it doesn’t matter which browsers you and your team members are using. Everyone can make as many changes and suggestions as they want, without worrying about losing the full Office file fidelity or document formatting.

Another great collaboration feature is the ability to share and connect with others—discovering the right information at the right time. Office Delve is a new way to discover relevant information and connections from across your work life. Delve displays information that is most relevant for each person based on the work they are doing and the people with whom they are engaging.  With Delve, information finds you versus you having to find information.

Go social to improve collaboration

To enhance collaboration even more, the Yammer enterprise social network works seamlessly with Office 365, which offers you the power of social engagement and interaction along with the familiar, rich experience of Office, the world’s most widely used productivity suite. Yammer also provides a way for you to create meaningful interactions beyond the walls of your organization. It only takes a few minutes to set up an external network, which is accessible using a single sign-on, making it easy for you to create partner and customer networks.

David Peterson, Enterprise Collaboration Manager at Trek Bicycles, a global leader in bicycles and related gear realized the need for a tool that would help sales representatives at the company communicate, collaborate, and achieve their goals while using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. He introduced Yammer to enable people to collaborate within Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online—replacing email and instant messaging for certain workgroups. Yammer helped improve collaboration within the development team. Steve Novoselac, Trek’s Business Intelligence and .NET Development Manager says, “Things were getting done because everyone had a new kind of awareness of what was going on in the group.”

According to Daniel Roach-Rooke, IT infrastructure manager for sports car manufacturer Aston Martin, by adopting Office 365 the Aston Martin IT department has been able to provide employees with the latest communications and collaboration capabilities, which they use to continue their pursuit of automotive perfection: “Office 365 gives our employees the technology they need to drive the business forward.”

Discover why Office 365 is best for collaboration

While Office 365 offers you tremendous flexibility and a number of different ways to collaborate, Google takes a one-solution-for-all approach to collaboration. Instead of tailoring its productivity tools to fit your needs as Microsoft does, Google forces you to adapt to the tools by providing two fixed product offerings to the users.

The Google productivity apps don’t offer the rich features that enterprise organizations need. Microsoft, on the other hand, extends the familiar Office experience from the desktop to the cloud and on multiple devices, so you never have to compromise or lower your expectations.

We think you don’t just need a “good enough” solution but deserve the best:  Office 365.

To learn more about Office 365 and start collaborating better today, visit the Office365 homepage.

The post Why Office 365 is the best choice for collaboration appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today we’re pleased to share news about an exciting new partnership with edX. EdX is a non-profit online initiative created by founding partners Harvard and MIT that offers interactive online classes and MOOCs from the world’s best universities, colleges and organizations benefitting millions of students around the world. EdX hosts a web portal at www.edx.org for online education, and also sponsors Open edX—an open source initiative for developers to create a next-generation online learning platform and bring quality education to students around the world.

EdX and Microsoft are announcing a partnership to make it easy to create online courses authored with Office Mix and experienced through edX.org. Many faculty use PowerPoint slides as the basis of their lectures for edX. But creating videos, updating and revising them and adding interactive elements to lectures can be time consuming. With Office Mix, educators will be able to easily produce videos and online lectures for edX that deliver an engaging experience to students, with support for audio and video recordings, screen captures, hyperlinks and digital ink.

Office Mix and edX are partnering on the following initiatives:

1. The development of an XBlock component for Office Mix. This solution allows educators to embed mix lectures hosted on OfficeMix.com directly into an edX course. Students will be able to view the mixes natively on edX.org.
2. Open sourcing of the Office Mix XBlock component for distribution on GitHub. Open edX deployments will be able to reuse or modify the Office Mix XBlock for their needs.
3. A commitment to interoperability as edX further extends and evolves the XBlock architecture.

Because Office Mix requires PowerPoint 2013, Microsoft will distribute PowerPoint 2013 180-day free trials to educators building edX courses.

Regarding our partnership, edX CEO Anant Agarwal said, “EdX and Microsoft share a vision to empower educators around the world to create high-quality courses, enabling students to learn wherever they are, for free. I have used Office Mix myself, and enjoy the simplicity of being able to edit video snippets from within PowerPoint. We are excited to partner with Microsoft as we continue to evolve open edX and provide teachers and faculty a richer set of course authoring tools.”

Anoop Gupta, Microsoft Distinguished Scientist and lead for the Office Mix project said, “We are delighted to be partnering with edX. Authoring online lectures is hard today so most faculty don’t even attempt it, whether for MOOCs or for blended-learning scenarios on the campus. In partnering with edX, our goal is to democratize the creation of online lectures and courses.”

Thanks for reading. We look forward to sharing details of more announcements and partnerships in the future. And as always,

Happy Mixing!

The post edX and Office Mix appeared first on Office Blogs.

Why Indiana? It’s because that town is called, for reasons too complex to relay logically here, “Santa Claus” and the U.S. Postal Service, cleverly and with no better alternative, began delivering them all there. Great canvas sacks of them. Literally, tens of thousands of envelopes filled with Christmas wishes and petitions of unnaughtiness that arrive by the truckload each December.

Since 1914, the townspeople have taken it upon themselves to answer every child’s letter they receive. And for a town which, even today, only has 2,500 residents, it’s a serious endeavor. “Santa’s Elves” is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to tackling it, and as Elf Pat Koch explains in the most kid-friendly way possible, “Santa Claus has to get all of those toys ready. He has so much to do. So, he needs people to help.”  Hence, Santa’s Elves.

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of that help—and this year, things are different. Working with OneNote, the Elves have gone digital.

First, they’re collecting every wish from this year’s letters into one giant list for Santa—because OneNote is great for creating and managing lists. The Elves are also using Office Lens to snap photos of the letters for a OneNote notebook on OneDrive to organize and protect them. Emily Thompson, director of the town’s Santa Claus Museum explains, “The ability to preserve these letters digitally means we won’t have to worry about them getting misplaced, or damaged by water, fire or time.”

Santa’s Elves’ notebook is bound to be a treat. Hundreds of memorable letters arrive every year; funny, touching, poignant, amazing. The elves always save some of the best letters to archive.

Go ahead. Write to Santa. The most direct way to get a reply from Santa’s Elves it to send yours (and your return address) to P.O. Box 1, Santa Claus, Indiana 47579. Perhaps you’ll be part of Santa’s first all-digital wish list. Check back December 12th for a video showcasing the Elves’ work. And be sure to keep an eye out for the full list on December 19th. You just might find the perfect last-minute gift idea on it.

Download OneNote for free on all your devices then follow us on Twitter or Facebook, where we’ll be posting OneNote tips and tricks for simplifying the holidays to help you get back to what really matters.

Get OneNote       |     Follow OneNote     

The post Santa’s Elves use OneNote to create giant wish list for Santa appeared first on Office Blogs.

Bing Image Search uses a copyright filter based on the Creative Commons licensing system.  The results that are returned are images that have been tagged with Creative Commons licenses.  A link to the source of the image is provided, which you should use to review the source of the image and the applicable license to determine whether your use will comply with the license. (The settings can be switched to show all web results to view more images.)  However, you are responsible for respecting others’ rights, including copyright. Learn more here.

–Doug Thomas

The post Clip Art now powered by Bing Images appeared first on Office Blogs.

Download the podcast.

Weekly updates

• How to change the lock status of a site collection by Suman Chakrabarti
•  SharePoint hosted app: How to manage DateTimeControl Picker and Format with the correct Language and Culture by Andre Lage
• Working with the AppInstalled and AppUninstalling events in SharePoint apps by Dan Saedén

Show notes

• Office Dev Center
• Office Dev Training Center
• Office 365 API code samples
• Connect(); event on Channel 9
• Visual Studio annoucements from Connect(); event
• Azure SDK 2.5 announcements

Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network.

The podcast RSS has been submitted to all the stores and marketplaces but takes time, please add directly with the RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast.

About Chaks

Chaks works as a program manager for Microsoft with the Visual Studio team. He currently owns the Office 365 API tooling developer experience within Visual Studio, which helps developers discover and consume Office 365 services in their applications. This involves understanding how developers use Visual Studio and build an intuitive way to consume services. Chaks assesses product opportunities and defines the required product experience that allows developers to build cloud applications that connect people, documents and enterprise data to collaborate business processes on modern devices. You can find Chaks blogging at  Chaks Corner and tweeting at @Chakkaradeep.

About the host

Jeremy is a newly appointed technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft.

You can find Jeremy blogging at jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.

Useful links

• Office 365 Developer Center
• Blog
• Twitter
• Facebook
• StackOverflow
  • http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev
  • http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev
  • http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev
• Yammer Office 365 Technical Network
  • O365 Dev Podcast
  • O365 Dev Apps Model
  • O365 Dev Tools
  • O365 Dev APIs
  • O365 Dev Migration to App Model
  • O365 Dev Links
• UserVoice

The post Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 023 on Office 365 and Visual Studio news appeared first on Office Blogs.

The Office for Android tablet apps will be generally available in early 2015 and we encourage you to download the apps at that time and experience the real Word, Excel and PowerPoint, with free core editing capabilities for consumers. We are committed to providing the best Office experience on all mobile devices. Learn more here.

The post Get the Office for Android tablet preview apps today appeared first on Office Blogs.

Office 365 Business provides all the familiar, installable apps you’ve come to depend on like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, on the devices you use most—like your laptop, tablet, iPad or smartphone. Plus, with 1TB (moving to unlimited) of OneDrive for Business storage, your files are never stuck on your computer at work or on your laptop at home so you can get work done—online or offline. You can share documents directly from your Office apps to work with your co-workers on the same document together—in real time. And Office 365 Business keeps itself up to date so you will always have the latest and best Office features. Learn more about Office 365 Business and see how businesses like yours use Office 365 to create amazing things.

Learn more about the full line up of Office 365 plans for SMBs.

The post Office 365 Business—Do your best work from anywhere on your favorite devices appeared first on Office Blogs.

Before talking about new features in this update, we would like to invite you to complete a survey. It will take you only a few minutes and it will help us better understand what you like or don’t like about Power Query, how do you currently use it and what new features you would like to see in the future.

Take the Power Query survey

What’s new in this update?

• SQL Server Analysis Services connector.
• Salesforce Reports and Objects connector.
• Expand Columns—Ability to disable and customize column prefix.
• Improved File menu options in the Query Editor.
• Entry point for Advanced Editor in the Queries pane inside the Query Editor.

Watch the following video or read below for more details about each feature.

SQL Server Analysis Services connector

With this update, you can now connect to Analysis Services (AS) cubes through Power Query. This connector has been long awaited for and commonly requested, and we hope that you like it. It provides exploration, transformation and import capabilities on top of AS cubes. Underneath the connection, Power Query translates user actions into MDX queries against the source. While the connector will also work for tabular instances, it is currently optimized for multi-dimensional experience. We hope to add first class support for DAX in the future.

You will find a new entry under the From Database menu that will let you connect to your AS server. After connecting, you will be able to browse your cubes and pick the desired dimensions, measures, hierarchies or KPIs from them, filter and transform the data before loading it to the worksheet or Data Model.

Salesforce Reports and Objects connector

This month we’re including the Salesforce connector as a mainstream Power Query feature, which has been in Preview since early October. This feature allows customers to connect to their Salesforce accounts and import data into Excel. There are two entry points offered; Salesforce Reports and Salesforce Objects . For a detailed description of these two capabilities, please check out this blog post.

Expand Columns–Disable and customize the column prefix

A frequent piece of feedback from our users is that they would like to have control over the column name prefix for columns generated by an Expand Column operation. Before this update, new columns would contain the original column name as prefix and users not wanting this prefix would have to manually remove it from each column afterwards (either via Column Rename or by modifying the generated Expand Column formula).

With this update, we’re adding a checkbox in the Expand Column dropdown menu to allow users opt out of the prefix naming convention.

In addition to this checkbox, we’re also giving users the option to change the prefix in the Expand Columns dialog.

Improved File menu options in the Query Editor

We also  added a few more options to the Query Editor File menu. Now you can access the Data Source Settings and Options dialogs without having to leave the Editor. Note that Workbook Settings are still not accessible from the File menu. This is something that we are hoping to enable in next month’s update.

Entry point for Advanced Editor inside the Query Editor

We’ve made it much easier to access the Advanced Editor dialog when working with multiple queries in the Query Editor. Simply right click the query that you wish to edit and select Advanced Editor in the context menu.

That’s all for this month! We hope that you enjoy this update and find the new features valuable for you and your customers. Please send us your feedback or suggestions via Smile/Frown in Power Query.

Download the November Power Query update and don’t forget to take the Power Query survey.

The post Power Query November 2014 update—Connect to Analysis Services, Salesforce and more!  appeared first on Office Blogs.

Saving the best deals 

These days, many stores post their sale ads online for easy browsing and sites like blackfriday.com collect mailers in one convenient place. The OneNote Clipper helps you clip and save the webpage to OneNote so you can reference it anytime, on your phone, computer, or tablet.

New OneNote Clipper update simplifies holiday gift list

For some of the most popular online retailers, including Amazon.com, the OneNote Clipper just got lot better—just in time for the holidays. With the update released today, shoppers can clip a product (such as the Sony Alpha a6000 shown above) and OneNote will simplify the clip down to the key pieces of information. Users can share a wish list, or find exactly what someone on their gift list wants. This feature also works with the Email to OneNote service.

Our goal is to help you collect your wish list and gift ideas in OneNote in a clear, easy to review format. Then, on these big shopping days, you can use OneNote on your phone, tablet or computer to keep track of it all—OneNote is available for free on all major platforms. We also put a link at the top so you can quickly get back to the online store on the day of the big deals. Product clipping works on several popular online retail websites such as Amazon.com, Homedepot.com, Sears.com, Lowes.com, and Overstock.com.

The clipper is also a quick and handy tool for capturing and organizing digital coupons, considering many stores will scan coupon bar codes right from your phone.

Snap deals to OneNote with Office Lens

Are you sick of holiday newspaper ads and inserts making a mess of counter space, but don’t want to lose out on a deal? Use Office Lens on your Windows Phone or snap a picture straight from OneNote on your iPhone, or iPad to capture the deals you want to keep for later. The image is automatically cropped, cleaned up and saved to OneNote so you can hit the road.

Planning your shopping adventure 

If you’re planning a major shopping excursion, you’ve got a lot of details to keep straight. There are so many stores to visit, all opening at different times. And once you’ve arrived, all the people and distractions can make it tricky to find just what you’re looking for.

Try planning your day in OneNote. Use Onetastic’s OneCalendar to schedule the stores you want to visit and when. Then make a checklist in OneNote with the items you know you want to snag. If they’re doorbusters or limited in quantity, note it so you’ll make sure to be there early.

How does product clipping work?

Much like we did with recipe clipping, we’re using the Bing platform to extract all the key details about the product and present them in simple and easy to review format in OneNote. Leveraging Bing’s rich technology in product search and shopping comparisons, we’re able to clip clear, simple product information into your notebook.

If you like how we’ve done this, let us know! You can use the feedback links at the bottom right of the product clipping to let us know how product clipping is working for you as you shop. Shop at an online retailer we don’t support? Email us at OneNoteProducts@microsoft.com and let us know.

…and some other OneNote Clipper improvements!

PDF clipping
Ever wanted to save that PDF you’re viewing into your OneNote notebook so you could read it later, read it on a different device, or take notes while you read it? Now, the OneNote Web Clipper can clip PDFs directly into your notebook. When you go back to OneNote, all of the pages will be crisply printed onto the page—no need to open a separate PDF reader. It’s easy, go try it!

Visual improvements
Finally, we’ve made a bunch of visual improvements to the Clipper itself. The Clipper bar is now the familiar OneNote purple and semitransparent to give you better context, icons have been made white for increased clarity, and the entire Clipper will now reflow better across various screen sizes.

Try it out now

To get started with preparing for Black Friday, simply visit OneNote Clipper  and follow the instructions to install. It’s that simple, now you’re all set to start clipping the web to OneNote.

To clip, just browse to any webpage and click the OneNote Clipper button. For more details on the clipping experience, check out our original blog post.

More holiday tips to come 

Make sure you check back on  Office Blogs or follow us on Twitter for more tips on how OneNote can simplify your holiday and help you get back to what really matters. We would love to hear from you, share your own OneNote wisdom with us on Twitter @msonenote.

Make sure you visit OneNote.com to get OneNote for free on all your devices and learn more. And of course, if you have any feedback, let us know in the comments below or on our OneNote Suggestions and Feedback site.

Get OneNote       |     Follow OneNote     

The post Take control of Black Friday and Cyber Monday with OneNote appeared first on Office Blogs.

We started Moderna back in 2010 based on a crazy idea that we could use messenger RNA (mRNA) as a therapeutic platform to treat and cure d, flexibility, and scalability as we rush to build internal development teams and an ecosystem of global collaborative partnerships that foster innovation. That’s because our mRNA Therapeutics technology platform has the potential to help the body fight and cure diseases that are currently untreatable. So when we choose technology, we look for solutions that help us to collaborate quickly and advance the science. That’s why we run almost exclusively on cloud technologies and why we use Microsoft Office 365 as our business productivity platform.

As a biotech company, we’re using Office 365 to accelerate everything we do at Moderna: going from having no employees, no capital, no office, and no labs three years ago to partnering with AstraZeneca and Alexion, and founding an oncology-focused drug development subsidiary called Onkaido Therapeutics. It is amazing how quickly we are setting up these partnerships, establishing new email addresses and collaborative team sites in SharePoint Online within the same Office 365 tenant in just a few days. And because it’s going to be several years to revenue, on a financial level, every minute counts to reduce the time-to-market.

I’m a big believer that speed is also a competitive advantage. In the Moderna ecosystem, everyone uses Office 365 tools to communicate and collaborate at the scale and speed we want. It only takes a few seconds, and we are up and running with a federated Lync Online video conferencing environment that we use to share content and desktops while brainstorming with a business partner in Europe or our informaticians and software engineers 10 time zones away. And because our Office 365 environment is integrated with Microsoft Azure for multifactor authentication, our scientists are sharing critical information without worrying about data security. We know where our data is housed in Microsoft servers with all the security and reliability that Microsoft contributes, so we’re not worrying about losing information or service interruptions.

All over the world, groups of like-minded scientists in the Moderna ecosystem use Office 365 tools to connect with each other as they work on mRNA design and manufacturing processes, innovating new chemistries, new formulations, new therapeutic applications, new protein and antibody targets, and new dosing paradigms. These scientists are not thinking about the technology behind the email, the instant messaging, the video conferencing, and the team sites they use to collaborate. They are not thinking about whether they’ll be able to access their Word documents at the airport, or whether their Excel spreadsheets will display properly on their iPad. It all just works.

I love the mobility and the flexibility that I get working with Office 365 ProPlus in conjunction with the online storage that we have with OneDrive for Business. Now I use the latest version of Office on my laptop, iPhone, and iPad to access my files anywhere, so I’m always connected to my content and I’m always productive. If I’m sitting in an office in Switzerland and I want to show a potential investor a PowerPoint presentation, I quickly access the file from the cloud through my phone’s hotspot. Using leading-edge technology to support our leading-edge science reinforces the Moderna brand and is good for business. And the more ventures we can forge with the companies and scientists we need to collaborate with to make our vision a reality, the faster we can offer hope to patients who have none. It’s an exciting prospect made possible by brilliant ideas, hard work, and underneath it all, technology like Office 365.

For more detail, don’t miss the Moderna Therapeutics case study and video.

The post Bringing a crazy idea to life—Building a foundation for innovation with Office 365   appeared first on Office Blogs.

From time to time, you might have received the same, annoying newsletters or coupons over and over again. The rate of such spam increases significantly specially during the holiday season. Recently, we promised to evolve the Exchange Online Protection (EOP) to protect against tomorrow’s threat, and continuing on our promise, we are pleased to introduce the enhanced bulk email experience in EOP. With this new capability, we are introducing a simple, intuitive control in the Exchange Admin Center to allow you to easily block more of these “bulk” emails. For example, for Exchange Online, we were able to increase the percent of filtered emails based on these new bulk mail capabilities by another 16 percent in recent months.

Enhanced Bulk mail control with Bulk Complaint Level (BCL) can help reduce the amount of spam reaching your inbox significantly.

Bulk (or “gray”) email is email that falls somewhere in the middle of spectrum between junk email and good email—some users want it, others do not. Examples of bulk email include newsletters, social updates and promotions. Earlier this year, we significantly increased EOP’s bulk detection and assigned Bulk Complaint Level (BCL) ratings to email from bulk senders to indicate the likelihood it would generate a complaint. Bulk email senders vary in their email sending practices. A low BCL indicates the sender generally uses good sending practices and the email is not likely to generate a complaint while a high BCL indicates the opposite. This release uses these BCL ratings to enable you to quickly configure the level of bulk email filtering your organization needs.

BCL indicate how likely the email is to generate a complaint based on the sending practices of the bulk email sender.

How to enable enhanced bulk email

To access the feature, in the EAC, click protection>content filter and then select edit an existing content filter policy () or create a new one (). Under the spam and bulk email actions tab, enable Mark bulk email as spam and then set the spam threshold level.

Default view with the Bulk email filter enabled.

When this feature is enabled, email identified as bulk at or above the specified threshold will take the specified spam action. This threshold is based on the BCL of an email. For example, selecting 5 treats email with a BCL of 5 or higher to be treated as spam.

As part of enhancing the overall bulk experience, we are also significantly increasing the amount of bulk email marked as spam by default by marking as spam emails with a BCL of 7 or higher. Depending on your organization’s needs, you can raise or lower this threshold to make the filter more or less aggressive.

Specify the threshold to treat messages as spam. Emails with a BCL at or above the threshold are marked as spam.

Bulk email can be a real nuisance for users. We hope that this feature will help you better manage the amount of bulk email your organization receives and look forward to continually improving our anti-spam service to meet your needs.

—Shobhit Sahay (@shobhitsahay88) and Chris Nguyen 

Frequently asked questions

Q. When will this feature be available?

A. We are starting to rollout this feature now. If you would like to be an early adopter of this feature, reach out to us via your account team and we can enable it in your tenant.

Q. What can I do to receive mail, which is treated as spam due to this feature but I don’t want to raise the threshold?

A. Bulk email is highly subjective, and we know certain users may want to receive certain emails. There are several steps indicated here to ensure a message isn’t marked as spam. Read this article titled, How to help ensure that a message isn’t marked as spam for more information.

Q. What will happen to the Bulk Mail Advanced Spam filtering option?

A. This feature replaces this setting and this setting will no longer be available in the Exchange Admin Center.

Q. Can this feature be accessed using Powershell?

A. Yes, this feature can be configured using the MarkAsSpamBulkMail and BulkThreshold parameters in the HostedContentFilterPolicy cmdlet.

Q. Where can I find more information about bulk mail?

A. Here are some resources to learn more about bulk mail:

• What’s the difference between junk email and bulk email?
• Bulk Complaint Levels (BCL)
• Anti-spam message headers

The post Block spam this holiday season with the new enhanced bulk mail experience in EOP appeared first on Office Blogs.

One reason so many individuals and organizations are choosing Office 365 is because of the way we keep making it better through continuous innovation, constantly adding new features and expanding the capabilities of the service. In the past two weeks alone, we started rolling out Clutter, a new feature that can help you organize and manage your email, and we announced Skype for Business, which will combine the capabilities of both Skype and Lync to provide a more unified communications solution. We also introduced Office 365 Video, to enable organizations to make video an integral part of their internal communications.

Another reason that so many customers are choosing Office 365 is because it offers the exceptional privacy, security and compliance they value and they trust Microsoft to help them manage their information.

Below is a round-up of some key news items from the last couple of weeks. Enjoy!

Microsoft, Office 365 mobility, and the subscription experience – Find out why Tien Tzuo,  CEO of Zuora and former Chief Strategy Officer at Salesforce.com, thinks Microsoft’s recent move to make Office 365 more available to mobile users is a good strategy.

This is Why Microsoft Corporation Will Win the Cloud Wars – Discover why Microsoft’s SaaS approach to the cloud could be a winning strategy.

Microsoft solutions help universities make performance-based decisions more efficiently – Learn how Microsoft tools can provide data to help universities make decisions on academic advising, retention improvement, and general institution assessment.

Choosing Office 365 to reduce the stress of starting a new practice – Find out how Dr. Vikram Gandhi used Office 365 to start and grow his successful dentistry practice

6 Things You Can Do with Microsoft Office for iPhone – Discover some of the most useful things you can do with Microsoft Office for iPhone.

Microsoft’s New $199 Bundle Includes Skype Unlimited, Xbox Live Gold And Office 365 – Find out why the new Microsoft Work & Play bundle (available only through the holidays) is such a great deal.

The post Office 365 news round-up appeared first on Office Blogs.

We’re proud to announce that a new feature called, “Download in Excel” is available to all of our Access 2013 Office 365 customers, which makes this process much simpler. The changes are on the server side which means you do not need to update your Access client program at all. This update is available for customers using Office 365 with Access Services so look for this feature soon within your web apps and try it out.

How does the Download in Excel feature work?

When viewing any datasheet views in your browser for your Access web app on Office 365, you’ll see the new Download in Excel button on the right side of the Action Bar, as shown in the following screenshot:

When you click the Download in Excel button, you are prompted to either open or save the spreadsheet. If you choose to open the spreadsheet, Excel downloads a copy of the data from the datasheet view and then immediately displays it within the familiar Excel interface, as shown in the following example:

Once you have the data in Excel, you can utilize the rich set of Excel features to perform different tasks such as:

• Use the sort and filter options in Excel to quickly see different views of the data.
• Use conditional formatting options to highlight data the meets certain conditions.
• Create PivotCharts and PivotTables on your data.
• Perform complex calculations on your data such as calculated columns.

Currently, you can download up to 10,000 records from a datasheet into Excel. If you do not want to show this option for specific datasheet views, you can hide the Action Bar for that view, which will hide the Download in Excel button.

We hope you enjoy this new Download in Excel feature within Access web apps for SharePoint, which opens up more scenarios for your custom web apps built on top of Office 365. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

The post Introducing a new feature in Access 2013 web apps—Download in Excel appeared first on Office Blogs.

Now we are asking for your feedback so we can deliver on that promise. What do you want to see at Microsoft Ignite? Help us provide you with better content by taking this quick online anonymous survey on the sessions you want to see; Call for Topics.

We’re holding a series of TweetJams on Twitter so we can hear more about what you want to see at the event. To participate, log in to Twitter at one of the times below, follow the corresponding product handle and tweet using the hashtag #ignitejam.

Here are general questions we’d like your feedback on during the TweetJam. Have other questions you think we should ask? Tweet them to @office365_tech.

1. What’s one thing you’ve loved in a past event that you’d like to see included in Microsoft Ignite?
2. How can we help showcase your community at Microsoft Ignite?
3. What is your preferred way to engage with our engineering teams at the event?
4. What specific sessions do you want to see?
5. What have you seen done at ANY event you’ve attended, Microsoft or other, that we should consider doing at Microsoft Ignite?
6. How interested are you in learning about other Microsoft products, such as Azure and Windows 10?
7. What’s one “can’t miss” thing to do in Chicago?
8. As you know from past events, we throw a great party for attendees. What do you value in a party? Great band? Cool venue? Loud or quiet? 

If you haven’t already, register now for Microsoft Ignite. Early bird discount expires on December 11^th.

The post Help shape the Microsoft Ignite event appeared first on Office Blogs.

Trust is the foundation of every good relationship. That’s as true in business as it is in friendship. Today, more than 1.2 billion people worldwide trust Microsoft Office to provide a reliable productivity solution with commericial-grade privacy, security and compliance features to keep their data secured. With more organizations moving to the cloud, and more people using cloud-based services such as Office 365 to work anywhere, anytime, and across multiple devices, trust has never been more important.

In the last 12 months, 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies have purchased Office 365. These organizations trust us because we are committed to doing the best job of achieving three key objectives:

• protecting their privacy
• securing their data in the cloud
• helping them comply with regulatory standards

Read on to learn more about how we can help with security, privacy and compliance when you move your organization’s data to the cloud. You can also read the Trust in Office 365 white paper to learn more about how our offering compares with the competition’s offering in these areas.

How Office 365 protects your privacy

Office 365 uses your data for only one purpose: to provide you the services. That’s a commitment we make right in our contract. We have a rich history of offering and honoring privacy-friendly terms with our services and continue to play a leadership role in this area. Office 365 was the first cloud-based business productivity service to help customers meet Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements, by convening academic, public- and private-sector experts to help craft a business associate agreement (BAA) that would meet the needs of universities, health systems, and many other regulated organizations. We were also the first to receive written confirmation from the European Union’s data protection authorities that Microsoft’s enterprise cloud contracts meet the high standards of EU privacy law. In addition, we were one of the first to sign the K-12 School Service Provider Pledge to Safeguard Student Privacy.

We recognize that you need control over who accesses your organization’s data in the cloud. This is why we provide advanced data loss prevention controls and controls that let you restrict the copying, printing or forwarding of emails that contain confidential information. We offer controls to help restrict the accidental leakage of sensitive information such as credit card numbers via our services by providing real-time alerts to users attempting to share such content, and we even enable the admins in your organization to set policies that will automatically encrypt such content.

How Office 365 keeps your data secured

Office 365 offers built-in security and compliance capabilities, which means you don’t have to spend extra time and money finding trustworthy third-party apps to ensure you have an enterprise-grade solution that is secured and compliant. Office 365 users who were surveyed in a recent study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by Forrester Consulting saw the following savings, on average, after moving to the cloud and adopting Office 365:

• 6.8% reduction in compliance costs
• 10.7% reduction in time spent on eDiscovery
• 73% decrease in the number of data breaches
• 32% reduction in the cost of those breaches.

With more customers accessing corporate data on multiple devices, and collaborating on team sites and shared drives, we are constantly innovating to keep your data secured. Last month at TechEd we announced new updates to the built-in security capabilities in Office 365. New mobile device management (MDM) capabilities, set to roll out in the first quarter of 2015, will enable secured access to corporate data in Office 365 services from a diverse range of smartphones and tablets, including iOS, Android, and Windows Phone devices. In addition, the expansion of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities beyond email to additional Office 365 services and Office clients will help you protect sensitive content no matter where it is stored and shared within our services.

How Office 365 enables regulatory compliance

At Microsoft, we not only help you meet your compliance needs, we help you exceed them. We have built more than 1000 controls into the Office 365 compliance framework that enable us to stay up to date with ever-evolving industry standards. Meanwhile, our specialist compliance team continuously tracks standards and regulations, and develops common control sets for our product team to build into Office 365.

Our work to help our customers stay compliant never stops. We are currently working to meet ISO 27018, an international code of practice that establishes controls to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in accordance with the privacy principles in ISO/IEC 29100 for the public cloud-computing environment. As evident from http://trust.office365.com, we not only offer you transparency about where your data is stored, who has access to it and when but also offer you meaningful choices in these matters.

Get more information

To learn more about the privacy, security and regulatory compliance capabilities of Office 365 and how they compare with the competition’s offering, read the Trust in Office 365 white paper. I also recommend you visit the Office 365 Trust Center, where we share our commitments and information on trust-related topics.

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