By Emily
Indeed, over the years, Microsoft Office has played a pivotal role in revolutionising the way people work — at the office, at home and on the go. But with employees communicating, collaborating, and connecting in new ways, and the pressures on business to improve productivity and efficiency growing, our newest version of Office is the best offering for modern organisations of all sizes.
Today, we are celebrating a significant milestone with our latest release of Office 365 for business – our biggest, boldest release of Office to date.
It’s the culmination of many people, many ideas, many skillsets, and a huge amount of analysis, insight and testing, and it’s based on several key trends that are having a profound impact on people and the modern workplace:
The need for an increasingly dynamic workplace…
Increasingly, business success will be determined by how quickly businesses can do something differently. Information isn’t always written in a document; it often resides in someone’s head. So business agility will be determined by how quickly people can make connections to information and each other (particularly as more 21st century organisations rely on a tightly knit web of suppliers and affiliates to run their companies).
The ability for people to make sense of it all…
Having access to information isn’t enough. Technology needs to help people find the specific information they’re looking for, from the oceans of data available to them. Then, it can help them focus on the right information and help provide answers, insight and wisdom.
The impact of consumerisation of IT and the merging of home and work
Increasingly people want devices that help them manage both their personal and work lives. The devices they want are being marketed to them through their consumer lives and CIOs are finding it increasingly hard to say “no” to employees’ technology demands. They are looking to trusted partners to help - which, over time, will drive consolidation of the market.
Technology is rapidly becoming more natural – anticipating what people want and enabling people to interact in natural ways.
As innovations in touch, gesture and voice recognition make interacting with technology increasingly human, this will help increase personal productivity and give people time back to focus on the things that are important to them.
And finally, the value and importance of responsible organizations in this increasingly interconnected world…
In the future the vast majority of businesses will look to trusted partners as the way to ensure the highest levels of security and reliability; levels never previously imagined, in ways they could never deliver themselves. Those vendors pushing the boundaries of scale will be engineering for the most complex situations, thereby ensuring state of the art reliability.
When we set out to build the new Office, we knew we needed to address these trends and ultimately help workers free up more time to do the things most critical to their business. The result is the most ambitious Office release yet, and the reinvention of Office as a service.
Today, Office 365 is available in 162 markets and 21 languages. There are different versions available to meet a broad variety of business requirements:
Also starting today, Office 365 Open allows existing channel partners to build recurring revenue streams by directly selling and billing Office 365 online services to their customers. This means partners can now easily package an Office 365 subscription with their customer service offerings and simplify the billing process for customers.
It’s been a big year for Microsoft, but really the transformation is just beginning as these new products and services get into the hands of our customers and help to transform businesses. For more information, check out Kurt Delbene’s blog post here . And if you’re a customer, do get in touch and let us know your thoughts!
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