Office 365 vs GMail

Microsoft has released an update fro its online collaboration suite Office 365, which includes 30 new features. The most important of them are support for Windows Phone 7.5, opportunity to edit documents stored in SharePoint Online on Windows Phone, Lync client for Windows Phone and Mac, ability to integrate Sharepoint Online with third-party applications (via SharePoint Business Connectivity Services), improved file uploading and sharing tools. Microsoft also made Office 365 available in 22 new countries including Argentina, South Africa and Taiwan. Together with Office 365 its free mass-market alternative SkyDrive has been updated. It also features the new HTML5-uploader an slick file sharing (that we have already mentioned). These new features, and the new file management tools are shown in this video:

It seems, Microsoft is already feeling confidence in its mobile future. According to The Daily report, in the 1st half of 2012 Microsoft will release Mobile Office for the competing platform - iPad. Of course, iPad is very popular among business users and Microsoft can easily dramatically increase its incomes by selling mobile Word and Excel for the iPad at $10 (the planned price). But from the political point of view, Microsoft is not interested in making iPad even more attractive product, because it competes with the upcoming Windows 8 tablets. However, after the intention of HP and several other manufacturers to support Windows 8, Microsoft is not afraid of iPad any more. As expected, the MS Office for iPad will be significantly stripped-down compared to the desktop version and will be integrated with the online service Office 365.

Remember how Mark Benioff laughed at Microsoft's anti-advertising campaign? It turns out that Microsoft also can do similar things. A few days ago Google launched the advertising campaign that encourages users to switch from draconian email systems and their “embarrassingly outdated addresses” over to GMail, which features such niceties as free phone calls and video chat. For this campaign the video (see above) was created. You can see the red link to this video in your GMail-account. But Microsoft, whose Hotmail service is obviously one of the targets of Google's campaign, isn’t keeping quiet. Today another video hit the Web:

For now the SaaS suite Microsoft Office 365 includes e-mail server Exchange Online, portal Sharepoint Online, document editors Office Web Apps and communication server Lync Online. But Microsoft has plans to expand this suite and make it the one-stop-service for small and medium business. The BlackBerry Office 365 module has been already announced. It will provide Blackberry users the push-access to Office 365 data. Also, we have previously reported about the plans to add MS Dynamics CRM Online and the future MS Dynamics ERP to Office 365. And according to the latest (insider) information in late 2012 or early 2013 the suite will be expanded by the online version of project management solution MS Project and the diagram editor MS Visio.

Today Steve Ballmer at the press-event in New York officially announced the launch of the cloud solution Office 365. And it's nice that it becomes available globally. Office 365 is offered in 21 languages (English, Br Portuguese, Chinese (simplified, traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Romanian, and Russian) and 40 countries (US, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, and the UK).

Next week Microsoft will officially launch its online office suite Office 365, and of course, the major competitors, Google and Box.net, want to spoil this party. First, they have integrated their solutions. Now Box.net users can edit any stored document in the Google Docs online editors. In addition, they can (in just one click) create new documents in Box.net folders by opening Google Docs apps. Recall that Box.net also features the similar integration with Zoho Docs, so now users will have a choice. Box.net CEO, Aaron Levy, says that he played with the beta version of Office 365 and that it’s lacking the power and functionality of the bunch Box + Google Docs.

Microsoft has opened its online Office 365 for public beta testing and there are already first reviews, so we can already judge of how this service will justify its label "Google Apps killer". Recall, Office 365 includes online versions of Exchange, Sharepoint, Lync and the office suite Office Web Apps. So the functionality of Office 365 is even better than in Google Apps. But "killing Google Apps" hardly possible because these are quite different products. Office 365 is more appropriate for medium and large companies, who used to work in Microsoft-oriented IT infrastructure, that already have an IT administrator who knows Active Directory, Exchange and Sharepoint settings. Without such administrator you can't manage Office 365, it's not so simple as Google Apps.

This year, marketers in Enterprise 2.0 companies haven't prepared  well for the April Fools' Day, perhaps because it fell on Sunday. The only diligent company was Google, that released several April 1 products. One of them - is GMail Tap - the new app for mobile GMail, which allows to quickly type text with just two buttons - dot and dash (watch video above). At the same time Microsoft, which recently was very productive in funny videos, at that time only unveiled the new interface for the online file storage and sharing service SkyDrive - SkyCMD. It allows you to manage your files using the classic DOS-syntax and the command line:

Usually the companies that develop and sell intranet portals, position them as an alternative to the Email. They say that instead of endless mailing back and forth, your users can now work with data in one place. But with Google - it's another story. Google wants companies to use Google+ as a social intranet solution and continue using GMail. So that's why both solutions have been closely integrated. In GMail you now can filter messages by Google+ circles. So, if you create a Google+ circle for a workgroup, you can view all emails related to this workgroup separately. In the right column near the message you now can see the latest post of this contact in Google+. In addition, contacts in GMail will be updated, if your co-worker updates his profile in Google+. Thus, your address book will be always relevant.

The confusing situation with mobile platforms is getting more and more clear day by day. The weaker devices, platforms, intermediate platforms are heading to the deadpool. Today, Adobe announced that it stops the development of Flash for mobile devices. As you know, the mobile Flash was actually killed by Steve Jobs, when he banned it on iOS. After that, Microsoft also didn't support Flash on Windows Phone. And although it later appeared on some Android-devices and Blackberry Playbook, it wasn't clever for Adobe to continue developing this not-so-crossplatform technology. Instead of Flash the company will focus on HTML5-app building tools. As we have suggested, HTML5 can become the "new flash" for Adobe.

As you know, earlier GMail, Google Calendar and Google Docs supported offline mode in all browsers using Google Gears plug-in. But then Google decided to bet on HTML5 and abandoned its own proprietary plug-in. The Gears was quickly removed from the Chrome browser (in Firefox and IE it still works). And today Google developers were happy to announce that the offline mode for these apps in Chrome is back and it is implemented on HTML5. However, for an average user it will look no better than it was before: for offline access you still need to install an app (from the Chrome Web Store). In addition, the interface of the offline app is different from the usual web-based GMail interface. It looks lie GMail for iPad.

What Google needs to do to entice users from Outlook to GMail? For example, make GMail look like Outlook. Now it's possible. You can add the Preview pane to your GMail inbox, placing it in the third vertical column (like at the screenshot) or under the messages list. The feature can be turned on in the GMail Labs. But between the left nav sidebar, the list of messages, the message itself, and then the right sidebar - which includes the new People Widget and ads - there’s a lot going on in the inbox.

VoIP-service in GMail, which was earlier available only in the U.S. and Canada, has appeared in the user accounts in almost all countries of the world - in 38 languages. Here is the list of countries where Gmail Call Phone is NOT currently available: Argentina, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran , Jordan, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Nigeria, North Korea, Peru, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Viet Nam. With this global intervention, Google has lowered its VoIP rates, making them slightly cheaper than rates of its new main rival - Skype. For example, a call to France costs 8 cents (vs. 16.9 cents in Skype), to USA - 1 (vs. 1.9). As before GMail Call Phone requires quick browser plug-in installation - the same plug-in that is used for video calling in GMail.

Remember how Mark Benioff laughed at Microsoft's anti-advertising campaign? It turns out that Microsoft also can do similar things. A few days ago Google launched the advertising campaign that encourages users to switch from draconian email systems and their “embarrassingly outdated addresses” over to GMail, which features such niceties as free phone calls and video chat. For this campaign the video (see above) was created. You can see the red link to this video in your GMail-account. But Microsoft, whose Hotmail service is obviously one of the targets of Google's campaign, isn’t keeping quiet. Today another video hit the Web: