Office 365 vNext: Ignite Session October 2012
This week I have been attending the Ignite Sessions on Office 365, three days of Technical Deep Dives and the newest features of all the products in the suite. There is quite some new stuff in there!
To enable businesses to use all of those features I think it’s time (at last) to get some form of user training. Because the changes in the client side of the next Office 365 are drastic (and, IMO, users are stuck when it comes to effectively using Office apps). Yeah! Training Time! Not only because of Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013, but also because of Windows 8. We must be very happy with these new versions because now the toolset is in such shape that we can really work on user productivity. Note that I am not using the term “end user”, just “user”. Because the same applies to systems engineers, administrators and so on.
The Windows Desktop and Office Suite haven’t changed much since Windows 95 and Office 95. And neither have our habits of using them. In those days, user training was booming; I trained over a 1.000 persons to get from MS-DOS/WP5.1/Lotus 123 to Windows 95/Office 95. Why did we stop doing that? We invested billions in hard- and software over the past two decades but we left users where they were and thus still are. Seems like a waste. So here is a brand new Desktop and a brand new set of Apps. Boy, will user be baffled when they see a couple of demo’s on touch-windows8-wordwebapp, adoption will take a lot of time if we do not put some effort in education.
So, that being said, what’s new in Office 365? It’s too much, but here are some of my highlights.
The Portal
The top navigation bar will follow whether you go to Outlook Web App, SharePoint Online, People, etc.
Two years ago I read on some Exchange Expert blog “We’re done”, Exchange is final, finished, nothing to do anymore. Well, they got it wrong. Exchange 2013 has a couple of totally new architectural concepts. For starters, there are only 2 roles left: Client Access and Mailbox. Secondly RPC/TCP is no longer supported, everything is RPC/HTTP(S). For the real details please look on http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/en-us/exchange-preview.aspx .
On the client side, well Outlook is still Outlook, no very radical changes. OWA is a bit sober, no more colors but the feature set is as expected. Best news is the partial OST-file. Just cache mail from the last 12 months or whatever setting you like.
Files
SharePoint has been overhauled thoroughly. MySite is now called SkyDrive Pro and there are (touch)tiles all over the place:
Everything is called App, so a Library is an App, a List is an App. You add Apps to your sites. A really handy feature is the SiteMailbox. You then have kind of mail able teamsite to keep mail and documents together in either Outlook or SharePoint.
Very spectacular is the way in which the Office Web Apps behave over different devices; the Apps seem to know when you are using a touch (Windows 8) device or a full (mouse) desktop device.
The way in which project, documents, lists are displayed is the same way as the new social pages, now to be found on the top menu bar under People and Newsfeed. So you can follow documents(sets), and people in the same way; very nice and easy!
Office
As mentioned, it’s school time! Is it SharePoint or is it Office? I really think that we can boost our productivity significantly by starting to use all of those features the way they are meant to be used. So finally, normal.dot is no longer hardcoded on A-4 or legal paper size. Knowing that just a small percentage will ever be printed. That makes sense and also a huge difference for reading pane and editing panes. Much more fluid and logical. Excel Pivot-tables now so easy for everyone to make use of, some great improvements there, especially when you add Apps into it, like Bing Maps.
Deployment and updates are smooth streaming processes and there even is an option for Office-On-Demand! Need Word for just now, click and go, nothing left when you’re done (I use it all the time on my servers, to read configurations guides and stuff like that).
There is a really nice OneNoteMX Metro App (Preview), it’s kind of “always on” whether you’re on a Mobile device, tablet or desktop, multiple people all at the same time in the same OneNote. Brilliant!
And now we’ll have to wait….. current Office 365 Customers will be upgraded and are able to choose for example when SharePoint gets the new looks. No hard dates just yet, somewhere Q1 2013 we’ll have General Availability.
Upcoming Blog: building Exchange 2013 Hybrid Deployments using ONLY Server 2012 (challenge with AD FS).
Tags: Cloud Computing, Office365
← Back home