Arpan Shah's Blog

My favorite Office 365 features

ArpanS — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:35:22 GMT

It’s been months since I blogged. Things have been busy in my current role! My team has been heads down on the most recent significant update to Office 365. It’s a super exciting space to be in and everyone here is committed to delivering innovation on a frequent basis and making sure that our Office 365 customers have tools to manage change.

Here’s a list of my personal favorite Office 365 features that I use on almost a daily basis. Of course, this is a snapshot in time since the service is always changing and is by no mean comprehensive of what Office 365 has to offer. In no particular order:

1. Office 365 ProPlus.

My last post was focused on this area of innovation. Office 365 ProPlus delivers the power and familiarity of Office on your PC and Mac (along with being very touch friendly) with all the deployment benefits of SaaS software. It supports side-by-side installation with older versions of Office, deploys to your PC and Mac very, very quickly and gives IT deployment flexibility. If you’re an IT professional, you can learn more about the value of Office 365 ProPlus through the Garage series @ http://www.microsoft.com/garage which is hosted by Jeremy Chapman on my team.

2. SkyDrive Pro.

I absolutely love SkyDrive Pro. It’s SkyDrive for the enterprise built on the SharePoint platform. You can access all your documents (personal, team, org) from the browser, desktop or mobile devices. In the screenshot below, at the top right, you can see a Sync action that brings your documents down to your device giving you offline access. I also have access to my SkyDrive Pro content on my Windows Phone device through the Office hub – very cool.

3. Office Web Apps.

Excel Web App, Word Web App, PowerPoint Web App and OneNote Web App are beautiful and powerful apps (Outlook Web App gets it’s own call-out). When I’m on the go (for example, using the machine at the Executive Briefing Center), I use the Web Apps to view, present and edit my documents. I never have to worry about file fidelity and I can access the same documents from Office 365 ProPlus when I’m using my PC or Surface Pro. I can also collaborate with my peers irrespective of how they are accessing the documents – Web Apps, Office 365 ProPlus, mobile, etc. Below, you’ll see screenshots of the Excel Web App and Word Web App which look great. You can use the browser of your choice and Web Apps also work great on mobile platforms. One question I frequently get is whether iPad is supported and the answer is yes.

4. Outlook Web App

The new Outlook Web App, or more affectionately referred to as OWA, delivers a beautiful experience. I personally use OWA on my Surface RT device and it works great. User experience enhancements include a touch-friend interface, intuitive threading, in-place reply functionality (no pop-ups when replying), Outlook apps (more on that in point #5) and more.

5. Office Apps

In the latest Office 365 update, we introduced a new developer cloud model that fully embraces web standards. This new model is a win-win-win for IT, developers and end users. Developers can develop apps that work for on-prem & Office 365 and easily publish them to the Office store, IT can have confidence that these apps will run safely and end-users can easily add apps from the Office store. This new app model spans across SharePoint, Exchange and the Office client. More information can be found @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/apps/fp160950.aspx

One example is the Bing Maps Outlook app (see below) that shows you an inline map for an address in an email address. Another example is the “Suggested Meetings” app that gets displayed if there’s date/time information in the email body. This app will help you schedule a meeting by directly populating the date/time information in a calendar appointment request. Really great stuff and both these apps ship out-of-the-box. You can also check out other apps that developers have written at the Office store @ http://officepreview.microsoft.com/en-us/store/

6. People Everywhere

People is a core focus in Office 365. Whether you are using a browser or the Office clients, you get a consistent People Card that aggregates information from different sources and allows you to quickly interact with the person. The screenshots below show just a few examples of where the People card shows up. The first screenshot is the People Card in OWA, the second one in Outlook client and the third is in SharePoint.

Besides giving a consistent, great end user experience, we also make it easy for IT to manage the user directory. We offer different options depending on your business requirements – for example, 1) you can host your entire, sole directory in the cloud, 2) synchronize users/passwords with your on-premise Active Directory (AD) or 3) implement ADFS for a single-sign on experience. We also support a number of 3rd party Identity partners to help you integrate with your existing Identity infrastructure.

7. Yammer and Social

Yammer and SharePoint deliver powerful enterprise social capabilities. There’s been a lot of communication on this topic so I won’t write much on this topic. We recently provided an update to the roadmap which you can find @ http://blogs.office.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2013/03/19/yammer-and-sharepoint-enterprise-social-roadmap-update.aspx

8. Security and Rights Management

We continuously invest in security. We take every measure to secure your data through 1) built-in Data Center security (eg. 24-hour monitoring, isolated customer data, secure network, encryption, automated operations) and 2) Office 365 customer controls (eg. antivirus/antispam, user access control, compliance, advanced encryption). I encourage you to explore the Office 365 Trust Center @ http://www.trustoffice365.com and read the Office 365 Security whitepaper @ Office 365 Security.

One of the hidden gems of Office 365 is Information Rights Management (IRM). IRM allows you to apply policies to data (eg. email, Office documents) so that content is protected even when it leaves Office 365. The first two screenshots show how easy it is for an end user to set permissions on an email through OWA or the Outlook client. The third screenshot demonstrates how a policy can be set at a document library level. So when a user downloads a document, the policy is included as part of the document. So for example, if you apply a “Do not print” policy on the document library, when a user downloads a Word document, they won’t be able to print the document from their desktop – very, very cool! The IRM value doesn’t stop at the end user level --- IT can also set up rules, for example by setting a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy, that defines when an email should be rights protected based on certain defined criteria. I always make it a point to mention that IRM is more than just encryption.

9. Compliance Features

Compliance features are features I personally don’t use on a daily basis as an end user, but I do know that Microsoft and other organizations do. New compliance features in Office 365 give you confidence that your organization is complying with corporate and legal policies. Features span areas of data loss prevention (DLP), eDiscovery, auditing and reporting. In the example below, there’s a DLP policy that checks outgoing email for credit card information.

10. Regular Updates

We’re delivering new features and enhancements on a monthly basis. This can range from minor fixes to enabling new scenarios. With Office 365, we’re able to react to customer feedback much more quickly. My team publishes some of the new features we release on a monthly basis @ http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/office_365_service_updates/default.aspx. One recent new feature that we announced is GeoFlow for Excel (currently in Preview), that I recommend checking out if you haven’t done so already @ http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2013/04/11/public-preview-of-geoflow-for-excel-delivers-3d-data-visualization-and-storytelling.aspx

I’ve limited myself to only 10 feature areas – there are a lot more. I encourage you to try out Office 365 for yourself if you haven’t done so already. You can sign-up for a trial @ http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans-FX102918419.aspx.

On a more personal note, I’m going to make it a point to blog more often!

Office as a service

ArpanS — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 17:51:02 GMT

One of my personal favorite new investment areas of the new Office release is how the Office client has transformed to a service. This is game changing and marries the beautiful, rich value of a rich client with the deployment ease of a browser app. Many people in today’s world carry multiple devices that have compute power, local storage and a unique form factor. Users shouldn’t have to use a browser experience as the lowest common denominator across all their devices when they can enjoy rich apps that deliver optimized experiences – good examples of apps that do this today are Skype, Netflix and SkyDrive. John Jendrezak has written a nice blog post on the Office Next blog on this topic that I recommend checking out @ http://blogs.office.com/b/office-next/archive/2012/07/17/office-and-the-cloud.aspx. This blog post is my personal view on the value Office as a service delivers to an end user. If you’re looking for the value this brings to IT Professionals in the areas of deployment and administration, check out Jeremy’s post @ http://community.office365.com/en-us/preview/blogs/office365preview/archive/2012/07/17/office-365-proplus-administrator-series-office-365-proplus-administrator-overview.aspx.

The new Office delivers a modern experience across PC, tablets, browsers and smartphones without compromise. Whether you’re on your Windows machine or on the go, you can sign in and quickly get access to the latest version of Office with your personalized settings and documents.

On all your Windows PCs and tablets, you can install Office quickly from the Internet. Your Office is always up-to-date with the latest features and takes advantage of your local machine hardware including compute power, graphics and storage allowing you to work the way you want when you’re connected to the Internet and offline. The new Office user experience is optimized for touch, keyboard, mouse and pen. It’s designed to put the content front and center allowing you to read, create and interact with beautiful documents. You just have to sign in to your Office with your ID and you will immediately have access to your recent files and settings stored in the cloud. It will even point you to the last position you were reading in a document on any PC you use.

When you’re on the go and have access to a browser, all you have to do is sign in to SkyDrive and use the latest version of Office Web Apps to view, edit and create beautiful Office documents. We’ll make sure document fidelity is maintained at all times. If you’re on the go and have access to a Windows PC, you can take advantage of Office on Demand - a new way to quickly deliver rich Office applications to a PC very quickly using application streaming technology. Office on Demand streams and launches a temporary copy of an Office app without installing it and when you log off, the application and the files you were working on are deleted. On mobile devices, we also offer great experiences that I will write about in the future.

I highly recommend trying it out yourself @ http://www.office.com/preview ! Another benefit of the new Office is that you can install it side-by-side with an older version of Office, making it very easy for you to try out. :-)

Office 365 Investments

ArpanS — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 14:57:00 GMT

The last few months in the new job have been super busy. The Office 365 team is passionate, customer focused and agile. Just in the last few months, we’ve made a number of investments. As a result, I haven’t been able to blog as much as I’d like. I’m stepping away of some of the WPC activity right now to share some of the new investments we’ve made in Office 365. Below are just a few examples:

Office 365 for Government. Office 365 for Government is a new multi-tenant service that stores US government data in a segregated community cloud. You get all the rich functionality that Exchange, SharePoint and Lync have to offer at very attractive pricing.

Office 365 for Education. We offer Office 365 for Education A2 plan for free! This is incredible value for education institutes. Microsoft has a history of providing great value to education, and this is just another example. To learn more about the different plans, check out @ http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/edu

Security and Standards. We support a wide array of industry standards including ISO-27001, EU Model clauses, HIPAA-BAA and FISMA—just to name a few. Check out the new, improved Office 365 Trust Center to learn more.

Geo Expansion. Office 365 is available in 88 countries and 32 languages and we’re looking to expand even more in the future.

Feature Improvements. We have been adding value to Office 365 on a monthly basis based on customer and partner feedback. You can follow the updates @ http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/office_365_service_updates/974.aspx.

If you’re a Microsoft customer or partner and haven’t checked out Office 365, I highly recommend checking it out. If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it – feel free to tweet me @arpanshah.

Office 365 : Continuous Innovation

ArpanS — Sun, 06 May 2012 16:40:40 GMT

One of the great things about Office 365 is that we can continuously innovate and improve our service. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. You can learn all about our updates @ http://community.office365.com/en-us/w/office_365_service_updates/default.aspx. I encourage you to sign up for a trial of Office 365 if you haven’t already and experience it yourself! All you need to do is go to http://www.office365.com and within minutes you’ll be up and running.

To The Cloud!

ArpanS — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:43:13 GMT

I’ve taken a new role in the Microsoft Office Division and I’m excited to say that my new team will be leading core product management for our Office 365 Suites. Our mission is to deliver the best online productivity solution in the industry to our customers. My team will work closely with engineering as well as our outbound channels.

While I am super excited about my new role, I will miss being part of the Project team. The Project team is one of the best teams I’ve been a part of at Microsoft – great people, great technology and great community. It has truly been a pleasure & honor to lead the business for the last 1.5+ years.

Looking forward to an exciting future for Office 365!

Arpan Shah
Director, Office 365 Suites

Project Collaboration with Microsoft Project 2010 and Office 365

ArpanS — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:09:38 GMT

I wanted to call out some really interesting content that highlights the power of Microsoft Project 2010, Office 2010 and Office 365. I definitely recommend reading the article and watching the videos from http://blogs.msdn.com/b/project/archive/2012/01/25/leveraging-office-365-for-project-collaboration-success.aspx

Cell Phone Trends in Asia

ArpanS — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:08:43 GMT

I had a unique opportunity to spend 6 weeks in Asia – specifically in India, Cambodia and Thailand from early November to late December. And while this was a personal trip, I observed technology trends that were quite different from the US. Here are a few that I noticed:

- WiFi is not ubiquitous. Unlike many places in the US where WiFi is present in many homes, coffee shops, airports and city centers, WiFi is not everywhere in India. There are definitely pockets of WiFi access, but even in many homes, it’s not available.

- BlackBerry is a popular smartphone in India. Caveat: while I was in India, Windows Phone was not widely available. BlackBerry was by far the most popular smart phone. And what was most interesting and least obvious was the reason for its popularity – BBM which stands for BlackBerry Messenger. It’s a social messaging system and many consumers are hooked on it. Many people buy the BlackBerry because their friends are on BBM. The most popular non-smartphone choice was by far Nokia – which makes me excited about the opportunity that Windows Phone + Nokia brings to India.

- SMS is king in India. Cell phone data connections are not nearly as popular as SMS. This has been the case for many years now but it’s still surprising to see. Any technology venture in India needs to think about having some kind of SMS strategy and keep in mind that not everyone has cell phone data plans and WiFi access – but everyone has and loves SMS.

- Custom Ring tones are popular. If you hear the tune to a popular song in a café, more likely than not, it’s someone’s cell phone ringing.

Well that’s my last post for 2011. Happy 2012 to all of you!

Project Conference 2012 – Register now!

ArpanS — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 10:56:08 GMT

The Project Conference 2012 is less than 4 months away! It’s an opportunity to see the Microsoft Project team and share ideas & experiences with the greater Microsoft Project community. This conference is ideal for Business owners, Project Managers, partners, developers and IT Managers – check out the tracks at http://msprojectconference.com/pages/tracks.aspx. You can also register now at http://www.msprojectconference.com

I’m looking forward to meeting you in Phoenix, AZ, next March!

My Netbook, OneNote and Phone

ArpanS — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:29:56 GMT

Over the next few weeks, I’m traveling around the world spending time with friends and family. I plan to stay unplugged from work the entire time. But unplugged from work doesn’t mean unplugged from technology. :-)

Here’s how I’m balancing the art of staying unplugged from work and still remaining connected for surfing, email, photos and Skype – of course:

1. Shut down the work laptop and boot up the netbook. The easiest way to leave work behind is to leave the work laptop behind. I booted up my netbook, upgraded the netbook memory to 2GB and installed the latest updates including IE 9.0 and Windows 7 SP1. I also installed Windows Live Essentials to manage photos and write blog entries (like this one). And of course, I have my favorite software installed: Office 2010. I wrote an earlier blog entry on how I used Project 2010 as well – worth checking out if you haven’t.

2. OneNote Everywhere. OneNote is really useful for work and home. It’s the perfect way to keep a journal, track things I have to do, take notes and track important information such as hotels, tickets and pictures. What’s really special is that I can use OneNote from my netbook, Phone and any browser. Not only that, but my wife can do the same. It makes it really easy for the two of us to have one single OneNote notebook. I’m also lucky enough to be on the latest Windows Phone 7.5 (“Mango”) – and WP7.5 + OneNote is pure magic. Let me give you my real life example: I have OneNote installed on my netbook and I’ve created a Notebook (“Personal Diary”) that is stored in Skydrive (free cloud service). I have two sections right now – one for “Diary” and one for “Information”. In the “Diary” section, each page represents a day; Information has pages for Hotel and Flights. And because the Notebook is stored in the cloud, I can access it seamlessly from my Phone through the Skydrive integration in WP7.5 (if you haven’t tried it out – amazing) as well as any browser on any computer. Absolutely killer. The more I think about it, I’m surprised more people aren’t doing this for their blog. Much richer and easier to author and access.

3. Windows Phone 7.5. I removed the work Outlook tile and unchecked email sync. Here are some of the features I’ve been using on a daily basis:

- Hotmail. Conversation view with WP 7.5 makes it easier to read and manage email.

- Zune Music Pass. I’m the biggest fan of the Zune Music Pass. I have a large music collection on my phone that I really enjoy and I’ve been able to easily find great english and hindi music.

- People Groups. I have a family group tile where I can easily keep in touch with family and see what’s going on with them – for example, mass e-mail and SMS. I really like the ability to view “What’s new" that aggregates Facebook information.

- Task List. In the calendar hub, there’s a native To-Do list/app that can sync with an email service like Exchange or Hotmail. Very convenient and great for work and home.

- OneNote/Skydrive as I mentioned above. I’ve created a tile that takes me right to my “Personal Diary” from the Start screen with one click. Once I’m in the notebook, I can take notes, pictures and even record audio.

- Pictures and one click upload to Facebook. Makes it easy to share pictures and videos with family.

- Deeper integration with social networks like FB, Twitter and LinkedIn. Not only is aggregation a key service, but the ability to post natively from the phone to FB and Twitter is really cool and convenient.

- My favorite apps like Yelp, IMDB, Amazon, MSN News, etc.

- And a lot more features like Bing Scout, maps, etc.

Using Microsoft Project 2010 to Plan My Trip

ArpanS — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 19:34:13 GMT

I’m taking a sabbatical from October 7th to January 2nd. It’s an award I was given at my 10 year Microsoft anniversary. It’s an opportunity to unplug, relax and come back recharged for 2012 – specifically Project Conference 2012 in March! There’s never a great time to take time off, but this window turns out to be a pretty good time. I plan to write a blog post reflecting on my 10 years at Microsoft – stay tuned for that!

Now back to the topic. With 12 weeks time off, my wife and I discussed many different ways to spend the time. We wanted to spend time with family, visit Europe and also go to South Asia for some warm weather. We started planning with paper and pen and very quickly we realized that we needed a lot of rewriting and paper. :–) Some of the reasons why this was the case:

- We needed visas for a few of the places we wanted to visit and visas need processing time, have restrictions, etc.

- We wanted to spend time with both of our extended families. Family dates kept moving.

- We were flexible in our travel dates and could adjust our schedule based on ticket/hotel prices.

- We had a preference on the trip order.

So what did I do? I think most people would have tried using Excel – which would have helped but not solve the problem. I went right into Project Professional 2010 to schedule my trip! And it has proved to be very helpful in planning and communicating my trip details to family members – thanks to the power of scheduling and the timeline view!

Here are two simple steps I took before I started planning:

1. Change Working Time. I changed the default calendar to a 24 Hour calendar. Be sure to go into Options and change hours per day/week values. Vacation is a 24-hour “job”! :–)

2. Change Project Information. Apply the 24-hour calendar to your Project.

That’s it. I was ready to go! Very easy to plan, to change and communicate. And most importantly, I’m excited about my time off and I feel confident that we’ve put together a solid plan! Below is a high-level timeline – I’ve cleaned it up for privacy reasons but should give you a good idea of how I am communicating my trip schedule with my family and friends.