Tag Archives: microsoft

Jan201121

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Microsoft OneNote for iPhone, for free, only in the US

Microsoft has released its first iPhone app with ties to its Office application suite, OneNote Mobile for iPhone. The app, which Microsoft says is free “for a limited time,” lets users access, edit and create notes from the iPhone. These notes can are then synced over the cloud with the OneNote web app or OneNote for Office 2010.

OneNote is similar to note-sharing services like Evernote; the difference is OneNote is tied tightly to the Office ecosystem and its focus has largely been on the desktop rather than the cloud or on mobile devices.

We took some time to play with OneNote Mobile for iPhone [iTunes link] in conjunction with the OneNote Web App. This web app was introduced in June and is one way that Mac users (OneNote is not available on Mac OS X) and others can access OneNote 2010 notebooks or create and store their own cloud-based notes.

The app is attractive and usable. The user interface has taken some cues from some of our favorite organizational apps like Things and OmniFocus, and that’s a good thing.

As expected, note options are more limited than either OneNote 2010 or the OneNote Web App. Notes are entered in as plain text and because of the rich text limitations of iOS (for non-Apple developers anyway), some rich text formatted notes from the web or OneNote won’t show up correctly. Hyperlinks, for instance, are selectable as a URL but not highlighted.

You can embed photos from the camera roll or take a new photo from the camera itself, just like with Evernote. Unlike Evernote, OneNote Mobile doesn’t support audio notes at this time. We also couldn’t figure out how to rename tabs within the app.

For the most part, the app seems speedy with synching over the cloud. Our Internet connection was a tad slow so it was hard to judge, but it seemed to be in-line with the synching performance of Evernote or MobileMe.

The app by itself isn’t really enough to convert anyone over to using OneNote on the web or in Office 2010, so individuals already satisfied with services like Evernote aren’t going to be swayed away. However, this app has potential with existing OneNote users who were perhaps thinking about forgoing the desktop app in favor of something with a more robust mobile presence.

We also hope that OneNote Mobile is a sign that Microsoft will be bringing more readers and basic editors of its Office apps to the iPhone. The best way to keep individuals and businesses from jumping ship to a different product is to make accessing and editing documents as seamless as possible. It’s good to see Microsoft leveraging Sky Drive on the iPhone.

(from mashable)

Jun201009

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Microsoft Rolls Out Office Web Apps

Office 2010 logoMicrosoft rolled out Microsoft Office Web Apps on Skydrive to users in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Ireland yesterday. Users can login with their free Live accounts and create and edit Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010, OneNote 2010 and Excel 2010 documents in their browsers, and store them in the cloud. Users don’t need an Office 2010 desktop license to use the apps, but the Skydrive version integrates with desktop versions of Office 2007 and 2010. There is also a beta version of Office Web Apps that can be deployed on-premise as part of Sharepoint.

Office Web Apps screenshot

Features include:

  • Drag and drop uploading from desktop to browser
  • Real-time, multiuser collaborative document editing
  • Version history
  • Searching across documents, including documents shared by other users
  • Read-only access from mobile phones

The Register reports Microsoft is not officially supporting Google’s Chrome browser. However, we found that we were able to create and save documents from Chrome on a Windows 7 desktop.

This offering will doubtlessly bring comparisons with Google Docs. Office Web Apps feels quite similar, and is at least as functional as Google Apps.

The on-premise option, desktop integration, and the familiar features and interface of Microsoft Office, makes Office Web Apps a strong competitor against Google’s Google Apps and ZoHo as they market their office in the cloud solutions to the enterprise.

Last month, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writing for Business Insider, called on Google to buySalesforce.com to improve their enterprise penetration. “Google Docs just can’t compete with Microsoft Office on features, and while it’s better at collaboration, that advantage will vanish as Microsoft moves these features to the cloud,” he wrote.

Many other analysts disagreed, citing Google and Salesforce’s radically different corporate cultures. But it’s precisely these culture differences that Google could potentially benefit from if it really wants to step up its game against Microsoft in the enterprise.

(from readwriteweb)

Edit (dani): note that it is powered by SkyDrive’s generous 25 GB of storage space. For everyone, 25Gb free… not bad eh?

Jun201003

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Microsoft Rolls Out Impressive Enhancements To Windows Live Essentials Suite

The picture above is a complete fake. But more on that in a minute.

Microsoft is giving a preview of a variety of enhancements to its Windows Live Essentials suite – a set of online and desktop services that includes hotmail, messenger, sync, movie maker and photo gallery. Most of the desktop versions of these services are available only for Windows users, although the online components only require a browser from any operating system.

These enhancements come after Microsoft’s preview of the online version of Office, which is also within this suite. I had a chance to sit down with Brian Hall, GM of the Windows Live Business Group, today to see some of the changes.

Many of the changes are fairly minor, but at least two are going to be big crowd pleasers. First, Microsoft has made changes to their Movie Maker video editing software that allows for the creation of Animoto-like video clips containing photos and videos. They’ve added a variety of transition and effect options, as well as the ability to add music and text, to these clips.

But the really interesting changes are around Photo Gallery. Previously Microsoft had a facial recognition feature to allow you to quickly add names as tags to photos. But they are now adding facial recognition as well, and it takes a guess as to the person in the photo. In the demo it worked very well and saves time with tagging – a lot of time. The application also has one click sharing of photos to Facebook and other services and the tags go with it.

But by far the most impressive thing I saw today was the Photo Fuse feature that they’ve added. The general idea is you can take a bunch of pictures and turn them into a single photo that’s better than any of the originals. And it only takes a few seconds.

The best use case is clearly group photos that you’d take a a wedding or wherever. Someone always has their eyes closed or is looking away. With Photo Fuse you can take the best parts of a number of photos and create that perfect group picture.

Hall spent a lot of time today showing me Photo Fuse, which I zeroed in on among all the other new features launching. We even took a few pictures of Hall and his PR people – Michael Celiceo and Bonnie McCracken – and ran them through Photo Fuse.

This was the final result – a picture that was never actually taken (the top image – you just can’t tell). The working photos that are real are below it. There’s also a video of the whole process. Fascinating stuff.




The new suite will launch in a few weeks, says Microsoft. In the meantime we’ll give away 100 accounts now – details in the next post.

More screenshots from the new products:






(via techcrunch)

Oct200926

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Microsoft: Integrated Videos and Maps for Driving Directions

From Microsoft Research:

(a) Original spacing of panoramas. (b) Final spacing of video frames, after slowing down at landmarks/turns and speeding up between. (c) Straight ahead orientation. (d) Final orientation with look ahead. (e) Widening the view and freezing the landmark thumbnail. One frame of the route video. The field of view is automatically expanded to the left to emphasize the building landmark at this turn. The visual proxy is highlighted. Integrated video and mapping application. Abstract

While onboard navigation systems are gaining in importance, maps are still the medium of choice for laying out a route to a destination and for way finding. However, even with a map, one is almost always more comfortable navigating a route the second time due to the visual memory of the route. To make the first time navigating a route feel more familiar, we present a system that integrates a map with a video automatically constructed from panoramic imagery captured at close intervals along the route. The routing information is used to create a variable speed video depicting the route. During playback of the video, the frame and field of view are dynamically modulated to highlight salient features along the route and connect them back to the map. A user interface is demonstrated to allow exploration of the combined map, video, and textual driving directions. We discuss the construction of the hybrid map and video interface. Finally, we report the results of a study that provides evidence of the effectiveness of such a system for route following.





				

				
			

			
			
			
					
		
		
			

			
				

					
Aug200914

					
					
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New Microsoft Zune HD demo

					

				

				
			

			
			
			
					
		
		
			

			
				

					
Jul200901

					
					
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Google apps sync for Microsoft Outlook

					
Now businesses can run Microsoft Outlook on Google Apps instead of Microsoft Exchange, so they can achieve the cost savings, security and reliability of Google Apps while employees use the interface they prefer for email, contacts and calendar.


Not Quite Gears


“Although we use the same protocol as gears, we don’t use gears per se,” explained Vander Mey. “It’s all saved in outlook PST files. From a technical level [there] is a MAPI provider; when you connect to Exchange we have built our own MAPI provider – we just change what’s going out on the wire – as opposed to licensing from Microsoft.”


Key Features:


E-mail, calendar and contact sync
Synchronize all Outlook fields in both directions, keeping them up-to-date; Uses a Google native e-mail protocol.


Free/Busy and Global Address look up
The Global Address List feature lets you search for and access e-mail addresses of users and resources in your domain.


Simple, user-driven data migration
Letting users move data to Google instead of having to wait for IT admins.


You’ll need Outlook 2003 SP3 or 2007 SP2 (or SP1 with a hotfix), running on Windows XP SP2 (with selected hotfixes) or Vista SP1 (with a hotfix).


If you want to see how Google Apps for Microsoft Outlook works, watch this three minute video.



				

				
			

			
			
			
					
		
		
			

			
				

					
Jun200902

					
					
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bing: new search engine from microsoft

					
Yeap, Microsoft just launched a new search engine

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May200914

					
					
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Microsoft House of the Future