Microsoft Office

REDMOND, Wash.--Aiming to show it is still winning customers against Google, Microsoft on Thursday announced deals to provide hosted e-mail and portal software to three big corporate customers.

The software maker said Dow Chemical, Hyatt Hotels, and the University of Georgia are all using the company's hosted e-mail and portal software, known as Microsoft Online. The announcements were timed to come just as Microsoft is set to host its financial analyst meeting here. (I'll be covering the day-long event live, starting around 8 a.m. PT)

In an interview, Hyatt CIO Mike Blake said the company, which … Read more

After adding conversation view to the latest PC version of Office, Microsoft confirmed on Wednesday that it is adding the feature to the next version of Mac Office, which is coming later this year.

As part of a series of videos previewing Office for Mac 2011 that Microsoft is releasing on Wednesday, the company showed the new e-mail threading view as well as the ribbon-style interface and a new template gallery that will be part of the new Office. Conversation threading has long been a selling point of Google's Gmail, but Microsoft has been steadily adding it to products … Read more

Stephen Baker, NPD Group's vice president of industry analytics, on Tuesday called the first two weeks of sales for Microsoft's Office 2010 product "a bit disappointing."

The group's findings, which stem from its Weekly Tracking Service, were posted to NPD's company blog on Tuesday, and show that both the number of units sold and the money made from Office 2010 are less than they were for the first two weeks of sales for Office 2007. However, the findings also show that Microsoft is "in line, and in fact slightly ahead of" the … Read more

Microsoft's Outlook Social Connector has just gotten a bit more social courtesy of a new update that has added Facebook and Windows Live Messenger integration to its mix.

Unveiled Tuesday, the latest version lets Microsoft Outlook users view status updates, wall posts, and photos of their Facebook friends without leaving their e-mail. People will also be able to add more friends to Facebook and Windows Live directly from Outlook's People pane.

Facebook and Windows Live join LinkedIn and MySpace, which Microsoft integrated into the Outlook Social Connector last winter. Making its debut last year as part of the … Read more

The Office 2011 for Mac preview was on display at an entertainment-related event put on by Microsoft this week.

Microsoft says the goal of this latest installment of Office for Mac is to bring the software more in line with the Windows user experience of the suite. What we see as the most notable addition to the Mac version is Outlook, the e-mail and productivity software Mac users have clamored for for years. We also noticed that like Office 2010 for Windows, the Mac version looks like it will share the same unified Ribbon interface features of its Windows counterpart … Read more

Microsoft is once again betting that its customers can do a better job than anyone else of selling its software.

The company's $80 million "Make it Great" ad campaign for Office 2010, which kicks off today, is focused entirely on letting a small group of early users of the product tell their stories. Microsoft faces the not insignificant challenge to convince consumers that the product is worth shelling out cash for, as opposed to using free rivals, sticking with their old version or even using one of Microsoft's own free products.

Aaress Lawless, the editor of … Read more

As Office 2010 hits retail shelves on Tuesday, it finds itself competing with a host of free rivals, not the least of which are two new options from Microsoft itself.

Redmond has long had to deal with free alternatives, including everything from OpenOffice to Google Docs. And Microsoft has also battled both piracy and the "good enough" factor that prompts many consumers to stick with older software--sometimes several versions old.

With Office 2010, though, Microsoft has created a couple of its own new products that could create an opening for those who want Office, but don't want to pay. Most prominent are the free, browser-based products known as the Office Web Apps seen as a response to Google Docs. The software, which includes slimmed down versions of PowerPoint, Word, OneNote and Excel, are all free to consumers, along with 25 gigabytes of online storage via Windows Live. However, the applications only work when the browser is connected to the Internet.

The second free version of Office is Office Starter, a product that is replacing Microsoft Works as the software most consumers will get for free when they buy a new PC. Although it will give users a genuine, if limited version of both Excel and Word, Microsoft Senior Vice President Chris Capossela said that the goal is to make it easier, not harder to sell the full version of Office.

"Consumers have an Office experience right out of the box," Capossela said. Plus, since the bits for the full Office are on the PC, retailers can sell just a simple card with a product code--cards that can be placed not just in the software aisle, but also in other key selling locations, such as near new PCs and by the cash register.

As for the notion that customers will just stick with the starter edition, Capossela said he isn't too worried. He notes that Windows itself has a basic word processor--WordPad, included by default. And while Starter does include a bona fide version of Word and Excel, he said it lacks PowerPoint, OneNote, as well as many key spreadsheet and word-processing features. To drive that point home, Starter also has a small advertisement that rotates different messages reminding users what they are missing. … Read more

With Microsoft's Office Web Apps out in the wild, I thought it was time to try to test their limits.

For a while now, Microsoft has said that the experience on the iPhone would be similar to that in other mobile browsers--allowing document viewing, but not the editing and other features found in the full Web Apps.

Through some work, though, I managed to get the iPad to try to open up the full Office Web Apps. By clicking around various pages within Windows Live, I found some that had an option to click to switch to the &… Read more

Officially joining the browser-based productivity game, Microsoft late Monday released the browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

The Office Web Apps, as the programs are dubbed, are slimmed down versions of the desktop counterparts, allowing for document viewing, sharing, and lightweight editing. Consumers get free access to the tools, along with 25GB of storage as part of Windows Live, while businesses can also host their own version of the Web Apps using the latest version of Sharepoint. The main catch is that using the browser-based versions require an active Internet connection.

"We'll have more to share … Read more