The new Office 365 general availability

Today Microsoft is announcing the generally availability of the new Office 365.  Learn more about this exciting announcement from the official Office 365 Blog .  Customers who sign up  today will receive the new Office 365. Existing Office 365 customers can get more information about the service upgrade at their respective center for  Small Business and Enterprise . Some enhancements, like the updated Office Web Apps, are available to existing Office 365 customers today. The service upgrade includes new features and enhancements across all of the different services and here are a few select highlights: Office 365 ProPlus – Your Office as a service Office 365 ProPlus is your full Office suite offered as a subscription service.  It is the Office 365 equivalent of the volume-licensed Office Professional Plus 2013 and includes the same full apps: Access, Excel, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Lync, Publisher, and Word.  Office 365 ProPlus can be installed on up to five different devices per user, unlike traditional Office which is licensed per device.  Office for Mac is also included through Office 365 ProPlus, so you can easily have Office on all of your devices. Even though Office 365 ProPlus is a cloud-based service, these Office programs aren’t running up in the cloud. Instead, you download Office 365 ProPlus from the Office 365 portal and install it on your computer, so you can use Office when you’re offline, just like previous versions. Office 365 uses Click-to-Run technology to make the download and installation of Office 365 ProPlus fast and simple. Click-to-Run uses virtualization technology to run Office 365 in a self-contained environment on your computer, which allows you to run Office 365 ProPlus side-by-side with an earlier version of Office.  For more information, see the Office 365 ProPlus system requirements . New Outlook Web App The Outlook Web App (OWA) is updated with a fresh, modern look similar to the new Office suite.  The new look simplifies the navigation and interaction to help you focus on the content and get work done faster.  The new redesign also helps bring touch and screen-size specific experiences to OWA optimized for phones and tablets! Take a look at the same inbox viewed across three different sized screens:   First, you can see the new OWA on a traditional browser. The refreshed, clean look uses accents and just-in-time information to reduce clutter. For example the blue highlights unread messages and you can see contextual options (Delete & Flag) on the selected message, but not for the other messages until you hover over them. Also, with the new reply inline feature, you can reply to a mail without opening a new window to help streamline your email responses. Second, we have the tablet optimized experience. Notice the touch-friendly buttons around the edges for common tasks such as, creating a new mail, switching to calendar and contact, searching, and refreshing your inbox. To move between conversations, just tap the mail you want to view.   Third, we have the phone optimized experience. Designed for the vertical orientation, the bottom navigation is consolidated for the smaller screen. You can still see your full inbox, quickly search, and see similar email statuses like the [Draft] label to let you know you have an unfinished message. Swipe left to right across a message to get four message management options, to mark a mail as either read/unread, file to a folder, flag, or delete. You can also bulk select mail and apply these same mail management options to multiple emails at once. SkyDrive Pro SkyDrive Pro is the new name for the MySite document library. Your default storage is increasing from 500MB per user to 7GB, or a 14x storage increase for free! Another part of that is the SkyDrive Pro folder sync feature that lets you sync your SkyDrive Pro with your computer for offline copies that automatically sync with Office 365 when you make changes. The folder sync works with team sites and their documents as well. The new SkyDrive Pro shows you all of your documents and lets you quickly see if they are shared or locked to you. You can also see the last person to update the file. To sync offline copies to your computer just click the Sync button up in the top right-hand corner below your name. Clicking on the three dots by a file brings up a preview of the file using the Office Web Apps and quick actions you might want to take such as start editing the file, sharing it with co-workers, or copying the URL to embed in an email or presentation. Lync makes meetings more personal A large part of how people communicate is non-verbal, yet for many people today most work is done over email and through voice only conversations. Lync is designed to help people communicate and now you and your colleagues can feel like you’re in the same room with the new Lync multi-party HD video conferencing. Up to 5 live video streams can be viewed at a time and if the meeting has more people with video, Lync will automatically switch to the person talking. Now whether you work in a global organization or you’re a road warrior traveling to meet with clients you can be a part of the conversation and not miss a moment. We want to hear from you. Sign in to the community and leave a comment below to let us know what you think.

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The new Office 365 general availability


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