What’s Hot on Office 2010
On June 15, the world will get to buy Microsoft’s Office 2010 productivity suite. Yes, there are a lot of improvements to the package, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. I read somewhere that there’s more than 100 upgrades from the 2007 version.
But the biggest buzz about Office 2010 is the cloud computing option – which Microsoft has developed to compete with the growingly popular cloud-based Google Apps (Now boasting 25 million users!).
Microsoft hopes current users of Office will upgrade because of Web Apps, a cloud-based platform that is designed to integrate with Office’s desktop programs. Web Apps will let users upload their documents from their computers to Microsoft’s cloud-based Docs.com, allowing for accessibility from any machine or device anywhere with a web connection.
Yet Google will be a tough act for Microsoft to follow. Even though Office Word is the world’s most popular document editing software out there, Google has been dominating the cloud for years. And what I find a brilliant marketing move, the company is targeting educational institutions…and signing them, too, for use of Gmail and Docs as primary mail and document management tools.
The proof of Google’s success? I believe Google has something like 60% of U.S. schools as customers now – with about 8 million users. The apps represent a low-cost way for students and faculty to create and collaborate on documents.
No matter which cloud-computing app companies and schools choose, many are recognizing the importance of monitoring how those apps perform. That’s why they’re turning to monitoring software like Monitis, which resides and operates on the cloud, to keep 24/7 watch over how the cloud platforms that support those apps are running. Schools, like businesses, depend on notifications that monitoring tools provide to help them spot and address issues with their service providers.
