5 Reasons Why Buying Yammer is Brilliant for Microsoft (and Its Customers)

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shakes hands with Yammer CEO David Sacks

At the end of June, Microsoft purchased the San Francisco-based social media juggernaut Yammer for 1.2 billion. Yammer provides private corporate social networks to organizations all across the world, so employees can stay in touch and collaborate with each other in realtime.

This week at the Microsoft World Partner Conference in Toronto, Steve Ballmer addressed the acquisition as a “best of breed product that will fundamentally change how Microsoft and its partners communicate and collaborate” and cited it as a key move by the company that underscores its commitment to its growing portfolio of cloud services available in the enterprise.

When asked about Yammer’s purpose and potential,Yammer CEO David Sacks shared this simple but powerful nugget:

[Read more...]

Office 365: how to enable BlackBerry Business Cloud Services

Microsoft is in Beta Release of the Hosted Blackberry service for Office 365, called BlackBerry Business Cloud Services from RIM.

As of late, there has been a huge interest BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365. Please note that the general availability of the service is expected to be in January, 2012.  Microsoft is currently accepting participants for their Open Beta Program starting in October.  BlackBerry Business Cloud Services provides a secure link between your organization’s Microsoft Office 365 messaging services and BlackBerry smartphones. BlackBerry Business Cloud Services provides mobile access to email, calendaring and organizer data with Exchange Online.

In order to use this service, you will have to have a Microsoft Online Services ID and valid Office 365 service in place. You will then have to sign up to BlackBerry Business Cloud Services Beta on the RIM website; this will allow you to access the Office 365 Admin page to manage your users’ BlackBerry Business Cloud Services. This is the first step on our way to enabling BlackBerry Business Cloud Services.

In the Resources section under “Setting up email on mobile phones”  the following message now appears:

Set up BlackBerry® Business Cloud Services

 You can enable and set up BlackBerry Business Cloud Services from Research In Motion (RIM®) to enable your BlackBerry smartphone users to have a more integrated experience with Exchange Online.

To enable the service, you must meet the following requirements:

  • You must be an Office 365 global administrator.
  • Your company must have an enterprise subscription that includes Exchange Online.

Enable BlackBerry Business Cloud Services

 Once enabled, the Admin page will have a new service that the company’s Global Admins can manage:

Authorized Services

BlackBerry® Business Cloud Services from Research In Motion (RIM®)

Add and remove BlackBerry® smartphones, reset passwords, wipe devices.

Manage | Support | Remove service

 The Manage link takes you to the “BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365 Provisioning” site.

If you are already a BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365 beta participant and require assistance, please contact BlackBerry Technical Support at 1-877-255-2377 or email support and have your support code available. For other support options please visit BlackBerry support.

If you are interested in future BlackBerry® Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365 beta programs please visit blackberry.com.

Please keep an eye on the Navigator blog for more news and updates about this great Microsoft offering.

Microsoft Office 365 Announcement: The Wait is Over

For those who have been eagerly anticipating the full public launch of Office 365- the wait is finally over. Microsoft announced that on June 28th, the cloud-based online business application subscription service will be ready and available for the public.

Office 365 combines cloud delivery of the latest versions of Microsoft’s enterprise services — Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Lync 2010 — with Office 2010 Web Apps, and the option to upgrade to Office 2010 Professional Plus.

Microsoft had opened Office 365 for public-beta testing months ago, in April, 2011; June 28th’s release is the culmination of those months of testing and code improvements. Office 365 replaced the technology company’s previous cloud offering, the Business Productivity Online Suite (widely know as BPOS). [Read more...]

Getting unified communications without the fuss

 

Death of the PBX?It seems everyone wants a unified communications and collaboration platform – industry research shows this is a growing priority and the technology for it has radically evolved in recent years, making the business case even more compelling.

The trouble is, many organizations are weary about investing the time and costs of actually building it. The wide-spread perception is that doing so requires massive overhauls, and that’s not always feasible. [Read more...]

What people are asking about Project 2010 (Part 2)

project manager imageAs Microsoft Project 2010 settles into the market, I have noted that many users and potential users are trying to get a better understanding of the licensing and technology issues. From customer conversations over the past couple months, here are some of the questions that others are asking. [Read more...]

License Mobility makes it easy to build in the cloud

License Mobility for Software Assurance makes building in cloud easierStarting July 1st 2011, Microsoft is launching “License Mobility” to volume license customers with Software Assurance (SA), making it easier to deploy some Microsoft technologies to the cloud.

With increasing interest in “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS), organizations want to move workloads and applications to the cloud without having to acquire additional licenses. For select Microsoft server products, License Mobility allows customers to assign certain licenses to a cloud infrastructure for that customer’s use. The products included are: Exchange Server, Lync Server, SharePoint Server, SQL Server and Dynamics CRM.

Simply put: the change unlocks the ability to deploy these application server licenses with active Software Assurance on-premises or in the cloud in a shared hardware environment and to take advantage of the lowest cost infrastructure for changing business priorities.

This signals Microsoft’s desire to make it easier for customers to test out the ubiquitous cloud. [Read more...]