Microsoft cuts Office 365 prices

Posted on 15 March 2012 by Eduardo Hotta

Good news for the cloud enthusiasts. Microsoft announced on March 14 price cuts to a number of its Office 365 enterprise and academic plans.

Microsoft officials explain that due to economies of scale through their data centres and economies of skills with their staff they were able to lower the plan prices.

The price changes are effective immediately for new and renewing direct customers. Below is a chart with the previous and new prices.

Plan	Previous cost	New cost	Drop
K1	£2.60	£2.60	None
K2	£6.50	£5.25	19.23%
P1	£4.00	£4.00	None
Exchange Online plan 1	£3.25	£2.60	20%
Exchange Online plan 2	£6.50	£5.25	19%
SharePoint Online plan 1	£3.50	£2.60	26%
SharePoint Online plan 2	£6.75	£5.25	22%
Lync Online plan 1	£1.30	£1.30	None
Lync Online plan 2	£4.25	£3.50	18%
Office Professional Plus	£8.00	£8.00	None
Office Web Apps with SPO plan 1	£7.25	£6.50	10%
Office Web Apps with SPO plan 2	£10.50	£9.00	14%
E1	£6.50	£5.25	19%
E2	£10.50	£9.00	14%
E3	£15.75	£13.25	16%
E4	£17.75	£14.50	18%

Microsoft is also cutting the price for the ‘A2′, plan which is exclusive to educational institutions, making it free for faculty and staff. You can find more information about the academic plans here.

Interested in knowing how Office 365 can transform your business or your educational institution?

If you are, try it for free and contact Paul at paul.graville@concentra.co.uk or 07985 224 880.

Season’s Greetings!

Posted on 24 December 2011 by Eduardo Hotta

Can I use Office 365 on an Apple Mac?

Posted on 25 November 2011 by paul.graville

This is the question one of my customers asked me this week. Enough to send a chill down the spine of a die-hard Windows advocate? Well fortunately I’m both a Windows and an Apple Mac user so was in a position to advise.

The answer is that some of Office 365 works on a Mac. The best thing to do is to list what works and what doesn’t:

What works

Exchange Online: This pretty much works the same, except you can’t use Outlook 2010 of course! I’ve not seen the Outlook Web Access experience in Safari, but suspect it will be like the previous version i.e. will be a cut down version of what you get with Internet Explorer

What kind of works

SharePoint Online: The official line from Microsoft is that Safari users are now ‘First class citizens’ when it comes to using SharePoint. This means that most of the stuff you want to do in the browser works, but not all. It’s also much harder to save documents straight into SharePoint, in my opinion making it a jump to far to use it as a document management system in a Mac environment

What doesn’t work

Microsoft Office Professional 2010: This comes as part of Office 365 and quite simply doesn’t install on a Mac. So you will need to buy Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. It sounds like it might be one year ahead of Office 2010 but don’t be fooled! It feels to me like it’s 5 years behind. Outlook in particular is ugly, clunky and with features missing

Not sure

Lync: I’ve not tested if this works. With Office for Mac 2011 you get a Microsoft Instant Messenger client but I don’t know if you can connect it to Lync. My suspicion is you can’t

My advice would be to get yourself an Office 365 trial and test it out on your Mac to see if you can live with the limitations. Office 365 is a great set of applications and Apple Macs are awfully pretty – a match made in heaven???

Britain’s Fastest-Growing Private Tech Companies Honoured

Posted on 17 November 2011 by Eduardo Hotta

Tech Track 100

Owners and directors of Britain’s fastest-growing privately-owned technology (TMT) companies celebrated at the eleventh annual Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100 awards dinner, held at Vinopolis in central London.

Now in its eleventh year, the Tech Track 100 league table ranks Britain’s 100 private technology companies (TMT) with the fastest-growing sales over their latest three years, as published in The Sunday Times on 18 September 2011. Over their latest three years the companies have increased their combined sales from £680m to £3.1bn, and have almost tripled their number of employees to 13,500 people.

More than 250 guests attended the dinner, including founders and senior directors from well-known technology companies including Gocompare.com, Kaspersky Lab, Mind Candy, Wonga.com and Zoopla.
Guests were welcomed by Scott Dodds, marketing and operations lead from Microsoft UK, the title sponsor of the league table for an eighth year, who congratulated the top 100 companies for being “an elite group”.

Guest speeches

Guests heard a refreshingly frank interview with Nick Jenkins, founder of online personalised greeting card retailer Moonpig.com; and a speech by Richard Noble OBE, who broke the land speed record in 1983 and is now leading the Bloodhound SSC project to build a supersonic car that can go faster than 1,000mph.

Nick Jenkins, interviewed by Sunday Times business editor Dominic O’Connell, explained his reason behind selling Moonpig.com to digital photo service PhotoBox for £120m in July. He said that investors had put £2.5m of their own money into the business and that he was worried it was becoming too cautious: “There comes a point when you’ve put so much of your money into the business that you stop taking risks, and we were getting to that point,” he said. Jenkins also shared his experiences of starting out including the difficulties of securing funding. When pushed, he said he may launch another business within two years but needed a good idea first.

Richard Noble OBE gave an entertaining speech about his career in super-fast cars and explained his latest project, Bloodhound SSC, which aims to build a car that will go faster than 1,000mph. The car is being funded by a mix of corporate sponsors and public donations. It would be able to cover one mile in 3.6 seconds, and be five times louder than a jumbo jet. Construction is due to finish by next December. Noble said this was a good example of an entirely British-run project, but added that British culture is often too conservative to encourage innovation: “I often wonder how Steve Jobs would have got on if Apple was based in Britain,” he said.

Tech Track 100 sponsors’ awards

The Tech Track 100 award for best brand, sponsored by The Sunday Times, was presented by Dominic O’Connell to Gary Howlett, director at Kaspersky Lab. Kaspersky was founded 14 years ago in Moscow by Eugene Kaspersky, and now protects 300m customers around the world against IT security threats. Sales grew 69% a year from £63.5m in 2007 to £299.1m in 2010.

The Tech Track 100 Ones to Recognise award, sponsored by Barclays Corporate, was presented by head of TMT Sean Duffy to Paul Fockler, co-founder and chief technology officer of Mendeley. Mendeley is an online platform that started in 2008 to help users to share and manage academic research, and is backed by the four founding engineers of Skype.

The Tech Track 100 best management team award, sponsored by BDO, was presented by national head of TMT Julian Frost to Steven Oliver and Walter Gleeson, co-founders of MusicMagpie.co.uk. The company lets people trade their CDs and DVDs for cash on its website, and gives its valuations after people scan the barcodes using their webcam. Sales grew 205% a year from an annualised £1.1m in 2008 to £30.8m in 2011. Allan Leighton joined as chairman in April, when the company raised £10m from private equity firm LDC.

The Tech Track 100 award for technology innovation, sponsored by Microsoft, was presented by director Maurice Martin to Concentra Consulting founder Paul Graville and managing director Rupert Morrison. Concentra develops software to help organisations improve their efficiency, and its technology is being used by 80 hospitals in the UK. Sales grew 81% a year from £904,000 in 2007 to £5.4m in 2010.

Paul and Rupert at ST Tech Track 100

The Tech Track 100 fastest-growing company award, also sponsored by Microsoft, was presented by Scott Dodds to Wonga.com chairman Robin Klein, of Index Ventures, and head of technology Panni Morshedi. The online money lender was set up in 2006 to let customers borrow up to £400 for a maximum period of 30 days, and says it can put the money into a customer’s account within 15 minutes. Sales consist of interest and fees, and soared 361% a year from an annualized £752,000 in 2007 to £73.8m in 2010.

Credit: The Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100

GSMA aims to improve industry collaboration and knowledge management

Posted on 16 November 2011 by Eduardo Hotta

Concentra announced that it has been selected by the GSMA, which represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, to upgrade the GSMA Infocentre, an extranet providing collaboration and document management capabilities for GSMA members. The new system will engender collaboration and provide easier access to information, standards, contacts and forums, whilst enhancing networking and sharing opportunities among members.

Work on the updated Infocentre site will begin immediately and is expected to be completed by April 2012, when the new site will become available to the GSMA’s 20,000+ users worldwide. It will be built on Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

“The redeveloped Infocentre will be intuitive, easier to use, deliver greater flexibility and significantly improve search capabilities for the GSMA member base,” said Jon France, IT director at GSMA. “The site will be used globally by some of the industry’s most technically-minded people, so it’s vital that it delivers the best possible functionality, offers robust collaboration and provides relevant and up-to-date information at all times.”

Concentra was awarded the contract because of its previous experience in developing and rolling out collaboration platforms for large organisations and its ability to partner for success.

“Developing Infocentre plays to the heart of why we established Concentra – to make business improvements real,” said Ben Scott Knight, director at Concentra. “The combination of our capabilities in operations consulting and technology means we are able to develop the right solution for the GSMA – one that incorporates best-in-breed collaborative technologies and drives adoption across users.”

External users on Office 365 SharePoint Online

Posted on 4 November 2011 by paul.graville

I was asked if you can use SharePoint Online in an extranet or internet site capacity. The answer is no for internet sites but I have found out that you can invite up to 50 external contacts to your SharePoint Online site free of charge. Here’s how.

End-to-end steps to enable and external sharing with SharePoint Online:

The customer’s SharePoint Online Administrator turns external sharing ON for their whole tenancy. This merely enables the feature, but does not yet expose anything externally – merely lights up the capability at the site collection level
Set up a new site collection, or convert an existing site
Set external sharing to “Allow” at the site collection level. Note: you can always reset back to “Deny” if you no longer wish for the selected site collection to be shared externally.
Site Collection owner can now invite external trusted partners/customers by going to Site Actions “Share this Site”
External users get invited by site collection owners

They are invited with any email address
A Hotmail account is required to start login. End user will have the choice to use an existing Hotmail account, or be prompted to create one.
The end-user would use their user@hotmail.com as their O365 login user name. We simply create a Personal User Identification (PUID) in our system associated with this original Hotmail account and associate it to the site collection they were invited to.

End-user is now known at the SharePoint Online Directory Service (SPO-DS) within the site collection they were invited to

Note: steps 5b-5c are not required if the invitee is already an Office 365 customer. They both have Microsoft Online IDs which will be used to authenticate them, and thus they just need to be officially invited into a site collection across tenancies …

Also please note I haven’t actually tested this myself!