I recently wrote a piece on ten reasons why one should consider an Office 365 subscription. Later on there were some recent announcements and updates that might make it an even more juicier proposition. I will go straight to the meat of the story. You can read the ten reasons here.
Office Mobile App on Android and iOS
Now there is this announcement that came earlier in the year of Microsoft finally taking Office mobile beyond the Windows Phone and into both Android and iOS devices. This was an US exclusive at first but that is no-longer the case as we now have many more markets where this has rolled out including my home country Kenya. In Kenya we already have the Android app available and I use it quite a lot.
Beauty about this is that the app is completely free for Office 365 users, doesn’t depend if you are the enterprise user or small business subscriber. What this does is give a user the best Office mobile app you could get on Android, ofcourse with syncing to Skydrive that gets you the advantage of having documents available offline and online in multiple devices. Complete with nice controls for document editing.
Real-time Editing on Web Apps
I also mentioned Office Web apps in the last post. There is an update that came in a bit later that makes Office Web apps quite useful. Ofcourse you are aware by now that Office Web apps give you the advantage of full document editing on the browser with content quality in the same levels as on the desktop install.
Now Microsoft went a step further, made it possible to to real-time document collaboration on Office Web Apps. This means that you and your colleague can work on the same document at the same time and you can see what your colleague is working on, including who it is that is doing what.
This comes in handy when you need to get things done fast by a team and they happen to be at different locations. No need to use complex technologies, just go online.
Student Advantage
Office 365 Proplus for Education comes with a free proposition for Students in the campus. Microsoft also recently announced Student Advantage which is a product of Office 365 ProPlus or Office Professional Plus. When the University licenses either of the two for staff and faculty the students in the University by extension get access to the Office Installs free, on 5 of their devices.
Microsoft remains the single most popular Office productivity applications provider globally. In fact the closest competitor comes 6th in the chain of command. The first 5 being Office iterations. This means that the experience the users get is familiar across the board, and free.
