Kurt DelBene and John Case: Office 365 Commercial General Availability

JOHN CASE: Hello, and thank you for joining us from around the world. The video you just saw was from our consumer launch at the end of January where we launched Office 365 to consumers for the first time. It is great to see how people are excited to use Office across their home and workplace.

Today, we are here to mark the availability of the next generation of Office 365 to business customers. This completes the availability, delivering all the capabilities of the new Office, both on-premises and in the cloud, to all customers around the world.

We have a full and interesting agenda for you today. First up you’ll hear from the president of Microsoft’s Office Division, Kurt DelBene, who will provide his thoughts on our approach to cloud and today’s announcement.

Next, we have a great demo showing key Office scenarios across a variety of devices, both big and small.

Then I’ll get a chance to talk to a few Office 365 customers and hear why they chose Office 365.

And now let’s hear from the president of Microsoft’s Office Division, Kurt DelBene.

KURT DELBENE: Thanks, John.

It’s great to be here today to celebrate the availability of Office 365. I want to provide some context on how we’re thinking about the cloud, cover the essence of the release, and talk about what’s new in the service.

The cloud is certainly a once-in-a-generation technology change, and there are significant and important benefits that come out of your movement to the cloud.

First, there are new scenarios that end up being enabled. So for instance, the ability to access your information on any device, if you’re working at work on a document, when you come home you’ll start up exactly where you left off. You can create ad-hoc groups that involve people from your organization and people outside the organization. And you’ll have all the benefits essentially of when you’re on your corporate network.

It enables a faster rate of change. That means you’ll be up and going with the new products and new capabilities literally as quickly as we create them and deploy them to the service.

There’s substantial cost savings that are realized as well. That means less hardware investments upfront and less cost maintaining and managing the equipment over its lifecycle.

And then finally, all of these things taken together define a new role for IT in the modern cloud era. It’s less about managing and maintaining hardware, and it gives IT more freedom to focus on strategic investments.

Microsoft has a vision for the cloud that is comprehensive, that’s enterprise-grade and it’s people-focused.

Let me talk a little bit about the essence, the core features that we really think about for Office 365, and there are five.

The first is that it’s best on Windows 8. We really worked closely with the Windows 8 team to create an experience that is in harmony with Windows 8, it works for the kinds of touch-enabled devices that are enabled with Windows 8, and it has a gorgeous new look so that you can really think about if I’m looking at the old version of Office versus the new, I see the new one and I think, gosh, I’ve really got to have that.

And it’s not just about being beautiful, it’s about introducing things like motion, so, for instance, if you’re in Excel you can see the numbers change and the impact that you have on charts.

It’s built for the cloud from the ground up. That means it’s always up to date, it automatically saves information to the cloud, and it means your information is available from anywhere, and it’s available on your PCs or your Macs equally well.

We’ve really built social directly into all of the experiences that are part of Office. That means wherever there’s the notion of a person, we’ll give you the context of what’s going on with that person, who are they connected to, what’s going on in their social streams, their business streams. And so it will really help you connect with that person in context and with the information that matters most.

It’s built with the end user in mind and delivers new scenarios, and again these new scenarios cross over all of the different applications.

So, for instance, in PowerPoint the ability to have a brand-new presenter mode that shows your notes and it shows you the current slide and the next slide you’ll be moving to, really giving you that confidence to create great presentations.

Or the ability to do HD videoconferences and meetings in Lync, or the ability to import PDFs and actually make them live documents in Word.

Across all the different applications there are great must-have features in each one of them that will drive you to really want the next version.

But then finally, none of this matters if IT can’t manage the product as well, and can’t be a hero as a result. And so we’re also delivering the best of breed in security, in flexibility, and in compliance as part of this release.

With that in mind, here’s what’s new in the major update of Office 365.

Office 365 is available today for businesses of all sizes. From small business to medium-sized companies and enterprises, all businesses can now enjoy the benefits that Office 365 offers.

As part of that for the first time, we’ll deliver Office the client as a commercial cloud service. With Office 365 Pro Plus, business users can get the Office apps they’re familiar with delivered as a cloud service that’s always up to date and available on up to five PCs or Macs.

Finally, Yammer is now available with Office 365 for Enterprises. Existing and new customers will get the best enterprise social experience included in Office 365. This is a great example of the type of ongoing value we’ll continue to deliver with the service.

With this announcement, we’ve delivered the most ambitious release of Office ever. While we’d love to see all of our customers move to the cloud, we recognize that it will be a journey for many of our customers, and we will continue to deliver the on-premises products as we do the cloud offering as well. So in December we released the 2013 versions of our clients and servers for our on-premises customers.

With that, I just wanted to end by saying thank you for all of your support. Your partnership is critical to our success.

Back to you, John.

JOHN CASE: Great. Thanks, Kurt. We appreciate you taking us through the benefits of Office 365.

In a few minutes, we’ll chat with some Office 365 customers from the City of Chicago, Toyota, and a great nonprofit organization, Meals on Wheels, and hear about their experiences with Office 365.

But first Julia White, general manager for Office, will show us some of the exciting new scenarios available today. Let’s take a look.

JULIA WHITE: I’m really excited to show you the new Office 365.

So here I am with my Surface Pro with Windows 8, and I’m going to go ahead and start with Word. Now, we talked about Office being a new cloud-based subscription service. So what does that mean? The first thing is I actually sign into Office now, and you’ll see here I’m signed in as Julia White.

And when I sign in, I get a personalized Office experience that goes with me across devices. I get things like my recent documents here. Even if this is the first time I logged into this machine, it would know where all my recent files are. Even my favorite templates are made available right here, and that graphic, I chose that, that’s my personalized Office experience.

And if I log into my Word document, you’ll see that as it pulls it up, it takes me right back to where I left off.

So here I see I get this welcome back prompt, and if I select, it takes me right back to that document right where I left off. So as I move between devices I can pick up just where I left off, never missing a beat.

Part of the new Word experience is also about reading, not just editing. So we have a new read mode in Word. If I pick up my Surface and go to read mode, you’ll see the document reflows into a very natural reading experience. And I can swipe through and read the content. I can even in this case tap and see people’s comments. Here, Katie Jordan left me a comment, and because of integrated IM and presence I can just tap to call, tap to IM and ask her about that comment right here in the reading experience.

Or as I’m reading through, I notice that this graphic here is a little bit small, I can just tap and it blows it up, making a great reading experience there as well.

And maybe I’m in different light, so I can go to inverse in a lowlight experience and make it an easy reading experience there.

Now let’s go back to Word in edit mode.

Part of the new Office experience is bringing Internet content right into your documents to make your content richer and more dynamic.

So let’s say I want to bring in a picture from the Web. I can now just go to the ribbon, and here you see I have a new online picture option. So I can click on that, and you see I have a Bing image search right here within my experience.

I’m going to look for a picture of a Surface, and it’s going to go out and search. I’m going to grab this picture here and drop it right into there. And you’ll see because I have a picture selected, Word prompts me with this new live layout option. I can go ahead and select wrap text, and now as I resize that image you’ll see the text just flows right around it very naturally; a really beautiful layout, so easy for me to do.

Now I’m going to go ahead and save this, and when I go to save, you’ll see the new default is cloud storage. In this case, it’s my SkyDrive account with my company. So now the same workflow I used to use for saving my content, but it now goes to the cloud. And that’s so important, because as we move across devices and we want to be productive across those devices, it only works if your content is available. My moving content to the cloud, wherever I log into my Office experience, I have that content. If the content is sitting on my machine, I can’t be as productive. So a really important part of this new Office is that default Save to Cloud.

Now I’ll go on and show you my SkyDrive Pro account where you see my content. Here are all my documents. I can even just click to share right from here to inside or outside my company.

But also the very comfortable and familiar Windows File View, here I have my SkyDrive Pro account, and you’ll see all of my content as well. And it’s actually cached locally, so if I’m online or offline I can continue to be productive, and I can interact with it just like I would my documents folder. I can even drag and drop between the two. It’s that easy; very familiar experience, yet all my content sits in the cloud, so I can be productive across all my devices.

Now I’m going to go to my Windows Phone 8 and right here is Office Hub. If I tap in, you’ll see it connects me to my SkyDrive Pro account, and I get that same content that I was working with when I was on my Surface device.

As it downloads, you’ll see it brings me right back to where I left off last, and there’s the picture I just inserted. My content is always up to date and available across devices because it’s saved to the cloud.

Now let’s go back to the Surface.

I’m going to go into Outlook and talk about the new experience we have. Here you’ll see with Outlook it’s very clean. You see by default the ribbon is hidden, but if I select on it, it’s there. So all my controls are available but hidden by default so that my content is front and center.

Now, Office also notices that I’m on a touch device, and because of that it’s giving me these touch prompts. So here I can just go ahead and delete that email with a touch.

Another aspect of this Office is our new cloud developer model. So now any Web developer can be an Office app developer.

Here in my Outlook I have an example. I have an email with an address, and I have a Bing Maps app loaded in my experience. And because I just tap right here, Bing Maps will actually pull up that address right into my Outlook experience, and it’s live Internet content. I can zoom in, get a bird’s eye view right within Outlook. So now you can have an experience that brings in whether it be line of business information or Internet content right into my Office experience. I don’t have to move between devices, making it a much richer experience.

Also thinking about the touch experience, I’m going to go to our new OneNote Windows Store application. We have a few applications that we’ve built in the new Windows Store model, and those are the things you do most on the go: note taking and communications.

Here with note taking, I can see it’s a beautiful new Windows Store design, the content is front and center. I can just tap through, see my different notebooks, go back to my notebook that I want.

And let’s say I want to do some editing of this note. I can go ahead and highlight this text, and when I do that you’ll see I get a prompt here. And if I click it, this is our new radial menu, really thinking about a great touch experience for Office.

Let’s say I want to change the font. I can just go ahead and swipe out, and you’ll see I can just with my radial experience bump that up, almost like a speedometer.

Now maybe I want to change the color, and maybe I’m really finicky about my colors. So all I have to do is swipe again in that radial menu, and I can get just the color I want.

Now if I select out to a non-text area you’ll see that that radial menu now gives me different options, letting me know I can do different things. It even recognizes that this device has a camera. So it’s giving me an option to take a picture, and I can put that right within my notebook.

But of course taking notes is really about writing and doing that with a stylus. So we’ve also made a rich editing and writing experience with my stylus. I can annotate, I can take notes, and all of that is saved right within my content. So now you don’t have to carry around that pen and paper anymore; you have exactly what you need, whether it be using stylus or touch or mouse and keyboard. Your notebook is all taken care of.

The new Office unlocks some great new scenarios as well. So I’m going to go into Excel and show you that.

Now with this version of Excel we’ve tried to make every user a power user by bringing information straight to the user when they need it.

Here’s a great example, something we do every day. Here I have content that I’ve gotten from a back-end system or maybe I’ve copied from the Web, and I want to do analysis on it. But it’s concatenated together so I can’t break it apart and do the analysis I want. So I would do what I would always do is I’d start typing John in this case, the person, and then I’d type Jenny. But now with the new Excel Flash Fill technology, it actually learns what I’m doing and suggests it. So now by hitting enter, the whole column is completed.

Similarly, I want to know the category, so in this case events and then advertising. Again Flash Fill recognizes the pattern, and I hit enter, and I’m done. In this case it’s even smart enough to recognize that I wanted these two words, digital marketing, versus one. So it’s smart enough to figure out the pattern I’m looking for and adjust to that. Again, I didn’t have to look for it, it just came to me, Excel offered it up to me.

Now I’m going to grab that table to do some visualization around it, which is what we usually do with data. And by just selecting that table, you see I get prompted with this new quick analysis lens. If I click on it, it lets me hover over and just get a sense of different views, different formats I might want to use. Similarly, I can see what different charts would look like, maybe get a view of what my X and Y axis are.

And then my favorite is tables where just with a single click I can get a pivot table created. For someone who loves pivot tables but doesn’t really know how to create them, now with a single click I have a pivot table and it’s that easy. So anyone can do this with a single click. And again that was brought to me when I needed it. I didn’t have to search for it or look for it. Excel knew what I wanted and offered it up to me.

Now as we’ve made these things much more accessible for every day; we’ve also made some really powerful data visualization and BI capabilities as part of Excel, too.

Now here I have our new Power View, and behind this is a really rich pivot table behind it feeding this information, but it’s a beautiful visualization on top of it so that I can get more insights out of it.

So here I have different sales information about my different products, and let’s say I want to just see information about cameras and camcorders. By clicking on that, all of the information is re-rendered to just show me that information. Maybe I want to see computers. Similarly, you’ll see all of the tables and visualizations change to show me just what I want. I can interact with it just that way.

Now I’m going to get all my sales content back, and maybe I want to look at this content over time. So I’m going to blow just that section out, and you’ll see I have another data visualization that shows me my sales content, and in this case I can go ahead and hit play and show what happens to my sales over time. Again a really powerful, rich visualization so that I can get a lot more insight out of it, and so much easier than looking at tables and charts. It’s really about that beautiful visualization that unlocks those insights.

Now another great new scenario of Office is about enterprise social.

So here I’m opening Yammer, and Yammer is a company Microsoft acquired recently. It’s about enterprise social and bringing that to the enterprise.

And I can get started right away as a user. My company doesn’t even have to support it yet. I can just get started with my email and a password, and I’m off to the races.

In this case my organization has set up and is using Yammer as a company. I’m logged into my experience, and you’ll see here the things that you might expect in enterprise social, ability to like. I can also reply here: “Looks great.” And I can @mention. And by just hitting the @mention, because it’s hooked up to my corporate directory, I can select people from my organization. So I’m going to go ahead and select Garth, and then I’m also going to hashtag marketing so people looking for that tag can find it easily.

Now beyond just the like and reply, I also have rich content within my newsfeed. So here I have event information or one of my favorites is the ability to really easily send coworkers a thanks by saying praise your coworker, again right here within that experience.

And then also the ability to unlock ad-hoc information, an example of that being able to poll my coworkers and just quickly get information from them, get a point of view, or a perspective about what’s going on across the company that easily.

And then, of course, enterprise social is really about helping boost productivity of the company. So here I can interact with rich Office content and I can comment, I can reply, I can collaborate on that content right here within my newsfeed.

Now, beyond just keeping me up to speed on all the things I’m following, Yammer also suggests for me people and things I should also be following, so it brings to me information across the organization, making it very discoverable.

So here based on different information and profiles, it’s suggesting people I should follow and even groups that I should follow that are relevant to me and what I’m doing.

So with a click I’m going to go ahead and join this marketing group, and you’ll see with just that, now I can follow that group and know that I can see what’s happening across my company with that group.

Now, it’s about interacting with people in your organization, but it’s also about collaborating outside your company.

So, with Yammer, it’s super easy to create a new external network as well. So you say, create the network, and here I can go internal or external. I’m going to go ahead and create an external one. So I’ll say “EU friends,” and I can choose whether it’s open or a closed group. So I can set my permissions, and then go ahead and create that network. And with that I have my external network created. I’ll go ahead and say “welcome” to my new group. And with that, I have an external network created. It’s that easy.

Now I’m going to go to the Perceptive Pixel device. With best-in-class touch experience and intuitive gestures, this new PPI device makes team collaboration engaging and impactful.

So I’m going to go ahead and join an online meeting. And here from an Outlook reminder, I can go ahead and join with a single touch my Lync meeting that’s already in progress.

Now with Lync what’s happening is it’s pulling in my five HD video streams of my coworkers who are in the meeting. And I’ll go ahead and start my video as well so they can see what I’m doing. So here we are. And you’ll see between the Lync HD video capability and the beautiful PPI device it’s really an engaging experience. It’s like we’re here together.

Now all meetings really need content; that’s very typical. So I’m going to in this case add some content to this meeting. And you’ll see with Lync I can share my desktop or a program or I can add a PowerPoint, which is what I’m going to do in this case. So I just touch right there, and Lync will reformat such that I have my video still running across the top, and now my PowerPoint content front and center. And I can interact with my slides. I can even choose to use my stylus on this device and do some markup. So I’m going to go ahead and select orange and maybe I want to highlight this or cross this out, and I really want to check there. I can annotate it with the content for everyone on the meeting to experience.

Now, I also want to add some notes, because we want to take notes as we have this meeting. So I’ll go back and in this case I’m going to load a OneNote that I have associated. And when I do that, you’ll see that OneNote automatically brings in the participants right into the notebook, as well as the content associated. And if I touch this dock to desktop capability, again it reformats it, I keep my video across the top, my PowerPoint, and now I have my notes that all of us together can interact with. And again using the stylus, a very natural experience, let me go choose red, and I can highlight and summarize, I can make some markups, as could all the participants in the meeting. So we have a very rich, dynamic meeting, making this virtual meeting as impactful as an in-person meeting.

Now, that’s just a small sample of what’s possible with the new Office 365. There’s so much more for you to discover.

JOHN CASE: Thanks, Julia.

You can see Office 365 gives you new tools to do your best work, whether it’s connecting to coworkers through social or getting more done on your phone, tablet or PC.

Now let’s talk directly with a few customers. Joining us via videoconference from the City of Chicago is Brett Goldstein. In studio, I’m joined by Karen Nocket from Toyota and Liz Seman from Meals on Wheels. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining us.

LIZ SEMAN: Thank you.

JOHN CASE: Brett, let’s start with you. You’re the CIO obviously of a major United States city. Tell us what are some of the challenges that you and the team think about for the City of Chicago?

BRETT GOLDSTEIN: Well, I was put into my new role this past June, and Mayor Emanuel had me focus immediately on how can we transform government technology.

Now, as you know, I run the Department of Innovation and Technology. What we’ve been doing historically is too much technology and not enough innovation. So right off the bat I knew I needed to focus on that and figure out how I could re-gear my portfolio to be consistent with Mayor Emanuel’s agenda.

JOHN CASE: The City of Chicago recently chose to move all its 30,000 employees to the cloud. What drove that decision?

BRETT GOLDSTEIN: Well, when I got in, in June, that was one of the first things I decided to do. I wanted to — I felt that things had changed in technology. While we were building OpenTable over 10 years ago, I would build everything on my own. We had our own datacenter; we had our own Exchange Servers. But now when I came in, in June, I said what businesses can I get out of, what has become a commodity? Email and productivity apps from my perspective had become exactly that.

So when I made this determination, which was really my second week in this new position, I spent the next six months looking at what were our options, how do I get out of email and productivity apps, and how do I actually deliver more to the employees of the City of Chicago with less?

JOHN CASE: That makes a lot of sense. What factors led you to Office 365?

BRETT GOLDSTEIN: Well, for those of you that know me know that I’m a very careful and sort of deliberative person. So we looked in detail at all of our options.

So first of all, I had to think about adoption. I have 30,000 users, and it’s fine as a technologist to have a good solution, but I need to have a solution that will be adopted well: 365 will do that.

Two, this idea of a mixed environment, I have very different users. I have users in finance, I have users in budget, I have public safety, and each have different needs. I needed a product I could tailor for each one of their needs, because I don’t want people to think by me going to the cloud I’m going to deliver less. In fact, I wanted to deliver more, and this was the right match there.

But two other things that are really important. As the CIO of the city, I worry quite a bit about compliance. I have to work about CJIS, FERPA, HIPAA; these are critical things. And my solution as I make this big move to the cloud needs to check those boxes, and 365 did that.

But lastly, cybersecurity is a top priority for city government. We need to be very mindful of it, and I need to make my chief security officer part of the decision-making process. And he was, and he was involved through each of the products and how we implemented, and Office 365 really came out as the leader.

JOHN CASE: Thank you.

How do you see Office 365 changing the way you’ll work in the City of Chicago going forward?

BRETT GOLDSTEIN: Well, this is really important. I talked about focusing on innovation and less on technology. One of the really important things to Mayor Emanuel is the fact that government needs to think in an interdisciplinary way. We need to get out of our silos, get out of our departments and work together.

Problems are not about a single department, they’re about collaborating for better solutions. And that’s the world, collaborate. 365, SharePoint, Lync, these are going to help our departments work together, collaborate, do things in real time. This idea before of good enough for government work or government is going to be 10 years behind in technology does not work for Mayor Emanuel, it doesn’t work for me. He’s looking for government technology to be like Silicon Valley, the cutting-edge of tech, and this is what we’re bringing and this is a big move for us.

JOHN CASE: Brett, thanks very much for joining us from Chicago. We appreciate your time.

I’ll turn now to Karen and Liz here with me in the studio, and my first question to the two of you is, tell us about the challenges that you’re facing in your organization. And Karen, let’s start with you.

KAREN NOCKET: Well, working at Toyota, it’s just a great company. Over the last few years, we’ve had to deal with the economic downturn, and the natural disasters that affected our supply chain.

A lesson learned from these events was that we needed to improve our communication and collaboration for our associates and team members.

So IT took on this challenge, and we evaluated our legacy on-premises tool against the more robust, modern, integrated suites, and chose Office 365.

JOHN CASE: Great.

Liz, same question to you.

LIZ SEMAN: Well, our vision at Meals on Wheels in Greenville is to end hunger and isolation among the seniors in our community, and that’s a really daunting task. We’re preparing and delivering 1,500 meals every day. We’re coordinating thousands of volunteers and also handling a client caseload of nearly 1,400 folks.

So just as we need the right equipment to prepare our meals, we’re also looking for the right tools to manage our business.

JOHN CASE: Sure. And how does Office 365 help your organization?

LIZ SEMAN: Well, it’s really so much in line with our strategic plan. We have specific goals around improving our efficiency and effectiveness, cost savings through technology, and also collaboration. And all the various tools and opportunities afforded us through Office 365 really make a difference for us.

JOHN CASE: Sure.

And Karen, same to you. How does Office 365 help your organization?

KAREN NOCKET: Well, we first put together a robust PMO and plan to migrate over 30,000 people across North America. And we first started out with improving the network at headquarters and in the field. We uplifted our mobile strategy by introducing tablets and smartphones. And then we began just a tremendous change management effort, which involved a lot of communications, training, and really brought our business in to be the champions.

As a result, the business has embraced Exchange. They’re using presence in Lync. They’re setting up virtual meetings, they’re sharing their desktops. And more importantly, we’re seeing that the business is exchanging information from the field at the dealers to headquarters seamlessly.

JOHN CASE: Great. And your employees have been using Office 365 now for some months. What’s been their reaction so far?

KAREN NOCKET: Well, we have over 15,000 converted over the last year, and have another 16,000 to go over the next couple months. And so we’ve been using it for over a year. And I walk down the halls or go to executive coffee and they thank me. My boss Zack Hicks, who is the North America CIO, presented in front of the Lexus associates and they stood up and applauded. And, you know, when you’re an IT person, you don’t normally get applause. (Laughter.)

JOHN CASE: Sure. Sure, that’s great.

And the same for Meals on Wheels.

LIZ SEMAN: Well, listen, naturally people are curious about change and a little nervous. And so for our folks they’ve really embraced it. I mean, for us now simple things like sharing calendars, the collaboration that we can use through Lync now, and really the mobility for us to be able to be out in the community doing our work and still being connected, we can do anything from anywhere, has really made a huge difference.

JOHN CASE: Sure.

LIZ SEMAN: It’s really speeded up our time, and again it’s, you know, thinking about all we have to do in a single day and really focusing on the collaboration piece, we’ve really become a more effective workplace.

JOHN CASE: That’s great.

So overall what does Office 365 mean to you and to your employees and your users?

LIZ SEMAN: Well, for us it’s about stewardship. I mean, we really want to become the charity of choice in our community. We want to show folks that it’s the best investment of the dollars but also of their time. And so doing things to improve our efficiency, our effectiveness, our cost savings, Office 365 has really helped us achieve that goal.

JOHN CASE: Great.

And the same question about Toyota.

KAREN NOCKET: Well, moving to more mobile devices, moving to Office 365 in the cloud, I really feel that this is our first step into a really great journey. After this, we hope to move our associates to Pro Plus in the cloud, so I have communication and collaboration and productivity all available to our associates, so no matter what device they’re using, where they are, how they want to work, I’ve provided them with a very robust suite as well.

JOHN CASE: That’s a really interesting answer.

Thanks very much for this great, interesting discussion. I appreciate your time very much.

LIZ SEMAN: Thank you.

JOHN CASE: And thank you to everyone who joined this event. I hope you’ve learned a lot.

To trial Office 365, please go to Office.com. Alternatively, you can contact your Microsoft partner or Microsoft representative for more details.

Thanks for joining us today.

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