Author: Microsoft Stories

Microsoft has a cloud version of Office, called Office 365, that you pay for on subscription either monthly or annually.Office 365 is a little unusual in that it is cloud software and you install it on your PC, to give you the best of all worlds. Also, Microsoft automatically adds cool new features. Here are some cool features of Office 365 that you may not know about.

ICICI Lombard outlined the need to meet peak loads without increasing the data center footprint or budget. It also predicted that the public cloud would become commonplace. To test this out, in the first phase, it migrated its test and development environment for 17 key applications to Microsoft Azure. By this move, the company has been able to decommission 35 UAT (User Acceptance Testing) servers and get ready for the public cloud.

Being a people-driven enterprise, YES Bank wanted to provide a highly efficient customer service platform and also facilitate its employees with real-time business intelligence. To make this happen, the bank needed to automate its processes and create a single, user-friendly and collaborative platform. Post the deployment of SharePoint, YES Bank has increased process efficiency through automation, gained visibility into different processes for improved and faster decision making, which in-turn reduce the turnaround time.

Mobile banking, Internet banking, online relationship manager, 24/7 banking, virtual branches and conferencing meet-ups are terms that are hastening the change into that future.This Change is being driven by technology giants like Microsoft. The company has been working with scores of financial institutions to help innovate and evolve its offerings and retain customers, drive business insight, manage enterprise risk, and streamline operations. Additionally, Windows based devices is being used by banks to expand their customer base in unbanked rural areas.

Microsoft continues to bulk up its Azure cloud platform, adding a secure key vault for protecting cloud workloads as well as a new set of larger virtual machines and an easier way to deploy Docker-based workloads. Collectively, the new services could “enable simple and affordable solutions while still offering cloud-scale capabilities,” said Corey Sanders, Microsoft partner director of Azure program management.

The Indian government has announced a list of 15 NRIs who will be conferred the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman awards for 2015. The list includes Microsoft CEO Satyanarayana Nadella.

Microsoft has opened up the beta versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps in the Google Play store for Android tablet users. In a blog, the company said it wanted to get feedback from a broader set of users to ensure that the Office apps work well on a range of Android tablets before officially launching the apps.

Microsoft said its new Azure G-Series VMs are the largest currently available from any public cloud vendor in terms of the amount of memory, processing power and local solid state drive storage they include. Azure G-Series VMs come with up to 32 vCPUs using Intel’s Xeon E5 v3 processors, as well as 448 GB of memory and 6.59 TB of local SSD space.

Embee Software said Microsoft’s cloud-based technology and service is gaining pace in the eastern region. “Embee, one of Microsoft’s solutions partner in India, has registered 22 per cent year-on-year growth in its business, riding on high adoption of Microsoft Office 365 and Azure amongst customers,” said Sudhir Kothari, Managing Director, Embee.