New Delhi, June 11, 2014: Over the past three years Microsoft Office 365 has changed the way businesses operate by unlocking social and mobility scenarios enabling them to take advantage of the cloud. Amongst the thousands who have adopted the Office 365 solution are some of India’s leading non-profit organizations, education institutes, IT/ITES companies and manufacturing and healthcare organizations including Ascent Yarns, Bakewell Biscuits, BLK Super Speciality Hospital, Godrej Industries and iResearch.
Talking about how the move helped, Shailesh Joshi, Head – Corporate IT, Godrej Industries Ltd, said, “We chose Office 365 to integrate communications between our group companies across India as well as our international entities. With Exchange Online, our email is backed up with service-level agreements, performance guarantees, disaster recovery and assured business continuity. Overall, we are very satisfied with the stable performance of Exchange Online and its lower cost of ownership. We are also evaluating other services within Office 365 like SharePoint Online and Lync Online to avail full benefits of the Office 365 suite.”
Further reiterating the Office 365 advantages, Yogesh Shah, Founder & Director of iResearch Services Pvt. Ltd, another company that recently took to the cloud offering, is all for adoption of technology solutions to propel growth. “With Office 365, we are taking full advantage of reliable, state-of-the-art technology that helps our business run more effectively at lower costs. Most importantly, with majority of the research workforce being mobile and geographically spread out, tools like Microsoft Lync enable field workforce to host meetings, share desktop presentations, and find appropriate individuals/expertise quickly and effectively by collaborating remotely. All this helps us meet client deadlines efficiently. Microsoft technologies provide enterprise-class, reliable and robust solutions for our operations,” he said.
In fact, Office 365 Personal was recently added to complement the existing bouquet comprising Office 365 Home Premium, Office 365 University and Office 365 for businesses, and Office for iPad, aiding mobile scenarios. Office 365 is growing rapidly worldwide, making it the fastest-growing product in Microsoft history. As for Office 365 Home Premium, it is already at 3.5 million subscribers, and growing.
Ramkumar Pichai, GM – Microsoft Office Division, Microsoft India, said, “We are pleased with the adoption of Office 365 amongst businesses in India and globally, which reinforces our cloud and mobile leadership. Microsoft is focused on delivering the cloud for everyone, on every device. The future lies in people focused cloud productivity that – enables individuals and organizations to achieve more with the devices and services that people love the most.”
Updated capabilities of Office 365
Microsoft is bringing new personalized experiences that integrate social capabilities throughout Office 365. Powering these new user experiences is the Office Graph, a new Office 365 intelligence fabric that remains unseen to the user but is constantly analyzing content, interactions and activity streams and mapping the relationships using machine learning to intelligently connect and surface the most relevant content to each user. These new experiences include the following:
- Groups. Groups is a new feature unifying people, conversations, calendars, emails and files across the Office 365 suite, enabling a seamless collaboration experience across applications.
- Inline Social. Microsoft is bringing the power of social collaboration and conversations to everyone by offering Inline Social experiences throughout Office 365. It has the ability to have social conversations inside documents stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
- Office 365 Video Portal. It has been developed to support upload, storage and discovery of videos in a secure manner. Businesses will be able to categorize videos into channels for specific business needs and stream them on mobile devices, with all of the video compression, optimization and rendering work done by Office 365.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft set up its India operations in 1990. Today, Microsoft entities in India have over 6,000 employees, engaged in sales and marketing, research and development and customer services and support, across nine Indian cities – Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi and Pune. Microsoft is committed to touching and transforming lives and businesses in India through technology.
