Office 365

At Southern Illinois University, freshmen are going to get a nice surprise: they’ll receive Dell Latitude 10 touch-enabled tablets running Windows 8 for free. It’ll come pre-loaded with digital textbooks, course materials, Office 2013 and an assortment of student services.

Calling it the “biggest year of Office ever with the move to Office 365,” jovial tech journalist Paul Thurrott (of Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows) gushes about it in the latest Office “Garage Series” episode, the last of a six-part series shot in New Orleans.

New York State is the latest state government selected Office 365 to consolidate their email systems, provide access to familiar Office applications, and place shared calendars in a cloud-based system for more than 120,000 employees who work for state executive agencies.

Data about Office 365’s reliability was previously available only to customers, but will now be available to all on an ongoing basis on the Office 365 Trust Center site.

One of the world’s largest airline groups, International Airlines Group (IAG) – the parent company of British Airways and Iberia – has chosen Microsoft Office 365 for its 58,000 employees, enabling its far-flung workforce to collaborate virtually anytime, anywhere around the world.