Microsoft Office

Office Live Workspace

Microsoft Presspass has a great interview with Michael Schultz, Microsoft Office Live Director of Marketing.

There are millions and millions of people around the world using Microsoft Office to help manage their lives. They use the Office products to help schedule carpools, grocery shopping, design party invitations, write reports, just to name a few of the many helpful ideas Microsoft Office helps.

This week, Presspass (of the Microsoft network) spoke to Michael Shultz at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Schultz talked about how using traditional desktop software in conjunction with services such as the upcoming Office Web applications (lightweight, Web-based versions of Office applications expected to be released as part of the next version of Office) could change how consumers work and play, as well as about how parents, students, and home-based businesses can use Office 2007 to make life easier.

In part, here’s what Shultz and Presspass had to say:

Office 2007 can synchronize with Office Web Online to help search for ideas, products and reports. This can help students with school products, businesses with employees online and many other applications. Office Web applications, such as one being developed for Microsoft Office OneNote (becomea MOONie–MicrosOft OneNote!).

Office 2007 can help with tracking your exercise. Says Schulz: “After each daily run, you can post your time to a personal fitness workspace in Office Live Workspace and compare it to previous times. If you share that workspace with your teammates, they’ll get an e-mail every time you update the workspace and will be able to see how you’re doing, and whether they need to step it up.”

Use one of the many online options to share your information: from Office Online, Web based applications, Groove, Infopath, Outlook, for starters. The options are limitless on how you choose to share your information.

Families, businesses, schools and friends can keep in touch instantly with all the available technology Microsoft Office has to offer.

Higher education institutions are seeking new ways of enhancing the IT investments they have already made and new reasons to consolidate their systems to ensure maximum savings and efficiencies.

New cloud technologies enable convenient access to central applications and provide consolidation (and cost reduction) benefits. With hosted services and storage, for instance, customers are finding new savings. Schools are already seeing benefits with Microsoft Live@edu, a suite of messaging, mobile, and collaboration and productivity services that enables virtual campuses, where students and educators can benefit from the free flow of information and ideas within each learning community.

St. John’s University administrators have found that Live@edu is one solution that is helping to strengthen their business and empower their work. While they plan to provide a more cost-effective solution by fully utilizing the hosted Microsoft Exchange Server-based e-mail service for all students, they are also going to take advantage of the hosted collaboration and virtual file storage capabilities across all their campuses. This will enable them to keep faculty and students connected on the same collaboration platform, while solving their long-term needs for classroom collaboration pages and team project workspaces.

“The millennium student comes to St. John’s expecting the latest technologies and online experiences that they have grown up with,” said Gary Young, associate director of Academic Technology of St. John’s University. “Now with the Microsoft Exchange Labs solution, we get enterprise-level hosted e-mail and collaboration tools.”

University of Central Florida Chief Information Officer Joel L. Hartman agreed. “We launched Live@edu as our new student e-mail platform in August, and so far, more than 27,500 students have signed up for the service — thousands per day at times. Early feedback suggests that our students are delighted with the Live@edu features, especially Skydrive and Office Live Workspace,” he said. “Live@edu provides our students not only a robust and easy-to-use e-mail platform, but also an increasingly powerful range of tools and services they can use to support their academic work and social activities.”