Office 365 Evangelist

Yesterday was a very busy day for me, presented to the entire Catapult Sales and Management team about our new Office 365 Accelerate program, ran to a client meeting, back to the office for another client meeting. Now it is lunch time, am I hungry, yes, do I have time to eat and do what I really want to do before needing to head back to my client for work, no. So I forgo lunch and make a trip down I-25 a few miles to the Park Meadows mall and the Microsoft Store. I called around and the only place that had what I was looking for in stock, the Red Nokia Lumia 920, was the Microsoft Store. Walked right in and had one in hand and paying for it minutes later! The Microsoft Store Rep was having a little trouble getting my new SIM card activated, but it was quickly resolved and I was off with one of the coolest phones I have ever owned!

What is not to like about this phone? The Red color just pops and with the glossy finish it just screams, hey check me out! I am not going to spend time here with the specs of the phone, so if you have been living under a rock for the past six months, here is a rundown of the phone, http://www.nokia.com/us-en/products/phone/lumia920/specifications/. One thing that I will mention about the specs is that the phone supports the superfast LTE 4G spectrum, and an added treat of the day, AT&T launched LTE service in the Denver area, so I had great speed on the phone when not connected to a WIFI network.

This phone comes with the new Windows Phone 8 software, and between the dual core processor and the new OS this phone hums along. After getting some of my apps installed, I noticed immediately how much faster they loaded and performed flawlessly. Windows Phone has also been centered around tiles on the start screen. This is a great way for a user to make a phone theirs, you can move around and add and remove tiles to customize the layout of the start screen. Windows Phone 8 added another great way to customize the Tiles, now you can choose from three different sizes of the Tile.

Above is my start screen, you can see examples of small, medium and large tiles. The other thing about the Tiles is that they are LIVE! As you see above the top Live Tile is my calendar and shows my next appointment. The People Live Tile keeps showing pictures of the people in the People Hub. You can see emails that are unread in my various email accounts and a missed call.

This is the lock screen, same coolness can see missed calls, unread email and my next appointment just a glance.

One cool new feature is the Wallet, now I can store credit cards, loyalty cards, and other things in here. I can use them to securely buy things with my phone. But one great feature of this is that I can prevent anyone from buying anything, especially my daughter, from the store. The Wallet has a pin and you can configure it to protect Store purchases. This brings up another great feature, Kid’s Corner. This is an area I can setup for my daughter to use. I control what apps, games and music. It creates a phone within a phone and ensures that my daughter won’t do anything on my phone that could be damaging!

The Xbox Music service, formerly Zune Music, is great. Now all my music is stored in the cloud and made available on any device I sign in with my Windows Account. The music doesn’t not get stored on my phone automatically but is available to play streaming. I can select individual songs to download, this is nice for times I won’t have service or more importantly to avoid using my data plan when playing music. The one ask I have of Microsoft here is the ability to download an entire Playlist at once, and not require me to download each song individually. I mentioned the Windows Account earlier, and this really is what brings everything together, within the Office Hub and OneNote app I now have all my data stored on my SkyDrive. All my achievements in Xbox games are attached to my Xbox game status, on and on and on!

The Phone also has NFC (Near Field Communication), Bluetooth, wireless, an awesome display and camera, on and on and on. It is loaded with everything, even wireless charging! Overall this phone is better than advertised, it is just the best phone I have ever had and highly recommend it to anyone!

It has been a busy several days for Microsoft and more busy days on the way. On October 11^th Microsoft announced that the New Office has reached RTM (Release to Manufacturing) milestone. This was not just for the Office 2013 suite of applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc) but for the entire Office family; Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013, Lync 2013 and Office 365 vNext (back ended by the 2013 server versions). This is very huge! All these Office components really step up functionality and allow for greater collaboration for the enterprise. Another big benefit of this next wave of products is that all were designed and built with the cloud in mind, meaning better experience for Office 365.

From the link above you can see that Volume License (VL), MSDN and TechNet subscriptions will be able to download the full RTM bits of these products beginning in mid-November with General Availability in Q1 of 2013. Also in the announcement is the information I blogged about recently, that Office 365 will begin getting these new features in the upcoming service updates in November as well. The first thing that existing Office 365 customers will see is new versions on the Office Web Apps.

Microsoft Surface Tablet

This past Tuesday the 16^th Microsoft announces the pricing for the Surface with Windows RT Tablets. Microsoft also opened up the ability to pre-order the Surface with Windows RT. The pricing announced is very competitive with the iPad, the Surface with Windows RT comes in 32GB and 64GB versions. They also have two covers, the Touch and Type, which have keyboards built-in to the cover itself. These covers easily connect to the Surface and provide a great nearly fully functional keyboard that barely adds and size or weight to the overall tablet and also functions a protective cover for the tablet screen when not in use.

So what is Windows RT? We simple put it is Windows 8 that runs on ARM Processors, these are the same type of processors that the majority of other tablet OS’s run on (iPad and Android) as well as smartphones. ARM processors are also somewhat synonyms with System on a Chip (SOC), combine the data, RAM and GPU processing all together. One major benefit of ARM processors is the reduced power demand for these processors so longer life running on batteries is achieved. Windows 8 RT does share much of the code base with its “big brother” Windows 8 Pro, which run on x86 processors by Intel and AMD. The difference between RT and Pro is some functionality. RT will not have windows media player but will have the Office RT products included, but some of the functionality of Office applications will be missing, such as Excel Macros. Here is some good information about the two Office versions. And here is more information about Windows 8 RT.

The Surface with Windows RT is not the only device that will be running Windows 8 RT, Asus, Dell, Lenovo and others have also announced tablets that will run Windows 8 RT.

Microsoft has also announced that a future version of Surface with run Windows 8 Pro as well. Here is a good comparison of the two Surface versions.

Windows Phone 8

Windows Phone 8 launch event is set for October 29^th. This is big event, not only have Nokia, HTC and Samsung announced new phones that will run Windows Phone 8 but the actual operating system itself has been completed redone and is based on the same code as Windows 8 RT. This is huge! This means that now app developers can create an application once and it will run on Windows Phone 8, Windows 8 RT Tablets as well as the full Windows 8 Pro machines. When you really think about it, Windows Phone 7 gave use the “Metro” interface, now called Microsoft Design Style. This new interface and experience how now been adopted by Windows 8 and the Xbox 360. What this means is that all Microsoft interfaces are now using the same interface style, making learning/navigating one product very very very similar to the others. This to me really brings the Microsoft “3 Screens” story, Xbox, Phone and Browser/computer is very true to life now!

So my next phone for me is going to be the Nokia 920! My understanding is that this phone will be available from AT&T on November 4^th! Without pricing I am sold, this phone is solid and an excellent upgrade from my current Lumia 900. My only dilemma is how I am going to talk my wife out of her scheduled phone upgrade so I can get the 920 on the two year contract price and also how I talk her into the fact I need a Surface running Windows RT as well. Please send me suggestions and hints on how I get my new toys while maintaining my marriage! J

This past week I was on vacation with my family in the San Diego, CA area! We stayed at a great beach side resort in La Jolla and spent time at the beach, SeaWorld, Legoland and site seeing in San Diego. SeaWorld was great and I also really enjoyed touring the USS Midway, a US Aircraft Carrier that severed for 47 years and has been turned into a great museum on San Diego Harbor.

While on Vacation, Microsoft announced they are jumping into the tablet hardware race with the Surface, http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/about.aspx. They will have two versions, one running on ARM chips and one on x86 chips. I like the design, especially the keyboard built-in to the cover. Not sure I like then name, and this is because they have had Surface devices that came out a couple years ago touting touch technology, so when I finally saw a tweet about the Surface announcement I was a bit confused.

Seeing some supposed leaks about pricing, http://www.wpcentral.com/nope-we-havent-forgotten-about-surface-tablets Seems that these are ok prices, but I still want to know what processor power and memory available to make a better judgment on the leaked prices. Once way I think Microsoft should delay the deployment of Office for iPad. This is one of the biggest selling points for the Surface tablets over the fruit tablets. By delaying the availability for Office on iPads I believe Microsoft will have a broader adoption for their tablets running Windows 8 and a full Office experience!

The other big news came with the announcement about Windows Phone 8, http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/archive/2012/06/20/announcing-windows-phone-8.aspx. I really think having the workstation and the phone running the same kernel is key to the success of both. Now developers can develop one app for both platforms! While I am a bit discouraged about not being able to upgrade my Nokia 900 to the full Windows Phone 8 version, I do like that most generation 1 and 2 phones will get upgraded to Windows Phone 7.8, which will bring a bunch of the UI enhancements to older phones. But really, who am I kidding, once the new phones running Windows Phone 8 are available, I will be buying one. My daughter will most likely inherit my 900 as her “Phone”, she is currently using my original Samsung Focus.

Office 365 International User Group Meeting is this Tuesday, the 26^th at 8pm UTC/GMT. Head over to our website to get a meeting invite to add to your calendar and it includes the Lync Meeting info, http://www.office365union.com/Pages/Calendar.aspx

Here is the planned agenda:

1. Welcome and light discussion (how about we talk Windows 8 both on the desktop/tablet and the phone)
2. Presentation on RiverBed’s WAN acceleration for Cloud Computing – Brett Hill
3. Office 365 Exam Prep discussion
4. Office 365 Support discussion

Hope you can join the meeting and share in the discussions.

And I would like to leave you all with this; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBlbnvKmf1g A great video developed by our @SlingRock Marketing sister company. I had some input into this video as part of a large company we are working with doing a comparison between Office 365 and Google Apps!

So I was very lucky and won a Nokia Lumia 900 Windows Phone from @MobieChick! This was awesome, as I was debating how I could get my hands on this Flagship phone from Nokia and AT&T. I was nowhere near being able to get the 900 at the reduced $99 rate with a new two year contract. The reason being is I just bought the HTC Titan, a great phone, in November. So either I would have to add another line to get the reduced price, but add another $30 a month to my bill or pay about $400 + off contract.

So the phone arrived at my house yesterday! Got the delivery email from FedEx around 1pm and almost ran out of the office to head home, but waited and worked the ENTIRE day then made it home. So the first impression of picking up the phone was great, a very solid and well build device. The charger was tiny and it does a great job getting juice to the battery. What I had to do next is call AT&T to get the Micro SIM card enabled. This was easy but while talking to the AT&T rep I found out since the 900 switched to the Micro SIM card format I was out of luck to switch back easily to another device that took the AT&T standard SIM card. If I wanted to switch back to my Titan, just for a day I would be required to go to AT&T and get another SIM, enable it and then use it in the Titan. But then to switch back to the 900 it would be the same experience, get another Micro SIM from a store, enable it and use. This is because; as it was explained to me once AT&T disables a SIM it cannot be used again. I asked if I could have a Micro and Standard SIM active at the same time and the rep said that was not possible. This is not a major problem, but I would like to have the flexibility to switch SIM cards between devices.

So with all that I can’t say enough about this Phone! It just feels right, it looks right and it acts right! The True Black screen with the Nokia Blue Theme (a strong blue versus the built-in Microsoft blue) is awesome. The phone just say pick me up and use me. But when you pick it up, you can get info and be back to your life, unless you get caught into the great games with Xbox live and Indy games. This phone is so solid and just the right size, the Titan was great, a little big but really great, but this just fits into my hand and life.

I will say that Nokia hit a home run with this phone and getting it for free via the contest was just icing on the cake! Please take a close look at this phone the next time you are near a AT&T Mobile store, you will be impressed!

This is all from rumors and has not been verified, to my knowledge, by anyone at Microsoft. But with that said I hope it is ALL TRUE. First off, Windows Phone 8 (code name Apollo) is going to switch from the WinCE Kernel to the full Windows 8 Kernel! The full leaked story I am talking about is here: http://pocketnow.com/windows-phone/exclusive-windows-phone-8-detailed. So This story is spreading like wildfire, and to my knowledge at the time of this write, has not been denied by Microsoft. And I hope all of it is true!

So after reading the new integration between Windows 8 tablet/desktop and the Windows Phone 8 I have a problem. I have recently blogged about my issue with my HTC Titan phone, nothing with the phone (it rocks) itself but the fact that the Titan II is coming out in March with LTE band and 16 megapixel camera less than six months after I bought the Titan I. Also the Nokia 900, a phone that is getting great reviews and also has the LTE 4G band is set to debut on AT&T in March. So should I jump to the Titan II or Nokia 900 next month, or wait for the Windows Phone 8 hardware to launch, rumor late fall of 2012? As reported in the link above, NFC, 4 new screen resolutions, multi-core processors, removable SD storage, etc. is coming. So my gorgeous wife, already thinks I have a phone fetish (I do but don’t tell her) should I jump on either the Titan II or Nokia 900 or wait, and wait and wait until the Windows Phone 8 hardware and OS launches? While I think I should get one of the new phones in March when they are rumored to launch (Titan II and 900) and then upgrade again in late fall; I don’t want to get in too much trouble!

Here is a quick recap from http://wmpoweruser.com/windows-phone-8-specifics-leaked/

Go Windows Phone GO!

So the Big Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was this week.  If you are in to technology I am surely not breaking any news here.  What I would like to talk about is the great news around the Windows Phone 7 (WP7) platform this week.  Numerous new phones were announced, my top two are the two new AT&T LTE 4G phones,  the HTC Titan II (more about this later) The Nokia 900 (Best New Phone, CES winner).

Microsoft lead with and spent a good portion of the CES Keynote talking about the WP7 platform.  I am extremely happy with the direction of WP7 development and hoping that 2012 is the year of WP7!

One other cool thing that Microsoft, and more specifically, Ben Rudolph (@BenThePCGuy) did was the “Smoke by Windows Phone” $100 challenges during CES.  Ben with his trusty HTC Titan I in hand would challenge other mobile phones to speed tests.  The results were pretty great, Ben and WP7 had an 88% win over the other phone platforms!  Read about and watch videos about the head-to-head battles at Ben’s blog here!

So back to the Titan II, it is a great phone, LTE 4G, 16, yes SIXTEEN, megapixel camera and a 4.7″ screen.  So my BIG problem with this phone is…..I JUST BOUGHT THE TITAN I barely 3 months ago and now this is announced!  While I greatly appreciate that HTC, and AT&T along with the Nokia 900, are jumping into the LTE 4G speed lane, why release the Titan I at all?  I used my available upgrade window with AT&T to upgrade to the Titan I with AT&T from the Samsung Focus (a great first generation WP7 phone).  I want WP7 to succeed, I want to IOS iPhone and Android world to open their eyes to a great platform!  But why oh why am after only a couple of months stuck (without paying the non-contract price) on an older phone?

I am not even sure I would go with the Titan II at this point, would want to check out the Nokia 900 as well.  But I am pretty disappointed that The Titan I, the Samsung Focus S (Mango WP7 phone upgrade from my first generation Focus and at the time a phone I looked at to upgrade too) came out in November, and now in the first half of January are already out of date.  I would love for HTC, AT&T or Microsoft to make it up to their loyal WP7 users by giving me the chance to upgrade to the latest WP7 phone at the new contract price! Not asking for much, ask anyone who knows me, I constantly talk about WP7 and tell everyone how this is not Windows Mobile 5,6, or 6.5 but a complete and utter refresh and awesome mobile phone OS!

So it goes to show that the iPhone/iPad devices rule.  I say this being a very strong supporter of Windows Phone 7, but numbers don’t lie!  Today the Lync Mobile client was released in the Apple App Store and this blog site saw its highest traffic to date!  I am not saying this to brag as I have only been on this site for just about two months, but it is nice to see traffic pick up.  The primary reason for the spike in traffic is due to my posting here last Monday talking about Microsoft releasing the Lync Mobile Client (http://office365evangelist.com/2011/12/12/microsoft-releases-lync-mobile-client/) At the time of writing I made a bad assumption that all platforms (Windows Phone 7, Android and IOS) had released on the 12th.  This was incorrect, only Windows Phone 7 had the Lync client in the Marketplace.  Android released later last week and as I stated IOS today.  The post links to two documents for additional steps needed to ensure that a company’s Lync On-Premises or Lync Online with Office 365 is properly configured to ensure connectivity with the Lync Mobile Client.

Catapult Systems, my company, was part of the TAP program and we had access to the beta revs of the Lync Client.  I had actually been running it for about three months prior to the RTM launch last Monday.  I really like the ability that the client adds to my HTC Titan.  It does not replace the full Lync Client on my laptop, but helps in a pinch to see why co-workers and send a quick IM or even better now have one touch connection to a Lync Meeting.  Having Lync call me for the meeting is way better than dialing the proper number and entering the meeting code and my PIN.