Feature
Microsoft has upgraded a number of apps that give workers more efficient ways of creating, accessing and buying document related software.
The big announcement this week was the launch of Office for Android phones, which went into preview five weeks ago and are now generally available.
According to a blog post by Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft incorporated feedback it received from thousands of users during the preview period, including easier connections to popular file storage providers like Google Drive and Box. It's a competitive move, despite the fact that OneDrive for Business directly competes directly with these services.
It's also offering on-the-go reviews and edits, the ability to present from Android phones and easy document access. Microsoft has also been wheeling-and-dealing with some of the really big phone players like Samsung and LG to ensure that Office is pre-installed on at least some of their phones.
Microsoft Sway (H3)
But that’s not the only preview news this week. When Microsoft launched Sway Preview recently it said its priority was to ensure that anybody could use the rich web experience in any modern browser, without regard to the operating system.
Office Sway is a presentation web app and one of the Microsoft Office family of products. Sway allows users to combine text and media to create simple websites. Users can pull content locally from the device in use, or from Internet sources such as Bing, OneDrive, YouTube and Facebook.
In keeping with its goal of making it available everywhere, Microsoft announced that it would release a native Sway app later this summer for Windows 10. Sway for Windows will deliver a touch-first experience that syncs Sway across devices and the web. Unsurprisingly and just as with Windows 10, Sway’s initial release 10 will be for PC and tablets.
Finally, Microsoft is making it easier to access third party apps through Office 365. As of this week, it has started deploying an Office 365 Store to make third-party solutions accessible through an icon in the app launcher “waffle” in the top navigation bar. It’s a small thing, but will make life easier for those that depend on more than Office 365 to get their jobs done.
Unsending Gmail
Google has also been busy this week in the productivity space. You may recall for last year that Google announced a new inbox for its Gmail service to give workers a way of controlling their unruly inboxes.
In the intervening months, Google says it has received a lot of feedback on how users believe it could be improved and on the basis of that it says it will be working on these suggestions moving forward.
One of the things it introduced was an “unsend button” that delays the delivery of an email for between five and 30 seconds after the send button is pressed to enable users to retrieve the email before it leaves your inbox.
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This week, Google announced extended functionality that has long been offered through Google Labs to Android, iOS and the web.
Recently, California-based Vera announced similar functionality for Exchange in Office 365 (Could this be a new trend? Could we finally find a way of emptying our inboxes with just the click of a button? Hang-on, we have. It’s called ‘Delete’ but we just don’t use if very often!)
Accusoft’s Prizm E-Discovery
There’s been lots of talk over the week about content and content analytics and how content analytics can improve the use of legacy content.
The old fashioned way of doing that, and by far the most commonly used way is e-discovery applications. With this in mind, Accusoft just announced major upgrades to Prizm Content Connect v10.2. It comes with new e-discovery features that enable users to strengthen their redaction capabilities and improved document rendering and incident.
The newly added bulk redaction feature enables users to search for specific terms and text and redact this information instantly, which takes the pain out of a process that is generally done manually.
Accusoft has also added enhanced transparency to bulk redactions that enables users view their redactions before they are finalized in the document itself.
One other useful upgrade is improved HTML 5 conversion abilities that provides better document rendering for the web while at the same time conserving its quality. V10.2 is available as of this week.
Interact Integrations
Finally this week, intranet vendor Interact unveiled a number of new productivity improvements including integration with popular document management and storage solutions including, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox.
With it users can access external content within the intranet system, driving increased accessibility and boosting collaboration in conjunction with Interact's advanced search and social tools.
Interact's intelligent search function, which surfaces the most relevant content for individual users of the intranet, has been extended to include documents stored in any external cloud storage solutions. Combined with social tools such as @mention, tagging and document cross-reference, organizations can build a collaborative environment, which boosts productivity and inspires engagement.
Additional new features that Interact customers benefit from include bulk storage upload, making it easier to upload content. Inline preview also enables users can quickly identify content.
