Tag: Video

Retro Internet Guide

I remember when the Internet was but a twinkle in Vince Cerf’s eye but looking at this retro videos of the Kids Guide to the Internet boy do I feel old.

If you remember dial up modems and Netscape then I’d advise you even to take a look at the first few minutes and reminisce about those dial up days and how far we have come (and how old we have gotten).

If you don’t remember all that stuff watch anyway as I’m sure you’ll find it highly amusing at what technology was like back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Office 365 Power BI

Here’s a nice video showing the features of Power BI (Business Intelligence) for Office 365.

In essence it allows you to easily report on large data sets. There are plenty of really good examples of this already like:

No matter how small a business they can benefit from improved data analysis. Great thing is most already have the tools like Excel and Office365.

What really impressed me in the first video is the natural language queries that were performed towards the end of the video. Honestly, take a look at that and tell me that isn’t firstly really cool and really handy, especially for those no-IT type business owners.

There is so much opportunity around BI in the market and so few resellers seeming to grab it. Even down at the SMB level, BI is huge so if you are wondering how to make money as a reseller in the cloud look at getting into BI for your clients. In simple terms, BI helps customer understand their business by allowing them to quickly analyse their data. You won’t regret it I’ll bet.

Using Feedly

My business partner, Nigel Moore, has just done a quick video on how to use Feedly.com to keep up to date with various content published via RSS. This of course includes our new Cloud Business Blueprint and this blog.

Both Nigel and I are big Feedly users because it simply works across so many difference devices. So if you haven’t see Feedly yet, take a look and of course sign up to the Cloud Business Blueprint feed for more updates on what we are doing.

Office Web Apps improvements

You have always been able to work on documents simultaneously in Office Web Apps and Word on the desktop with SharePoint Online in Office 365, the only difference was that it would do a paragraph lock. This differed from the Google Docs approach which showed you real time editing of everyone. Basically you could follow every change they made to a document. Microsoft’s research indicated that was distracting to authors (and it is for me I know) so that is why they initially did it the way they did.

However, it seems that having the ability to see people individually editing every item in a document has won out, so Microsoft has now updated it’s Office Web Apps in SkyDrive and Office 365 to include this feature. You’ll get a better idea of what it looks like in this video:

This now makes the Office 365 editing experience more like that in Google Docs and removes a perceived difference between the products (and to be honest what appeared like a limitation in Office 365 even though it wasn’t). That is great news for Office 365 and makes the sell to customers who want a Google Apps like web editing experience much easier.

It will be interesting to see what Google does about this as puts the ball back in their court to come up with another differentiator. In fact, I think it puts the pressure squarely on them to come up with something as rich as what Office Web Apps is. Google Apps is looking pretty basic compared to Office Web Apps these days I reckon.