Author: Jan Van Belle

Office 365 – first impressions

This week, I migrated all of our personal mailboxes to the Office 365 for Professionals and Small Businesses program (also called the “Plan P1”). These are my first impressions:

  • pricing is very good; I already had some Exchange mailboxes, and for about the same price I get more storage (25 GB mailbox!), SharePoint and Lync;
  • there is a one month trial program; however, in the trial, you cannot link your own domain to Office 365;
  • you can add multiple domains to the same account; the fact that you have to point the name servers of your domain to Microsoft was a surprise to me. I expected that it would be enough to point the mx records to Office 365, but apparently in this plan this is not the case. There are some rumours that it works, but it is not supported;
  • you can configure A and CNAME records in the Office 365 DNS manager; it took me a while to figure out that you can use an @ to create a record for your root domain (http://mylearning.be)
  • the Office web apps are included in the package, and are very useful, e.g. if you need to edit Office documents on a mac and have no Office installed;
  • the primary support channel is the Office 365 community; content is relatively good, but sometimes it is difficult to filter issues from the beta program or from the enterprise subscription if you are looking for a specific issue; I filed a service request and got a response within 24 hours.

I’ll post more experiences once I explore the possibilities of the SharePoint part of Office 365, but for the moment I am very happy with it.

More info and trial on http://www.office365.com.

Microsoft LCDS 2.7 available

Microsoft released a new version of its rapid content development tool, Microsoft Learning Content Development System (LCDS). Major new feature is the possibility to create “Learning Snacks”, a specific Silverlight based format designed for small e-learning courses with a maximum of 6 topics.

Take a peak at Windows 8

Microsoft posted a video about the user experience in the coming version of Windows, Windows 8:

It is of course very early to draw conclusions out of this, but these are mine:

  • we need a design room like this for our team
  • it might be the end of “Windows” as we know it, because the only windows you see in the movie are the ones in the legacy applications
  • touch will become more and more important. Imagine this demo with a mouse and a keyboard…

E-learning in 1927

Via the Mobile Cowboys site, I found this video. It explains the use of a rotary telephone, and seems to be created in 1927.

It is interesting to compare this to the e-learning material we create nowadays. Especially the speed (or lack of speed) is quite surprising. And  it is good to realise that skills that we take for granted, are not necessarily “obvious” and sometimes still need explanation.

The (near) future of Productivity according to Microsoft

On a regular basis, Microsoft produces nice videos about their view on Information Worker Productivity in the future. This video shows the very near future: all products shown in the video are available as far as I can see. We are only waiting until companies implement them all, and until information workers start acquiring the competences to work with these tools in an efficient way…