SharePoint

Several of Microsoft's online services suffered an outage last night but are reportedly all back up at this point.

The company's Office 365, Hotmail, SkyDrive, and various Windows Live services were down throughout the world for a period of around three hours. Microsoft acknowledged the outage late yesterday in its Inside Windows Live blog and on its Office 365 Twitter feed and said that it was working to resolve the issue.

After a couple of hours of investigation, the company pinned the cause on a DNS (Domain Name System) issue and said that it was starting to see … Read more

Google took a few swings at Microsoft's Office 365 yesterday as the product gears up for its official launch today.

In an official Google blog, Shan Sinha, Google Apps product manager, touted several reasons from his perspective on why customers should opt for Google Apps over the new Office 365. Though he claimed to have 365 reasons in total, Sinha focused on just a few key points, flavored with a couple of quotes from seemingly satisfied Google Apps customers.

Sinha's first claim is that Office 365 is for individuals, while Google Apps is for teams, meaning that Google … Read more

Microsoft will officially launch Office 365 on June 28 at an event in New York City.

Hosted by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the event will start at 10 a.m. local time (7 a.m. PT) and be available via a live Webcast.

Announced in October, Office 365 is Microsoft's effort to offer business customers a cloud-based alternative to its traditional desktop and server products. Office 365 unites Microsoft's Office Web Apps with hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint along with Lync, which kicks in the online communication and collaboration piece.

Microsoft's announcement of the launch event … Read more

Microsoft has opened the tap on its cloud-based Office 365 and is now offering the service as a public beta for anyone to try out.

Available in 38 countries and in 17 languages, the new beta follows several months of limited testing among a couple thousand businesses that were able to kick the tires on the service. After the public beta, Office 365 will officially launch later this year.

Unveiled last October, Office 365 is Microsoft's attempt to offer businesses a cloud-based alternative to some of its traditional desktop and server products. The service combines Office Web Apps with … Read more

Microsoft plans to deliver the first service pack for Office 2010 this summer, as scheduled.

"We are on track for delivering Office 2010 SP1 and SharePoint 2010 SP1 in mid-summer 2011," the Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering Team wrote in a blog post.

The company will release more details about the service pack, including a tentative release schedule, at its TechEd North America conference in mid-May in Atlanta.

The service pack will include language updates for 40 different localized versions of the productivity suite of software. It will also feature a collection of security fixes that have dribbled out … Read more

Salesforce.com hopes its new Chatter product will give businesses something to talk about.

After beta testing the collaboration service since February, the company says the product is ready for mainstream use. Although it is designed to compete with Microsoft's SharePoint or IBM's Lotus Notes, Salesforce.com aptly describes Chatter as sort of a Facebook for businesses.

Instead of following old high school classmates, though, Chatter allows workers to follow co-workers, specific business documents, or pieces of data. A sales rep, for example, could follow a pending deal and get updates whenever details on the transaction are updated, … Read more

Microsoft issued three critical security bulletins on Tuesday, plugging 10 holes that could allow an attacker to remotely take control of a Windows computer via a malicious media file or streaming content, or malicious Web content viewed through Internet Explorer.

Overall, this Patch Tuesday release involves 10 bulletins fixing 34 vulnerabilities affecting all supported versions of Windows, Office XP, Office 2003 and 2007 Microsoft Office System, Office 2004 and 2008 for Mac, Excel Viewer, and Sharepoint Services 3.0.

"This is the largest Microsoft patch release of 2010 and ties the record for the most vulnerabilities ever addressed in … Read more

Microsoft will on Tuesday issue 10 bulletins fixing 34 vulnerabilities affecting Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer.

Six of the bulletins affect Windows, with two of those rated critical by Microsoft. Two bulletins target Office, one targets both Windows and Office, and one critical bulletin affects Internet Explorer, according to a Microsoft Security Response Center blog post on Thursday.

Microsoft also said that with the June bulletins it will be closing Security Advisory 983438, which involves a vulnerability in SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007 that was disclosed in late April and which could lead to a cross-site scripting … Read more

The bottom line: Microsoft Office 2010 is a worthy upgrade for businesses and individual users who need professional-level productivity apps, but it will take some time to get acclimated with the reworked interface. Users looking for bare-bones, dead-simple office software should stick with Google's and other online offerings or continue using older Office versions they have already mastered.

The world has changed plenty since Microsoft introduced Office 2007. In that time, Google has become a major player, with its suite of online tools, and even Apple has made inroads with its iWork office suite, though admittedly within a smaller … Read more