Preview: Office 2016 isn’t revolutionary, and that’s ok Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/digging-into-microsoft-office-2016s-mobile-first-cloud-first-future

Beneath the hype leading up to the imminent release of Windows 10, other teams at Microsoft are busy readying the 16^th full-version upgrade of the company’s highly successful office productivity software, Microsoft Office, officially dubbed “Office 2016.” The number of Office users has, when including the current 9.2 million Office 365 Personal and Home users and more than 50 million Office Online users, surged recently to an estimated total of 1.2 billion users overall.
Despite its enormous popularity, office productivity software is changing—rapidly and drastically, moving online and to the cloud. Microsoft itself has recently said that the new Office experience will be in recognition of this new mobile and cloud-first world (which was supposed to be the focus all along, we thought). In other words, if all goes as Redmond expects, Office 2016 will be important not as stand-alone software, but as part of the Office 365 subscription service.

A Full Version Upgrade?

The fact this happens to be the 16^th full upgrade is coincidental. At one time a full-version upgrade from, say, version 2 to version 3 was (especially for Microsoft) huge, with massive feature and performance boosts. Not any longer, it seems. In terms of new features, this “upgrade” doesn’t have many, though what is new looks useful.

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System admins will find many security and admin updates, and users should enjoy several new cloud and real-time collaboration features, as well as expanded touch. Even so, the new features list is a bit sparse for a full-version upgrade. The truth is, though, that Office doesn’t need a bunch of new word processing features. It has been around for over 30 years, and behind the ribbon interface you’ll find commands for nearly every conceivable scenario.

Change isn’t Always Good

Microsoft knows that while users demand faster, more capable software, they want it without being inconvenienced—which the company learned the hard way with its Office 2003 upgrade, where Microsoft introduced the once-reviled-but-now-reveled Ribbon Bar.
Related: Early Office ‘universal’ applications now available 
Prior to the icon-laden Ribbon Bar, all of Offices commands were accessed through a series of menus (with names like, File, Edit, View, and several others), that spanned the top of the application window. In the 2003 upgrade of Office, Microsoft replaced those menus with the ribbon bars you’re familiar with today.

Microsoft knows that while users demand faster, more capable software, they want it without being inconvenienced.

Long-time Office users, for many of whom the software had become almost second nature, no longer knew how to use their word processing and spreadsheet programs. What took a few seconds or minutes before the new version entailed searching through unfamiliar button bars to find nearly every function. Help moving from the old system to the new was inadequate or unavailable, and Microsoft provided no way to return to the menu system.
Working in Office went from second nature to total frustration overnight. Had there been a viable alternative at the time, Microsoft Office probably would have lost thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of users in a very short time.
Here again, with this upcoming release of Office, the number of new features takes a backseat to modernization of the interface, making it more mobile- and cloud-friendly. Even so, the transition will require a gradual, evolutionary-like process, rather than all at once.

Suite-Wide Enhancements

Without question, any enhancement to help users adapt the software across platforms is good news. Since many Office programs have several UI elements in common, many of the enhancements will be suite-wide. One of the most significant upgrades is the release of Office 2016 for Mac—after nearly five years, since 2011, with virtually no updates at all; Mac users finally get a new Microsoft Office—complete with full OneDrive and OneDrive for Business integration. Finally, Office for Mac will be part of the same suite instead of a compatible spin-off.
Here are a few new cross-platform features:

• Tell Me: Had Microsoft included this feature with Office 2003, it would have saved everybody a lot of grief. Tell Me consists of a text field on the ribbon bar in Word, PowerPoint, & Excel where you type help queries. As you type, the program tries to match it, displaying links to pertinent data.
• Higher resolution screen support: Many desktops, as well as several recent hybrids, laptops, and convertibles, support screens with resolution well beyond 1080p. Office should look better on higher resolution displays with improved font and icon scaling and high-resolution assets.
• Small screen profiles: These are essentially layouts you can save according to the screen size and resolution of your devices. When combined with other features, such as Outlook’s lean storage footprint on small devices and enhanced cloud attachments (discussed a little later), small screen profiles help devices adapt content.
• Backstage user interface: There are several enhancements to the “backstage” area and menu, especially when working with OneDrive or OneDrive for Business. There are several enhancements for working with files, such as grouping by properties, like creation date or some other criteria. That should make files easier to find from within Office applications.
• Outlook Data Loss Protection (DLP) extended to Word, PowerPoint, and Excel: The synchronization of DLP policies has been expanded to Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, providing organizations with unified policies across content stored in Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.

Outlook

Office’s personal information manager has a few new mobile-friendly features designed to make managing your messages easier, including:

• Recently edited files display as potential attachments: Rather than making you wade through a huge list of file names, now when you start the process to attach a file to an email message, Outlook displays recently created or edited files—the most likely attachments.
• The application window fits small screens better: Instead of shrinking down all panes, you can change the number of panes to display, thereby making the screen more legible on smaller screens.

Excel

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Aside from the universal changes listed earlier, most of the enhancements made to Excel this time around pertain to data manipulation, and are not really appropriate to this discussion of mobile and cloud-based feature enhancements. Microsoft says that upcoming Snap and Smart Scrolling features will make tapping and other selection and data manipulation options easier.

Word

Matt Smith/Digital Trends

Word’s updates have been minimal so far. Touch menu and text manipulation with your fingers is improved, with touchable controls for easy text selection and copying and pasting. Tapping on spelling mistakes will bring up a touchable menu with alternative spellings, and a new Bing feature dubbed “Insights” looks up related Web sites, news stories, and background information related to selected words.
Related: Microsoft Word knows how to spell favorite Game of Thrones character

PowerPoint, Access, OneNote

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While there are some additions to the other Office suite apps, aside from what we’ve mentioned so far, there is not a lot enhancements. Access and OneNote, for instance, don’t have Tell Me buttons on their ribbon bars or any other notable changes, yet.

Conclusion

If you’ve been following along with the Office 2016 news, you know real-time collaboration, a feature that Google Docs has supported for some time now, is one of the much touted new enhancements. However, it and many of these features were unavailable as of this writing, making them difficult to evaluate.
Keep in mind that so far we are looking at an early beta, which may or may not look a lot like the current preview. Most, if not all of the recently announced features should make the cut, though, which is great as long as the interface stays reasonably intact and those of us that make our living with Office suite products don’t have to learn them all over again. Office 2016 isn’t a great leap forward, but it also doesn’t make any mistakes.

Third-party apps on the Apple Watch set to improve Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/apple-jeff-williams-talks-watch-car-and-more

ecode’s already hosted a number of heavyweights at this year’s Code Conference, but Apple’s Jeff Williams was definitely one of the headliners. He took to the stage to speak with Walt Mossberg mainly about the Apple Watch and HealthKit, and while he didn’t reveal much — Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is only a handful of days away, after all — he announced a few nuggets worth highlighting. First up: Apple Watch sales. The company’s first wearable is “gathering momentum” and doing “fantastic,” Williams said, but he declined to provide specifics. (He told Mossberg that Apple would “rather spend time making great products” than focusing on metrics, a possible — if ever-so-slight — nod to the disappointing sales estimates.) Analysts peg shipments at about 2.5 million, far short of the five to six million units Apple ordered ahead of the Apple Watch’s launch in April.
Williams was a little more forthcoming about a native SDK for the Apple Watch, which he revealed will drop a lot sooner than expected. A preview version will launch at WWDC, he announced, with a wider rollout to follow in fall. That’s surely welcome news for developers, who’ve by and large blamed the Apple Watch’s sluggish and buggy app performance on gimped access to the wearable’s hardware — right now, third-party Apple Watch apps can only stream information to the watch from a paired iPhone via Bluetooth, not run on the watch itself. The new development tools will not only boost performance by letting apps tap the Apple Watch’s silicon, but also allow them access to the watch’s bevy of buttons and sensors — the digital crown, speaker, plethysmograph, gyroscope, and heart rate monitor, among other accoutrements.

Russia Aims to Build US-Free Mobile OS

Russia wants to develop alternatives to proprietary or partly closed mobile operating systems by using open source tools as a foundation, Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications Nikolay Nikiforov said last week.

Russia's BRICS partners -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- are expected to support the plan, he said.
"Success would make a fairly significant impact on the go-to market plans of numerous IT vendors. We are seeing the beginnings of similar efforts in China, a market that has long been central to many vendors' future plans and hopes," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.
"Longer term, any sort of Balkanization is likely to fray the value of global technology markets and services," he told LinuxInsider. "We may be witnessing the creation of what are effectively national information silos."

Plan Unfolds

The software replacement plan is an example of an ideal project for international technological cooperation as Russia expands its partnership with BRICS for collective software development in these markets, noted Mikiforov. The cooperation resulted from ongoing worries about existing monopolies in the global software market.
The linchpin in Russia's plan apparently is Sailfish, an open source mobile OS developed by Jolla, a Finnish mobile device manufacturer that now has less than 1 percent saturation in Russia.
Still, Jolla is almost an international company today, according to Nikiforov., as it is owned not only by Finnish, but also Russian and Chinese shareholders. Indian, Brazilian and South African investors may join Sailfish soon to shore up the software development plan, if Russia's strategy succeeds.
Russia also hopes to attract developers to Tizen, an open source mobile OS developed by the Tizen Association from the MeeGo framework created by Nokia. Sailfish also is anchored in MeeGo.
One plan Nikiforov floated is to offer financial grants to developers who port their apps to Tizen and Sailfish operating systems.
Another plan, reportedly favored by Jolla Chairman Antti Saarnio, would be to create a localized edition of Sailfish to provide Russian replacements for services offered by American businesses.

Shifty Business

The plan to develop an alternative mobile platform might be, in part, a response to economic sanctions resulting from Russia's invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. Another driver might be Russia's growing fears over American surveillance.
Security plays a key role. Apple and SAP reportedly refused to comply with the Russian government's request to provide access to their source codes.
Russia apparently wanted to know whether either company allowed U.S. spy agencies backdoor access to their operating systems, according to reports.
Shifting Russian users to a government-mandated OS would entail numerous challenges. For one, Russian leaders would have enact laws requiring use of the OS and impose penalties for using iOS or Android, suggested Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.
"I doubt the Russian populace will be amused -- but if they don't do this, people won't move to the new platform," he told LinuxInsider.

Competitive Move

One obvious question is how capable Jolla's Sailfish is to compete with Android and iOS.
Technologically, Sailfish looks pretty solid, as it is the brainchild of a group of Nokia engineers who left the company after it dropped development of the MeeGo platform, noted King.
"In other words, Jolla and Sailfish look legit," he said.
However, "from a market standpoint, an OS developed by the Russian government is unlikely to find much of an audience outside the former Soviet bloc countries. It is simply carrying too much baggage in terms of political repression, corruption, cybercrime and other issues to be attractive outside of a small circle of Russian allies, King observed.
The market's response to a Sailfish-based OS will depend on how well its launch is funded. However, a bigger concern will be the security issues surrounding the apps, added Enderle.

Success Factor Questionable

The apps pose two problems: how the app developers will make money; and how the apps will b secured.
Many of the security problem on smartphones are not linked to the OS -- they're in the apps, said Enderle.
"If the new Russian software project succeeds, it will probably, over time, lock non-Russian cellphone makers out of Russia. But I doubt the phones will sell any better than any Russian electronics have sold in the Western or Asian markets," he said.

Off-Target Choice

It is understandable for Russia to want to have a mobile infrastructure that is free of Western commercial interests -- but the choice of Sailfish is curious, said Marble Security CTO Dave Jevans, who serves as chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group.
Sailfish is compatible with Google's Android OS, and it can run Android apps. Sailfish and its components are a mix of open source and closed-source code. You would think Russia would want to audit all the code in its OS, Jevans told LinuxInsider.
"I think the goal of 50 percent market share on Russian mobile devices is extremely aggressive," he added, "and will require a US$200 million-plus investment by Russia to achieve."

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