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Weekly #WhyMSFT Round-Up 10/28/2011

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Each week, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Enjoy this week’s selections.p>

Top Hotel Group Goes 365 The company studied various cloud computing services on the market and decided to deploy Microsoft's Office 365. "The Microsoft [product] won out because it offers a full package of benefits, including robust security, full integration, collaboration and flexibility to move at our own pace," said Izaks. The decision was eased by the company's experience with Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).

RIM Announces BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365
RIM has announced their plan to offer BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365. This new RIM-hosted online service is geared toward midsized businesses and the enterprise market. The service allows organizations to manage their own BlackBerry deployments in the cloud.

Microsoft Upgrades CRM with Social Networking, Ties to Office 365 Customers using both CRM Online and the Office 365 e-mail and productivity suite will now have a common administration, billing, and provisioning platform, Microsoft said. Additionally, Dynamics CRM now has social features including activity feeds that sound much like Facebook posts, described by Microsoft as “Configurable, real-time notifications on important relationships and significant business events via a blended view of micro-blog posts and interactions for a person, customer or sales opportunity.”

Dynamics CRM Online Grows with New Social and Cloud Features
Available for Dynamics CRM Online, but also for on-premises and partner-hosted deployments, the November 2011 service refresh provides a collection of enhancements to existing functionality, which existing customers will be able to take advantage of at no extra cost. According to the software giant, companies leveraging both Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365 have a unified administration, billing and provisioning platform at their disposal.

Microsoft Hopes Skype Will Continue Business Software's Success
Microsoft said that its SharePoint, Lync, and Exchange revenue collectively grew over ten percent in revenue, with Lync revenue itself growing over 25 percent. Microsoft's business division pulled in the most revenue of all its business units at $5.62 billion, up 8 percent over 2010. Operating income also increased from $3.47 billion to $3.66 billion.

Microsoft's Cloud Push Begins to Pay Off
Enterprise sales energized the company, and the performance of cloud-based offerings exceeded its expectations. "Microsoft is no doubt going to continue to aggressively invest in the cloud, and [Office] 365 is a core tenet in that," said Oppenheimer's Brad Rebeck.

Power to the SME
Cloud technology gives smaller enterprises access to tools they could not have afforded otherwise, industry players agreed. This means the barrier to entry becomes much lower, and the quality of services that smaller businesses are able to provide is increased.

If you have a blog post or article you want to see in next week’s round-up, tweet a link to us at @whymicrosoft or post it in the comments below.

 

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