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Today’s business leaders are looking for ways to unleash their employees’ potential for greater impact, freed from limitations imposed by time and place. That’s one of the reasons that businesses are embracing the cloud to accelerate business performance while providing new, flexible ways for employees to collaborate and securely access data and documents. Of course they’ve been doing this for some time, but often in a piecemeal fashion. One department selects a line of business app, another signs up for some compute cycles, and a third adds some productivity tools. But the era of making isolated, single-solution decisions is rapidly coming to a close. Smart businesses are now choosing partners that have a holistic, comprehensive and connected set of cloud offerings and in doing so, creating a “data culture” in their organization.

File sync and share solutions represent key capabilities that keep people on the same page and responsive. There are several solutions offered, many from companies that have sprung up to focus exclusively on this market. Some have come from the consumer world and are new to the enterprise software market and the requirements around delivering enterprise-grade cloud services. Others are focused on the enterprise, but only as a point solution. Few are prepared to meet the evolving needs of businesses looking for a holistic and comprehensive approach to meeting the full needs of their employees as they live a cloud first, mobile first workstyle.

We believe Microsoft offers the most complete solution for businesses looking to maximize their employees’ ability to create, collaborate, analyze and act – and sharing, storing and syncing are foundational to that.

OneDrive for Business has been part of Office 365 for some time, but earlier this month we announced a new standalone offer for OneDrive for Business, making it even easier for our business customers to get the file sync and share service that’s designed to meet the anywhere access, storage, scale, data security and compliance requirements organizations need.  OneDrive for Business is unique because it offers the flexibility of a reliable and secure standalone service, but is also a tightly integrated Office 365 service, offering enterprise-class productivity.

Today we’re announcing the following:

  • First, we will be increasing OneDrive for Business storage from 25GB to 1TB per user.
  • Second, all Office 365 ProPlus customers will get 1TB of OneDrive for Business storage per user as part of their Office 365 ProPlus subscription.
  • Third, we’ll help organizations migrate data to OneDrive for Business

If you don’t currently subscribe to OneDrive for Business or have it as part of your Office 365 subscription you can take advantage of attractive promotional pricing to get started, at a fraction of the cost of alternatives. We have a robust roadmap which we discussed at SharePoint Conference last month. In addition, our roadmap includes the powerful search and discovery solution, codenamed Oslo and the Office Graph, new document conversations powered by Yammer, and more that will enable people to engage with their OneDrive for Business content in new and interesting ways.

As important as robust file sync/share is, we believe it’s only useful if it’s part of a holistic and comprehensive solution for team-based productivity and collaboration.  That’s why we believe organizations should expect more from their solutions. Here are 5 ways we deliver on that:

  1. Native integration with Office documents: Enables people to discover content and collaborate with others in real time with efficient synchronization of changes and real-time co-authoring using Office Online.
  2. Connected to what you need, when you need it: As cloud services like Office 365 get smarter and more personalized with Office Graph, OneDrive for Business becomes part of a connected productivity solution where content is discoverable, sharable and personalized for individual users, helping to increase personal and organizational responsiveness.
  3. A trusted service: OneDrive for Business provides enterprise content management, compliance and admin controls, financially backed by the industry-leading Office 365 Service Level Agreement. We’ve made investments in manageability, security, auditing and information protection including rights management, data loss prevention, auditing, eDiscovery, legal holds, etc. and more that can work for OneDrive for business but also across SharePoint and Exchange.
  4. Deep investment in certifications and infrastructure: We’ve invested heavily already in areas that are important for doing business in major vertical industries and geographies, such as FISMA, the EU Model Clauses, CJIS and more, many of which are detailed on our Trust Center.  Microsoft has industry-leading, cloud reliability and security and has made a massive investment in physical datacenters around the world, enabling us to deliver high availability and robust disaster recovery capabilities.
  5. Scale through partners: Our 400,000 partners around the world can help customers get up and running quickly with OneDrive for Business as a standalone solution or with Office 365.

Microsoft is committed to delivering the very best file sync and share solution as part of our commitment to creating the world’s most compelling cloud-first, mobile-first productivity experiences on the planet – beloved by end users and IT professionals, and delivered by hundreds of thousands of partners around the world.

We’re excited about recent new features, partnerships, customer wins and customer events that have inspired many great conversations with you about ever-growing interest in the future of productivity and momentum for Office 365 which is now on a $2.5 billion annual run rate. We’ve shipped nearly a hundred updates over the past 12 months including Office for iPad, new OneNote for Mac and iPad, Power BI and Office Online; Office 365 operated by 21 Vianet has launched in China, and we shared our vision for the new ways people will work together leveraging personalization, enterprise search and machine learning, with Office Graph and Oslo. We’ve added new partners like GoDaddy and Docusign, and announced several new Office 365 customers across industries and the public sector. There’s much more to come!

The cloud is about breaking down walls between people and information. Not building a new set of islands in the sky. Make sure you bet on a file sync and share solution that helps you embrace that.  For more information visit OneDrive for Business.

Source: http://blogs.office.com/2014/04/28/thinking-outside-the-box/

Category: News; Office 365
Published: 4/28/2014 19:19
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