Tag Archive for: Office 2013

Posts

Using MS Office 2010 or 2013 Puts You at Risk

/in

Office 365 IconsOn October 13, 2020, Office 2010 reached “end of support” (EOS) and Office 2013 lost its connection to the cloud. You may be one of the many small businesses using one of these versions.

It is not uncommon for SMBs to avoid upgrading software. The cause is often a perceived “lack of need” for new features and concerns about cost. Continuing to use software past EOS is risky and will likely stifle productivity.

What This Means

Past EOS, Office 2010 no longer gets security updates and bug fixes. Continuing to use Office 2010 puts you at risk from cyber attacks.

With the loss of cloud connectivity, Office 2013 can no longer access the productivity and collaboration features in Office 365 and Microsoft 365.  More than losing features, your team is missing opportunities to improve the way you work, share, and communicate.

Next Steps

Moving to Office 2019, or to Microsoft 365, upgrades your business to a modern, secure collaboration and productivity suite. Beyond email and file sharing, the suite includes collaboration, conferencing, security, advanced threat protection, and more. Microsoft 365 saves more than 70% over purchasing these solutions separately.

To protect and empower your business, now is the time to act.

 

 

 

Office 2013 – Much Ado About Nothing New

/in

 

Microsoft recently announced and started providing demonstrations of Office 2013.  And as discussed in this Vanity Fair article, it is clear that Microsoft continues to suffer from lack of innovation.  The number of new features is limited, many of the new features are playing “catch up”, and Office 2013 will lock you into a closed ecosystem.

Here is some of what is “new” in Office 2013:

  • Office 2013 will work with touch and stylus devices like tablets and smart-phones.  You will be able to navigate and annotate documents using touch, much like you can today with a mouse in Powerpoint.  (Not really a new feature, but you can use a touch screen instead of a mouse)
  • Excel 2013 has a few new advanced analytic features that will be useful to hedge fund managers and the like.

Here is some of what is in Office 2013 that is new to Office, but catching up with the competition:

  • In Outlook, you can reply in-line (just like Gmail’s conversation view)
  • In Outlook calendar, you can put an address in the location of a meeting and have a link to pull up a map on Bing (just like Google Calendar)
  • You can save a file on your PC and access it on other devices nearly immediately via cloud storage (just like Google Drive and Docs has allowed for years, as have Box, Dropbox, and others)
  • You can have real-time video chat (just like Google Talk), but only if you install a thick client

Here is what you will NOT see with Office 2013:

  • Real-Time Collaboration:  Users are limited to co-authoring — serial editing by one user at a time
  • Office 2013 running on much of your existing equipment:  Office 2013 will only run on Windows 8.  Get ready to pay to upgrade your operating system and your desktops and laptops in order to install Windows 8 and Office 2013
  • Good Support for Macs.  Macs are second class when it comes to MS Office in general, and with the “Windows 8” only message from Microsoft, it is unclear if a full version of Office 2013 will even make it to the Mac platform
  • Smartphone / Tablet Integration:  Granted, you will be able to run Office 2013 (and connect via Office 365) from MS Surface tables and Windows 8 phones — but who is buying those?  Microsoft is hedging on support for iOS (iPhone/iPad) support and has said nothing about Android-based devices.  If you want to run Office 2013 anywhere, be prepared to change your mobile device strategy.

As noted in this analysis of Microsoft’s 2012 10-K filing on ZDnet. Microsoft is clearly using Office 2013 and Windows 8 to create a vertically integrated ecosystem designed to block out other technologies.  The question is, do you want to lock your business into an ecosystem and a company that has failed, and continues to struggle, to innovate?