Tony Bradley takes a look at Microsoft’s new low-cost option for Office 365, which is aimed at individual users.  Microsoft is shaking things up a bit in the Office 365 lineup. Office 365 Home Premium is a tremendous value, but it’s designed and priced for a family to use. Starting April 1, Microsoft isintroducing Office 365 Personal for individual users who don’t need Office on five different PCs. For $70 per year (or $7 per month), Office 365 Personal will allow a customer to install and use Microsoft Office on one…

Employees who used to burn the midnight oil at the office now get to do so from the comforts of home, thanks to the proliferation of personal laptops, tablets and smartphones. Getting files to appear on and sync with multiple devices can be challenging, but a little bit of advanced planning can go a long way. Working late into the night in your cubicle to meet a deadline is an uncommon scenario these days. Most employees can use a business-issued laptop or a home PC to complete work assignments from…

I don’t think it comes as any shock that Federal IT is at a crossroads – straining to keep up with budget cuts, substantial data growth, and user demands.  With high expectations for application development and deployment, users are forced to go outside of traditional IT versus working with their centralized IT function – causing significant inefficiencies government-wide. It’s time for an IT shift – away from a manual IT-centric delivery model (fitting services into a one-size-fits-all box), to an IT-as-a-Service model (identifying enterprise needs and modeling IT to meet…

It’s a good thing I didn’t know exactly how dangerous a trip I was embarking on, because when I left home in October 2013 to fly to Sudan, I was scared enough. What I had committed to was, quite frankly, the most “impossible” thing I’d ever tried to accomplish. Three months earlier, over dinner, I’d learned about a doctor in Sudan’s Nuba mountains, Dr. Tom Catena, who was treating thousands of people — many of them children — who’d had limbs blown off in the Sudanese government’s bombing raids. By coincidence,…

When we look back on 2014 in IT, there are going to be a couple of things that dominate our thinking and my guess is it won’t be BYOD or Big Data. In reality, a much more mundane yet critical event will be at the forefront. That is the end of extended support status for key workhorse applications Windows XP, Exchange 2003 and Windows Server 2003.  I’ve written before about the level of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP and the bottom line is, if you haven’t started that data migration,…

New Demands Require a Shift in Business Processes What an exciting time to be in the tech industry.  We are at the beginning of a major transition to the Mobile-Cloud era.  Trends like bring your own device (BYOD), access anywhere, virtualization, and machine-to-machine connections have given way to a new breed of applications.  We estimate that approximately 50 billion devices will be connected by 2020. In 2010 alone, more than 350, 000 applications were developed with more than three million downloads.  A 44-fold increase in data creation is predicted from…