Microsoft's New Windows 365 Will Take PCs to the Cloud
Microsoft's New Windows 365 Will Take PCs to the Cloud
"With Windows 365, we’re creating a new category: the Cloud PC," Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, said in. "Just like applications were brought to the cloud with SaaS, we are now bringing the operating system to the cloud, providing organizations with greater flexibility and a secure way to empower their workforce to be more productive and connected, regardless of location.
Over the last year, Microsoft systems have been plagued with security issues ranging from the to the recent vulnerability, which presented.
Still, the company promises strong security in Microsoft 365 through cloud-based information and data storage based on Zero Trust principles, along with more flexibility in where they can work, with an instant on-boot into what the company describes as their "personal cloud PC."
The new and improved UI For Microsoft Office 365 is finally available to Office Insiders. While nice, it doesn’t yet seem to reflect the company’s focus on simplicity and ease of use.
Microsoft has been updating the user interface (UI) for its Office 365 suite of tools since last year. Following the, the company seems to have doubled down on the efforts to revamp the look and feel of the applications.
This past week, the first update, including several new UI changes for Office 365, such as more rounded corners on the app’s ribbon, easier access to sharing, and other key features. After playing around with the new UI for a few days, I'm happy to say it does make navigation a little simpler to work with while also making the ribbon easier on the eyes.
In June of last year, Jon Friedman, corporate vice president of design and research at Microsoft, revealed a look at the. In that original sneak peek, Friedman touched on Microsoft’s plans to hone in on focus and simplicity. Additionally, Friedman’s post also seemed to hint at removing the ribbon—the user interface featured at the top of Word and other Office products.
The current iteration that Microsoft is showcasing to Office Insiders pulls from that original reveal, though it looks like the company isn’t in a hurry to replace the ribbon completely.
Instead, the UI update acts as a redecoration of the ribbon, itself. The colors and words on the ribbon are cleaner and crisper, making it easier to read. The entire app feels bouncier and more bubbly, similar to the look that other Windows 11 UI features heavily.
Ultimately, what is available so far doesn’t feel like it’s any easier or more difficult to use than previous iterations of the Office 365 UI. However, it is nice to see Microsoft making some changes to the UI, which has fundamentally stayed the same for several years.
All the usual categories you’d expect can be found inside of the new UI just as easily as before, so it shouldn’t be that difficult for users to make the switch whenever Microsoft pushes it out to the public.
Despite a heavy emphasis on focus and simplicity, the current UI changes don’t seem to hit those markers, and it would be nice to see programs like Excel getting better support to help users dive into it.
If Microsoft can nail that feeling of simplicity and make Office even easier to get up and running, it could start to push back against the competition from other word processors like Google Docs, especially when the online version of Office starts to receive these updates.
How much that will change in the future or how quickly it will change is still unclear. What we can say, for now, is that the UI changes don’t usher in an entirely new feel for the Office suite, and that isn’t a bad thing.
The company estimates that it will probably take at least a year or two to roll out all the planned changes for Office 365. This means users could be waiting a while before we start to see any background updates to the core systems and features of the tool suite.
Ultimately, Office 365 still feels like the same suite of tools we’ve been using for years now. There’s some comfort in that familiarity, but I can’t help but hope that Microsoft continues to push the tools forward and offer deeper changes to how we use them.
Office and iWork are good productivity suites that offer a variety of apps. Both offer fully featured word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software. iWork is better if you create lots of charts, while Office creates splashier documents and presentations. iWork is free, which makes it an attractive choice for iOS owners.
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