Wednesday, 25 April 2012

Office 365 for Education to launch

It looks like I can post pictures again from Windows Live Writer, but to do this I have had to change the account that I post messages with. This does not really have any technical impact on the blog itself, but it does indicate that Google’s blogging API has a few bugs in it, and doesn’t always support external blog authoring clients the way that it should. I’m guessing this is because the pictures for some reason aren’t being posted into the Windows Live Writer album for this account, when they should be. I don’t actually mind using a different Blogger account because it keeps the photos out of my main Picasa photo albums site.

Now, I read that Office 365 for Education is being launched during the northern hemisphere summer, which is fairly soon. I don’t know when it will come to New Zealand. The indications at this stage is that we will get more than what is currently being offered by Live@Edu. We will get free of charge, Office Web Apps and a Sharepoint offering. The relevance of Sharepoint is that hopefully with Office Web Apps integrated into it, it will allow us to have a central cloud-hosted document store so that our users can view and edit documents from anywhere.
Win8
You’ve already seen this picture which is included here for testing purposes. What will I use Windows 8 for? Much the same as my phone probably. How much use will this be? Well a fairly good 3G plan would be needed to get the best from it, but this will soon add up and become expensive. This is the real question for most of us. Can we connect it to wifi and save a lot of money on the 3G, do we really need the full 3G capability which is quite expensive? The cheapest I can see on Vodafone is Broadband Mini which is $20 per month for 512 MB, or $10 per month with an existing phone plan. There are a lot of useful things you could do with that and hopefully it is not going to use up all that bandwidth at a high cost.