Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announced several new and updated applications and services including Microsoft Office for iPad and free Office Mobile apps for iPhone and Android phones. Microsoft released a version of Office for the iPhone last year, but adoption has been tepid as many Office functions don’t work well on smartphone screen sizes.
Microsoft also announced the Enterprise Mobility Suite, a comprehensive set of cloud services to help businesses manage corporate data and services on the devices people use at work and at home. In addition, the company announced the upcoming availability of Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium and enhancements to Windows Intune.
According to Microsoft, Office 365 subscribers can simply add an iPad as one of their chosen devices included in their subscription benefits, and can create and edit documents with Word for iPad, PowerPoint for iPad and Excel for iPad. These apps are available as free downloads from the App Store, enabling people to read and present documents, spreadsheets and presentations. To get the full editing and creation experience, you need an Office 365 subscription. Office 365 subscription plans which include Office for iPad are Office 365 Home, Office 365 Small Business Premium, Office 365 Midsize Business, Office 365 E3 and E4 (Enterprise and Government), Office 365 Education A3 and A4, Office 365 ProPlus, and Office 365 University.
Office 365 is Microsoft’s fastest-growing commercial product ever, with increasing popularity of the subscription service among consumers because of the ability to move between devices, share subscription benefits with household members with an Office 365 Home subscription, and have constant access to important Office documents online. In addition to Office for iPad announced on Thursday, Microsoft also offers other iPad-optimized productivity applications, including OneNote, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics AX, Bing, Lync, Outlook Web Access, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Yammer and Skype.
The new Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) provides comprehensive device, identity and access management with data protection from the cloud. EMS includes Windows Intune, Azure Active Directory Premium and Azure Rights Management Services, to give IT the tools they need to help protect corporate assets and enable people to work on the devices they love.
The new Azure Active Directory Premium delivers cloud-based identity and access management with single sign-on to over 1,000 popular software as a service (SaaS) applications, self-service tools for users, and machine-learning-driven security reporting and anomaly detection. With Azure Active Directory Premium customers can reduce their IT costs and more easily manage their users, groups and SaaS application access.
Microsoft also announced additional enhancements to Windows Intune, including support for the Samsung KNOX platform, Remote to My PC capability for Android and iOS devices, and support for the next update to Windows Phone, continuing Microsoft’s commitment to cloud-first mobile device management across all devices.
Microsoft Office for iPad is now available in 29 languages. The apps require an iPad running iOS 7.0 or later. The new Windows Intune features and Azure Active Directory Premium will be available in April, and the Enterprise Mobility Suite will be available via Microsoft Volume Licensing channels on May 1.
