Microsoft Office 365 from Indiblogger Meet #Cloudblogathon

It is more than two decades now I passed out of college! And during these two decades I have done several kinds of jobs: Teaching, training, selling AMCs for computers, maintain radars at airports, raising husband and children and now finally writing! In fact while doing all these jobs I wasn’t really working instead I was learning. My learning did not stop at college; it seems like an ongoing process never to stop!

What has changed however is the method of learning!

Earlier it used to take ages to collect content, arrange them, share them with group and get approval. Twenty years back, while in the fifth or seventh semester I was struggling to prepare a project on “levitation”. The concept of levitation had fascinated me so much and I was dreaming of its use in Indian Railways for super fast trains. Searching out right books, right content was so difficult. Handling thick and fat encyclopedias day in and day out helped maintain my weight but they didn’t prove any good for grades. There was no WIKIPEDIA then!

When I look back now, I feel I could have done better in the project if more easy and liberal sharing of information was possible. Over the years technology has improved, various products have been launched. Handling information, putting them to use and sharing got easier and easier. Just when I felt about any product that: “this is the ultimate!” a newer version would be launched, which had better features than the previous one.

Microsoft Office 365 is one such product!

When Kalidas wrote Meghdoot (Cloud Messenger) – a Sanskrit poem in which a Yaksha is held captive in central India. He sends his message to his love Alka in Kailas Mountain through cloud – he would have never imagined that centuries later people would modify his concept to store complete office in the cloud (a jargon – remote space).

Specific features of Microsoft Office 365 that I would have missed during college days are:

1. Irrespective of where you are located you can now have easy access to Microsoft Office tools. This is possible with reliable broadband connection document storage. – Yes! I wish there was something like this couple of decades back.

2. SkyDrive and Shared Documents: All documents get stored here and just by right clicking a doc it is possible to shae, I now think the distances I covered to share the material with project mates, whew!

3. When I see the publisher feature, I know I missed something like this terribly during my project completion days. Adding pictures, editing them, sharing them, and being able to save them would have been such an easy procedure. Publishing the final project report would have been a less headache.

More features…

More such features, the more I study about it more I am convinced how beneficial Microsoft Office 365 will be for students today. With newer versions expected to hit market at regular intervals team work is going to be fun and light!