This week has seen three bits of news from Microsoft about more apps and features coming our way. Let’s have a look at what’s supposedly in store; Flow, Office Now and OneClip. Two could be interesting and useful, the other will send chills up the spine of anyone with a shred of interest in their privacy.
It’s not clear if these are true ‘leaks’ from Microsoft or deliberately placed stories from their PR machine. There’s no release dates for any of these products.
Flow
Flow was discovered by WalkingCat and an image from a private Microsoft web page shared on Twitter. At first look, its seems like yet another Instant Messaging program to go with Skype, Skype for Business/Lync and Skype Qik (and that’s from Microsoft alone).
Introducing Flow by Outlook for iPhone
A great way to have rapid email conversations on your phone with the people who are important to you.
Use Flow with anyone, it’s email. Reach anyone with an email address and all conversations for you and others are also in Outlook. Together, you can use Flow and Outlook interchangeably to participate in the same conversations.
Fast, Fluid, Natural Conversations. No subject lines, salutations or signatures. Flow is designed for fast, light-weight conversations in real-time.
Focus on what’s important. Only conversations started in Flow and their replies show up in Flow, not your whole Inbox. Focus on your most important person-to-person conversations without the noise.
Microsoft is saying nothing officially. The fact that it is based around Outlook might suggest that Flow requires or works best with Exchange Server hosting.
Office Now
Apparently, this is a Bill Gates pet project. A ‘personal agent’ works with your online store of information from calendar and contacts to present time relevant information like the time to your next meeting, traffic details, maps etc.
Source: NeoWin
If this seems familiar, that’s because you’ve seen Google Now. That’s a similar thing even down to use of the term ‘cards’. But Microsoft’s Office Now goes further.
Office Now will be able to alert you to last minute changes in a meeting or event. You can also setup new appointments.
There’s an ‘At a glance’ summary of the day … which brings back memories of Outlook Today which is one of those heavily hyped but now forgotten Microsoft promises. Highlights is similar with a quick look at the day ahead; time spent at events, first event start and last event end.
Naturally, all this works from your data on Microsoft Exchange Server/ Office 365 hosting but the Office Now app will be available for Apple, Android and Windows devices.
Office Now news came from WalkingCat with a lot more detail via NeoWin.
OneClip
This last one is hard to believe. Hard to believe that Microsoft is so deaf to customer concerns about privacy that they are making yet another way for your personal and business information to be ‘hoovered up’ and saved online.
“A cross device, secure, intelligent clipboard in the cloud”
OneClip is a shared clipboard across all your connected devices. You’ll be able to copy information from one machine (presumably with a shortcut like Ctrl + C) and it’ll appear on the other connected devices (and presumably Microsoft’s servers).
Usually when cloud providers talk about ‘secure’ they mean the links between devices and their servers. The data isn’t secure or very private on the cloud servers themselves.
It would be a handy thing to have, especially since most of us have more than one computer. But the cloud store that it’s based upon needs to be a lot more private than OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox are now.
“Why didn’t anyone think of this earlier?”
We hate to break this to Microsoft, but many people have not only thought about shared clipboards – they’ve done it. A Google/Bing search for ‘shared clipboard’ will burst Microsoft’s ego bubble. It’s not even new to Microsoft. The Live Mesh team (of fond memory) proposed exactly the same thing about five years ago.
Most of those services work only with a local network but we did see Clipbrd for Android and Chrome browser.
Clipbrd says that their data is encrypted end-to-end so no-one ‘including NSA or even the Clipbrd staff’ can see the contents. That’s the design goal Microsoft should be aiming for with OneClip.
