Today, I’m pleased to announce some great news for government customers in the United States.

First, we’re introducing Office 365 for Government.  Office 365 for Government is a new multi-tenant service that stores US government data in a segregated community cloud. Like other Office 365 offerings, it includes productivity and collaboration services including Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Professional Plus.  Customers can contact their Microsoft representative for details and to explore the service.

We also know that security and privacy play a big role in any decision to move to the cloud.  Today, Office 365 supports the most rigorous global and regional standards such as ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II, EU Safe Harbor, EU Model Clauses, the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the US Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and the US Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).  To meet evolving needs, we also plan to support IPv6 in Office 365 for Government by September of this year, and we’re taking steps to soon support Criminal Justice Information Security (CJIS) policies. 

We look forward to working with our government customers on these initiatives in the coming months.

Corporate Vice President

Microsoft Office Division

(Guest blogger Jen Singer is the creator of MommaSaid.net, a Forbes Best of the Web community for moms, and ParentingWithCancer.com.

In this post, I share some ways that I keep my MommaSaid.net empire running from home (and my car, and soccer practice) with the help of Microsoft Office. I let Anderson Cooper in on some when I appeared on his TV show, but time was too short to fit them all in. Check out all the tips here.

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There were few customer reports (http://forums.adobe.com/message/4392653) of icons going missing in files panel after the release of OSX Lion version 10.7.3. It was something which we investigated and worked with Apple to identify the issue and resolve it.

The update of 10.7.4 went live a few weeks ago and it was expected to fix the issue. The engineers have verified it internally and confirmed the fix. In the community also, there are no longer reports of the issue being raised anymore.

It is a good indication that Mac platform users, update to the latest available from Apple. So if you are running into such an issue, you should go ahead and launch Software Update installing the latest ones available in the list.

In this week’s webinar, author and popular blogger Jen Singer (Momma Said.net) joins us to share some of her favorite Office timesavers. Plus, you’ll learn more of them from the Help writers at Office.com who use every day. We start at 9:15 am Pacific Time with a Q&A to follow. Click the link below or go to http://aka.ms/offweb for more information on how to join the series.

Join online meeting

https://join.microsoft.com/meet/dougt/F274WBQZ

There are two ways you can join: Use the free Lync Attendee download to get full video and sound, or use your web browser, and call in to get audio: 888.320.3585, Conference ID: 84172528.

A video of the webinar and all the timesavers mentioned will be posted soon after the webinar is over.

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A lot of you want to know the difference between gridlines and borders. Gridlines help you work in a spreadsheet, and borders help you highlight important information in one for your audience. Gridlines appear automatically so you can see how your data is organized into rows and columns; borders need to be added by you so you can highlight certain cells. This post describes how to work with both of them.

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A well designed database stores data in a normalized format with dates defined in a field so that new data is simply added as additional records. However, people want to see data with dates grouped by columns. This can be done by using a crosstab query. However, when creating reports based on crosstab queries, we need to control the specific column names that are returned by the query. Otherwise, the report cannot refer to the query’s fields.

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Office for Mac 2011 and PCs are working better together. In this week’s webinar we’ll show Office for Mac 2011 including some features that make that possible. We start at 9:15 am Pacific Time with a Q&A to follow. Click the link below or go to http://aka.ms/offweb for more information on how to join the series.

Join online meeting

https://join.microsoft.com/meet/dougt/F274WBQZ

There are two ways you can join: Use the free Lync Attendee download to get full video and sound, or use your web browser, and call in to get audio: 888.320.3585, Conference ID: 84172528.

A video of the webinar will be posted soon at it’s over.

What you will learn at Tuesday’s webinar:

• Outlook now on the Mac
• SkyDrive for the Mac
• What about…

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Now when is that neighborhood planning meeting and will it conflict with the business dinner your boss just asked you to attend? Your calendar is so full that scanning it won’t help. You might not know that the Outlook Calendar has its own Search to help you sort out the dates.

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Issue: I have a list of URLs with their corresponding page views. The URLs include a section of the site and the date when the page was published. I’d like to calculate the total number of page views by site section and the total number of page views by publication date. I want to reduce the time it would take to manually enter this data into new columns. To save time, I plan on using the Text to Columns wizard and Concatenate function rather than a complex formula. Once you learn the steps, it will take you only a few minutes to complete the tasks.

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Microsoft Office 365 is an online business service that was purposely built to optimize the flexibility, responsiveness, and efficiency of the cloud. It was also created with a strong emphasis on data protection and with Microsoft’s three tenets of privacy – responsibility, transparency, and choice – at its core. This week we’ll explore each principle as explained in the Microsoft whitepaper “Privacy in the Public Cloud: The Office 365 Approach” and on the Office 365 Trust Center , which provides…(read more)