Windows Phone news: SkyDrive, Office 365, Lync, WHS, and Nokia Services

We told you this weekend about some “unofficial” news about Windows Phone coming from WPDevPodcast, and now a post on the Windows Phone Blog has made some of of that news official.

While we should be hearing a lot more about Windows Phone from a special press event slated to take place in New York on May 24th, Microsoft is revealing a few business oriented tidbits now from Tech Ed.  These include the ability to share and save Office Documents through Office 365 and Windows Live SkyDrive, a new announcement about Lync (enterprise level IM/conferencing/VoIP) integration,  and a nice list of new features, including:

  • Pinnable email folders: Pin an email folder to the start screen!
  • Conversation view in email
  • Server search: search for emails even if they’re not on your phone (but are on Exchange Server, etc)
  • Lync: a free app from Windows Phone Marketplace
  • Complex (alpha-numeric) password support
  • Information Rights Management security for emails and Office documents
  • support for hidden WiFi networks

threaded-convo-wp7

In some other news, Paul Thurrott recently tweeted that Windows Home Server 2011 will be getting some Windows Phone love:

MS says Windows Phone integration add-in for WHS 2011, SBS 2011 Essentials and Storage Server 2011 Essentials will be available in 3-4 weeks

about 20 hours ago via DestroyTwitterReplyRetweetFavorite
@thurrott

Paul Thurrott

Nokia_logoAnd then just one more thing: we wrote yesterday about what the Nokia/Microsoft partnership may mean for Bing Maps, and now today Engadget picked up on a story from last week that Nokia is rebranding their services from “Ovi” to simply “Nokia”.  A blog post dated May 16th goes into detail about the change, noting that it is “solely a name-changing exercise” which makes sense at least here in the United States where the Nokia brand is far stronger than Ovi.



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