Free Office apps to mobile users a teachable moment for CIOs

The big news this week is that Microsoft has decided to change up its software strategy. The software giant is  now offering free Office apps for iPhone and Android users and has even made a deal with Dropbox so that Office users can access the storage service with their mobile device.

If the king of enterprise software is changing up its software strategy should CIOs be doing the same? That’s the question SearchCIO’s Fran Sales explores in this week’s Searchlight News Roundup.

She argues that Microsoft’s move is reason enough to think long and hard about  BYOA (bring your own application) — the inexorable push by employees to use whatever apps they feel they need to get their jobs done, corporate-sanctioned or not.

Of course, embracing BYOA can be tricky. Sales’ column provides tips from O’Sullivan and Blue Hill Research’s Chief Research Officer Hyoun Park to help you get started.

In other news this week, Workday is incorporating big data analytics into its products, Facebook placed an “I’m a Voter” button at the top of their page this week (to sway the elections perhaps?), Google is playing catch-up with amazon (announcing that they are adapting their cloud services to allow customers to set them up more quickly), and more in this week’s Searchlight.