Office Lens - Microsoft's mobile scanner

Office Lens works like a scanner with your mobile phone. It enhances pictures taken through your cell phone camera. You can convert documents, notes, expense bills to neat scanned copies and save them to One Note.


Obviously, there are a lot of available software that can perform the same job for free and can be used on multiple devices. However, the main appeal for Lens is its integration with Office applications.


Pictures from Lens are directly saved to One Note and using Office Online we can use them on multiple devices (actually any device with an internet connection). And since Microsoft Office is very much part of our daily lives it becomes easy to use the data.


Examples -
1. Whiteboard data during meetings can be easily re-used to create presentations
2. Restaurant bills can be easily converted to create expense claims.
3. Hard copies of multiple documents can be collected together and can be searched through for specific keywords using OCR.


But these are just a few of the examples that I could think of.


Lastly, Lens is now available on iDevices and hopefully will come up in PlayStore soon.


For more details - http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/office-lens-a-onenote-scanner-for-your-pocket/

Microsoft Office on iOS and Android

Microsoft Office Products are available in the App Store and Play Store!


Though Office Online does provide most office products (for home usage) to users online it is good to have the products on your device for offline usage.


This combined with the new Nokia X series phones, which operate on Android based systems shows that new Microsoft strategy to win back the user base it is losing to these systems.


You can find more information about the office products at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile

Hope we get Lync on Android soon!