Microsoft news – Page 102

Posted on July 1, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Skilling for the future: new investments in Microsoft Learn

At Microsoft, we’re building a “learn it all” culture where we aim to embrace curiosity, focus on being resourceful, and take our learnings and apply them for future success.

In that light, learning is more important than ever, and our goal is to help make technical learning even more accessible to everyone who wants to acquire a new skill, chase a new career path, and stay up-to-date on the latest technological advances. As we announced yesterday, Microsoft and LinkedIn are making a broad commitment to help students, job seekers and employees gain the skills they need to be successful in today’s digital-first economy.

Microsoft Learn is an integral part of our skilling experience – it’s a free online learning platform that combines short step-by-step trainings, browser-based interactive coding and scripting environments, and task-based achievements to help learners advance their technical skills and prepare for certifications. From Azure to Microsoft 365 and Power Platform to Dynamics 365 and more, we offer training that can help everyone learn – from students to job seekers to professionals. Learners and organizations can personalize their experience by building and sharing customized training collections and can use bookmarks to easily find and return to content. Throughout the learning journey, learners can earn points, levels, and unlock badges, and can easily share their progress with colleagues and on social media.

With more than 4 million learners registering in the less than two years since its launch, we’ve been humbled and inspired to see the adoption and engagement from the community. And in the last few months, as people have transitioned to work from home, we’ve seen a spike in Microsoft Learn usage, with users engaging with 192% more learning modules from January through May of this year compared to last year.

We’re continuing to invest in the Microsoft Learn platform, where learners will find:

More than 225 learning paths.Collections of modules are organized around specific roles and technologies.
More than 1,000 modules. The building blocks of the Microsoft Learn experience, a module is a course that contains videos, labs and articles.
Role-based learning for 17 roles. For example, software developer, AI engineer, data scientist and solutions architect.
Training aligned to 35 Microsoft certifications. Earning certifications shows you are keeping pace with today’s technical roles and requirements. Certification exams can be taken online, and users can easily share their certifications on their LinkedIn profile. Later this year, we will offer discounted certification exams for those impacted by COVID-19.
More than 160 instructor-led training courses. Access deep technical training, taught by Microsoft-certified trainers, bringing you and your team customizable learning solutions.
Localized in up to 23 languages. Learning paths are supported in up to 23 languages depending on the topic.

Recently introduced Microsoft Learn features include:

Learn TV: Learn TV streams original live and pre-recorded content daily from Microsoft and the community. Meet our engineers through live training, casual conversations, event coverage and hackathons, all on Learn TV.
Cloud Skills Challenge: A new way to build your cloud skills with easy, self-paced learning that lets you complete modules in a team environment and compete for prizes.
Microsoft Q&A: Relevant and timely answers to technical problems from a community of experts and Microsoft engineers. Microsoft Q&A is now the single question-and-answer destination for all Azure products and services.
Microsoft Learn Catalog API: Integrate Microsoft Learn into your company’s own experiences. Now in preview, the Catalog API enables developers to integrate Learn content and trainings into their existing applications and learning management systems, and provides organizational reporting capabilities.
Microsoft Learn for Students and Educators: We launched a new collection of curated content for students, including learning paths from leading universities and content to inspire and challenge students to build with social impact and responsibility in mind. For educators, we’ve made it easy to access Microsoft ready-to-teach curriculum and teaching materials aligned to industry-recognized Microsoft certifications. These certifications augment a student’s existing degree path and validate the skills needed to be successful across a variety of technical careers.
Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors: Microsoft Learn is where everyone comes to learn, and the Learn Student Ambassadors are everywhere helping students learn. This new program brings together a global group of campus leaders to help their peers learn things they care about most, from social issues to new technologies. Ambassadors get a first look at new Microsoft technologies, gain leadership skills, and receive mentoring from professionals in the industry, and their peers benefit from their knowledge, which can now be shared via the Microsoft Learn platform.

Microsoft Learn complements LinkedIn Learning’s online educational platform of over 16,000 courses taught by industry-leading experts that helps people discover and develop business, technology-related, and creative skills. Microsoft Learn and LinkedIn Learning will be incorporated into the new learning app in Microsoft Teams, previewing later this year. The new app will make learning a natural part of an employee’s job, leveraging the tools they already use every day at work.

As a lifelong learner myself, I’m excited we’re able to offer such a robust set of free resources for everyone who wants to learn. If you don’t have a Learn account, I encourage you to check it out. It’s a great time to polish your skills and learn something new in a fun way.

Learn more about Microsoft’s commitment to helping 25 million people acquire new digital skills needed for the COVID-19 economy, and hear Brad Smith talk about why it’s important.

Posted on July 1, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft and the city of Atlanta lead coalition of partners to close the digital skills gap and build a more inclusive workforce

ATLANTA — July 1, 2020 — On Wednesday, Microsoft Corp. announced “Accelerate,” a new program designed to address economic recovery through both skilling underserved communities and re-skilling the many Americans impacted by COVID-19. Accelerate: Atlanta is the first of many city-focused digital skills and employment partnerships designed to upskill and increase employability.

Accelerate: Atlanta is the first U.S. implementation of Microsoft’s global skills initiative, an ambitious plan to help 25 million people worldwide acquire new digital skills by the end of the year. The announcement supports the needs of Atlantans impacted by the global pandemic and racial inequities in access to education. With support of the mayor’s office and additional public and private partnerships, the initiative aims to accelerate economic recovery from the impact of COVID-19, address the needs of people of underserved communities who require digital skills to stay competitive, and empower them to seize the employment opportunities of the future. Expanding access to digital skills is a critical first step in improving employability to help build local economic recovery, especially for the people hardest hit by job losses.

Accelerate: Atlanta brings together civic, learning and corporate partners to provide skills across the spectrum of digital proficiency to build a more inclusive workforce for all.

Empower underserved communities to close the digital divide in the growing workforce.
Provide digital skills to promote economic uplift for Atlanta’s populations with the highest susceptibility to automation and COVID-19 impact.
Target the market with existing digital fluency to ensure that they can keep up with the advances in AI and machine learning.

Partners in the coalition include:

Civic partners: The Office of the Mayor of Atlanta and Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce
Learning partners: General Assembly, OpenClassrooms and TechBridge
Corporate partners: Accenture and others to be announced soon

Microsoft is backing the effort with over $1 million in investments to assist those who need it most, including people with lower income, people with lower educational attainment and racial/ethnic minorities. Atlanta-based nonprofit organizations led by and serving Black/African American communities will be among the 50 such organizations across the United States receiving cash grants to aid in this skills initiative.

“Through Accelerate: Atlanta, Microsoft and its partners will help close the digital divide and ensure there is a place for everyone in our shared future,” said Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. “The road to economic recovery must begin with pathways to opportunity that are inclusionary and accessible to all. This is more than an initiative — this is an investment in underserved and underrepresented communities that will equip our residents with skills to compete in a modern workforce, while at the same time grow our middle class.”

“Atlanta is the first U.S. city in our ambitious national investment plan to support our country’s economic recovery,” said Kate Johnson, president of Microsoft U.S. “We’re delighted that we can bring the breadth of the Microsoft technology ecosystem in partnership with the mayor to provide communities in Atlanta with the digital skills needed for a more equitable, prosperous future.”

“We’re committed to equipping more communities with the digital skills needed to come back from this crisis even stronger through our work with Microsoft,” said Jake Schwartz, CEO and co-founder at General Assembly. “We’ve been proud to be a part of Atlanta’s thriving tech, startup and innovation ecosystem for years, and are thrilled to continue our investment in the community while advancing this important national partnership with the launch of Accelerate: Atlanta.”

“Microsoft shares our commitment to serving underrepresented communities with equity, access and opportunity. We are thrilled to align our mission of ‘breaking the cycle of generational poverty through the innovative use of technology’ with Microsoft and the Atlanta community to close the digital divide, creating real opportunities for those who need it most,” said Nicole Armstrong, CEO of TechBridge.

“I applaud Microsoft and the many partners working to make Accelerate: Atlanta a success. Our region is uniquely situated to benefit from this initiative through our dense innovation community coupled with the presence of noted higher education institutions training our brightest minds,” said Metro Atlanta Chamber President and CEO Katie Kirkpatrick. “I am excited to see the progress as Accelerate: Atlanta closes the digital divide and equips the next generation with the in-demand skills needed to succeed.”

“Accenture is committed to advancing equality for all people all the time, and to doing more to drive sustained change in our communities,” said Jimmy Etheredge, Accenture’s CEO for North America. “We are pleased to join Microsoft and our coalition partners in Atlanta to equip more of our citizens with the digital skills they need to be prepared for the jobs of the future — and we look forward to extending the impact of this initiative across the United States.”

More information can be found at https://aka.ms/AccelerateAtlanta.

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

For more information, press only:

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications, (425) 638-7777, rrt@we-worldwide.com

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.

Posted on July 1, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

How 3 Windows Insiders combined forces at Microsoft Hackathon to tackle illegal timber trading

What do a forester, a developer, and a software architect have in common? A passion for problem-solving and, as it turns out, stopping illegal timber trade. Antonio de Marco, James Mundy, and Mauro Petrini came together from different corners of the world to participate in the 2019 Microsoft Hackathon. Their objective was protecting biodiversity through sustainable forestry by solving one piece of the complex puzzle: the real-time identification of imported or exported timber species, verified against an endangered species database using a mobile app. As we look forward to an all new virtual experience for Hackathon 2020 this summer, we are spotlighting this team’s achievements and the spirit of Windows Insiders at Hackathon.

Imagine a customs officer inspecting shipments of timber where, in some cases, the wood origin is not clearly noted on the accompanying documentation. TimberAI, the project which Antonio, James, and Mauro collaborated on would help the custom’s officer identify if the species is endangered or commercial with the snap of a photo using Microsoft Cognitive Services and Azure. The app can reduce instances of illegal timber being traded but also protect critical forests and habitats as a tool for officials to enforce more sustainable, legal logging.

TimberAI team at Hackathon 2019 – James Mundy, Mauro Petrini, Antonio de Marco. Photo Credit: Windows Insider Program

Windows Insiders bring fresh perspectives to Hackathon

The three team members shared something else in common—all are Windows Insiders. Spanning the globe with millions of participants, the Windows Insider Program is a free program that enlists the help of consumers to improve Windows. One of the largest fan programs at Microsoft, Insiders can choose when and which Windows 10 Insider Preview Builds they would like to install on their devices, and after trying it out, provide valuable feedback directly to Windows engineers.

Another benefit of becoming a Windows Insider is the opportunity to win exclusive experiences to Microsoft events like Microsoft Build or, in this case, the company’s global Hackathon produced by the Microsoft Garage.

After reviewing hundreds of submissions to the Windows Insiders Hack at Microsoft contest, ten Insiders were chosen to come to Redmond to participate in the 2019 Hackathon last July. “We try to align our offerings with what our Insiders tell us they value most, like talking to the teams that build the products they love and early access to the latest technology,” said Michelle Paison, a program manager who oversees the contests and giveaways for WIP. “It’s definitely a cool experience, getting to be on the inside of what’s traditionally an internal event and work on hackathon projects with Microsoft employees.”

Windows Insiders who participated in Hackathon 2019: Stefan Malter, Mark Lunney, Michelle Spaul, Josh Cardif, Clint-Roy Mukarakate, Dr. Robert de Graaft, James Mundy, Dan Flores, Mauro Petrini, Antonio de Marco. Photo Credit: Windows Insider Program

A large part of what makes a hackathon project successful is having teammates who are willing to solve problems in new ways. Insiders expressed an openness to collaborate with other talented individuals, and most contest entrants had an entrepreneurial spirit, taking initiative in their job or for a cause they were passionate about. Insiders brought a wide range of skills and represented global perspectives from countries like Kenya, Argentina, and Germany.

Meet the team and the TimberAI potential on a global scale

“It was nice to put my skills to good use to create a solution that might, in the future, make a discernable difference towards preserving trees — one of our best weapons against rising CO2 levels,” said James. “I was struck by the idea and the unique product we could build, and also how feasible it was that we could lean on Azure Cognitive Services and Antonio’s image library to build a prototype in just a few days.” The team created a working prototype using Xamarin to build the mobile app front-end with Microsoft Cognitive Services to recognize and classify wood image samples.

James is a Freelance Software Developer and Product Builder based in London. Teammate Mauro works as a Software Architect for a financial company in Argentina. In addition to his day job, Mauro volunteers with a nonprofit that makes prosthetic hands.

Leading the project is Antonio, who brought the concept behind TimberAI to the Hackathon and project manages the app development. Antonio is a forestry engineer currently collaborating with the Wood and Science Technology Laboratory from the Forest and Natural Environment Engineering School at the Technical University of Madrid. The idea for an app started in the Wood and Science Technology Lab with Antonio and Professor Luis García Esteban, who is also the TimberAI project Resource Manager.

“Illegal timber trading is one of the biggest factors leading to the loss of global biodiversity. With more sustainable legal logging, we would have greater biodiversity and greater forest cover, which helps remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reduce the impact of climate change.” – Antonio de Marco

Antonio explained, “This project acts as a straight knowledge-tunnel between some of the most renowned wood technology investigators and the daily users at customs, who need powerful but simple tools to work with. Illegal timber trading is one of the biggest factors leading to the loss of global biodiversity. With more sustainable legal logging, we would have greater biodiversity and greater forest cover, which helps remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reduce the impact of climate change.”

According to Antonio, the world cuts around 4,000 million cubic meters of wood annually, which is roughly the equivalent of cutting about 30 soccer fields per minute for a year. It’s estimated that about 10-30 percent of all the wood is illegally logged. “We are losing species at an extinction rate not known in the geological record of the Earth,” said Antonio. Like others, he is driven to do what he can with the tools and resources he has to create a more sustainable future with the biodiversity that’s crucial in a thriving, healthy ecosystem.

Because of its geographical location, Spain is a hub of international commerce with large amounts of items, including timber, being funneled through its ports and redistributed to Europe, Asia, and even America. “This is why Spain must play a very important role in order to put a first barrier to the illegal traffic of those species of wood,” said Antonio. Outside of his work with the university, Antonio also runs a startup that improves air quality of indoor spaces. His expertise in forestry helped the team of three achieve a working prototype.

Screenshots of the TimberAI MVP. Photo Credit: Antonio de Marco

Winning the Sustainability Challenge

“Besides getting to work with two fantastic people, James and Mauro, the biggest takeaway for me was being able to link my forestry engineer profession to my techie passion. There is nothing better than enjoying yourself while working on something that could possibly have a positive impact on a lot of people,” said Antonio.

Each year for Hackathon, there are challenges issued by executive leadership focused on areas important to their business which teams can choose to hack on. After the Hackathon finished, Antonio, James, and Mauro received news their project was selected as the top project in the Sustainability Challenge. The company has long been a proponent of sustainability, but the 2019 Hackathon marked the first year a Sustainability Challenge was issued by Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer, Brad Smith, with a goal to fuel innovation and accelerate environmental sustainability across the company and around the globe.

“What they were able to accomplish is truly remarkable and a testament to their intelligence and innovation,” said Michelle. “There are just so many good ideas that exist within the Windows Insider community, with the improvements they suggest for Windows 10 daily, and that extends into different issues outside as well.”

AI for Earth and the path forward

While unrelated to the Hackathon, Antonio and Luis were also awarded an AI for Earth grant for the work they’ve continued to do at the Technical University of Madrid and working with the government of Spain.

“Customs agents have to make quick decisions about thousands of shipments every day, and it’s not feasible for them to be experts in every material they have to inspect. AI systems like TimberAI offload that niche, ever-changing expertise to technology,” said Dan Morris, Program Director for the Microsoft AI for Earth Program.

Antonio was also invited to speak at an AI for Earth Innovation workshop in Spain as part of a team of mentors. “He shared his overall experience with Microsoft in such a positive light and served as inspiration to the rest of our participants,” said Alma Cardenas, AI for Earth Senior Program Manager who attended the workshop.

In the time since Hackathon, Antonio and the team at the Wood and Science Technology Lab have been standardizing the process of wood species identification using macroscopic photographs from smartphones, creating a more robust library of species TimberAI can identify based on the CITES species guide.

“We were able to showcase our working prototype at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, so it’s been getting a lot of positive reception from other national entities,” said Antonio. “It was a pleasure getting involved in the Microsoft Hackathon. I have been part of other local hackathons, but this one was something special. Being on the same team as James and Mauro to get the first MVP of TimberAI working was possible thanks to this experience.”

Windows Insiders getting ready to hack at Hackathon 2019. Photo Credit: Windows Insider Program

A prime example of how hackathons can take ideas to the next level, from concept to prototype, embracing new challenges and different perspectives to form solutions, collaborating with the same goal in mind – sparked by a passion for positive impact on our shared planet.

Posted on June 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft to help 25 million people worldwide acquire new digital skills needed for the COVID-19 economy

REDMOND, Wash. — June 30, 2020 — Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday announced a new global skills initiative aimed at bringing more digital skills to 25 million people worldwide by the end of the year.

The announcement comes in response to the global economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Expanded access to digital skills is an important step in accelerating economic recovery, especially for the people hardest hit by job losses.

This initiative, detailed on the Official Microsoft Blog, includes immediate steps to help those looking to reskill and pursue an in-demand job and brings together every part of the company, combining existing and new resources from LinkedIn, GitHub and Microsoft. This includes:

The use of data to identify in-demand jobs and the skills needed to fill them.
Free access to learning paths and content to help people develop the skills these positions require.
Low-cost certifications and free job-seeking tools to help people who develop these skills pursue new jobs.

This is a comprehensive technology initiative that will build on data and digital technology. It starts with data on jobs and skills from the LinkedIn Economic Graph. It provides free access to content in LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn and the GitHub Learning Lab, and couples those with Microsoft Certifications and LinkedIn job seeking tools. These resources can all be accessed at a central location, opportunity.linkedin.com, and will be broadly available online in four languages: English, French, German and Spanish.

In addition, Microsoft is backing the effort with $20 million in cash grants to help nonprofit organizations worldwide assist the people who need it most. One-quarter of this total, or $5 million, will be provided in cash grants to community-based nonprofit organizations that are led by and serve communities of color in the United States. The company is also pledging to make stronger data and analytics — including data from the LinkedIn Economic Graph — available to governments around the world so they can better assess local economic needs.

Microsoft will use its voice to advocate for public policy innovations that will advance skilling opportunities needed in the changed economy.

Microsoft also announced it is creating a new learning app in Microsoft Teams designed to help employers skill and upskill new and current employees as people return to work and as the economy adds jobs.

“COVID-19 has created both a public health and an economic crisis, and as the world recovers, we need to ensure no one is left behind,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “Today, we’re bringing together resources from Microsoft inclusive of LinkedIn and GitHub to reimagine how people learn and apply new skills — and help 25 million people facing unemployment due to COVID-19 prepare for the jobs of the future.”

“The biggest brunt of the current downturn is being borne by those who can afford it the least,” said Microsoft President Brad Smith. “Unemployment rates are spiking for people of color and women, as well as younger workers, people with disabilities and individuals with less formal education. Our goal is to combine the best in technology with stronger partnerships with governments and nonprofits to help people develop the skills needed to secure a new job.”

“Creating opportunity for every member of the global workforce drives everything we do at LinkedIn,” said LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky. “As a part of the Microsoft ecosystem, we have the unique ability to help job seekers around the world — especially those who have been disproportionately disadvantaged during the COVID-19 crisis — gain the skills and find the jobs they deserve. We’re proud to be bringing the right data about what the jobs and skills of the future will be to create the right learning paths to help 25 million job seekers find their next opportunities. We’re making it all available at opportunity.linkedin.com.”

More information can be found at the Microsoft microsite news.microsoft.com/skills.

For more information, press only:

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications, (425) 638-7777, rrt@we-worldwide.com

Posted on June 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Universities tackle big challenges with Microsoft Power Platform

Today’s unprecedented public health and educational crisis is creating enormous challenges for institutions of higher education. Chief among these are campus closures and the need to switch to remote or hybrid learning, concerns over the health and well-being of students, faculty, and the community, and the need to understand the impacts on academic research.

As higher education institutions prepare for the upcoming academic year, they will have to address the needs of their communities, while meeting operational requirements across the university. Some solutions can be found in new, agile low-code tools, which are helping institutions quickly meet specific challenges they face. Microsoft’s Power Platform allows users to address challenges and streamline processes across an institution through low-to-no-code apps, bots, and the automation of backend processes—all integrating with Microsoft Teams as a single hub for students, faculty, and staff.

We’re hearing incredible stories about how institutions are addressing challenges like student engagement and well-being, back-to-school requirements, and research in real-time with the Power Platform, including low-code apps with Power Apps, automated processes with Power Automate, powerful chatbots with Power Virtual Agents, and up-to-the-minute analytics with Power BI. That’s all happening without the need for developers or data scientists.

The Upstate Medical University story

Upstate Medical University serves 17 counties and nearly 1.8 million constituents in New York State. The institution recently released a back-to-school solution to ensure a safe return to campus. With limited staff to deploy as screeners, Upstate and Microsoft introduced a new, self-screening assessment tool to ensure the safe return of faculty, staff, students, and medical residents to campus.

To keep the campus safe early in the COVID-19 pandemic many staff members worked from home and campus buildings had only limited access. Individuals who did report to campus were screened for symptoms by an Upstate staff member.

However, with the use of the new tool, since June 8, Upstate has completed more than 8,500 screenings with more than 2,000 screenings completed on the first full day the tool was launched. As the campus begins to reopen, Upstate will need to provide symptom screening at more campus locations. This self-assessment tool assists Upstate in these screenings through allowing daily symptom checking online in accordance with CDC guidelines

Upstate Medical responds quickly to community during pandemic

At the outset of the pandemic this spring, Upstate Medical University launched a COVID telephone hotline on behalf of Onondaga County to provide information on COVID-19 to the public and to help triage symptomatic patients to the right location for follow-up care and possible testing. As the hotline call volume increased significantly, Upstate recognized the need to provide an additional method to address the public’s questions.

Working with Microsoft, Upstate quickly developed an online coronavirus assessment tool to enable users to assess their symptoms and determine whether they should seek testing. The health bot solution allowed for a quick remedy to the high call volume of the telephone hotline while continuing to provide the public with information. The assessment tool logged 8,000 users in its first week of operation. The success of the tool enabled Upstate to scale back hours for its telephone hot line, enabling the staff who volunteered to answer calls to return to their normal positions. Upstate Medical was able to reduce call center and testing center volumes optimizing human capital, resources, and facilities.

Dr. Robert Corona, CEO of Upstate University Hospital, said, “There is much anxiety from the public, and understandably so, during this critical time. The coronavirus assessment tool, coupled with our COVID-19 triage line, can help the public get quick accurate information about their current health situation, and reassurance on next steps.”

Understanding the financial impact at Purdue

Announced last month, Purdue University, a top public research institution in Indiana, partnered with Microsoft to create a Power App, the Higher Education Crisis Financial Impact Tracker, to help determine how the current situation is affecting academic research programs and provide an aggregated view of the financial impact on the university. Purdue researchers can access the application through Teams and input information on specific research initiatives and how they’ve been affected.

In a recent press release, Theresa Mayer, Purdue’s Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships, said, “At this point, we have more than 1,100 faculty members on campus using the tool, and it is allowing us to get a clearer picture of how the COVID-19 event has affected our research programs. Until now, we have not been able to quantify impact at the research project level this efficiently.” Purdue University was the first university to implement the Higher Education Crisis Financial Impact Tracker. Microsoft announced that this Power App will soon be available to all universities. Learn more at https://aka.ms/educfit.

ANS provides student engagement solution

To support student engagement, ANS, a UK cloud and digital services provider, developed a Power App solution to help improve student engagement and identify at-risk students during the COVID-19 crisis. The solution works by gathering various data from Microsoft Teams such as which students have virtually attended lectures. It then automates a workflow that helps the university pinpoint and address specific student needs, allowing them to act quickly to ensure the best outcome.

See ANS’ blog to learn more. And get the new IDC report, “Transform Student Engagement: Achieve Personalized, Efficient, Inclusive, and Accessible Higher Education with AI,” to learn more about top use cases for AI enabling student engagement.

Microsoft’s platform is flexible to assist higher education institutions in adhering to local guidance and requirements regarding faculty, staff and student privacy and safety. With the help of these tools, Microsoft aims to continue to be a resource for higher education institutions as they address the emerging needs of students, faculty, and staff across university and healthcare settings.

Learn more about Power Platform and Teams for Education and adapt quickly with agile, low-code tools available using the following solutions:

Microsoft Power Apps empowers everyone, regardless of their technical abilities, to build low-code apps quickly and easily.
Power Automate enables you to streamline repetitive tasks and paperless processes.
Power Virtual Agents enables you to create powerful chatbots, like a crisis response chatbot—without the need for developers or data scientists.
Power BI enables everyone at every level of your institution to make confident decisions using up-to-the-minute analytics.

For more information:

And see how a Tacoma, Washington school principal built a Power App to improve reading assessments.

Posted on June 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Walgreens Boots Alliance creates personalized, omnichannel healthcare and shopping experiences powered by new customer experience management technology and data platform

Company announces strategic partnership with industry leaders Microsoft and Adobe to launch second phase of digital transformation at the intersection of health and technology

DEERFIELD, Ill., REDMOND, Wash., and SAN JOSE, Calif. – June 30, 2020 – Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. (Nasdaq: WBA), today announced an expansion of its strategic partnership with Microsoft and Adobe to launch a world-class digital experience and customer insights platform to deliver personalized healthcare and shopping offerings. It will provide Walgreens and Boots customers with products and services from its global pharmacy and retail businesses wherever, whenever and however they may want them. Establishing this platform will advance WBA into the second phase of its digital transformation, one of its key strategic priorities.

“At WBA, our mission is to deliver extraordinary experiences that enrich our customers’ lives. Capabilities to combine previously disparate customer data sets, including information from more than 100 million members of our loyalty programs, into more singular, unified view of the customer – powered by these modern technology platforms – will enable us to truly personalize our omnichannel healthcare and retail offering,” said Vineet Mehra, global chief marketing officer, Walgreens Boots Alliance. “This digital magic coupled with the valued knowledge and quality of care provided by our pharmacists and team members is what allows us to best serve our customers.”

For more than a century, WBA’s iconic brands, including Walgreens and Boots, have earned the trust of patients and customers by serving their needs in some of the most personal categories – health, wellness and beauty. The strategic partnership with Microsoft and Adobe allows WBA to harness insights to deliver more engaging and personalized experiences, while respecting and protecting privacy choices of patients and customers. This can help increase access to key services within pharmacy and beauty, among other categories, while driving convenience and providing more options to address daily needs. Data privacy and security are fundamental design principles in the development of the technology, underscored by Microsoft’s investments in building a trusted cloud platform.

For example, with this new personalization platform, Walgreens will launch an individually tailored prescription experience for patients at Walgreens, and Boots will launch a bespoke beauty experience for customers by enabling Boots Beauty Consultants to provide custom product recommendations. This new platform will also dramatically enhance WBA’s marketing effectiveness and power the company’s strategic initiative around mass personalization – delivering the right offers and content to the right customer, in the right context, at the right time and through the right channels.

Personalized Customer Experiences

The strategic partnership with Microsoft and Adobe is the cornerstone for these new WBA customer experiences, connecting WBA’s wealth of knowledge related to serving customers in the health, wellness and beauty categories. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will serve as WBA’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) to provide a unified, 360-degree view of the customer and unlock insights that power personalized customer experiences. Adobe’s Customer Experience Management (CXM) solutions will enable the company to deliver those unmatched customer experiences, with the industry’s only end-to-end solution for analytics, content management, personalization, campaign orchestration and more.

“There’s no denying that the retail industry has been in a constant state of change over the past several years and consumers expect personalized interactions, connected online and in-store experiences, and high-quality customer service when they shop,” said Shelley Bransten, CVP Retail and Consumer Goods Industries, Microsoft. “Through this strategic partnership, Walgreens Boots Alliance is transforming the future of retail, health and beauty, creating digital experiences that make shopping fun and rewarding. Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Adobe’s Experience Cloud will provide deep insights and a single view of the customer, enabling the nurturing of customer relationships on one platform for highly tailored experiences.”

“Adobe has been a strategic partner for global brands in their digital transformation,” said Anil Chakravarthy, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Experience Business, Adobe. “COVID-19 has created a world that is more digital, while redefining the value of physical stores. Walgreens Boots Alliance, a global leader in retail and wholesale pharmacy, is taking this head on and paving the way for its next chapter. With Adobe Experience Cloud, WBA will be able to activate customer data and personalize experiences, while better blending online and offline customer experiences.”

About Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc.

Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA) is a global leader in retail and wholesale pharmacy, touching millions of lives every day through dispensing and distributing medicines, its convenient retail locations, digital platforms and health and beauty products. The company has more than 100 years of trusted health care heritage and innovation in community pharmacy and pharmaceutical wholesaling.

Including equity method investments, WBA has a presence in more than 25 countries, employs more than 440,000 people and has more than 18,750 stores.

WBA’s purpose is to help people across the world lead healthier and happier lives. The company is proud of its contributions to healthy communities, a healthy planet, an inclusive workplace and a sustainable marketplace. The company’s businesses have been recognized for their Corporate Social Responsibility. Walgreens was named to FORTUNE* magazine’s 2019 Companies that Change the World list and Boots UK was recognized as Responsible Business of the Year 2019-2020 by Business in the Community.

WBA is included in FORTUNE’s 2020 list of the World’s Most Admired Companies. This is the 27th consecutive year that WBA or its predecessor company, Walgreen Co., has been named to the list.

More company information is available at www.walgreensbootsalliance.com.

About Microsoft

About Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe is reimagining Customer Experience Management (CXM) with Adobe Experience Cloud, the industry’s only end-to-end solution for experience creation, marketing, advertising, analytics and commerce. Adobe Experience Cloud helps brands deliver consistent, continuous and compelling B2C, B2B and B2E experiences across customer touchpoints and channels—all while accelerating business growth. Unlike legacy enterprise platforms with static, siloed customer profiles, Adobe Experience Platform empowers companies to fully understand customers and make data actionable through Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI and machine learning technology. Industry analysts have named Adobe a leader in over 20 major reports focused on experience—more than any other technology company.

Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: All statements in this release that are not historical are forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks, assumptions and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, those related to the timing and effectiveness of implementation of plans for the new platform, the ability to realize the anticipated benefits of the strategic partnership, and the ability to realize anticipated efficiencies and achieve anticipated financial and operating results in the amounts and at the times anticipated, as well as those described in Item 1A (Risk Factors) of Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc.’s Form 10-K for the fiscal year ending August 31, 2019, Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ending February 29, 2020, and in other documents that Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. files or furnishes with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. does not undertake, and expressly disclaims, any duty or obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statement after the date of this release, whether as a result of new information, future events, changes in assumptions or otherwise.

(WBA-GEN)

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USA / Molly Sheehan                                                                                               +1 224 303 8105
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Posted on June 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Walgreens Boots Alliance builds a better shopping experience – with better access to wellness

As a new immigrant to Canada, Vineet Mehra quickly grasped the inequities that he and his family now faced.

He was just 6 years old.

But he saw the unfairness. His parents, who had arrived from India with little money, both worked hard. Yet they lacked the same access to health care as other residents in the town’s more-affluent neighborhoods.

That disparity – health outcomes driven by postal code more than genetic code – became “etched in my mind,” recalls Mehra, global chief marketing officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA). Today, he remains devoted to closing those gaps with fresh technologies that can help democratize health and wellness.

Vineet Mehra is shown from the chest up. with his arms folded. He is smiling. — Vineet Mehra.

Tuesday, WBA, Microsoft and Adobe launched a cloud platform that will provide WBA customers with personalized health care and shopping experiences. Headquartered in suburban Chicago, WBA owns Walgreens, Boots and Alliance Healthcare.

Transform spoke with Mehra to learn how the new platform and its data-fueled customer connections can help reinvent shopping for health and wellness goods – and make those products available to more people.

TRANSFORM: How will the platform make shopping better and more personal?

VINEET MEHRA: We have two of the largest loyalty programs in the world – our Walgreens Balance Rewards program and our Boots Advantage Card program. Between them, there are well over 100 million primary customer profiles.

The work we’re doing with Microsoft is critical as we organize that information and data in a cloud-based solution. This new cloud platform puts our most valuable data in one place and allows us to orchestrate experiences that meet people where they are, giving them what they need.

TRANSFORM: Can you give me an example?

MEHRA: Imagine a customer named Annie who receives an email through her loyalty membership for Vitamin B offers. Based on her purchase history, we know she’s a Vitamin B shopper. We know she typically runs out of Vitamin B after 30 days.

Annie visits walgreens.com and Vitamin B options are prioritized for her viewing. We don’t show her anything but Vitamin B because we know she’s in the market for that now. She buys it. As she’s further browsing the site, Annie adds Emergen-C (a Vitamin C supplement) to her cart. But let’s say that Annie doesn’t finalize her purchase online – it remains in her cart.

Later that day, she’s walking by a Walgreens store. We now have the infrastructure to allow Annie to control how and when we communicate with her. So, when we identify that the Emergen-C that she left in her online cart is in stock at that Walgreens location, she receives a text message notifying her. She goes in to buy it.

TRANSFORM: How does the platform connect the retail and pharmacy experience for customers?

MEHRA: Let’s go back to Annie. As she enters that Walgreens store to buy her Vitamin C, she gets a real-time alert on her phone: The prescription that she was supposed to pick up tomorrow can be ready today at that store. This is because we now know she’s in the store with us.

Annie heads to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription. The pharmacist also reminds her she’s due for a flu shot. We know from our cloud-based customer data that she gets the vaccine each year.

With customer information thoughtfully organized, we can create these seamless experiences around health and wellness that allow our retail offering to complement our pharmacy offering. But that can only be enabled if all that data is in one place, not scattered in many data warehouses all over the country.

TRANSFORM: You have previously talked about the need to democratize health care, to make it more human and more personal, to treat each customer and patient as a complete, unique individual. Does this platform help WBA meet that mission?

MEHRA: Absolutely. It’s something that I personally and our company are passionate about.

The recent events around the racial equality movement are showing there are “haves” and “have-nots” in our society. Your postal code, in some cases, dictates your health outcome more than your genetic code. We have pharmacy deserts in America. We have food deserts. We have areas without access to health care. But imagine if we knew who you were, we could offer those experiences to you in multiple ways.

So health outcomes don’t have to be defined by the fact that you may live in a lower-income area or that you don’t have access to public transportation or a car or that there’s no pharmacy around you. If we knew who you are, we could say to you, “Hey, it’s time for your Vitamin C to maintain the health of you and your family.”

We can offer up an experience to deliver it direct to your door. And we’ll set up delivery lockers in certain neighborhoods where people can pick things up.

TRANSFORM: And through these innovations, you are democratizing access to health and wellness products?

MEHRA: Yes, to products that families need but may not always have access to just because of the structural challenges we have in our society in America. By knowing who people are, we can provide them access that may not always involve heading to a store.

In other cases, you have families with two working parents or single moms or single dads. How do they even get out of the house when they’ve got three kids at home and one of the kids is sick? You start to see how this information will allow us to get people health and wellness the way they need it when they need it.

TRANSFORM: When and how did this mission become so important to you?

MEHRA: I grew up as a first-generation immigrant kid. I was born in India. My parents came to Canada, to a blue-collar town, with relatively little. The experiences some of my friends and I had there are still etched in my mind – like this idea of access to health and wellness being defined by where I live, it never made sense to me.

It comes from those roots, from realizing that some people had more than I did but it had nothing to do with how hard we worked. Health care should be one of those rights that everyone has access to.

TRANSFORM: At their core, these innovations are all about people, is that right?

MEHRA: It’s important that we don’t just talk about this as digital technology. It happens to be digitally hosted but with the idea of human kindness and digital magic coming together. That applies to the side of the business with our pharmacists – humans you interact with in critical ways. We’re mashing together human kindness with technology.

TRANSFORM: How will Microsoft Dynamics 365 benefit the new platform?

MEHRA: The best part of Dynamics is that it acts as a tool that is constantly giving us better signals.

If you think about health and wellness and taking care of your family, these things are constantly evolving. You can be diagnosed one day with something. You can go from having a cold one day to allergies the next. Dynamics 365 is a great customer-data platform because it’s so real time. It’s processing data constantly then turning that data into insights that allow our pharmacists to more efficiently treat patients.

TRANSFORM: Before joining WBA, you were the chief marketing officer at Ancestry.com. There may be nothing more personal than genealogy and genetic testing. Do you think of yourself as an evangelist for truly personalized customer service?

MEHRA: In my experience working deeply in consumer genetics, I got a deep appreciation for the fact that while we all may be more similar than we think, we’re all wired up very differently. The medicines that work for you may not work for me.

We have to meet people where they are – this idea of personalization is becoming absolutely critical in health and wellness.

Brands like Walgreens and Boots are the front lines of health and wellness access to much of the population. If we can be in the business of personalized health services for people, that’s going to make society healthier. It’s going to give people access in ways they’ve never had before.

Top photo: A Walgreens store in downtown Chicago. (Photos courtesy of Walgreens)

Posted on June 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New computers: why get one now and what to look for

3 reasons to consider getting a new computer

We’re relying more than ever on the technology in our homes. The refrigerator to keep our stocked-up food cold and safe to eat, the dishwasher to clean endless loads of dishes after eating meals at home, and our devices to keep us connected to the world outside.

For a lot of people, basic internet is no longer sufficient; calling and texting doesn’t seem like enough. Now people are working, learning, teaching, and connecting from home. Video chatting with family and friends. Streaming first-run movies, binge-watching TV, submitting daily class assignments, video conferencing with global participants—the needs are much more complex.

Is your older computer keeping up with what you want to do? If not, look at these simple tips to help you find a new computer so you can do more of what you want and what you love.

1. Make the most of your time with a faster device.

We know that you want to do what you want to do when you want to do it, and it needs to keep up with you, too. Whether that’s a faster response time when opening apps, streaming movies or music while you do your work, or surfing the web with all of your saved tabs open, we can help guide you to the device that will do just that.

With the latest Intel processors (the “brain” inside your computer) and solid-state drives (“SSDs” and the storage compartment within your device), starting up your device is up to three times faster than what you may be experiencing on an older device¹. What does this mean? It means that you’ll have the speed and power you’re looking for when working, playing, connecting, or learning online.

How do you choose?

We can help determine the right processor for you, based on your needs. Whether you are looking for an entry-level computer to do the basics, or if you expect a higher level of performance from your device to work and play games, there is something for everyone.

What processor do you need?

Your needs influence what processor is right for you.

Best value, lowest price: The 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i3 processor is perfect if you’re looking for a sub-$500 computer for basic computing tasks.
Everyday requirements: If you’re looking to balance performance and cost, the 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i5 processor helps you find this balance.
Heavy work and play: If you’re a gamer or work a lot on your computer, 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 and i9 processors are worth the expense and peace of mind.

A solid-state drive or a hard disk drive?

Which choice is best for you? Differences are based on price, speed, and storage.

SSD: While these may cost you a little extra, they are worth it for the weight, speed, durability, and lower energy usage to have on your device.
HDD: Hard disk drives provide a bit more storage at less cost, however with this storage comes a significant impact on performance—so if you like a responsive computer, SSD is the way to go.

2. It’s easier to work, play, learn, and connect from anywhere.

On average, modern computers with solid-state drives (SSDs) weigh less than five pounds. And because SSDs consume less power, you’ll get longer battery life—on average, eight-plus hours of video playback.² These portable powerhouses are just what you need to do whatever you want from wherever you are, with or without the cord—even if you are just moving from room to room.

What do you look for to meet these needs?

Consider a 2-in-1 laptop for complete flexibility, giving you the experience of a tablet, usually with a keyboard you can flip over and a touchscreen interface, with the software and computing capability of a laptop for when you need it.
Touchscreens are worth it. You love it on your phone, right? Especially with a smaller laptop, tablet or 2-in-1, you’ll love it there, too. Pinch and zoom, move things around, or just use it instead of a mouse or touchpad. Once you try it, you’ll wonder why you waited so long to get one.

3. You can find something that fits your style and budget.

Computers have more personality these days, and you can choose one that reflects yours.

Buying a device is an investment for today and in the future, but that doesn’t mean you have to break the bank. With the broad selection of devices available today, there is a computer that not only fits your budget and personal needs, but your style too. Whether you are looking for thin and light to make moving throughout your home easier, or a new color to match your home office, there are options available for everyone.

Posted on June 29, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

AIOps: Advancing Azure service quality with artificial intelligence

“In the era of big data, insights collected from cloud services running at the scale of Azure quickly exceed the attention span of humans. It’s critical to identify the right steps to maintain the highest possible quality of service based on the large volume of data collected. In applying this to Azure, we envision infusing AI into our cloud platform and DevOps process, becoming AIOps, to enable the Azure platform to become more self-adaptive, resilient, and efficient. AIOps will also support our engineers to take the right actions more effectively and in a timely manner to continue improving service quality and delighting our customers and partners. This post continues our Advancing Reliability series highlighting initiatives underway to keep improving the reliability of the Azure platform. The post that follows was written by Jian Zhang, our Program Manager overseeing these efforts, as she shares our vision for AIOps, and highlights areas of this AI infusion that are already a reality as part of our end-to-end cloud service management.”—Mark Russinovich, CTO, Azure

This post includes contributions from Principal Data Scientist Manager Yingnong Dang and Partner Group Software Engineering Manager Murali Chintalapati.

As Mark mentioned when he launched this Advancing Reliability blog series, building and operating a global cloud infrastructure at the scale of Azure is a complex task with hundreds of ever-evolving service components, spanning more than 160 datacenters and across more than 60 regions. To rise to this challenge, we have created an AIOps team to collaborate broadly across Azure engineering teams and partnered with Microsoft Research to develop AI solutions to make cloud service management more efficient and more reliable than ever before. We are going to share our vision on the importance of infusing AI into our cloud platform and DevOps process. Gartner referred to something similar as AIOps (pronounced “AI Ops”) and this has become the common term that we use internally, albeit with a larger scope. Today’s post is just the start, as we intend to provide regular updates to share our adoption stories of using AI technologies to support how we build and operate Azure at scale.

Why AIOps?

There are two unique characteristics of cloud services:

The ever-increasing scale and complexity of the cloud platform and systems
The ever-changing needs of customers, partners, and their workloads

To build and operate reliable cloud services during this constant state of flux, and to do so as efficiently and effectively as possible, our cloud engineers (including thousands of Azure developers, operations engineers, customer support engineers, and program managers) heavily rely on data to make decisions and take actions. Furthermore, many of these decisions and actions need to be executed automatically as an integral part of our cloud services or our DevOps processes. Streamlining the path from data to decisions to actions involves identifying patterns in the data, reasoning, and making predictions based on historical data, then recommending or even taking actions based on the insights derived from all that underlying data.

Figure 1. Infusing AI into cloud platform and DevOps.

The AIOps vision

AIOps has started to transform the cloud business by improving service quality and customer experience at scale while boosting engineers’ productivity with intelligent tools, driving continuous cost optimization, and ultimately improving the reliability, performance, and efficiency of the platform itself. When we invest in advancing AIOps and related technologies, we see this ultimately provides value in several ways:

Higher service quality and efficiency: Cloud services will have built-in capabilities of self-monitoring, self-adapting, and self-healing, all with minimal human intervention. Platform-level automation powered by such intelligence will improve service quality (including reliability, and availability, and performance), and service efficiency to deliver the best possible customer experience.
Higher DevOps productivity: With the automation power of AI and ML, engineers are released from the toil of investigating repeated issues, manually operating and supporting their services, and can instead focus on solving new problems, building new functionality, and work that more directly impacts the customer and partner experience. In practice, AIOps empowers developers and engineers with insights to avoid looking at raw data, thereby improving engineer productivity.
Higher customer satisfaction: AIOps solutions play a critical role in enabling customers to use, maintain, and troubleshoot their workloads on top of our cloud services as easily as possible. We endeavor to use AIOps to understand customer needs better, in some cases to identify potential pain points and proactively reach out as needed. Data-driven insights into customer workload behavior could flag when Microsoft or the customer needs to take action to prevent issues or apply workarounds. Ultimately, the goal is to improve satisfaction by quickly identifying, mitigating, and fixing issues.

My colleagues Marcus Fontoura, Murali Chintalapati, and Yingnong Dang shared Microsoft’s vision, investments, and sample achievements in this space during the keynote AI for Cloud–Toward Intelligent Cloud Platforms and AIOps at the AAAI-20 Workshop on Cloud Intelligence in conjunction with the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The vision was created by a Microsoft AIOps committee across cloud service product groups including Azure, Microsoft 365, Bing, and LinkedIn, as well as Microsoft Research (MSR). In the keynote, we shared a few key areas in which AIOps can be transformative for building and operating cloud systems, as shown in the chart below.

Figure 2. AI for Cloud: AIOps and AI-Serving Platform.

AIOps

Moving beyond our vision, we wanted to start by briefly summarizing our general methodology for building AIOps solutions. A solution in this space always starts with data—measurements of systems, customers, and processes—as the key of any AIOps solution is distilling insights about system behavior, customer behaviors, and DevOps artifacts and processes. The insights could include identifying a problem that is happening now (detect), why it’s happening (diagnose), what will happen in the future (predict), and how to improve (optimize, adjust, and mitigate). Such insights should always be associated with business metrics—customer satisfaction, system quality, and DevOps productivity—and drive actions in line with prioritization determined by the business impact. The actions will also be fed back into the system and process. This feedback could be fully automated (infused into the system) or with humans in the loop (infused into the DevOps process). This overall methodology guided us to build AIOps solutions in three pillars.

Figure 3. AIOps methodologies: Data, insights, and actions.

AI for systems

Today, we’re introducing several AIOps solutions that are already in use and supporting Azure behind the scenes. The goal is to automate system management to reduce human intervention. As a result, this helps to reduce operational costs, improve system efficiency, and increase customer satisfaction. These solutions have already contributed significantly to the Azure platform availability improvements, especially for Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs). AIOps solutions contributed in several ways including protecting customers’ workload from host failures through hardware failure prediction and proactive actions like live migration and Project Tardigrade and pre-provisioning VMs to shorten VM creation time.

Of course, engineering improvements and ongoing system innovation also play important roles in the continuous improvement of platform reliability.

Hardware Failure Prediction is to protect cloud customers from interruptions caused by hardware failures. We shared our story of Improving Azure Virtual Machine resiliency with predictive ML and live migration back in 2018. Microsoft Research and Azure have built a disk failure prediction solution for Azure Compute, triggering the live migration of customer VMs from predicted-to-fail nodes to healthy nodes. We also expanded the prediction to other types of hardware issues including memory and networking router failures. This enables us to perform predictive maintenance for better availability.
Pre-Provisioning Service in Azure brings VM deployment reliability and latency benefits by creating pre-provisioned VMs. Pre-provisioned VMs are pre-created and partially configured VMs ahead of customer requests for VMs. As we described in the IJCAI 2020 publication, As we described in the AAAI-20 keynote mentioned above, the Pre-Provisioning Service leverages a prediction engine to predict VM configurations and the number of VMs per configuration to pre-create. This prediction engine applies dynamic models that are trained based on historical and current deployment behaviors and predicts future deployments. Pre-Provisioning Service uses this prediction to create and manage VM pools per VM configuration. Pre-Provisioning Service resizes the pool of VMs by destroying or adding VMs as prescribed by the latest predictions. Once a VM matching the customer’s request is identified, the VM is assigned from the pre-created pool to the customer’s subscription.

AI for DevOps

AI can boost engineering productivity and help in shipping high-quality services with speed. Below are a few examples of AI for DevOps solutions.

Incident management is an important aspect of cloud service management—identifying and mitigating rare but inevitable platform outages. A typical incident management procedure consists of multiple stages including detection, engagement, and mitigation stages. Time spent in each stage is used as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to measure and drive rapid issue resolution. KPIs include time to detect (TTD), time to engage (TTE), and time to mitigate (TTM).

Figure 4. Incident management procedures.

As shared in AIOps Innovations in Incident Management for Cloud Services at the AAAI-20 conference, we have developed AI-based solutions that enable engineers not only to detect issues early but also to identify the right team(s) to engage and therefore mitigate as quickly as possible. Tight integration into the platform enables end-to-end touchless mitigation for some scenarios, which considerably reduces customer impact and therefore improves the overall customer experience.

Anomaly Detection provides an end-to-end monitoring and anomaly detection solution for Azure IaaS. The detection solution targets a broad spectrum of anomaly patterns that includes not only generic patterns defined by thresholds, but also patterns which are typically more difficult to detect such as leaking patterns (for example, memory leaks) and emerging patterns (not a spike, but increasing with fluctuations over a longer term). Insights generated by the anomaly detection solutions are injected into the existing Azure DevOps platform and processes, for example, alerting through the telemetry platform, incident management platform, and, in some cases, triggering automated communications to impacted customers. This helps us detect issues as early as possible.

For an example that has already made its way into a customer-facing feature, Dynamic Threshold is an ML-based anomaly detection model. It is a feature of Azure Monitor used through the Azure portal or through the ARM API. Dynamic Threshold allows users to tune their detection sensitivity, including specifying how many violation points will trigger a monitoring alert.

Safe Deployment serves as an intelligent global “watchdog” for the safe rollout of Azure infrastructure components. We built a system, code name Gandalf, that analyzes temporal and spatial correlation to capture latent issues that happened hours or even days after the rollout. This helps to identify suspicious rollouts (during a sea of ongoing rollouts), which is common for Azure scenarios, and helps prevent the issue propagating and therefore prevents impact to additional customers. We provided details on our safe deployment practices in this earlier blog post and went into more detail about how Gandalf works in our USENIX NSDI 2020 paper and slide deck.

AI for customers

To improve the Azure customer experience, we have been developing AI solutions to power the full lifecycle of customer management. For example, a decision support system has been developed to guide customers towards the best selection of support resources by leveraging the customer’s service selection and verbatim summary of the problem experienced. This helps shorten the time it takes to get customers and partners the right guidance and support that they need.

AI-serving platform

To achieve greater efficiencies in managing a global-scale cloud, we have been investing in building systems that support using AI to optimize cloud resource usage and therefore the customer experience. One example is Resource Central (RC), an AI-serving platform for Azure that we described in Communications of the ACM. It collects telemetry from Azure containers and servers, learns from their prior behaviors, and, when requested, produces predictions of their future behaviors. We are already using RC to predict many characteristics of Azure Compute workloads accurately, including resource procurement and allocation, all of which helps to improve system performance and efficiency.

Looking towards the future

We have shared our vision of AI infusion into the Azure platform and our DevOps processes and highlighted several solutions that are already in use to improve service quality across a range of areas. Look to us to share more details of our internal AI and ML solutions for even more intelligent cloud management in the future. We’re confident that these are the right investment solutions to improve our effectiveness and efficiency as a cloud provider, including improving the reliability and performance of the Azure platform itself.

Posted on June 29, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Digital Marketing Center adds Twitter support, new features, pilot for small business owners

In October, Microsoft Advertising began inviting small businesses to try Digital Marketing Center, a Microsoft Garage project. After working with many small businesses over the last few months, the team has received very encouraging feedback, has added additional features to serve user needs, and is now ready to extend the invitation to additional businesses. Small business owners can request an invitation to try Digital Marketing Center in this short, online questionnaire.

Digital Marketing Center provides small and medium businesses with a central platform to grow their business. The tool allows businesses to efficiently manage their online presence and marketing activities across paid search advertising, paid social advertising, and organic social media management. The one-stop-shop tool allows business owners to manage their digital marketing across not just Microsoft Advertising, but also leading advertising and social media platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and now, Twitter as well.

After working with small businesses from the first batch of the pilot, the Digital Marketing Center team added a number of new features to the solution.

In addition to adding support for Twitter, the team has also enabled private messaging on Facebook, a new home page experience aggregating social and ad metrics, and improved tools for ads. For example, users can now utilize a field for an extra headline, allowing advertisers to include more information in ads, leverage improved location targeting, and appeal most disapproved ads from Bing and Facebook.

The team is excited for additional feedback and would love to invite more small and medium business owners to attend. Request an invitation to join the experiment here. The tool is currently free to use—users can manage their social presence at no cost (pay only for search and social ads).

New Features

Social management inbox A one-stop shop for liking, replying, and direct messaging on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
Image ad suggestion With image ad suggestions, you can effortlessly create appealing image ads by just picking from suggested ads
Improved tools for ads Users can now utilize a field for an extra headline, allowing advertisers to include more information in ads and leverage improved location targeting
Appeal disapproved ads Appeal most disapproved ads from Bing and Facebook
A new home page experience The new home page aggregates social and ad metrics in one view
Twitter support Now enabled

See the full list of key features on the Garage Workbench page.

Request to join the experiment

Digital Marketing Center is currently available for trial and feedback with select small businesses. If you’re interested in participating in this experiment you can fill out this short, online questionnaire. To get early access to insights from the Digital Marketing Center experiment, request to receive insights and the team will be in touch.