Microsoft news – Page 115

Posted on April 28, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

What’s new to Microsoft 365: Yammer in Teams, new features in Microsoft Edge

In this world of remote everything, our customers are discovering so many new ways to work and learn online. And we’re committed to shipping updates and improvements to our tools that help them stay connected, productive, and secure through the current crisis and beyond. This month, we’re announcing a new Yammer app in Microsoft Teams as well as a new way to intuitively search data in Excel. Meanwhile, capabilities in Microsoft Edge make it easier to copy and paste between tabs and apps, manage open tabs, organize information more intuitively, and better protect your data as you browse and work online. Let’s dig into all of April’s news.

Connect and create with app updates in Yammer, Excel, Outlook, and Visio

This month, we’re introducing app updates that bring the new Yammer experience to Teams and mobile; help you easily analyze data in Excel; and quickly make changes to diagrams in Visio for the web.

Bring Yammer into Teams—Last November at Ignite, we unveiled the new Yammer, with a beautiful new design that powers community, knowledge-sharing, and employee engagement. The new Yammer includes a fully interactive Yammer app called “Communities” that brings your communities and conversations directly into Microsoft Teams. Put simply: It’s Yammer, but in Teams. No more toggling between apps or confusion about where to chat—just pin the Yammer app in the navigation rail and start discovering communities, knowledge, and conversations alongside your projects, chats, and meetings. Install the Yammer app in Teams to get started.

Experience the new Yammer on mobile—The new Yammer app for iOS and Android connects your entire organization with a redesigned live events experience that allows everyone to watch and participate right in the app, enhancing company-wide engagement. Plus, mobile users can experience the new Yammer layouts and styling that make it easier to discover content and post replies, like comments, and include better previews for images, videos, links, and files. Finally, we’ve improved the performance of uploading attachments and large videos. Download or update your app from the App Store or Play Store.

Quickly turn data into insights with natural language queries in Excel—Data analysis in Excel just got incredibly intuitive. At Ignite last year, we announced that we were bringing natural language queries to Excel, enabling you to ask a plain language question of your data to get answers. We’re excited to announce that the natural language queries feature is now generally available to Microsoft 365 subscribers in Excel for Windows, Mac, and Excel for the web. Simply open the Ideas pane in Excel, enter a question in the query box at the top of the pane, and press Enter.

Easily schedule shorter meetings—As we learn more about remote work productivity, we’re finding that teams tend to prefer shorter meetings while working apart to help break up the day. This month, we’re announcing a new Outlook feature that lets you end appointments and meetings early so you can get 5, 10, or 15 minutes back after every meeting. You’ll be able to set this up in the Calendar settings soon.

Bring ideas to life in Visio for the web—We’re adding a trio of new capabilities in Visio for the web. Now you can replace an existing shape in a diagram with a more relevant one in just a few clicks. The new shape will retain the formatting, connectors, and all other characteristics of the original shape. You can also add images of diagrams to other documents to easily share with stakeholders. Finally, you can now more easily focus on certain elements in a diagram with the new pinch-and-zoom functionality.

Copy and paste and more in Microsoft Edge

This month, we announced a host of new capabilities coming to Microsoft Edge that demonstrate our commitment to help you work more quickly, stay organized, save time, and have more control while you browse and work online. This month’s updates deliver more control over your data and your family’s online information, and offer new ways to organize your online research. If you haven’t yet tried the new Microsoft Edge, you can download it here.

Copy and paste between tabs and apps—Smart copy will make it easier to select, copy, and paste the exact content you want from the web while preserving the rich web format. This allows you to save valuable time since you don’t need to re-format tables, fonts, and more. Smart copy is coming soon to preview builds of Microsoft Edge.

Manage many tabs at once—For those who like to have dozens of tabs open at a time, we’ve introduced vertical tabs to make it easier to manage many open tabs at once. No more struggling to see which tab is which or accidentally closing a tab as a result. Vertical tabs is coming soon to preview builds of Microsoft Edge.

Search more securely—Each year, millions of online personal credentials are exposed in data breaches and end up being sold on the dark web. Password Monitor helps keep your online accounts safe from hackers by notifying you if the credentials you’ve saved to autofill have been detected on the dark web, and providing a way to update them. Password Monitor is coming soon to preview builds of Microsoft Edge.

Browse privately—InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Search with Microsoft Bing keeps your web browsing and Bing search history private by automatically deleting history, cookies, and site data when you finish a browsing session. InPrivate searches are never saved to Bing or Microsoft browsing history, and Bing prevents you from signing into your Microsoft account, so searches are not attributed back to you. InPrivate Mode with seamless integration of InPrivate Search is now generally available. Download Microsoft Edge and try it now.

Organize your research—When researching online, it can be difficult to organize your results, resources, and content you find across the web. Collections helps you easily collect information from different websites and organize it so you can pick up right where you left off between sessions. And with Microsoft 365 integrations, you can export your collections to Word or Excel. Send to Word allows you get a head start on research with automatically generated citations, and Send to Excel creates an automatically formatted table with key information, perfect for side-by-side comparisons. Collections is now generally available. Download Microsoft Edge and try it now.

Give back more easily—Finally, you can now donate to causes just by searching in Bing. The new Give Mode feature enables you to automatically donate the Microsoft Rewards points you earn to the nonprofit of your choice. Give Mode is now generally available. Try it now and start giving back to your community.

Move to remote work more easily

We’re updating our small and medium-sized business offerings and adding new reporting tools to help organizations move more easily to remote work and make the most of their Microsoft 365 investments.

Ease the move to remote work with new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Business Premium—With so many employees working from home, small and medium-sized businesses need to stay productive without compromising security. We’re adding the full Azure AD Premium P1 License to Microsoft 365 Business Premium (formerly called Microsoft 365 Business). With this addition, customers will now get features like Cloud App Discovery, application proxy, dynamic groups, and more, which help employees maintain secure access to work apps from home. This change is rolling out to new customers now, and existing customers will see it added automatically in the coming months.

Get insights into how your organization is working—To help our customers understand how remote work is impacting their organization’s usage behaviors, we added new data to the Microsoft 365 usage reports. The updates include helping you measure calendar activity in the email report, understanding the total activity across Microsoft 365, and a new report to help you see Microsoft 365 app (formerly Office 365 ProPlus) usage. We also added a new card to the usage report homepage to help you understand how solutions that contribute to remote work are being used. You can learn more about usage reports and see your specific data in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

At a time when we are all navigating a lot of uncertainty, we are committed to building the tools that enable our customers to work and learn remotely. From bringing Yammer right into your Teams app to finding new ways to help you search more securely and give to the causes that matter to you most, these updates are aimed at helping you stay connected, productive, and secure through the current crisis and beyond.

Posted on April 28, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

‘Excellent’ Gears Tactics now available for PC

Summary

Gears Tactics is available now with Xbox Game Pass for PC (Beta), Steam and Windows 10 PC
New Xbox Game Pass members can get their first month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with all the benefits of Xbox Live Gold, and access to over 100 great games for console and PC, for just $1 USD
Play Gears Tactics before May 4 to receive the Thrashball Cole Character Pack

Today, a new chapter in the Gears saga begins with the launch of Gears Tactics, a fast-paced, turn-based strategy game developed from the ground up for PC, now available with Xbox Game Pass for PC (Beta), Steam and Windows 10 PC.

Gears Tactics has garnered praise from media reviews: PC Gamer and 3DJuegos lauded the title for merging the core gameplay mechanics of the genre with the action-packed intensity and signature tone of Gears of War. Similar sentiment was shared by USgamer who praised Gears Tactics for having a strong narrative focus interwoven into the campaign, while GameSpot and Game Informer further celebrated the title as distinctly Gears, as the latter opined it to be a great fit for the tactics genre. Reviews also underlined how well Gears Tactics plays, with IGN stating that “Gears Tactics is an excellent turn-based tactics game” and PC Gamer highlighting how Gears Tactics is a “deep, fast-paced strategy game.”

Set 12 years before the first Gears of War, Gears Tactics sees cities across the planet Sera beginning to fall to the monstrous threat rising from underground – the Locust Horde. With the government in disarray, commandeer a squad of survivors led by Gabe Diaz as humanity’s last hope. Customize your squad’s loadout and equipment as you take on a desperate mission to hunt down the relentless and powerful leader of the Locust army: Ukkon, the evil mastermind who makes monsters.

Play Gears Tactics before May 4 to receive the Thrashball Cole Character Pack which includes Augustus Cole as a recruit and the Thrashball Armor Set, complete with rare abilities. If you’re new to Xbox Game Pass, you can get your first month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with all the benefits of Xbox Live Gold, and access to over 100 great games for console and PC, for just $1 USD.

Series fans will want to check out “Gears of War: Bloodlines,” the new novel by New York Times bestselling author Jason Hough, that sets the stage for the events of Gears 5 and Gears Tactics, and the father-daughter relationship between the respective games’ leads, Kait and Gabe Diaz. “Gears of War: Bloodlines“ is now available in paperback, ebook and audiobook.

For those interested in going behind the scenes with the artists and developers, ”Gears Tactics: The Art of the Game“ tracks the entire development process from concept sketches to final production art. “Gears Tactics: The Art of the Game” is available today from Titan Books.

For the latest on the Gears franchise, stay tuned to Xbox Wire and follow @GearsofWar on Twitter.

Posted on April 27, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Our commitment to privacy and security in Microsoft Teams

Almost overnight, video conferencing has become a big part of our daily life and work. A few weeks in, my team and I at Microsoft have adjusted to the new reality of seeing each other’s homes, complete with dogs, cats, and other family members. Everyone around the world is now working, learning, and connecting with colleagues, friends, and family through the power of technology. From kitchen tables to living room couches, and from home offices doubling as home schools—people are relying on Microsoft Teams to work and learn.

Businesses large and small are depending on Teams for mission-critical work. First responders are using Teams to communicate when lives depend on it. Governments are turning to Teams to move medical supplies to where they are needed most. Doctors and nurses are using it to consult with patients, and researchers are collaborating on it across continents to find a vaccine. And teachers are using Teams to teach students in entirely new ways. Important moments of human connection, achievement, and celebration have all moved online.

Now more than ever, people need to know that their virtual conversations are private and secure. At Microsoft, privacy and security are never an afterthought. It’s our commitment to you—not only during this challenging time, but always. Here’s how we’re working to earn your trust every day with Microsoft Teams.

We provide privacy and security controls for video conferences in Teams

We offer a variety of privacy and security controls to allow you to manage who participates in your meetings and who has access to meeting information.

For example, you decide who from outside your organization can join your meetings directly, and who should wait in the lobby for someone to let them in. You can also remove participants during a meeting, designate “presenters” and “attendees,” and control which meeting participants can present content. And with guest access, you can add people from outside your organization but still retain control over your data. Moderation allows you to control who is and isn’t allowed to post and share content. And advanced artificial intelligence (AI) monitors chats to help prevent negative behaviors like bullying and harassment.

When recording a meeting, all participants are notified when a recording starts, and online participants can access our privacy notice directly. Recordings are only available to the people on the call or people invited to the meeting. And recordings are stored in a controlled repository that is protected by permissions and encryption.

We safeguard your privacy by design

When you use Microsoft Teams, you are entrusting us with one of your most valuable assets—your data and personal information. Our approach to privacy is grounded in our commitment to giving you transparency over the collection, use, and distribution of your data. Far from an afterthought, privacy is deeply ingrained in our company philosophy and how we build products. Here are our privacy commitments to you.

We never use your Teams data to serve you ads.
We do not track participant attention or multi-tasking in Teams meetings.
Your data is deleted after the termination or expiration of your subscription.
We take strong measures to ensure access to your data is restricted and carefully define requirements for responding to government requests for data.
You can access your own customer data at any time and for any reason.
We offer regular transparency reports on the Transparency Hub, detailing how we have responded to third-party requests for data.

We protect your identity and account information

Multi-factor authentication (MFA), a feature turned on by your IT administrator, protects your username and password by requiring you to provide a second form of verification to prove your identity. This simple, two-step verification process is widely used in many consumer applications today, including banking, and protects you from attacks that take advantage of weak or stolen passwords.

We protect your data and defend against cybersecurity threats

As a leader in security, Microsoft processes more than 8 trillion security signals every day and uses them to proactively protect you from security threats. In Teams, we encrypt data in transit and at rest, storing your data in our secure network of datacenters and using Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) for video, audio, and desktop sharing.

We meet more than 90 regulatory and industry standards

To comply with global, national, regional, and industry-specific regulations, Teams supports more than 90 regulatory standards and laws, including HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP, SOC, and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for the security of students and children.

For more information on the features we’ve built to deliver on these promises, see our detailed post on privacy and security in Microsoft Teams or refer to our Teams product documentation. And to learn more about our approach to security, compliance, and privacy across all our products, including Teams, visit the Microsoft Trust Center.

No matter how you’re using Teams at this extraordinary time to connect with the people that matter most to you for work and in life, we’re committed to continuing to learn and get better each day as we work to help you keep all your conversations private and secure.

Posted on April 27, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

C3.ai selects Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Teams to power the next phase of growth

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., and REDMOND, Wash. — April 27, 2020 — C3.ai, a leading innovator in enterprise AI software for accelerating digital transformation, announced plans to collaborate with Microsoft Corp. to enhance C3.ai’s global customer experience and elevate sales performance using intelligent cloud technology.

As demand for enterprise-grade, AI applications continues to grow, so does the need for modern CRM tools to help businesses identify new leads, manage existing relationships, and deliver customized experiences with real-time insights. As a result, C3.ai adopted and deployed Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Teams in less than two weeks to help streamline sales operations, collaborate in real time, expand mobile capabilities to power remote selling and generate new business opportunities.

As industries worldwide shift to a digital-first approach, remote selling is becoming more important than ever. C3.ai recognized the need to not only provide sellers with comprehensive data and insights, but also remote access to enable efficient pipeline execution worldwide. With Dynamics 365 Sales, and key integrations across Microsoft Teams, C3.ai can better prioritize workloads, enhance sales experiences with mixed reality, and manage customer needs with conversation intelligence and sentiment analysis to discover what makes customers respond positively with relationship analytics based on unified data from Dynamics 365, Office 365 and LinkedIn.

“At C3.ai, we’re growing rapidly and needed a CRM solution that could scale with us, supporting our global sales and service teams,” said Thomas M. Siebel, CEO, C3.ai, and founder and CEO of Siebel Systems. “After an extensive review of commercially available CRM solutions, it became clear to us that Dynamics 365 Sales is, by far, the best CRM product in the market. We were able to deploy it into production globally in only eight days. We have experienced a significant increase in sales productivity across all sectors, even during the global COVID-19 shutdown.”

For years, C3.ai and Microsoft have successfully collaborated in the enterprise AI space. The companies have tightly integrated the C3 AI Suite and Microsoft Azure to deliver an enterprise-scale platform for AI application development, optimized to run on Azure. Looking ahead to the next phase, C3.ai will aim to build a unified experience across the various departments of the organization by deploying Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Marketing and building deeper Teams integrations.

“We’re looking forward to working with C3.ai to further its business goals with our intelligent cloud services,” said Hayden Stafford, corporate vice president, Business Applications, Microsoft. “With Dynamics 365 at the center of its business transformation, the C3.ai team can streamline customer engagement across sales and customer service to bring a unique, tailored experience to its employees and customers.”

About C3.ai

C3.ai is a leading AI software provider for accelerating digital transformation. C3.ai delivers the C3 AI Suite for developing, deploying, and operating large-scale AI, predictive analytics, and IoT applications in addition to an increasingly broad portfolio of turn-key AI applications. The core of the C3.ai offering is a revolutionary, model-driven AI architecture that dramatically enhances data science and application development.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and 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 for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, rrt@we-worldwide.com
April Marks, C3.ai, (917) 574-5512, pr@c3.ai

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 April 27, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Looking back on an unprecedented quarter: customers embrace technology to advance industry innovation, respond to COVID-19 and plan for the future

It is predicted that by 2030, there will be a $4 trillion opportunity focused on new mobility services, as the automotive and transportation sectors converge.

This year has been unlike any other. As we welcomed the new decade, we witnessed industry-leading innovations by our customers and partners at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and National Retail Federation (NRF) conferences in January. We announced ambitious new sustainability initiatives and how we plan to help our customers reduce their carbon footprint. Then COVID-19 changed everything, disrupting business as usual and forcing organizations across industries to navigate a new landscape. As we work through the effects of the pandemic together, it is incredible to see how technology is enabling our customers to be agile and maintain business continuity. We are also seeing them adapt and scale to sustain critical products and services — all while preparing for a post-pandemic comeback and the new normal.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivers the opening keynote at NRF 2020, sharing his thoughts on the future of retail and how technology can help the industry transform.

Groundbreaking innovation across industries

The first quarter of calendar year 2020 began with a strong focus on what is next in automotive and our participation at CES, a global technology event. The industry is transforming at an incredible speed, quickly shaping the future of mobility and the automotive experience by using cloud, edge, IoT and AI services. Faurecia, a leading automotive technology company is using the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, Teams and Project xCloud to help people stay connected, productive and entertained while in the car. LG Electronics is working to build its automotive infotainment systems with our Azure cloud and AI services, and ZF is transforming into a software-driven mobility provider using Microsoft’s cloud services and developer tools.

At NRF, the world’s largest retail conference, Satya Nadella delivered the opening keynote, sharing ways we are working with retailers to help them better understand their customers, empower employees with digital tools, create a more intelligent supply chain through co-innovation and ultimately reimagine their businesses. During the event, Walgreens Boots Alliance announced it is piloting an immersive mixed reality training program for its employees using HoloLens 2. IKEA shared how it is deploying Microsoft Teams to more than 70,000 workers (including first-line employees) to increase productivity, and H&M shared how Azure IoT is helping propel its continued work toward a more sustainable future for the fashion industry by offering smart garment recycling bins in select stores around the world. Canada Goose, one the world’s largest makers of luxury performance apparel, showed how the company is building on the principle of the endless aisle using Dynamics 365 Commerce software to offer its entire range of products to customers without any physical stock in the store, and Home Depot bet on Microsoft PromoteIQ to help maximize the nearly 170 million monthly visitors on its e-commerce site with the PromoteIQ end-to-end commerce marketing platform. Samsung announced a new smartphone with a push-to-talk button that will leverage the new Walkie Talkie feature available in Microsoft Teams, providing first-line workers like retail employees easier ways to communicate on the job.

In February, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Bosch Group and ZF Friedrichshafen signed up as steering committee members of the Open Manufacturing Platform — founded by Microsoft and BMW in 2019 — to help manufacturing companies accelerate innovation at scale through cross-industry collaboration, knowledge and data sharing.

The emergence of a pandemic

As the fight against COVID-19 continues, I am encouraged by how customers are using technology to respond.

On the frontlines, care teams are using technology to scale their triage process to address the overwhelming number of patients needing care and to ease volume in the system. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a COVID-19 assessment bot, powered by Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot service running on Azure, to help organizations screen patients for potential infection and care options. These bots use artificial intelligence to help pre-screen patients and provide guidance on care plans, reducing the burden on medical professionals. Swedish Health Services built a mobile app to help hospital staff and administrators monitor resources, protective gear and ventilator use. The app syncs with hospital dashboards powered by the Power Platform emergency response solution to help manage bed count and inventory of critical supplies while sharing the information across the region to help other health professionals prepare their facilities.

Telemedicine is also enabling healthcare providers to continue delivering treatment. For example, Microsoft Teams has allowed doctors at St. Luke’s University Health Network to safely perform more than 75,000 virtual visits with patients vulnerable to the virus, while minimizing direct exposure and preserving valuable resources like masks and gloves.

In education, we are working with schools around the world to enable a remote learning system that fosters a culture of learning outside the classroom — as schools, universities, students and parents adopt the tools necessary for distance-learning models. That includes making Teams available for free for students and educators. The University of Bologna moved 90% of courses for its 80,000 students online to Teams within three days. AI is also playing a critical role in keeping students engaged and learning. The University of Sydney built an AI-infused bot using Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services that responds to students’ questions about COVID-19, providing instant answers and access to additional resources. At Case Western Reserve University, medical students are using Microsoft HoloLens to continue immersive remote learning without falling behind in classwork. In a larger-scale effort to support educators, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is launching a global e-learning initiative to minimize educational disruptions and maintain social contact. Microsoft has joined this coalition to contribute resources and technology expertise to ensure #LearningNeverStops.

In response to the COVID-19 National Emergency Declaration, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) directed the majority of its workforce to work remotely and created the Commercial Virtual Remote (CVR) Environment to provide secure teleworking capabilities to millions of users across the entire department. Our continued work with the DoD will lead to the single largest tenant of Office 365 and Microsoft Teams in the coming weeks, with the speed of deployment exceeding anything before it.

A quiet Microsoft Commons in Redmond, Washington as employees work from home in the time of COVID-19.

We are working across industries to accelerate research for a cure for COVID-19 and recently announced our participation in a new consortium alongside C3.ai and top universities to apply AI toward this pandemic challenge. The institute’s work aims to slow the spread of COVID-19, speed the development of medical treatments, predict its evolution and improve public health strategies. Additionally, Microsoft joined the White House-led consortium to provide COVID-19 researchers worldwide access to the most powerful High Performance Computing resources to significantly accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. As we strive to support our customers through technology, we are also doing our part to ensure our employees remain safe while contributing to efforts to protect public health and the well-being of our communities.

Planning for the future

In recent weeks, we have shared details about groundbreaking new partnerships in the financial services sector, major league sports and consumer goods and services. BlackRock is moving its Aladdin platform to Microsoft Azure, the NBA is redefining and personalizing the fan experience through Azure and its AI capabilities, and last week, as part of our deep partnership with the NFL, Microsoft Teams and Surface were part of the technology solution that brought the first-ever virtual NFL Draft to life. Just today, The Coca-Cola Company announced it is standardizing business operations on Microsoft’s cloud to modernize how the company engages with employees and customers. In addition, in late March, we announced an agreement to acquire Affirmed Networks, a leader in fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network solutions. This acquisition, which closed last week, will allow us to evolve our work with the telecommunications industry, building on our secure and trusted cloud platform for operators, while we continue to focus on interoperability and strong partnerships with suppliers, emerging innovators and other stakeholders to extend cloud-based, software-defined networking into the world of 5G connectivity.

I am deeply inspired by how our customers and partners across every industry are harnessing digital tools to navigate an uncertain landscape. While COVID-19 has disrupted lives, the resilience we see today gives me confidence that we will be prepared to build a new normal together, full of opportunity and powered by innovation and ingenuity.

Posted on April 27, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

The Coca-Cola Company announces strategic partnership with Microsoft to transform global engagement and experiences

ATLANTA and REDMOND, Wash. — April 27, 2020 — The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE: “KO”) on Monday announced a five-year agreement with Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: “MSFT”) to standardize its business operations on Microsoft’s cloud and deliver rich new digital experiences that will provide innovative solutions to modernize how the company engages with employees and customers.

With this agreement, the companies will utilize the capabilities of Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365. These solutions will help The Coca-Cola Company gain new insights from data across the enterprise, enabling a 360-degree view of the business, and providing enhanced customer and employee experiences.

“At The Coca-Cola Company, innovation and growth are key pillars of our business,” said Barry Simpson, senior vice president and chief information and integrated services officer of The Coca-Cola Company. “This partnership with Microsoft allows us to really step change our employee experience through replacing previously disparate and fragmented systems. These platforms allow us to deliver relevant, personalized experiences as we network our organization.”

“Coca-Cola is a pioneer and forward-thinking leader in its industry,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president, Worldwide Commercial Business, Microsoft. “Today, the company is taking its digital innovation a step further, leveraging Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 and Azure to better connect people and opportunities through breakthrough productivity and powerful information management that will drive continued business success over the next decade.”

Building on the goal of empowering employees with a networked way to access information and support, the company has expanded beyond a chat interface and designed a compelling and comprehensive app-based experience available on employee mobile devices. The Coca-Cola Company is also deploying Dynamics 365 Customer Service, the Power Platform and Microsoft Teams to all its employees, updating productivity with the enhanced security that runs across Azure and Microsoft 365 cloud services.

Once deployed, new Dynamics 365 AI-driven insights and real-time dashboards will allow call center managers to monitor performance metrics for overall employee satisfaction scores and benefit from real-time insights into which call topics are driving scores. These investments will also enable The Coca-Cola Company to access the latest innovations in the Dynamics 365 portfolio of applications and expanding capabilities that offer a true 360-degree customer and business view, unifying processes and providing forward-looking intelligence, enabling employees to proactively drive decisions and action.

The Coca-Cola Company is also rolling out Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams worldwide, equipping employees with a single hub to connect and collaborate across chat, calling, meetings and documents. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Coca-Cola Company is leveraging Microsoft’s collaboration technologies to support the increased demand of a largely remote workforce. These technologies are enabling The Coca-Cola Company to host many internal meetings on a global, regional and local scale, and with the global shelter-in-place mandates, on April 21, 2020, the company held a virtual quarterly earnings townhall meeting for employees using Microsoft 365 Live Events, which enables “broadcast-style” video presentations for large-scale audiences, both live and on demand.

About The Coca-Cola Company

The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE: KO) is a total beverage company, offering over 500 brands in more than 200 countries and territories. In addition to the company’s Coca-Cola brand, our portfolio includes AdeS, Ayataka, Costa, Dasani, Del Valle, Fanta, Georgia, Gold Peak, Honest, innocent, Minute Maid, Powerade, Simply, smartwater, Sprite, vitaminwater and ZICO. We’re constantly transforming our portfolio, from reducing sugar in our drinks to bringing innovative new products to market. We’re also working to reduce our environmental impact by replenishing water and promoting recycling. With our bottling partners, we employ more than 700,000 people, helping bring economic opportunity to local communities worldwide. Learn more at www.coca-colacompany.com and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.

About Microsoft

For more information, press only:

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

The Coca-Cola Company, Scott Leith, sleith@coca-cola.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 April 27, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Azure confidential computing delivers new level of data protection with DCsv2-series VMs

Security and privacy are critically important when storing and processing sensitive information in the cloud, from payment transactions, to financial records, personal health data, and more. With the general availability of DCsv2-series VMs, we are ushering in the start of a new level of data protection in Azure.

With more workloads moving to the cloud and more customers putting their trust in Microsoft, the Azure confidential computing team continues to innovate to provide offerings that keep and build upon that trust. Starting with our world-class security researchers, and working closely with industry partners, we are developing new ways to protect data while it’s in use with Azure confidential computing. DCsv2-series VMs can protect the confidentiality and integrity of your data even while it’s processed.

What is confidential computing?

There are ways to encrypt your data at rest and while in transit, but confidential computing protects the confidentiality and integrity of your data while it is in use. Azure is the first public cloud to offer virtualization infrastructure for confidential computing that uses hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs). Even cloud administrators and datacenter operators with physical access to the servers cannot access TEE-protected data.

By combining the scalability of the cloud and ability to encrypt data while in use, new scenarios are possible now in Azure, like confidential multi-party computation where different organizations combine their datasets for compute-intensive analysis without being able to access each other’s data. Examples include banks combining transaction data to detect fraud and money laundering, and hospitals combining patient records for analysis to improve disease diagnosis and prescription allocation.

Data protection powered by Intel hardware

Our DCsv2 confidential computing virtual machines run on servers that implement Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX). Because Intel SGX hardware protects your data and keeps it encrypted while the CPU is processing it, even the operating system and hypervisor cannot access it, nor can anyone with physical access to the server.

Microsoft and Intel are committed to providing best-in-class cloud data protection through our deep ongoing partnership:

“Customers are demanding the capability to reduce the attack surface and help protect sensitive data in the cloud by encrypting data in use. Our collaboration with Microsoft brings enterprise-ready confidential computing solutions to market and enables customers to take greater advantage of the benefits of cloud and multi-party compute paradigms using Intel® SGX technology.” —Anil Rao, VP Data Center Security and Systems Architecture, Intel

Partners in the Azure Marketplace

Microsoft works directly with platform partners to provide seamless solutions, development, and deployment experiences running on top of our Azure confidential computing infrastructure. Software offerings can be discovered through our Azure Marketplace including:

Fortanix—Offers a cloud-native data security solution including key management, HSM, tokenization, and secrets management built on Azure confidential computing.
Anjuna—Delivers secure Azure instances using end-to-end CPU hardware-level encryption without changing your application or operations.
Anqlave—A valued partner in Singapore, offers enterprise ready confidential computing solutions.

“Anqlave’s proprietary, institutional-grade modern key management and data encryption solution addresses the most critical security issues we face today. With Anqlave Data Vault (ADV) secret management allows users to securely create, store, transport and use its secrets. Leveraging Azure confidential computing, allows us to make this technology more accessible to our enterprise customers and easily support their scale. Providing a secure enclave that is portable in the cloud is one the key reasons why our enterprises will prefer to host their ADV on Azure confidential computing regardless of their other cloud infrastructure.” —Assaf Cohen, CEO, Anqlave

How customers are succeeding with Azure confidential computing

Customers are already using Azure confidential computing for production workloads. One customer is Signal:

“Signal develops open source technology for end-to-end encrypted communications, like messaging and calling. To meet the security and privacy expectations of millions of people every day, we utilize Azure confidential computing to provide scalable, secure environments for our services. Signal puts users first, and Azure helps us stay at the forefront of data protection with confidential computing.” —Jim O’Leary, VP of Engineering, Signal

While many applications and services can take advantage of data protection with confidential computing, we have seen particular benefits with regulated industries, such as financial, government, and healthcare. Companies can now take advantage of the cloud for processing sensitive customer data with reduced risk and higher confidence that their data can be protected, including when processing.

For example, MobileCoin, a new international cryptocurrency trusts Azure confidential computing to support digital currency transfers. Their network code is now available in open source, and a TestNet is available to tryout:

“MobileCoin partners with Azure because Microsoft has decided to invest in trustworthy systems. Confidential computing rides the edge between what we can imagine and what we can protect. The praxis we’ve experienced with Azure allows us to commit to systems that are integral, high trust, and performant.” —Joshua Goldbard, CEO, MobileCoin

Confidential computing has proven useful for enterprise-grade blockchain, enabling fast and secure transaction verification across a decentralized network. Fireblocks is yet another customer taking advantage of Azure confidential computing infrastructure:

“At Fireblocks, our mission is to secure blockchain-based assets and transactions for the financial industry. Once we realized the traditional tech stack was not suitable for this challenge, we turned to Azure confidential computing and Intel SGX to implement our patent-pending technology. Our customers trust Fireblocks to securely store and move their digital assets—over $6.5 billion of them each month—and Azure provides a backbone for us to deliver on that promise.” —Michael Shaulov, CEO and co-founder, Fireblocks

Industry leadership bringing confidential computing to the forefront

Microsoft is not alone in bringing confidential computing to the forefront of the cloud computing industry. In September 2019, we were a founding member of the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC), which now consists of dozens of companies working to develop and open source technologies and best practices for protecting data while it’s in use. These companies include hardware, cloud, platform, and software providers.

Microsoft is also committed to the developer experience to ensure platform partners and application developers can build solutions that take advantage of confidential computing. We donated our Open Enclave SDK to the consortium, an open source SDK for developing platforms and applications on top of confidential computing infrastructure.

Get started today

Get started deploying your own DCsv2 virtual machine from the Azure Marketplace and install necessary tools. Then, run the Hello World sample using the Open Enclave SDK to begin building confidential workloads in the cloud.

Posted on April 24, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Innovating for impact: Meet the 6 Imagine Cup World Finalist teams

Demonstrating tremendous diversity in thought, our six Imagine Cup World Finalist teams offer innovation for social good in many different areas. For example, one team created a robot that can help Kenyan farmers weed their large-scale farms, eliminating the need for environmentally destructive herbicides. Another is building a tool that will make it easier for Parkinson’s patients to have a doctor’s visit, saving them time and money. These are just a few ideas from the six teams that were chosen as finalists, creating tools that change the way we see and solve problems in our world.

For the 18^th annual Imagine Cup, thousands of student teams from around the world submitted impactful tech innovations. The teams were challenged to bring life to an idea that tackles a local or global issue, using Microsoft Azure. One former finalist described Imagine Cup as the “Olympic Games of Student Technology,” providing students the chance to not only share their idea with industry professionals, but also gain a $100,000 prize and the opportunity to receive mentorship with Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella.

This year’s six finalists have created projects that touch on topics such as the environment, mental health, accessibility, and healthcare, with an overarching focus on inclusivity. Taking on the challenges they have seen in their own lives, they are bringing focus, passion, and ingenuity to our world, pushing the envelope on what is possible.

Meet the six final teams and learn more about their projects:

Team Deeptector: US, University of Missouri

Team members: Caleb Heinzman, Kolton Speer, and Imad Eddine Toubal

Projects: Deeptector.io

Team quote: “As with any revolutionary technology, as the benefits of artificial intelligence grow, so does the potential for harm. Our goal for Deeptector is to use AI to help protect the world from the harmful effects of AI.” – Caleb Heinzman, Deeptector

Their project: Deeptector.io is a web app that detects deepfakes, an increasingly common method for propagating misinformation. Using the same AI methods that generate state-of-the-art deepfakes, Deeptector aims to protect journalists and the public from the damage of misinformation. The algorithms that Deeptector uses are commonly known as deep neural networks, which train themselves to differentiate between real videos and fake ones by looking at thousands of examples of each. The team uses Microsoft Azure virtual machines, Storage, and containers, in addition to Twitter API, Python, Flask, and Pytorch.

Their inspiration: The negative consequences of misinformation within society, and Alan Turing

Who can use it? The web app is designed to be as accessible as possible for everyone.

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Team Hollo: Hong Kong SAR, the University of Hong Kong

Team members: Piyush Jha, Natalie Lee, Cameron van Breda

Project: Hollo

Team quote: “The younger generation would like to be heard and for their problems to be seen, and we’re here to help them do that.” ‒ Cameron van Breda, Team Hollo

Their project: Hollo is a digital, mental health companion and therapist, used to enhance practices by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and therapists through an AI chatbot. It leverages Big Data and AI to introduce youth to therapy and counseling practices through online gamified journaling and mindfulness activities. Data from the AI chatbots and journaling can then be collected to generate actionable findings. This scalable model aims to cut the heavy cost of mental health care for youth and supplements existing self-help techniques and therapy practices.

Why it’s important: According to the team, the current model of counseling is not reaching the younger generation. Hollo is making huge strides in becoming a product to help this generation.

Future plans: The team aims to launch within the year to place Hollo in institutions all over Hong Kong and possibly expand to other countries around Asia within a couple of years.

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Team The Knights: Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology

Team members: Kenneth Gicira, Michael Mwaisakenyi

Project: Weeding Bot

What’s important to The Knights? They want to highlight the problems Kenyan farmers face with weeds on a larger scale in order to bring more visibility to the issue, and how their technology can offer a solution.

Their project: The autonomous weeding bot uses AI (and four-wheel drive and four-wheel steering) to discriminate between weeds and crops achieved through cameras as sensors gathering input from the environment. The vehicle uses the cameras to navigate rows of crops. It encompasses a robotic arm for weeding in between the crop row and a ploughlike weeding tool that is dragged by the robot as it passes in between the rows of crops to remove interrow weeds. Microsoft Azure technology that the team uses includes App Services for mobile and web, Storage, analytics, and Cognitive Services.

Their inspiration: Elon Musk, solving problems on a global scale

Who can use it? The robot can be used by anybody and does not require technical skills to operate. The team made sure that the farmer needs only to place the robot at a given part of the farm, and it will do the rest.

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Team RedWalls: Tunisia, National Institute of Applied Science and Technology

Team members: Mohamed Said Fayache, Achraf Feydi, Meriem Zhang

Project: I-Remember

Team quote: “Everyone says that there is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease or a way to slow its progression yet. But as Robert A. Heinlein said, ‘Everything is theoretically impossible until it is done.’ Today … the only thing that can make us abandon our fight with this disease is believing that it’s incurable.” – Achraf Feydi, Team RedWalls

Their project: I-Remember is a two-part mobile application designed for the well-being of both the Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers. The patient interface includes task reminders, live facial recognition, labeled photos, emergency location, and call assistance, in addition to memory games to help evaluate and train the user’s memory. The caregiver interface provides the same, but with supervisor features. The team uses Microsoft Azure Storage, containers, and Cognitive Services.

Who can use it? Anyone with a phone can download it for free.

Their inspiration: The movie Still Alice, about a linguistic professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, sparked the team’s interest in how technology can be applied to help people.

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Team Syrinx: Japan, the University of Tokyo

Team members: Jaesol Ahn, Kunhak Lee, Masaki Takeuchi

Project: Syrinx

Team quote: “Syrinx will be a device for not only laryngectomy or tracheostomy patients, but also people all over the world.” ‒ Masaki Takeuchi, Team Syrinx

Their project: Syrinx, a neck wearable EL (electrolarynx) device, restores the ability to speak for people who have lost their voices. Leveraging Azure Notebooks technology, Syrinx’s device vibrates the user’s throat to create the sound that matches the movement of the user’s mouth, then uses neural networks to learn the lost voice characteristics and restore it. Previous systems were robotic, whereas Syrinx provides both female and male voices.

Future plans: Team Syrinx plans to improve the quality of the device voice by incorporating Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, noise canceling, and making it applicable to anyone with a need or interest in this type of voice technology.

How they met: At a summer program for society-based projects at the University of Tokyo, where they set out to “solve a problem for people with a disability”

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Team Tremor Vision: US, University of Washington

Team members: Janae Chan, Drew Gallardo, and Robert Minneker

Project: Tremor Vision

Team quote: “I grew up in a rural, low-income household in Eastern Washington, where I lived with my disabled brother. A major challenge we faced as a family was driving over 150 miles to get my brother to his regular doctor’s appointments, oftentimes in terrible weather conditions. With the help of telehealth platforms, like Tremor Vision, we could eliminate the need for patients to travel vast distances for routine clinic visits and increase access to quality healthcare.” ‒ Drew Gallardo, Team Tremor Vision

Their project: Tremor Vision is a web-based tool that enables physicians to detect early-onset Parkinson’s and quantitatively track patient progress throughout a prescribed treatment plan. By using a touchscreen device connected to the internet, users send clinical results to their physician. The platform empowers patients to save the time and money required by routine clinical visits and increases a physician’s reach in screening for early signs of Parkinson’s. The team uses Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, MATLAB, and Microsoft Visual Studio.

Their inspiration: Pioneers using technology in innovative ways to contribute to human health and well-being

Why it’s important: Parkinson’s is the second most-common age-related neurodegenerative disorder. There is no standardized way of evaluating the spiral test, one of the most commonly conducted tests to detect early-onset Parkinson’s and track its progression.

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The safety of our community is top priority, and in light of global health concerns due to COVID-19, we have moved this year’s competition to a virtual format. Please join us in wishing all the teams best wishes on the final stage of competition and follow the finalists’ journey on Twitter and Instagram as they head to the World Championship to compete during the Microsoft Build digital event in May.

Posted on April 24, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

UK NHS doctors are using Microsoft Teams to get Coronavirus test results straight to their phones

NHS staff at a major hospital in Southampton are managing the surge in people arriving with Coronavirus symptoms by using technology to quickly find out who has the virus and who doesn’t.

Doctors, nurses and specialists at University Hospital Southampton have switched to receiving patients test results on their mobile phone thanks to a bot in Microsoft Teams. This has cut the amount of time it takes to discover if someone has the virus from hours to minutes.

Patients with negative test results can then be moved out of isolation units, where they are routinely placed if they show symptoms, and onto a ward, freeing up space for new people arriving at the hospital.

Previously, healthcare staff would check a desktop computer on a ward or in an office every few hours to see if test results had come in.

Dr Ashwin Pinto, a neurologist at the hospital, said: “We can now give doctors and nurses real-time data. I can get COVID-19 results, which come up on my phone instantly as soon as they are released by the lab.

“We can know where that patient is, so we can make sure they go to the right care environment and that staff are safe as well. That’s been transformational.”

University Hospital Southampton also has a notification channel to alert everyone if a staff member is found to have Coronavirus.

The bot has been created by Microsoft partner Medxnote for use in Teams, which is also being used by healthcare staff to communicate and share information, even when they are not in the hospital. Doctors and nurses can also use Teams to alert colleagues instantly if they are needed in a specific area of the hospital.

Similar bots are being used in NHS Foundation Trusts across the country, including Liverpool University Hospitals and Mid Cheshire NHS Foundation Trust.

All NHS staff were given free access to Teams to support them as they work. Doctors and nurses typically use a combination of pagers and phone calls to communicate. However, mobile phone calls took too long and were difficult to answer while working, and information that was shared was hard to record and track.

Dr Pinto said: “We realised that we needed to surface information in real time. We wanted to be able to give key information directly to the junior doctors so they could know exactly whom to see and whom to prioritise. Teams is the only product we’ve been able to use that surfaces data in a really simple format for the junior doctors and allows them to share it so they can work as a team to prioritise patients.”

Laura Robinson, Health & Life Sciences lead at Microsoft UK, said: “It is crucial that NHS staff can communicate and collaborate quickly and easily, especially in times of crisis. No matter where they are in a hospital, doctors and nurses need to send and receive information in order to offer the best care to patients. Microsoft is proud to be helping healthcare workers on the frontline of the Coronavirus pandemic.”

Posted on April 22, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Lucas Joppa on 50th anniversary of Earth Day: Our environmental commitments are as crucial as ever

Every Earth day serves as reminder to give thanks to the incredible benefits nature provides to people, and to recommit ourselves to building a sustainable future for us all. This Earth Day, its 50^th anniversary, is taking place in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis. Quite rightly, this is a time when ensuring the immediate health and safety of people around the world is the priority issue of the moment and the year. Yet, through this crisis and beyond, we must remain dedicated to building solutions to the environmental challenges that face us all.

Five decades ago, Gaylord Nelson, a U.S. Senator from my home state of Wisconsin, had the idea for Earth Day as a way to give a voice to the rising awareness about environmental concerns. He brought together a group of diverse organizations – advocacy, religious, education and civic society – that wanted to increase awareness about the health of the planet and inspire people to live in a more sustainable way.

Now, as we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day, I am reflecting on the enormity of those challenges and how technology can help address them. My passion for the environment was ignited as a child exploring the woods by my home with a sense of wonder and fascination about how the natural world worked. My love of science and belief that technology provides an opportunity to move faster than environmental decline brought me to Microsoft, where sustainability is a core operating value. Now, the urgency of the environmental crisis has reached new heights and we need to rapidly address climate change to avoid the catastrophe that will come from complacency.

Senator Nelson understood that it would take collective action and purpose to reverse the harmful impacts of human activity on the environment. In the 50 years since, our environmental problems have become a global crisis needing urgent attention. In our pursuit of solutions, we should look to data, and to science. The former tells us where we are, and the latter tells us what we need to do to avert the worst social, environmental and economic impacts of a planet whose health is in rapid decline. Worryingly, the gap between the data and the science grows, and the news is grim. Of course, it is heartening that we’re seeing governments and organizations around the world increase their ambitions to address that gap, but we must all move faster and more aggressively. That is why, earlier this year, we accelerated our environmental sustainability strategy at Microsoft with a company-wide focus on four critical areas: carbon, water, ecosystems and waste. Our core strategy rests on setting ambitious goals and outlining detailed plans.

In January, we launched a bold new ambition to address our carbon footprint. By 2030, we will be carbon negative for scopes 1, 2 and 3: meaning our direct carbon emissions, emissions associated with our electricity consumption, and emissions resulting from our supply and value chains. By 2050, we will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975. By 2025, we will power 100% of our business with renewable energy. And we are putting our capital to work to stimulate and accelerate the development of climate technologies with a $1 billion investment over the next four years.

Last week, we announced our plan to address the decline of biodiversity and ecosystems. Maintaining nature for the benefit of current and future generations is one of humanity’s greatest challenges; deploying technology to support this global effort is one of ours. Our new biodiversity initiative aims to put data and digital technology to work, including through an ambitious program to aggregate environmental data from around the world and put it to work in a new “planetary computer.” We will combine this and our expanded AI for Earth program with new work enabling partners and customers to use the resulting output to enhance environmental decision-making in their organizational activities. We’ll also use it to speak out on ecosystem-related public policy issues and take responsibility for Microsoft’s own land footprint.

This summer, we will share our plans on waste and this fall we will share our plans on water. As we work across the company to reduce the environmental impact of our business, we will build the technology solutions that help our customers do the same.

I had planned to spend this 50^th anniversary of Earth Day paying homage in person to Senator Nelson’s legacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s institute that bears his name – the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Those plans, like those of so many people’s plans around the world, have changed due to the COVID-19 crisis, but they have not been canceled. I will join participants from around the world, virtually, for a celebration of the impact of Earth Day. And I will help lead discussions about how we can learn from the successes and failures of the past to build a better future. Because, as the COVID-19 crisis reminds us every day, to be a healthy society we must have a healthy planet. Working together, we can have one – and technology can help us get there.