Microsoft news – Page 159

Posted on October 8, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Family settings updated: Now parents can cap how much time their children use specific apps or games

The new school year is well under way, and as families continue to balance homework and after school activities with screen time, Xbox is here to help. We’re continuously studying ways to improve children’s safety online and to give you, their parents or guardians, the tools to help ensure their wellbeing throughout their online interactions in the digital world.

Late last year, we detailed the many easy-to-use features built into your Microsoft account to give you peace of mind with family settings for screen time limits, purchase limits, content filters, and privacy settings.

Today, we’d like to share with you some of the additional steps we’ve taken to improve our existing family settings. We’re giving you more control over what your children see and interact with on the devices in your home, which is part of our commitment to make gaming a fun, inclusive, and safe experience for everyone. For us, that means offering tools that provide choice so families can create the right balance of screen time in their lives.

Improved Family Settings

We’ve updated our existing family settings to now include app and game limits to cap how much time your children can use specific apps or games. You can activate this feature across the devices tied to your child’s account, which is connected to your Microsoft family group. Creating a family group is an easy and important first step! The feature is currently available in preview release, and we are eager to hear your feedback so we can continue to refine the experience for your family.

For example, you can choose to set one hour of game time for Ark: Survival Evolved each day and two hours for Netflix. Prior to this, you could set broad screen time limits (three hours on Xbox One), whereas now you can determine what specific apps or games are playable or not playable within that timeframe. These app and game limits are shared across Xbox One, Windows 10, and Android via Microsoft Launcher devices and work on all child and teen accounts. You may be wondering about accessing websites through a browser. While the new app and game limits only apply to apps and games – which does not include the app’s website – you can choose to filter websites through the currently available family settings.

Meeting the Needs of Parents Today

In the past year, we’ve also updated family settings on Xbox to empower parents and guardians to enable or block their child’s access to play or communicate with players on other networks. You can modify this setting in supported games on any child or teen account (defaulted to off for child accounts). These features can be found under your Microsoft account on Windows 10 or Xbox One. Simply select the account you’d like to update, and then enable or block cross-play/cross-network communication.

These cross-play settings are currently available for Fortnite, Rocket League, Dauntless and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and we expect other games will enable them, as well.

We’ve also made it easier to set up a child account on Xbox One. You now only need to add your e-signature to provide consent for your child to have a Microsoft account — credit cards are no longer required for verification.

It’s important to us to continually update our family settings to ensure they fit the unique needs of families today.

Balancing Work and Play

Every Microsoft family account can choose to receive a weekly activity report — sent to both you and your child — which contains an overview of how much time was spent on apps, games, and websites. The activity reports provide transparency in how your children are engaging with Xbox One, Windows 10 devices and Android running with Microsoft Launcher and empower you to set limits and features that you feel are the best fit for your family.

When your child reaches the end of their screen time permitted for a specific app or game, they have the option to request additional time, which you can choose to allow or deny through your Microsoft account.

You know what’s best for your family; no technology can ever replace that. The right tools can help make parenting easier and family settings on Xbox does this by putting parents in control of what your children can access across the platform.

Posted on October 8, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Private preview announced for Azure Spring Cloud: fully managed service for Spring Boot microservices

As customers have moved their workloads to the cloud, we’ve seen a growth in the use of cloud-native architectures, particularly microservices. Microservice-based architectures help improve scalability and velocity but implementing them can pose challenges. For many Java developers, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud have helped address these challenges, providing a robust platform with well-established patterns for developing and operating microservice applications. But creating and maintaining a Spring Cloud environment requires work. Such as setting up the infrastructure for dynamic scaling, installing and managing multiple components, and wiring up the application to your logging infrastructure.

To help make it simpler to deploy and operate Spring Cloud applications, together with Pivotal, Microsoft have created Azure Spring Cloud.

Azure Spring Cloud is jointly built, operated, and supported by both Pivotal and Microsoft. This means that you can use Azure Spring Cloud for your most demanding applications and know that both Pivotal and Microsoft are standing behind the service to ensure your success.

High productivity development

Azure Spring Cloud abstracts away the complexity of infrastructure management and Spring Cloud middleware management, so you can focus on building your business logic and let Azure take care of dynamic scaling, security patches, compliance standards, and high availability.

With a few clicks, you can provision an Azure Spring Cloud instance. After configuring a couple dependencies in your pom file, your Spring Cloud app is automatically wired up with Spring Cloud Config Server and Service Registry. Furthermore, you can deploy and scale Spring Boot applications in seconds.

To accelerate your development experience, we provide support for the Azure Spring Cloud Maven plugin and VS Code extensions that optimize Spring development. In other words, you can use the tools that you already know and love.

Ease of monitoring

With out-of-the-box support for aggregating logs, metrics, and distributed app traces into Azure Monitor, you can easily visualize how your applications are performing, detect and diagnose issues across microservice applications and their dependencies, drill into monitoring data for troubleshooting and gain better understanding of what end-users do with your apps.

Open source innovation with Spring integrations

Azure Spring Cloud sets up the compute foundation for cloud-native Spring applications. From there, Azure Spring Cloud makes it simple to connect to data services such as Azure SQL Database, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Cosmos DB to enable enterprise grade end-user authentication and authorization using Azure Active Directory, to bind cloud streams with Service Bus or Event Hubs, and to load and manage secrets with Azure Key Vault. To help you save the effort of manually figuring out dependencies and eliminate boilerplate code, we’ve created a rich library of Spring integrations and starters for your Spring applications.

Sign up for Azure Spring Cloud

Both Pivotal and Microsoft are looking forward to hearing feedback on the new Azure Spring Cloud from our joint customers. If you’re interested in joining the private preview, please submit your contact details here. To hear more from Pivotal on today’s announcement, head over to their blog and let us know what you think.

The service will be available in public preview, for all customers, before end of the calendar year.

Posted on October 7, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft employee and nonprofit founder Brittany Valdes is rewriting the narrative about working mothers

Brittany has always been driven by her career, she explains. During college in West Palm Beach, she ran multiple student and community activities. Then she moved to Chicago and worked in marketing and events at a publishing company and a tourism group. By age 25, her professional achievements were mounting, fueling her growing ambition.

“I was working 60-hour weeks in a big city, and it never felt like work,” she says, laughing knowingly at her younger self. “I thought I was invincible.”

And then, she was contacted by a recruiter. Did she want to lead local community programs for a new Microsoft retail store in Miami? It was the career move she’d been waiting for.

Three weeks later, Brittany received the job offer, but then her life took a twist.

She found out that she was pregnant—and was immediately overcome with doubt and ambiguity.

“I thought that if I wanted to raise a family, I couldn’t be a working mom,” she says, her cheery voice turning suddenly serious.

The decision felt especially fraught for her, given the culture in which she was raised.

“My dad’s side is Cuban, and my mom’s side is Puerto Rican. People from cultures centered on family like mine often particularly struggle with the guilt from wanting both,” she explains.

She was tortured with questions: “Will I get to spend enough time with my kids? Will I be able to devote enough energy to my clients? My baby will only be little for a short time. . . . If I take a break from work, will I be able to pick up where I left off?”

Even though she was uncertain and scared, she had a village around her and decided to make the leap. She took the position as a community development specialist with Microsoft and helped open the first Microsoft retail store in the Miami area.

Posted on October 7, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

EVP Jean-Philippe Courtois: How AI is transforming education and skills development

Artificial intelligence can help us to solve some of society’s most difficult challenges and create a safer, healthier and more prosperous world for all. I’ve already shared the exciting possibilities in the fields of healthcare and agriculture in previous posts. But there may be no area where the possibilities are more interesting – or more important – than education and skills. From personalized learning that takes advantage of AI to adapt teaching methods and materials to the needs of individual students, to automated grading that frees teachers from the drudgery of assessing tests so they have more time to work with students, to intelligent systems that are transforming how learners find and interact with information, the opportunities to improve education outcomes and accessibility will be truly transformational.

There are many classrooms around the world where educators teach very diverse groups of students from different cultures, who speak multiple languages. Take The Dhour Shweir Public Secondary School in Lebanon, for example. It improved the academic interaction between students and educators through applications like OneNote and Microsoft Teams which provides real-time language translation, allowing students who speak different languages to communicate with one another. The tools not only promote better collaboration and productivity, but also enhanced interaction between the students and their teachers.

We also saw just how much more Teams can do when Australian professor, David Kellermann, recently demonstrated how he created a unique learning experience for his university students – from a Question bot that can answer students’ queries on its own to a Power BI dashboard that shows how students’ exam answers compare to peers’ and helps build personalized study packs for future tests based on previous performance.

I am intrigued by a new digital assistant that was recently launched by Staffordshire University, in England. Called Beacon, it is designed to help ease the stress and anxiety that many students experience in their first year at university. Hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform, Beacon takes advantage of the fact that students at Staffordshire, one of the UK’s leading institutions for digital technologies, are more likely to use their mobile phone to find information or search for help than to talk to a lecturer or seek out a member of the university’s staff.

Part information source and part digital coach, Beacon answers questions, suggests activities that students might be interested in, checks on their mood, and supports them in their classwork. If the digital assistant detects signs that a student is struggling, it can send an alert to a university staff member who is able to offer help. By providing insights about how each student is adjusting to university life and creating an avenue for delivering extra support quickly to those who need it, the hope is that it will reduce the dropout rate and help students thrive.

Education doesn’t end with school or University. In today’s world, we must all be prepared to keep learning and re-skilling, as the world of work evolves.

Outside of traditional education institutes, AI can also help people to reskill or acquire news skills – for example, through Microsoft’s partnership with Ashoka, a global organization that supports social entrepreneurs who are committed to finding innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social, cultural, and environmental challenges. As part of Microsoft’s worldwide Tech for Good Initiative, at the heart of this new partnership is the Microsoft-Ashoka Accelerator, a program designed to foster an ecosystem of start-ups that take advantage of the power of cloud computing and artificial intelligence to tackle social and environmental issues. I had the pleasure of meeting Arnaud Mourot, Co-Director of Ashoka Europe earlier this year, to talk about support for promising social start-ups. Microsoft is providing access to technology, AI and cloud expertise, and mentors who can help entrepreneurs create intelligent, data-driven solutions, connect to markets, and more.

I also attended the opening of the first Microsoft-Ashoka Accelerators in France and India, where we are piloting the program. Among the early participants in the program are Singa, an organization that helps refugees and asylum seekers connect with people, services, and economic opportunities in their host countries; Ipso Health, which is working to improve healthcare systems and expand access to quality healthcare; and Libraries Without Borders, which sets up libraries and provides access to information resources in conflict zones and areas affected by natural disasters.

One of the things I like most about this new partnership is Ashoka’s focus on programs for young people and its understanding of the value that comes from helping a new generation of young entrepreneurs gain the skills, knowledge, and confidence they need to apply advanced technology to social innovation. Through its Youth Ventures program, Ashoka has worked with more than 500,000 young people around the world.

I too, am a strong believer in the value of mentoring young people, and it is something I am actively engaged in through Live for Good, a foundation my family and I founded in 2015 to enable young people from all walks of life to reach their full potential through social entrepreneurship and digital innovation.

One of the most important things I have learned is that the world is filled with talented young people who have brilliant ideas and a deep desire to create a better world, but who often lack access to skills training, to technology, or to mentors who can provide the critical guidance they need to truly thrive – in school and at work. Today, AI-based services like Staffordshire University’s Beacon digital assistant and programs like the Microsoft-Ashoka accelerator are providing opportunities for young people to get the support they need to prepare them to lead the way forward, while technologies such as AI are creating new ways to have a positive impact.

To me, this is probably the most inspiring and promising aspect of the digital revolution—the doors it is opening for all of us to thrive and to create a better world.

Posted on October 7, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Why lifelong learning makes for top teaching

Every year, EU Code Week encourages young people across Europe to engage with computer science in a hands-on way. Computer science skills are increasingly in demand in Europe’s labor market, across all kinds of sectors. In fact, over 90 percent of all jobs now require basic levels of digital skills. Meanwhile the demand for skilled ICT professionals in Europe has grown by 4 percent annually in the past decade.

EU Code Week is the perfect time for young people to dip their toes into the world of coding and start building up their expertise. But as this year’s edition kicks off, we also want to recognize the teachers working not just this week, but year-round, to ensure that their students are equipped for future success.

We recently spoke to several teachers from across Europe about the skills they value most in their classrooms – and how they work to hone these skills using technology.

From honing soft skills to staying safe online
Tere Lorca Alhama, a Music and ICT teacher from Spain, highlighted communications and problem solving as her priority skills, alongside critical thinking and digital literacy: “When it comes to their online lives, we must give students the tools to interact safely and behave appropriately. Social media can be a powerful teaching tool, for instance, but children need to learn to use it first.”

For Nicos Paphitis, an ICT teacher from Cyprus, soft skills are important, but there’s also a need to adapt to different students’ needs. As his students tinker with Minecraft or explore a new programming language, they are in fact learning how to collaborate, rethink, troubleshoot and improve, all at their own pace. This is “deep learning”, as Nicos calls it, and it is where he sees students truly thriving and remaining engaged.

Such an environment fosters creativity, which is highly sought-after by employers. Łukasz Gierek, a teacher from Poland, whose school is part of the Microsoft Showcase Schools Program, highlights why this skill in particular takes center stage in his classroom: “Creativity and collaboration are the two most important skills for the next generation. Creativity is what makes us human. The more we use AI, the more we need to cultivate creativity.”

Posted on October 7, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

The path to prosperity through access to high-speed internet

Last year, the world reached a major modern milestone – as of 2018, half of the world’s population is online with some form of internet connection. The bad news is that, despite this progress, this status quo still puts billions of people on the wrong side of the digital divide. Leaving half the world without access to the electricity of today’s age – internet access, and increasingly at broadband speeds – means that existing inequalities, poverty and insecurity will persist, worsen and become increasingly difficult to address.

Efforts to accelerate internet access globally, with a focus on developing nations, are not new. But it’s clear that the world needs a new approach to this work. The UN State of Broadband Report found that broadband adoption has slowed, and progress is especially elusive in low-income countries and rural areas across the globe. Most of the connected population relies on low speed, basic cellular services and only 14.1% of the global population has an in-home internet subscription.

That is why Microsoft is reaffirming our commitment to global connectivity today at the Devex Conference on International Finance. Through the new international track of the Airband Initiative, our goal is to extend internet access to 40 million unserved and underserved people around the globe by July 2022. We’ll concentrate our efforts to areas with significant underserved populations – initially, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa – that also have regulatory interest in solving connectivity issues. Extending internet access to 40 million people around the world in the span of three years is a big task – but it’s informed by our ongoing work in connectivity, experience with partners and engagement from development finance institutions.

In the past, we’ve done this work on a project-by-project basis spanning across Africa, Latin America and Asia. In the U.S., we formalized our connectivity work in 2017 by launching the Airband Initiative, with the goal of bringing broadband connectivity to 3 million people in rural America by July 2022, and today marks the formalization of the international work within the Initiative.

How the program will work

Like our work in the U.S., our goal is to empower local partners who know their communities’ geographies and needs to solve their community’s last mile connectivity challenges. Experience has taught us that diverse challenges require diverse solutions. What works in one part of South Africa may not be a fit for Ghana. A wireless technology or a business model that is suitable for connecting customers in one location might not be suitable for connecting customers in another location. Bringing broadband access to the world’s unserved communities will require much greater reliance on innovative technologies, regulatory approaches and business models. Our experience has shown us that a multi-stakeholder approach is needed to close the connectivity gap. While we might go faster alone, we go much farther together. For this reason, these programs seek to combine our and our partners’ expertise and assets.

Airband International will rely on a four-part approach:

Removing regulatory obstacles to TV White Space (TVWS) and other technologies that help our partners extend their networks quickly in unserved, predominantly rural, areas.
Partnering with local internet service providers (ISPs) to provide affordable, reliable internet services.
Enabling rural digital transformation in newly connected areas, with a focus on supporting agriculture, education, rural entrepreneurship and telemedicine, as well as off-grid energy sources where necessary in order to improve rural productivity and livelihood.
Building a larger ecosystem of support, with a focus on stimulating international financing, to scale connectivity projects beyond our own direct investments.

Early signs of success

We know that new technologies like TVWS can be incredibly useful in meeting rural connectivity needs at an affordable price. However, regulatory frameworks in many parts of the world have not kept pace with innovation. We’ve seen great progress from engagements to date. In Colombia, as we started our work to create a long-term solution for the Meta region, we sat down with the national spectrum regulator to understand the region’s needs, existing regulations and to determine any gaps. In Ghana, we partnered with government officials to ensure strong regulations were in place to deploy long-term solutions such as TVWS.

School children sitting and holding tablets — In Colombia, we worked with regulators to create a framework that will now allow us to extend access to 6 million people throughout the country. Photo credit: Colombian Ministry of ICT

Once these hurdles are removed, partners around the world are poised to move quickly and deliver big results. BLUETOWN is a connectivity and digital content service provider committed to making broadband connectivity more accessible. With regulations in Ghana now permitting access to the TVWS, BLUETOWN is on a path to bring affordable broadband access to over 800,000 people living in the rural eastern part of Ghana who were previously underserved.

These large-scale gains in connectivity are not limited to smaller countries, nor does it stop at connectivity alone. In Colombia, with coffee company Lavazza, ALO partners, Makaia and Microsoft’s support, a small project connected two schools and five farms to broadband via TVWS technology – perfect technology for the region’s jungled and mountainous terrain. It has continued to grow, and now includes an agreement between Lavazza, Microsoft and the National Coffee Growers Association of Colombia that will result in the rural digital transformation for half a million small coffee farmers in the region. Additionally, Airband has co-invested with ISPs in Colombia to extend broadband access to 6 million rural Colombians – that’s 12% of Colombia’s total population.

This work was accelerated by a partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Additional financing is critical to bring these from small projects to scale. The partners invited IDB to join, and this support has helped create results and a blueprint that can be showcased in other countries of the region to accelerate this work.

Looking forward

To close the digital divide once and for all, we need to act to connect the world quickly. This will require the engagement of companies like Microsoft, but importantly, the financial support of international financing organizations around the world. Internet connectivity and technology infrastructure has made up a very small percentage of development bank funding historically, and that will need to change to bring connectivity to the more than three billion people around the globe who lack access to some form of internet connection. To help tackle these challenges, international financing organizations also need to be willing to make bets on local entrepreneurs deploying innovative new technologies and business models better suited to reaching the remaining unconnected communities.

Through our work and our engagement, we hope to not just connect people, but provide a blueprint for other public and private sector entities to think about connectivity as a core part of their investments in health, gender equity, water, energy or any other core area of sustainable development.

There are too many things that divide us in the world today. The internet can bring us closer together, foster new understandings and connections and remove structural barriers to opportunity and equality. Airband International is focused on doing just that, and we hope that you’ll add your support to these efforts as we move forward.

Posted on October 7, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Get ready for Yammer at Microsoft Ignite

Microsoft Ignite is less than a month away and 2019 is turning out to be the year of Yammer. The event is sold out, but you can watch online if you missed your chance to be in Orlando. We’ll have a lot to share for IT Pros, Community Managers, Business Decision Makers, and end users.

It’s going to be big.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK76xSyyn74]

Sessions

The session builder is now live and we have a great mix of roadmap sessions, deep dives, customer stories, and practical learning and opportunities to up-skill. Make sure you add these Yammer-focused sessions to your schedule before they fill up.

The Big One.

The future of Yammer: Share knowledge, engage leaders, and build communities in Microsoft 365 (BRK2233)

Come see the future of Yammer. The Yammer product leadership team unveils the most significant innovations in Yammer history. Explore the vision for Yammer powering leadership engagement, corporate communications, and communities in Microsoft 365. Be the first to discover new Yammer features and integrations that empower people to connect and share knowledge across the organization with open conversation backed by enterprise-grade privacy, security, and compliance.

Featured Sessions

Learn how Yammer powers communities and knowledge sharing in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. Come see what’s new and coming next across Microsoft 365 to extend the powers of what your community can do and how knowledge management and AI can provide real business outcomes, save time, and deliver value.

What’s new in Yammer. Take a deeper look at the latest innovative capabilities and experiences coming to Yammer. Don’t miss this demo-heavy exploration of how Yammer powers and connects organizations and how it’s designed to drive engagement, increase communication and learning, and forge the path of knowledge management in the modern workplace.

Learn how to administer your Yammer network and manage its compliance using the same Microsoft 365 tools you use for Microsoft Teams, Office 365 groups, and other Microsoft products. This session covers recently added support in Yammer for data residency in Europe, and dives deep into Native Mode, which allows all users, groups, and files to be managed through the Microsoft 365 and Azure Active Directory admin centers. Also, learn about new Yammer eDiscovery and data governance features in the Microsoft 365 compliance center.

This session provides both the strategy and tools needed to supercharge engagement and reduce the distance between leadership through to your Firstline workforce. Understand how to foster employee participation, address issues, and take important steps towards driving company initiatives. Learn the components of a modern leadership engagement environment using Yammer, SharePoint, Microsoft Stream, Microsoft Teams, and live events.

Yammer for Good!

Creating an inclusive and diverse workplace has numerous business and cultural benefits for an organization. Come learn actionable strategies, campaigns, and methods you can employ to begin delivering a modern employee experience. We demonstrate how you can use Yammer and Microsoft Teams to: • Build and manage open communities of interest • Create and share inclusive comms campaigns • Host townhalls around topics and initiatives • Navigate challenging conversations to create a culture of open sharing Come with an open mind. Leave with the resources, skills, and confidence to create a D&I initiative at your company.

Community

We’re planning a lot of great chances to connect with community and the folks who work on Yammer at Microsoft. Sign up for a pre-day, keep an eye out for meetups and community events, stop by the Expo hall for demos and swag at the Yammer booth, and take exams for free while you’re at the event. We’ll have more to share as we get closer to November.

Keep up with the latest news and share in the excitement by following @Yammer on Twitter and following the #YearOfYammer tag.

See you in Orlando!

-Mike Holste

Product Marketing Manager, Yammer

@mike_holste

Posted on October 4, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Recent cyberattacks require us all to be vigilant

Today we’re sharing that we’ve recently seen significant cyber activity by a threat group we call Phosphorus, which we believe originates from Iran and is linked to the Iranian government. We’re sharing this for two reasons. First, it is important that we all – governments and private sector – are increasingly transparent about nation-state attacks and efforts to disrupt democratic processes. Second, while we have processes to notify customers about nation state activity and have AccountGuard to monitor accounts of campaigns and other associated organizations related to election processes in democracies around the world, publishing this information should help others be more vigilant and take steps to protect themselves.

In a 30-day period between August and September, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) observed Phosphorus making more than 2,700 attempts to identify consumer email accounts belonging to specific Microsoft customers and then attack 241 of those accounts. The targeted accounts are associated with a U.S. presidential campaign, current and former U.S. government officials, journalists covering global politics and prominent Iranians living outside Iran. Four accounts were compromised as a result of these attempts; these four accounts were not associated with the U.S. presidential campaign or current and former U.S. government officials. Microsoft has notified the customers related to these investigations and threats and has worked as requested with those whose accounts were compromised to secure them.

Phosphorus used information gathered from researching their targets or other means to game password reset or account recovery features and attempt to take over some targeted accounts. For example, they would seek access to a secondary email account linked to a user’s Microsoft account, then attempt to gain access to a user’s Microsoft account through verification sent to the secondary account. In some instances, they gathered phone numbers belonging to their targets and used them to assist in authenticating password resets.

While the attacks we’re disclosing today were not technically sophisticated, they attempted to use a significant amount of personal information both to identify the accounts belonging to their intended targets and in a few cases to attempt attacks. This effort suggests Phosphorus is highly motivated and willing to invest significant time and resources engaging in research and other means of information gathering. MSTIC works every day to track threat groups including Phosphorus so we can notify customers when they face threats or compromises and so that we can build our products to better defend against these threats.

As we’ve previously disclosed, our Digital Crimes Unit has also taken legal and technical steps to combat Phosphorus attacks and we continue to take these types of actions.

There are also a range of steps customers can take to help secure their consumer accounts. We strongly encourage all customers to enable two-step verification on their accounts which can be done in Account Security settings. While there are a number of ways to enable this two-step verification, the most secure option is through a password-less solution like Microsoft Authenticator.

People can also periodically check their login history, and we recommend this for journalists, political campaigns staff, and others interested in assuring account security. These logs are made available through the Account Security Sign-In Activity tab. They are easy to read and look like this:

Expanding any of these events in this tab will provide details on the device and IP address used to access the account in question. If any of the activity looks suspicious, you can notify Microsoft by clicking on the associated “Secure Your Account” link. If you detect suspicious activity, you should change your password and enable two-step verification. To better secure your Microsoft account, follow these tips for keeping your Microsoft account safe and secure.

While this advice relates to consumer accounts, we also provide a range of additional tools and advice to IT administrators to protect their corporate networks. A starting point for accessing these tools is here.

However, if you are part of a political campaign, a political party committee or an NGO or think tank working on issues related to democracy, you are eligible for Microsoft AccountGuard, an offering from our Defending Democracy Program, and can sign up here. There are currently 60,000 accounts in 26 countries protected by AccountGuard, which provides monitoring and unified threat notification across the Office 365 accounts you use for work and the personal accounts of your staff and others affiliated with your organization that opt-in for this protection. To date, we’ve made more than 800 notifications of attempted nation-state attacks to AccountGuard customers.

We hope all governments, companies and advocacy groups will consider joining the Paris Peace Call for Trust & Security in Cyberspace and that all companies will consider joining the Cybersecurity Tech Accord. These are two important initiatives that aim to keep the internet safer from the types of malign activity we’re discussing today.

Posted on October 3, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Enabling government to advance ‘tech intensity’ with newest cloud product innovations

In a world where every company is transforming to be digital, we see examples of organizations across public and private sectors embracing the concept of ‘tech intensity’ to maximize their impact. From our perspective, there are three aspects to the leadership principle of tech intensity: First, every leader will need to tune their organization to become a fast adopter of best-in- class technology. Second, organizations will need to build their own unique digital capabilities, which starts with workers who are deeply knowledgeable about the latest technology. And finally, leadership in the digital economy will be exponentially amplified by the level of trust that is created with customers, partners, and stakeholders.

Today’s landscape demands a different leadership approach to capitalize on opportunities at the accelerated pace required to deliver modern mission outcomes. In the U.S. federal government, leaders are adopting technology to successfully optimize existing programs and to accelerate new services that improve the lives of American citizens. Many of our government customers are leading by example in building their own tech capabilities, which enable them to be more efficient and be better positioned to deliver on their mission service to their citizens. Examples abound and you’ll hear us showcase our partnerships with the Department of Veterans Affairs, USDA Agricultural Research Service, the Department of the Interior and more in the coming weeks.

Government is Embracing Tech Intensity

Tech intensity is really an equation – Tech Intensity = (Tech Adoption X Tech Capability) ^ Trust and as a company Microsoft is focused on providing the inputs to help our customers solve it. For the government agencies harnessing the benefits tech intensity today there are three critical factors to success we’re seeing them embrace: First, they’re finding ways to increase agility and become fast adopters of best-in-class technology, and equally important, they’re building or looking to build their own unique digital capabilities. Don’t forget the human factor here which starts with workers who are deeply knowledgeable about the latest technology backed by a culture that encourages capability-building and collaboration to generate new, breakthrough concepts. To speed tech adoption, they recognize how vital it is that they are able to access the latest commercial platforms, tools and training, so that they don’t have to re-create technology that already has been commoditized. It’s really the first step to building tech intensity. Finally, to assist government leaders in building trust in technology and its deployment to meet Agency missions, Microsoft provides a variety of tools including AI Business School government curriculum (see below) and books like The Future Computed and Tools and Weapons which provide guidance around the impact and ethics of AI which we are seeing government agencies beginning to adopt.

Enabling Government’s Tech Intensity Journey

Microsoft is committed to supporting the technology needs of all branches and levels of government and we’ve worked with our government customers to achieve the most certifications of any cloud provider. We’ve built the most trusted, comprehensive cloud for government which includes Azure Government, Microsoft 365 Government, and Dynamics 365 Government. Today, we’re announcing the latest advances to these government cloud solutions, demonstrating our commitment to our customers unique needs and desire to empower their tech intensity journey.

Delivering mobility and power at the tactical edge with new Data Box capabilities

Microsoft offers a comprehensive portfolio designed to bring compute, data analysis and insight to the tactical edge. Azure Data Box and Azure Stack family of products help government agencies with remote operations access the information they need to make decisions at the edge, along with access to the full range of cloud capabilities as connectivity allows.

For example, Azure Data Box Edge, an AI-enabled edge computing appliance, processes and analyzes data right at the tactical edge and transfers data to cloud when connected. It includes an FPGA on-board to accelerate machine learning inferencing at the edge and transfers the data to Azure over network to retrain the machine learning model or perform aggregated data analytics.

Today we’re sharing that we are getting ready to deliver a new form-factor of Data Box Edge, which will be rugged, portable, and battery-operated. The new form-factor will be ruggedized to meet MIL-STD-810G and MIL-STG-461 standards. A single person can carry this appliance in the field, for example, in their backpacks, in remote and disconnected areas. In field operations, speed is of the essence and insights empower decisions. We’ve partnered with Klas Telecom to bring you this new form-factor, which will further the intelligence of the forward-deployed operating units, ground patrols, or similar mission needs at the tactical edge and empower faster decision making.

New Microsoft 365 Government capabilities for cross agency collaboration and security

In March 2019 we announced that Microsoft Teams – the hub for teamwork– is available in all U.S. Government cloud environments. To further enable cross agency collaboration, we’re excited to announce. Teams Phone Systems and Audio Conferencing are rolling out GCC High and Department of Defense (DoD) environments starting mid-October. These new capabilities along with all the current collaboration services in Teams will enable governments to be mission focused and better service citizens.

As governments embrace tech intensity there’s in increasing demand on time and resources to manage data with a secure cloud environment. Microsoft 365 Government includes built-in security capabilities to protect, detect, and respond to cyberattacks. We’ve also recently announced general availability of Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to the GCC High environment, bringing endpoint detection, response, automated investigation and remediation to U.S. government customers in this environment.

New Business Applications capabilities to empower citizens through proactive customer service

Empowering citizens to engage is essential to modern government. With our Microsoft Business Applications portfolio, government is better able to interact with citizens, empower employees, optimize operations and transform cities at scale with our immersive solutions across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Earlier in 2019, we announced PowerApps and Flow for our GCC environments and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Government availability meeting DoD requirements for contractors holding, or processing DoD controlled unclassified information or subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). By the end of this calendar year, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Government for DoD will be available.

Today, we are expanding the availability of PowerApps and Flow to GCC High environments. This means our government customers and DoD contractors with higher compliance demands can benefit from these tools. PowerApps and Flow, along with Power BI enables users to do three key actions on data: analyze, act, and automate. Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow work together to help anyone, regardless of technical ability, drive decisions with data.

Outdated tools, systems and practices can make interacting with the government cumbersome. To provide additional channels of engagement that make connections easier, we are announcing Chat for Dynamics 365 is generally available in GCC environments. Chat is an engagement channel that enables your agents to connect with customers in real-time.

Connecting global locations with fast, private, hybrid network connectivity

Customers with distributed operations across the United States or across the globe can benefit from the speed and efficiency of high-bandwidth connectivity, intelligent traffic routing, and the global scale of our network. With ExpressRoute Global Reach, customers gain not only a fast, private connection to the cloud, they can also use our global network as a backbone to connect their on-premises networks together. ExpressRoute can also be used to bring satellite data from ground to cloud, so it can be harnessed at the tactical edge or rapidly distributed to locations around the globe.

Meeting the full spectrum of data classification requirements

As previously announced, Azure Government Secret includes dedicated regions built to support US agencies and partners working with Secret U.S. security classification level data. We’re seeing significant demand for these new regions, and today we’re announcing Sequoia Combine for Azure Government and Azure Government Secret, delivering dev, test and deployment capabilities for classified clouds from an unclassified environment. This emulator service, currently in preview, offers an approved, trusted, and proven approach for IC and DoD air-gapped region solution development.

Accelerating the path to compliance

We’re continually working to streamline compliance, making it easier for customers and partners to accelerate their path to ATO. FedRAMP is a critical certification for many federal agencies and a growing number of state and local government agencies. Today we’re announcing the built-in Blueprint for FedRAMP to help customers with compliance requirements based on FedRAMP proactively manage and monitor the compliance of their Azure environments. This new offering joins a series of recent releases including the NIST SP 800-53 R4 blueprint, all focused on helping you meet your compliance requirements more easily and efficiently.

Responsible AI in Government Business School Module

We launched AI Business School because we know AI will be used more and more to help organizations to innovate and solve problems, and we wanted to help leaders be ready to do so in the right way. We recognize that every organization faces its own challenges, and we wanted to provide concrete examples for each of them through tailored information and real-world case studies. That’s why we added a learning path specific to government because of the uniqueness of the problems these agencies face when considering AI applications. Earlier this week, we rolled out a new version of AI Business School, with updates to that government path, new and adapted lessons within our Responsible AI module and a new learning path for education industry decision makers and educators. The new module focuses on identifying governing practices for responsible AI in government and draws on the wisdom from experts at EY and Altimeter Group. In it we share examples from governments around the world to shed light on what government officials should consider and how to take action. It also has information on tools to support responsible AI and how to make AI governance both tangible and measurable

We’re on a Mission Together

Tech intensity is the motivation behind our mission at Microsoft to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As agencies face a range of new challenges in meeting their missions, we are committed to helping our more than 10,000 government customers use technology to unlock the power of data, which underpins everything they do. I look forward to sharing many more examples of how government is embracing tech intensity to better engage and connect with citizens, modernize the government workplace, and enhance government services to benefit society. Learn more about how government agencies are using Microsoft cloud technology here.

Posted on October 3, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Running on ritual: How Microsoft Netherlands used data and relentless experimentation to reinvent the way it works

Days before the 2018 New Year, the brisk Amsterdam cold was settling into the city’s streets and canals and Ernst-Jan Stigter was beginning to wonder if he was about to make a major visionary move or take things too far.

As GM of Microsoft’s Netherlands subsidiary, he had been helping to steer, along with a group of involved employees, a full renovation of the organization’s office, a six-story glass edifice located on the outskirts of the city alongside the swooping planes of Schiphol Airport. But early on, Stigter and his team had decided that they would not simply rebuild the space. They would use the opportunity to take the next big step in a relentless experiment their organization had been conducting for more than a decade. Since 2005, Microsoft Netherlands has been obsessed with finding ever-new ways for employees to work and engage with customers, believing that if it harnessed the latest research in behavioral science and productivity, it could end up with happier, more innovative workers and stronger partner and customer relationships.

In short, the team was constantly trying to figure out not so much how to squeeze more into their days—more emails, more projects, more checkboxes checked—but how to get more out of their days—more focus, more balance, more relationship-building and collaboration. How, as they put it, to find “more life in a day.”

Against the backdrop of a broad transformation Microsoft embarked upon after CEO Satya Nadella came onboard in 2014, the Netherlands office was seeking to future-proof its workforce and accelerate success. It was a natural next step for the change-hungry team with a growth mindset, which had begun pioneering innovative office space and prioritizing work-life balance for employees before either was part of the mainstream business paradigm.

That culture of experimentation and customer obsession is how Stigter ended up feeling more than a little nervous as an important milestone loomed in January 2018. He and about 800 of his reports and other Microsoft employees were preparing for an almost unheard of exercise, one undertaken voluntarily as part of this new wave of transformation: while the Netherlands office was closed for 10 weeks of renovations, there would be no official temporary workspace.