Microsoft news – Page 204

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

It’s time for a new approach for mapping broadband data to better serve Americans

Every day, our world becomes a little more digital. But reaping the benefits of this digital world – pursuing new educational opportunities through distance learning, feeding the world through precision agriculture, growing a small business by leveraging the cloud, and accessing better healthcare through telemedicine – is only possible for those with a broadband connection, a link not available to at least 25 million people, 19 million of whom live in this country’s rural areas, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

This lack of connectivity has a very real impact on economic well-being. There are at least six independent studies that show that broadband has a direct impact on jobs and GDP growth. Our analysis shows that the counties with the highest unemployment also have the lowest broadband usage (and broadband access).

Despite the importance of this issue, we are not making very much progress in closing the broadband gap. In the past five years, there’s been more than $22 billion in subsidies and grants to carriers to sustain, extend and improve broadband in rural America. But adoption has barely budged.

This Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee will explore one of the reasons progress has lagged – a continued reliance on inaccurate broadband mapping data that vastly undercounts the number of Americans without access to broadband. This has been an area of concern for some time, and below we have outlined the issues with the current approach to broadband mapping and steps the Senate, and ultimately the FCC, could take to resolve them.

The government’s most current broadband statistics come from the FCC and suggest 25 million Americans lack access to a broadband connection. There’s strong evidence, though, that the percentage of Americans without broadband access is much higher than the figures reported by the FCC.

Getting these numbers right is vitally important. This data is used by federal, state and local agencies to decide where to target public funds dedicated to closing this broadband gap. That means millions of Americans already lacking access to broadband have been made invisible, substantially decreasing the likelihood of additional broadband funding or much needed broadband service.

We’ve seen this in the past year, in many places and in many ways, including talking directly to the people who live in rural America as part of our Airband Initiative work to expand rural connectivity. We examined other data sources, including Pew Research and the FCC’s own subscription data, that show far lower usage rates than the 92 percent access reported by the FCC.

Two US maps showing broadband access — Maps showing large differences of broadband access vs. actual usage of broadband.

This led us to explore this issue ourselves. Using anonymized data that we collect as part of our ongoing work to improve the performance and security of our software and services, we found that 162.8 million people are not using the internet at broadband speeds. Our results align well with the FCC’s broadband subscription data and the Pew Research numbers, which suggests these data sets are far closer to the mark then the broadband access data reported by the FCC and leaves us with the unescapable conclusion that today there exists no accurate, comprehensive and public estimate of broadband coverage in the United States.

In our home state of Washington, the FCC data indicates that 100 percent of Ferry County residents have access to broadband. When we spoke to local officials, they indicated that very few residents in this rural county had access and those that did were using broadband in business. Our data bears this out, showing that only 2 percent of Ferry County is using broadband.

There is a Ferry County in every state. In Mississippi, the FCC indicates that broadband is available to 97.1 percent of people in Tishomingo County, while our data shows that only 3.6 percent of the county uses the internet at broadband speeds. This is not just a rural issue, either. In more urban states, like Massachusetts, the issue persists. The FCC indicates that broadband is available to 86.3 percent of the people in Berkshire County, while our data shows that 39.4 percent of the county is using the internet at broadband speeds.

These significant discrepancies across nearly all counties in all 50 states indicates there is a problem with the accuracy of the access data reported by the FCC. Additional data sources like ours, as well as work by others to examine data in a few states or regions, are important to understanding the problem. But this problem cannot be solved by more or different data alone.

There are two fundamental problems with the data used for broadband mapping right now.

The request on the form the FCC uses to collect broadband data is too broad. Form 477 is the primary tool used to collect data on broadband deployment. Right now, this form asks providers if they are “providing or could …without an extraordinary commitment of resources provide broadband service to an area.” If the answer is yes to either question, the area is considered covered – meaning many places are counted as covered that have no access and providers have no plans to provide it any time soon.
The lack of location specificity poses challenges. The FCC data is based on census blocks, the smallest unit used by the U.S. Census Bureau – though in rural areas, these blocks can be quite large. If broadband access is delivered to a single customer in that block, the entire block is counted as having service. We must be able to count those within the census block who are unserved.

We commend Chairman Roger Wicker, Ranking Member Maria Cantwell, and all the members of the Commerce Committee for their active oversight and leadership on this issue and recommend three actions the committee could take to encourage the FCC to more quickly close the broadband gap:

Remove “could provide” from the question in Form 477. We should measure actual progress, not hypothetical progress, and make funding decisions on real access data.
Use both availability and actual usage (and/or subscription data) to guide investments and communicate progress moving forward. Both access and usage data sets are critically important in building a full and accurate broadband map, as access data shows the current and near-future plans and usage data helps us understand how access translates into service and verification of the availability of broadband.
Fix the availability data collection and reporting challenges prior to releasing a new report on broadband mapping. Our data science team has reviewed the draft report from the FCC and compared it to our latest usage data. We found that the increase in access reported in that draft document has not translated into broadband usage growth, especially in rural areas. This demonstrates the need to make significant adjustments to methodology prior to release.

We’re encouraged by productive conversations we’ve had with many members of the Commerce Committee, as well as other members of Congress, the administration and the FCC who understand the problem and have a shared desire to provide better connectivity for all Americans. We stand ready to assist in whatever way we can, and look forward to continuing our work, both through partnering with the public sector and with providers through our Airband Initiative, to close the broadband gap, quickly.

Learn more about our data here: https://news.microsoft.com/rural-broadband/

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

Hybrid storage performance comes to Azure

When it comes to adding a performance tier between compute and file storage, Avere Systems has led the way with its high-performance caching appliance known as the Avere FXT Edge Filer. This week at NAB, attendees will get a first look at the new Azure FXT Edge Filer, now with even more performance, memory, SSD, and support for Azure Blob. Since Microsoft’s acquisition of Avere last March, we’ve been working to provide an exciting combination of performance and efficiency to support hybrid storage architectures with the Avere appliance technology.

Linux performance over NFS

Microsoft is committed to meeting our customers where we’re needed. The launch of the new Azure FXT Edge Filer is yet another example of this as we deliver high-throughput and low-latency NFS to applications running on Linux compute farms. The Azure FXT Edge Filer solves latency issues between Blob storage and on-premises computing with built-in translation from NFS to Blob. It sits at the edge of your hybrid storage environment closest to on-premises compute, caching the active data to reduce bottlenecks. Let’s look at common applications:

Active Archives in Azure Blob – When Azure Blob is a target storage location for aging, but not yet cold data, the Azure FXT Edge Filer accelerates access to files by creating an on-premises cache of active data.

WAN Caching – Latency across wide area networks (WANs) can slow productivity. The Azure FXT Edge Filer caches active data closest to the users and hides that latency as they reach for data stored in data centers or colos. Remote office engineers, artists, and other power users achieve fast access to files they need, and meanwhile backup, mirroring, and other data protection activities run seamlessly in the core data center.

NAS Optimization – Many high-performance computing environments have large NetApp or Dell EMC Isilon network-attached storage (NAS) arrays. When demand is at its peak, these storage systems can become bottlenecks. The Azure FXT Edge Filer optimizes these NAS systems by caching data closest to the compute, separating performance from capacity and better delivering both.

When datasets are large, hybrid file-storage caching provides performance and flexibility that are needed to keep core operations productive.

Azure FXT Edge Filer model specifications

We are currently previewing the FXT 6600 model at customer sites, with a second FXT 6400 model becoming available with general availability. The FXT 6600 is an impressive top-end model with 40 percent more read performance and double the memory of the FXT 5850. The FXT 6400 is a great mid-range model for customers who don’t need as much memory and SSD capacity or are looking to upgrade FXT 5600 and FXT 5400 models at an affordable price.

Azure FXT Edge Filer – 6600 Model	Azure FXT Edge Filer – 6400 Model
Highest performance, largest cache	High-performance, large cache
Specifications per node:	Specifications per note:
1536 GB DRAM	768 GB DRAM
25.6 TB SSD	12.8 TB SSD
6×25/10Gb + 2x1Gb Network Ports	6×25/10Gb + 2x1Gb Network Ports
Minimum 3-node cluster	Minimum 3-node cluster
Uses 256 AES encryption	Uses 256 AES encryption

Key features

Scalable to 24 FXT server nodes as demand grows
High-performance DRAM/memory for faster access to active data and large SSD cache sizes to support big data workloads
Single mountpoint provides simplified management across heterogeneous storage
Hybrid architecture – NFSv3, SMB2 to clients and applications; support for NetApp, Dell EMC Isilon, Azure Blob, and S3 storage

The Azure FXT Edge Filer is a combination of hardware provided by Dell EMC and software provided by Microsoft. For ease, a complete solution will be delivered to customers as a software-plus-hardware appliance through a system integrator. If you are interested in learning more about adding the Azure FXT Edge Filer to your on-premises infrastructure or about upgrading existing Avere hardware, you can reach out to the team now. Otherwise, watch for update on the Azure FXT Edge Filer homepage.

Azure FXT Edge Filer for render farms

High-performance file access for render farms and artists is key to meeting important deadlines and building efficiencies into post-production pipelines. At NAB 2019 in Las Vegas, visit the Microsoft Azure booth #SL6716 to learn more about the new Azure FXT Edge Filer for rendering. You’ll find technology experts, presentations, and support materials to help you render faster with Azure.

Resources

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

Ann Johnson: Demystifying cybersecurity starts with the language we use

As the cybersecurity industry has evolved, one dynamic has remained consistent: our industry-“speak”. We use a language that is very unique, difficult for new folks to understand, and oftentimes just plain sensationalistic. While any industry has its own technical terms, our language can also be a barrier to recruitment for many. This should be of concern to all of us in cybersecurity as we look to become more inclusive, rather than exclusive.

Language often reflects and supports a culture. Culture is defined by language norms and values of its people. It is easy to become conditioned to the way we speak and use terminology. As we look to how we can encourage industry growth and maturity, we should strive to evolve the way we use our industry’s nomenclature to be more open and consider how we are defining and shaping our industry’s culture through language. The exciting thing is, the opportunity is right before us, because cybersecurity is constantly evolving.

There are many examples of words that are part of the InfoSec culture – words that do not easily translate to people without a deep industry background. My approach is to avoid hyper technical or sensationalistic terms, and to create a language baseline that is simple and inclusive. Then, I put it to the test: Is the cyber language we’re speaking something my family can understand? Are there other terms we could use to simplify unique technical terms? Can we all agree to search for new words and try them out?

Let’s consider terms like sandboxing, detonation chamber, whitelists, blacklists, and so forth. While each have specific purposes, we should ask ourselves: are there different ways of saying the same things or defining these terms? What would the synonym be for “blacklist” and would “filtering known bad sites” or “risk lists” suffice?

We must also examine and test whether ways that are more easily understood help to make the industry appear more open and accepting to a broader, more diverse audience or talent population. This is not a matter appearing politically correct – it is a matter of being pragmatic and understanding we will not solve the talent shortage in cybersecurity if we do not make some fundamental changes to the industry. One of the simple changes we could make is to make our common industry vernacular less intimidating.

Testing the waters, I fielded this very topic about whether our industry terms are terrifying and/or confusing to those not in the industry. While many shared examples of cyber terms we should explore, there was agreement that most of our vernacular leans to weaponized or militaristic language.

As a technology professional with 30 years of experience working for companies that are not pure security focused, I have spent many hours creating glossaries and explaining InfoSec language to my colleagues. Quite often there are raised eyebrows and snickers at some of the things we consider common language – as well as questioning and commentary on how unique security people are. I have no issue with uniqueness or deep skills, but that does not mean everything the industry does needs to be unique. The days of security by obscurity are dead.

The cyber insiders club we have created for ourselves is not what makes us special. What makes us special is that we are required to adapt quickly, evolve, and grow. If we don’t, we will become extinct. Bad actors are continually changing and modernizing their tools and methods. They recognize the evolution of InfoSec as an opportunity of scale. By allowing more people to easily understand the fundamentals of security and take an active role in shaping its culture, we can and will build better defenses. Imagine how much easier your job would be if you didn’t spend the first 30-minutes of every InfoSec-related meeting developing a common understanding of language.

If we are to truly influence and shape our industry’s culture, I am asking everyone in the industry to examine how and what we communicate, how we can make cybersecurity easier to understand by the language we use. Thus we will become more open and inclusive. We can do so much if we embrace change and growth, and open our arms to those who have so much to contribute, but who may not “speak” our language.

Posted on April 6, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Present more inclusively with live captions and subtitles in PowerPoint

Live presentations can be thought-provoking, inspirational, and powerful. A great presentation can inspire us to think about something in an entirely different way or bring a group together around a common idea or project. But not everyone experiences presentations in the same way. We may speak a different language from the presenter, or be a native speaker in another language, and some of us are deaf and hard of hearing. So, what if speakers could make their presentations better understood by everyone in the room? Now they can with live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint.

In honor of the United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities, we’re announcing this new feature—powered by artificial intelligence (AI)—which provides captions and subtitles for presentations in real-time. Live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint supports the deaf and hard of hearing community by giving them the ability to read what is being spoken in real-time. In addition, captions and subtitles can be displayed in the same language or in a different one, allowing non-native speakers to get a translation of a presentation. At launch, live captions & subtitles will support 12 spoken languages and display on-screen captions or subtitles in one of 60+ languages.

Live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint brings:

The power of AI to presenters, so they can convey simple and complex information across subjects and topics.
Speech recognition that automatically adapts based on the presented content for more accurate recognition of names and specialized terminology.
The ability for presenters to easily customize the size, position, and appearance of subtitles. Customizations may vary by platform.
A peace of mind with security and compliance knowing that the feature meets many industry standards for compliance certifications.

The feature joins other accessible features in Office 365, like automatic suggestions for alt-text in Word and PowerPoint, expanded availability of automatic closed captions and searchable transcripts for videos in Microsoft Stream, enhancements to the Office 365 Accessibility Checker, and more.

Here’s what one of our customers had to say:

“We are constantly looking for new ways of ensuring that the Government of Canada sets the highest possible standards as an accessible and inclusive workplace. We welcome such positive advances in technology, like this feature, that allows everyone, and notably those with disabilities, to better communicate ideas. They help break down barriers and lead to greater inclusiveness to the benefit of individuals and society as a whole.”
—Yazmine Laroche, deputy minister responsible for Public Service Accessibility

Live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint will begin rolling out in late January 2019 and will be available for Office 365 subscribers worldwide for PowerPoint on Windows 10, PowerPoint for Mac, and PowerPoint Online.

Posted on April 6, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Collaborate with others and keep track of to-dos with new AI features in Word

Focus is a simple but powerful thing. When you’re in your flow, your creativity takes over, and your work is effortless. When you’re faced with distractions and interruptions, progress is slow and painful. And nowhere is that truer than when writing.

Microsoft Word has long been the standard for creating professional-quality documents. Technologies like Editor—Word’s AI-powered writing assistant—make it an indispensable tool for the written word. But at some point in the writing process, you’ll need some information you don’t have at your fingertips, even with the best tools. When this happens, you likely do what research tells us many Word users do: leave a placeholder in your document and come back to it later to stay in your flow.

Today, we’re starting to roll out new capabilities to Word that help users create and fill in these placeholders without leaving the flow of their work. For example, type TODO: finish this section or <<insert closing here>> and Word recognizes and tracks them as to-dos. When you come back to the document, you’ll see a list of your remaining to-dos, and you can click each one to navigate back to the right spot.

Once you’ve created your to-dos, Word can also help you complete them. If you need help from a friend or coworker, just @mention them within a placeholder. Word sends them a notification with a “deep link” to the relevant place in the document. Soon, they’ll be able to reply to the notification with their contributions, and those contributions will be inserted directly into the document—making it easy to complete the task with an email from any device.

Over time, Office will use AI to help fill in many of these placeholders. In the next few months, Word will use Microsoft Search to suggest content for a to-do like <<insert chart of quarterly sales figures>>. You will be able to pick from the results and insert content from another document with a single click.

These capabilities are available today for Word on the Mac for Office Insiders (Fast) as a preview. We’ll roll these features out to all Office 365 subscribers soon for Word for Windows, the Mac, and the web.

Get started as an Office for Mac Insider

Office Insider for Mac has two speeds: Insider Fast and Insider Slow. To get access to this and other new feature releases, you’ll need a subscription to Office 365. To select a speed, open Microsoft Auto Update and on the Help menu select Check for Updates.

As always, we would love to hear from you, please send us your thoughts at UserVoice or visit us on Twitter or Facebook. You can also let us know how you like the new features by clicking the smiley face icon in the upper-right corner of Word.

Posted on April 6, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft Search—cohesive search that intelligently helps you find, discover, command, and navigate

At Ignite last year, we introduced personalized search across Office 365, a way to bring intelligent search and discovery experiences directly to you. Today, we’re delighted to announce that we are expanding that vision to encompass search both inside and outside of Microsoft 365. By applying artificial intelligence (AI) technology from Bing to the deep personalized insights surfaced by the Microsoft Graph, we are able to make search in your organization even more effective.

With Microsoft Search, we’re introducing new organizational search experiences into the apps you use every day, including Bing.com and Windows, and our vision to connect across your organization’s network of data.

We’re also evolving the notion of what search means. Getting pages of results with hyperlinks to other information is simply not enough. Faced with ever decreasing attention spans, and an explosion of data, we recognize that the challenge is to find and deliver answers to your questions, suggest insights, and enable you to take action on your tasks. This makes search a powerful capability that stretches across your work to make you more productive and take advantage of the collective knowledge from your organization.

Our vision is a cohesive and coherent search capability, prominent in every experience, providing the way to search across all your organization’s data—both inside and outside of Microsoft 365.

Over the next few months, you’ll experience these first steps:

Search will move to a prominent, consistent place across the apps you work with every day. From Outlook to PowerPoint, Excel to Sway, OneNote to Microsoft Teams, Office.com to SharePoint, the search bar will be in the same place—across desktop, mobile, and web.
Personalized results as soon as you click in the search box, such as people you share with the most and documents you were working on recently. No query is required to get suggestions.
The search box itself will also command the application where you are working. For example, begin typing “acc” in Word to get list of suggested actions such as Accept Revision or Accessibility Checker. You no longer need to hunt through toolbars to look for a command.
Search results will include results from across your organization. For example, within Word, you can find not only other Word documents, but also a presentation you were working on. You can navigate straight to that presentation or you can choose to incorporate slides from that file directly into your document.
Extending that same organizational search experience wherever you are working—in Bing.com (when signed in with your Office 365 account), Edge or Windows. Search wherever you want to and get the same experience.
Unified administration of your organizational search results, including admin-curated results such as bookmarks.

Experience Microsoft Search today

Key to delivering the Microsoft Search capability is the ability to have consistent scope of results anywhere you are searching. Even if the interface looks different, the goal is to have the same experience, personalized and contextualized for that specific interaction point.

Microsoft Search in Bing.com

Over the last year, 180 companies participated in our private preview, with files, sites, people, locations, and groups based on Microsoft Graph data. Based on the private preview feedback, we’re announcing the ability to search across conversations in both Teams and Yammer simultaneously.

Searching in Bing returns both your organizational results and web results, making it an easy destination for broad searches to get the best of your work world and secure your web searches. Public preview begins rolling out today. Tenant admins must opt in to the experience for their organization. Visit bing.com/business/explore for details.

Microsoft Search in Office.com

Get back to your work faster with Office.com, surfacing the same search scope across Microsoft 365. Find documents you were recently working on, as well as recommended documents that your colleagues have mentioned you in, and keep up to date with what has been worked on since you last looked at it. Microsoft Search in Office.com goes into targeted release today.

Microsoft Search in SharePoint mobile app

The new version of the SharePoint mobile app includes search as the default experience when you enter the app. It lists common questions, personalized results, and frequent searches that organizations can curate. The new SharePoint mobile app is available for download today.

Microsoft Search in the Outlook mobile app

The Outlook mobile app also highlights search as an important element of the user experience, providing access to commands, content, and people. With “zero query search,” simply placing your cursor in the search box will bring up recommendations powered by AI and the Microsoft Graph. The Outlook mobile app for iOS and Android are available for download today.

Outlook will also bring zero query, fuzzy search, and top results based on intelligent technology to other endpoints as we drive towards coherence. Enhancements to search in Outlook for Windows, Mac, and on the web started to roll out to targeted release mid-September.

Connect and curate data across your organization’s systems

Boundary-less search is only as good as the sources it has access to. We recognize that organizations have a wealth of data in other third-party services and applications. In 2019, we will build native connectors for popular third-party applications that will surface search results inline with Microsoft data into all the search experiences you have, including Office, Windows, Edge, and Bing.com. Administrators will be able to select which connectors they wish to use for their organizations based on which investments they’ve already made in third-party applications. Further extensibility with APIs will also be possible. Organizations will be able customize the search sources and the display of search results with custom refiners and verticals, and control the display of how sources of information look in result pages.

Coming in the first half of 2019

Microsoft Search in Office

Our new suite-wide search in the ribbon offers the same consistent experience and results across your favorite Office apps—across desktop, mobile, and web. Find, command, navigate, and discover directly from the same search box.

Microsoft Search in Windows

Right from your taskbar, perform searches that include local and organizational search results; whether that is people, the location of an office, or your files, you can find it all in Windows.

What’s coming next?

The Microsoft Graph gleans insight from the people, sites, devices, and documents you work with and is the basis for consistent learning across your organization, wherever you and your colleagues work. Microsoft Graph ranks search results relevant to your needs. You can see all the results that satisfy your query, but personalized search prioritizes the results that are most likely to achieve your objective.

Supercharging the Microsoft Graph with advanced AI technology from Bing and its knowledge of the world, we can extend our vision for insightful technology to make it simple to ask natural language questions and get real answers, without manual intervention. For example, a question such as “Can my brother work for me at my company?” means that not only syntactic parsing of the question is necessary but semantic understanding. Your organization’s HR policy probably specifies “close family relationships,” so we use Bing’s knowledge of the world to expand and match “brother” and couple that with searching your organization’s intranet to derive the answer.

Using this machine reading comprehension technology is just one of the many ways we’ll be continuously improving Microsoft Search in the future.

Posted on April 6, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

MyAnalytics, the fitness tracker for work, is now more broadly available

MyAnalytics—the fitness tracker for work—will be available to everyone using Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Business suites that include Exchange Online. Previously, MyAnalytics was only available with an Enterprise E5 plan or as an add-on to E1 and E3 plans.

Via a personal dashboard, an Outlook add-in, and weekly emails, MyAnalytics summarizes how you spend your time at work, then suggests ways to work smarter—from cutting unproductive meeting time to reducing time spent working after hours. It even uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help you stay on top of your to-dos by flagging commitments you’ve made in email.

The MyAnalytics dashboard.

New insights give a more complete picture of how you spend time at work

As we continue to evolve the product, today we’re also making MyAnalytics insights more well-rounded. MyAnalytics currently provides insights based on time spent in Outlook emails and meetings, and Skype for Business calls and chats. This month, we’re adding new insights based on your Microsoft Teams calls and chats, as well as signals from documents you’re working on that are saved in OneDrive and SharePoint. With 329,000 organizations and 87 of the Fortune 100 using Teams, this takes us one step closer to providing you with a more complete picture of how you’re spending time at work.

MyAnalytics Outlook add-in and weekly email.

A recent Gallup study found that two-thirds of full-time employees say they experience burnout at work. Multiple factors are contributing to burnout—such as the increased pace of work, a rise in collaborative work like chats, emails, and meetings, and the continuing trend of technology blurring the lines between work and life. Our customers tell us they’re looking for ways to address these challenges by helping employees find time to focus, improve work-life balance, build better meeting habits, and create deeper connections with their colleagues. By making MyAnalytics features more broadly available to our millions of customers, it is our goal to make work days around the world a little more balanced and fulfilling.

Availability: MyAnalytics insights from Microsoft Teams and documents saved in OneDrive or SharePoint will begin rolling out to existing customers with MyAnalytics in January 2019. With today’s updates, MyAnalytics features will be available for Microsoft 365 E3, Business, and Office 365 E3, E1, Business Premium, and Business Essentials plans. MyAnalytics functionality will roll out in phases, beginning with the Outlook add-in. Beginning mid-March, 2019, MyAnalytics licenses will be assigned and activated; however, users will not be able to see any MyAnalytics functionality. In mid-April, admins will begin to see a toggle in the Exchange Admin Center that supports tenant-level management of MyAnalytics functionality. The add-in functionality will begin rolling out on May 15, 2019.

Note: Today, we’re also announcing new security and compliance packages for our enterprise customers. Please read Introducing new advanced security and compliance offerings for Microsoft 365 to learn more.

Editor’s note 3/15/2019:
This post has been updated to reflect the most current availability of MyAnalytics features.

Posted on April 5, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Helping IT reduce costs, increase security and boost employee productivity

Today, we’re announcing several new Microsoft 365 enhancements to help IT reduce costs, increase security, and boost employee productivity.

Here’s a quick summary:

Windows Virtual Desktop is now in public preview, providing the best virtualized Microsoft 365 experience across devices.
Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) now supports Mac, extending Microsoft 365 advanced endpoint security across platforms.
The new Microsoft Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM) capability in Microsoft Defender ATP will help detect, assess, and prioritize threats across endpoints.
Office 365 ProPlus will now include the Microsoft Teams app, enabling a new way to work.
We’re reducing the time it takes to apply Windows 10 feature updates, making it easier to deploy and service Windows 10.
We’re enhancing Configuration Manager and Microsoft Intune with new insights and deployment options to make it easier to manage your devices across platforms.
Microsoft 365 admin center is now generally available.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1YfK0Kdhzs?feature=oembed&w=960&h=540]

Virtualize Windows 10 and Office 365 on Azure with Windows Virtual Desktop—now in public preview

Today, we’re happy to announce the public preview of Windows Virtual Desktop. Windows Virtual Desktop is the only service that delivers simplified management, multi-session Windows 10, optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) environments in a shared public cloud. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes, with built-in security and compliance.

For more information about Windows Virtual Desktop or how to get started with the public preview, read the full announcement and watch the new Mechanics video.

Address risks and protect more of your Microsoft 365 devices and endpoints with Microsoft Defender ATP—now in public preview

New today, we’re extending support for our Microsoft Defender threat protection platform to Mac. And because we’re extending support beyond the Windows ecosystem, we’re renaming the platform from Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). Starting today, Microsoft Defender ATP customers can sign up for a public preview. For more information, visit our Tech Community blog.

We’re also announcing Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM), a new capability within Microsoft Defender ATP, designed to empower security teams to discover, prioritize, and remediate known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations exploited by threat actors. Using TVM, customers can evaluate the risk-level of threats and vulnerabilities and prioritize remediation based on signals from Microsoft Defender ATP. TVM will be available as a public preview for Microsoft Defender ATP customers within the next month. Learn more about it in our Tech Community blog.

Today’s security announcements are an important milestone in our Microsoft 365 endpoint security journey. For more details, check out Rob Lefferts’s post on the Microsoft Security blog.

Enable a new way to work with Office 365 ProPlus and Teams—starting in March

Starting in March, new installs of Office 365 ProPlus will include the Teams app by default. As a “hub for teamwork,” Teams combines chat, voice, video, files, meetings, and calls into a single, integrated experience.

In addition, the default installation for ProPlus will now be 64 bit, enabling better reliability and more effective use of newer PC hardware. If you have earlier 32-bit installs, a soon-to-be-released in-place upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit Office 365 ProPlus will allow you to upgrade the Office apps without uninstalling and reinstalling.

Reducing the time required for Windows 10 feature updates—starting with version 1709

We made important changes to the Windows update process. Starting with Windows 10 version 1709, devices are updating up to 63 percent faster. Additionally, with the release of Windows 10 version 1703, we’ve seen a 20 percent reduction in operating system and driver stability issues.

Simplify and modernize management with Configuration Manager and Intune

Configuration Manager current branch offers CMPivot for real-time queries and updates to management insights that help with co-management readiness. What’s more, you can now take advantage of new deployment options, including phased deployments and configuring known-folder mapping to OneDrive.

Mobile Device Management (MDM) Security Baselines are now in preview in Intune. These baselines are a group of Microsoft-recommended configuration settings that increase your security posture and operational efficiency and reduce costs. We’re also announcing several new Intune capabilities for unified endpoint management across devices and platforms.

Check out What’s new in Microsoft Intune and Configuration Manager for more detailed information on our broad unified endpoint management investments.

Manage Microsoft 365 with a new admin center—rolling out now

We’re also announcing the that the new Microsoft 365 admin center, previously in preview, will become the default experience for all Microsoft 365 and Office 365 admins. Admin.microsoft.com is your single entry point for managing your Microsoft 365 services and includes new features like guided setup experiences, improved groups management, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for admins, and more.

For more information on this new release, check out the detailed post on the Microsoft 365 Tech Community blog.

More at Microsoft Ignite: The Tour in Amsterdam

We’re sharing more on each of these announcements this week at Microsoft Ignite: The Tour in Amsterdam. I’ll be there to co-present a session with Jeremy Chapman on “Simplifying IT with Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus.” You’ll have a chance to learn more from many of my colleagues in the teamwork, modern desktop, and security sessions. I hope to see you there!

Editor’s note 3/21/2019:
Blog post was updated to correct information regarding Configuration Manager current branch.

Posted on April 5, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft Teams wins Enterprise Connect Best in Show award and delivers new experiences for the intelligent workplace

Today, at the Enterprise Connect event in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft Teams won the Best in Show award for the second year in a row in recognition for its vision for making communication and collaboration easier for the entire workforce, including those on the frontline. This week marks the second anniversary of the worldwide launch of Microsoft Teams. Over the past two years, Teams has grown significantly in both new capabilities and customer usage, as the hub for teamwork that brings people together and fosters a culture of engagement and inclusion. We’re unveiling eight new capabilities in Teams that make collaboration more inclusive, effective, and secure. Watch Microsoft’s keynote at Enterprise Connect live Tuesday March 19, 2019 at 10 AM ET or on-demand.

More than 500,000 organizations, including 91 of the Fortune 100, use Teams to collaborate across locations, time zones, and languages, including Cerner, Cox Automotive, dm-drogerie markt, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Hendrick Motorsports, Konica Minolta, Lexmark, Mitsui & Co., National Bank of Canada, Pfizer, Razer, Ricoh, and Trek Bicycle. Teams is currently available in 44 languages across 181 markets, and soon we’ll roll out support for nine additional languages, including Hindi, Filipino, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Malayalam.

Teams makes collaboration more inclusive, effective, and secure

Microsoft Teams is improving workplace collaboration by helping organizations move from an array of disparate apps to a single, secure hub that brings together what teams need, including chat, meetings, and calling, all with native integration to the Office 365 apps. Users can customize and extend their experience with third-party apps, processes, and devices, giving them the tools they need to get work done.

Following the customizable mobile Teams experience announced in January, today we’re unveiling eight new capabilities in Teams that make meetings more inclusive and effective while delivering new levels of security and compliance.

Customized backgrounds takes our intelligent background blur technology further, allowing participants to select a custom background, such as a company logo or an office environment when working from home, to appear behind them during a meeting or video call. This improves the effectiveness of remote meetings by encouraging the use of video while minimizing distractions. Coming later this year.

Content cameras and Intelligent Capture in Microsoft Teams Rooms will soon support an additional camera for capturing content, such as information on analog whiteboards. Using any USB camera, Microsoft Teams Rooms leverages Microsoft’s new Intelligent Capture processing to capture, focus, resize, and enhance whiteboard images and text, so remote attendees can clearly see whiteboard brainstorming in real-time, even when someone is standing in front of the whiteboard. Coming later this year.

Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams meetings provides an infinite digital canvas for meeting participants to work together directly in Teams. With upcoming support for Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams Rooms, in-person attendees can also contribute. You can even add content from a physical whiteboard onto the Whiteboard canvas without having to recreate it from scratch. Whether you choose to participate from the meeting room or remotely, Whiteboard in Teams enables everyone to actively participate in the conversation. Now in public preview.
Live captions & subtitles make your Teams meetings more inclusive for attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, have different levels of language proficiency, or are connecting from a loud location. Improve meeting effectiveness by allowing attendees to read speaker captions in real-time, so they can more easily stay in sync and contribute to the discussion. English preview coming soon.

Secure private channels allow you to customize which members of the team can see conversations and files associated with a channel. You can restrict channel participation and exposure when needed without having to create separate teams to limit visibility. This is one of our top requested features and we’re excited to be actively testing this internally and with select customers. Coming later this year.
Information barriers avoid conflicts of interest within your organization by limiting which individuals can communicate and collaborate with each other in Microsoft Teams. This helps limit the disclosure of information by controlling communication between the holders of information and colleagues representing different interests, for example, in Firstline Worker scenarios. This is particularly helpful for organizations that need to adhere to Ethical Wall requirements and other related industry standards and regulations. Coming soon.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations enables customers to detect, automatically protect, and screen for sensitive information in chats and channel conversations. By creating DLP policies, admins can help prevent sensitive information from unintentionally being shared or leaked—either inside or outside of the organization. Now generally available in all Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plans that include Office 365 Advanced Compliance.
Live events in Microsoft 365 enables anyone to create live and on-demand events that deliver compelling communications to employees, customers, and partners. Live events use video and interactive discussions across Teams, Stream, or Yammer and can be as simple or as sophisticated as needed. Up to 10,000 attendees can participate in real-time from anywhere, across their devices, or catch up later with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) features—such as automatic transcription—to unlock the content of the event recording. Now generally available.

To learn more about these announcements and more, read our detailed blog on the Teams Tech Community.

Hear it from our customers

All around the world, in businesses of every size and industry, people are using Teams as their hub for teamwork. With the help of Teams, airline crews stay connected, marketing agencies prepare pitches, teachers give all students a voice, financial analysts beat deadlines, patients receive better care, and employers find the right talent. We are thankful to all our customers, partners, and those of you who have become avid Teams users for coming on this journey with us.

NASCAR racing team Hendrick Motorsports gains competitive edge

Legendary race team Hendrick Motorsports chose Teams as the hub for its race communications and decision-making. While the cars speed along the racetrack, race engineers, mechanical experts, and strategists take their positions in the Team Operations Center in Concord, North Carolina—hundreds of miles away. They gather and analyze massive amounts of data and communicate in real-time with the team at the track. “Quick, clear, effective communication is of the utmost importance in racing,” says race engineer Zac Brown. Zac relies on Teams to stay in constant contact with his driver, his crew chief, and pit crew at the track. He uses Teams to share large files and says that because Teams is integrated with the full Office 365 suite, it saves critical seconds otherwise lost in toggling between apps.

Razer wins in the gaming industry with constant, clear communication

Razer dominates the fast-moving gaming lifestyle industry where speed of execution and quality keeps them ahead. Managing dual headquarters in San Francisco and Singapore and an international team spread across the globe, Razer requires the best tools for rapid communication, fast decision-making, and real-time collaboration. They chose Teams to meet this need and gain a competitive advantage in this highly competitive industry. “We use Teams for the rapid-fire burst of communications we need to be super productive, and we’ve really changed the workplace culture, accelerating efficient communications to speed time-to-market—from innovation to manufacturing to marketing,” says Patricia Liu, chief of staff at Razer.

Cerner’s empowered workforce adopts Teams with enthusiasm

Cerner is one of the world’s largest providers of health information technology solutions and services. Cerner’s associates work across the world in different shifts, different time zones, and different languages. Communication and content creation historically happened using disparate tools, making it difficult for employees to work together effectively. Now, Teams allows them to connect and collaborate intuitively. “You know a solution resonates with a workforce when it is adopted without any prompting from IT. This is the case with Teams,” says Bill Graff, CIO at Cerner. “In just a few months, our associates formed more than two thousand teams across the organization—and it all happened organically.”

Konica Minolta accelerates communication and collaboration

Konica Minolta is renowned for pioneering flexible work arrangements. It empowers employees to telework and do their best creative work from anywhere. Konica Minolta decided to embrace a new form of communication centered on chat, to make communication easier and speedier. With Teams, information workers have all their day-to-day tools in one place. Go Kawakami, IT infrastructure manager, says, “We manage tasks with Planner, report the status of projects with OneNote and Excel, and use SharePoint calendars as bulletin boards. With Teams, we can do this seamlessly.” The ability to invite people outside the company to a Teams channel has streamlined cooperation with partner companies. The company has seen many tangible efficiency improvements, from the PR division to the IT Help Desk.

These are just a few examples of how Teams is delivering an intelligent workplace for everyone—whether you’re a team at headquarters, a remote employee working from home, or a Firstline Worker serving customers each day. If you’re not using Teams yet, be sure to try it now.

To see what’s next in our vision for Teams, watch Microsoft’s keynote at Enterprise Connect live Tuesday March 19, 2019 at 10 AM ET or on-demand.

Posted on April 5, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Podcast: ‘Behind the Tech’ with Kevin Scott

Jaron Lanier: father of Virtual Reality

Scientist and renaissance man, Jaron Lanier is best known for his work in Virtual Reality. His startup VPL Research created the first commercial VR products. Lanier shares why he is worried the present Internet may be destroying societies, democracies, and economies.