A few months ago, we provided an update on our continued commitment to making Skype accessible. We are very grateful for the feedback you’ve given us—it continues to be an essential and impactful part of our work. We listened and made changes to make Skype more accessible for everyone.
Below are just some of the recent accessibility improvements available in Skype version 8:
Improved navigation now makes the app easier to use. Navigation is smoother and takes a more natural left-to-right and top-to-bottom path.
Additional information about messages that are sent and received is now displayed. For example, we now announce when messages are sent and when messages you attempt to send have failed.
A number of new keyboard shortcuts make it easier to start a chat, answer a call, and navigate within Skype. Visit Skype support for a full list of shortcuts.
Accessibility functionality was rolled out across all platforms. Skype version 8 is available on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and most recently iPad.
If you haven’t already done so, we encourage you to upgrade now—only Skype version 8 will be available after September 1, 2018.
We continually work to improve our technology to ensure it is accessible and empowers every person and every organization to achieve more. Please share your comments and feedback via Microsoft Accessibility UserVoice or contact the Disability Answer Desk for real-time support via phone, chat, or ASL videophone. If you are an early adopter and would like to participate in early preview releases, please consider joining the Skype Insider Community.
Romney said the experience has made him think about packaging differently.
“We have customers in our store every single day who buy product. I look at our laptop boxes and how they have to be opened. How many steps, how much packaging and how much of a barrier do each of those pieces become to someone with a mobility limitation?”
Romney thinks the Xbox Adaptive Controller packaging has the potential to set a new standard.
“I think it’s going to change how we look at things in the industry, in terms of how we make boxes. And I think it has to,” he said. “I think as a case study of inclusive design, the Xbox Adaptive Controller is going to make a brilliant example of how you do it, and how you include your audience and design with a population, rather than for a population.”
For Marshall and Weiser, the packaging project was challenging, time-consuming — and ultimately rewarding.
“It was a really powerful experience,” Marshall said. “I don’t think you realize, until you’re required to think differently, what you take for granted. As a designer, when you see things through a completely different lens, it’s paradigm-shifting.”
Said Weiser: “We put in a lot of extra time on it, but it was a pleasure to be able to work on this type of project. It’s great that we’re focused on this as a company.”
Discussions are underway about how Microsoft might use the learnings from the Xbox Adaptive Controller packaging. Marshall hopes the deceptively simple-looking box can serve as a springboard for future efforts.
“It’s certainly changing how we’re looking at packaging. We’re excited about moving forward from this point with a new lens and looking at what we can do,” he said.
Today’s post was written by Bert Floyd, senior IT manager of assistive technologies at TD Bank Group.
My journey with accessible technology at TD started more than 10 years ago, when I was called in to help incorporate a screen reader and Braille display into our retail environment for a new employee who was blind. Back then, it was a steep learning curve for the IT department. That’s not the case today. Over the intervening decade, we have created an inclusive corporate culture that celebrates everyone, including people with disabilities, and provides us with huge business potential. For example, one in seven people* in Canada identifies as having a disability, and there is an increasing incidence of age-related disabilities among our growing elderly demographic. Making sure our services are easily accessible is key to earning the business of this considerable segment of the population.
We are excited about introducing accessible technologies within Microsoft Office 365 and Windows 10 to empower our employees to help us work toward this strategic advantage. We find that most people can benefit from these accessible technologies, whether they identify as having a disability or not, because the technologies are built in to the Office apps. When employees can customize their environment and adapt to a wide variety of situations, they will be far more successful and productive.
And when we accommodate employees who identify as having a disability, we gain their insight and innovation to help us build accessibility right into our products and services. People with disabilities must think creatively about how to do things that other people don’t necessarily have to worry about, and we want to support that creativity in our workplace. We’re deploying Office 365 to all our employees and Windows 10 to almost 100,000 computers, which helps create an accessible workplace and ensure we will not miss out on hiring the best and the brightest.
From our websites to our brick-and-mortar branches and ATMs, we try to consider accessibility in every aspect of the customer experience. And we believe that with a more diverse and inclusive workforce, we’ll be in a better position to get there.
I’m excited about giving our employees the opportunity to leverage the accessibility features in Office 365 and Windows 10 in their everyday work lives. All employees need to think about accessibility, and everyone plays a role in creating a supportive, inclusive culture. When we all use the same inclusive tool set, there is enormous potential for improving productivity and driving awareness about the value of creating accessible documents and presentations for everyone to easily read and understand. Employees at TD already have access to Accessibility Checker, which makes it easy to spot problems and make content in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote more accessible. People are learning about Narrator and Magnifier in Windows 10 and about the built-in color filters.
We have come a long way since hiring that first employee who was blind. Today, approximately 6 percent of our workforce identifies as having a disability. Our Assistive Technologies Lab welcomes anyone to come and learn about inclusive design and the technologies we have available to support our employees. We work with technology projects to help them conform to our IT accessibility standards, and we rolled out a training program for our developers and testers—a number of them with disabilities—to ensure we fully consider accessibility in our customer-facing products and services.
Today, TD prides itself on its diverse and talented workforce, and I’m incredibly lucky to be part of a great team that works hard to put so many resources behind our employees. Along with our assistive technologies, we are using Office 365 and Windows 10 to help us remove barriers for people with disabilities to create a more inclusive workplace that’s as diverse and exciting as the communities we serve.
With the advent of the 4th Industrial Revolution and the rapid spread and adoption of cloud computing, cutting-edge technological solutions are now widely available around the world.
But to effectively tap this tech-driven potential, Asia’s emerging economies must pursue new ways of educating and training present and future workers – including women and girls who too often languish at the bottom of the employment pool with few educational opportunities.
“Ultimately it is the matter of human capital and developing relevant skills,” Arnold says. “That is currently a big constraint in many countries. So, we see this as an area of importance and priority.”
Breaking down and replacing long-held institutional and bureaucratic practices and barriers are high on the list of must-dos as well. It also happens to be a mantra that has been internalized by the Foundation, which has itself embraced technology to do its work better. Arnold sees the Foundation’s own internal digital transformation dividend as being a sort of microcosm of where the region should be heading.
Established by forward-thinking business people, academics, and U.S. government officials in 1954, The Asia Foundation is a non-profit international development organization committed to improving lives across the region. It works both at the high-end of public policymaking and at grassroots levels with local communities. It has an effective, integrated strategy to help Asian countries promote good governance, empower women, expand economic opportunity, boost education, increase environmental resilience, and promote international cooperation. It fosters deep, long-term partnerships with local organizations and individuals and relies on support from governments and a myriad of donors.
The Asia Foundation
In short, its goals are high, its reach wide, its challenges big and complex, and its stakeholders demanding. So, to boost its impact it embraced change.
For most of its early life, the Foundation was a largely paper-based, administratively disjointed, highly siloed and decentralized operation that stretched from its headquarters in San Francisco across a network of offices in 18 Asian countries.
Ken Krug joined its ranks in 2011 to become Vice President for Finance, Chief Financial Officer, and a champion for digital transformation. “We were in the Middle Ages as far as technology was concerned,” he recalls.
Previous attempts to create in-house IT solutions had been unsuccessful. But about five years ago, the Foundation adopted “OneTAF” – a cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 solution named for the abbreviation of The Asia Foundation.
Now all sorts of files and knowledge are linked and made accessible across the Foundation’s diverse geographic footprint. One can imagine the unique challenges of being stretched from Colombo to Kabul and from Ulaanbaatar to Jakarta, and how much freedom and ease can be derived from sharing information and materials in real time.
In an open letter to U.S. law- and policy-makers, Microsoft’s Council for Digital Good is calling on government to address digital-world realities like cyberbullying and “sextortion” by modernizing laws and promoting in-school education to encourage positive online behaviors.
“As young people who have encountered some of these problems firsthand, our goal as the Council for Digital Good is to provide strategies, solutions and resources for other young people in these situations,” council members wrote. “For our sake and for that of future generations, it is imperative that we amplify discussions about making the internet a more productive, civil, and safe place.”
The letter, shared last week at an event featuring the 15-member council at Microsoft’s Innovation and Policy Center in Washington, D.C., touts the benefits of awareness-raising of digital risks. The council also recommends that in-school online safety and behavioral education be supported and prioritized, and requests that laws be updated and brought into the digital age. The letter and its recommendations to policymakers is the culmination of the council’s work after 18 months of other assignments, activities, learning and fun. In addition to the council members and a parent or chaperone who accompanied each of them to the event, the young people also hosted leaders from other technology companies, non-governmental organizations and D.C.-area influentials.
Youth shine in the nation’s capital The event, “Is there a place for civility in our digital future? Conversations with Microsoft’s Council for Digital Good,” featured two panel discussions, comprised of teens sharing their work and views, and two sets of three adult panelists, each responding and reacting to the young people’s presentations. The first panel focused on the state of online civility today and included Christina W., Jazmine H., Judah S. and Miosotis R. These four young people, ages 14 to 17, went above and beyond their regular council assignments, taking it upon themselves to speak in their schools and communities on or around international Safer Internet Day this past February. They then brought those learnings to this panel discussion.
From left, Judah S., Miosotis R., Christina W. and Jazmine H. following their panel discussion.
Christina spoke of the rewarding experience it was to see parents interact with one another after hearing her guidance for staying safer online; Jazmine noted the importance of awareness-raising and education among all groups; and Judah highlighted the importance of respecting age requirements on social media. Miosotis talked about her peer-to-peer outreach in both Florida and Puerto Rico. The adult respondents from Google, Born This Way Foundation and Columbia University were impressed by the young people’s drive, determination and knowledge of the issues.
The second panel focused on building and growing a culture of digital civility. Indigo E., Jacob S. and Sierra W. presented the cohort’s written manifesto for life online first released in January, while Bronte J., Rees D. and William F., unveiled the open letter. Adult respondents from Snap, Inc., Tyler Clementi Foundation and UNICEF posed some provocative and important questions and offered instructive advice for reaching policymakers with their message.
Jacqueline Beauchere summing up after a second panel with Council for Digital Good members and adult respondents.
Erin R., Robert B. and Isabella W. showcased their individual art projects, and Katherine C. and Champe S. shared highlights from their council experiences, and assisted me in opening and closing the event, respectively. These 11 council members range in age from 14 to 18.
“The CDG council members are impressive and inspiring,” said retired U.S. Ambassador Maura Harty, president and CEO of the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who attended the event. “Their kindness and maturity are matched by their desire for effectiveness. With their manifesto, they have provided a well-considered road map and a path to greater digital civility for all of us. Emphasizing awareness, skills, and yes, ethics and etiquette, they have modeled the behavior we all should emulate.”
Program highlights importance of the youth voice We assembled this impressive group as part of a pilot program in the U.S., launched in January 2017. The council served as a sounding board for Microsoft’s youth-focused, online safety policy work. Prior to last week’s event, the council met for a two-day summit last August where they each drafted an individual manifesto for life online. They were then tasked with creating an artistic or visual representation of those written works. The written cohort manifesto and a creative cohort manifesto followed, all leading up to the crafting of the open letter and the youth assuming a more visible role as a full group.
As I’ve mentioned before, we thought the in-person portion of the program would conclude after the August summit. But after meeting these youth, we knew it would be a missed opportunity not to bring them together again and in a more public way. We wanted others to appreciate their passion and perspectives and to hear from them in their own words. Indeed, for us at Microsoft, the program underscores the importance of the youth voice and the need for young people to have a say in policy matters – be they governmental or corporate – that affect them. We shared a lot and we’ve learned even more from these youth. I’m planning a more reflective account of the full program soon.
Following the D.C. event, first lady Melania Trump met with the council members, and spent time with each teen personally to learn about their individual creative projects and to hear about the cohort’s 15 online safety tenets.
Afterward, we held a brief capstone event, where we honored each council member for his or her unique contributions to this pilot program. We are excited to learn that many council members want to stay involved in these issues and to remain in contact with us at Microsoft and many of our partner organizations.
As the youth concluded in their open letter: “Now is the time for action, and we need your help in the push for change in online culture. If we gain the ability to always harness the internet in a positive and productive way, we will be able to use our generation’s signature swiftness, effectiveness, and global platform to make a difference.”
Learn more Read the council’s full open letter here; view all of their individual, creative projects at this link, and learn more about digital civility by visiting www.microsoft.com/digitalcivility. Look for our latest digital civility research releases leading up to Safer Internet Day 2019 in February and, until then, follow the Council for Digital Good on our Facebook page and via Twitter using #CouncilforDigitalGood. To learn more about online safety generally, visit our website and resources page; “like” us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
For those who want to explore quantum computing and learn the Q# programming language at their own pace, we have created the Quantum Katas – an open source project containing a series of programming exercises that provide immediate feedback as you progress.
Coding katas are great tools for learning a programming language. They rely on several simple learning principles: active learning, incremental complexity growth, and feedback.
The Microsoft Quantum Katas are a series of self-paced tutorials aimed at teaching elements of quantum computing and Q# programming at the same time. Each kata offers a sequence of tasks on a certain quantum computing topic, progressing from simple to challenging. Each task requires you to fill in some code; the first task might require just one line, and the last one might require a sizable fragment of code. A testing framework validates your solutions, providing real-time feedback.
Working with the Quantum Katas in Visual Studio
Programming competitions are another great way to test your quantum computing skills. Earlier this month, we ran the first Q# coding contest and the response was tremendous. More than 650 participants from all over the world joined the contest or the warmup round held the week prior. More than 350 contest participants solved at least one problem, while 100 participants solved all fifteen problems! The contest winner solved all problems in less than 2.5 hours. You can find problem sets for the warmup round and main contest by following the links below. The Quantum Katas include the problems offered in the contest, so you can try solving them at your own pace.
We hope you find the Quantum Katas project useful in learning Q# and quantum computing. As we work on expanding the set of topics covered in the katas, we look forward to your feedback and contributions!
Take a look around your house, office or even the next store you visit, and you’ll start to notice that internet-connected devices are bringing us closer than ever before to a world of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence. As these Internet of Things (IoT) devices become increasingly commonplace, people will start to expect computing to be more integrated into their lives, to anticipate, understand and seamlessly meet their needs. They will expect software to respond to spoken natural language, gestures, body language and emotion, and for it to understand the physical world and the rich context surrounding each user as they navigate their personal life, their work and the world around them.
This trend has more promise than just bringing additional convenience, productivity and connections to our everyday lives. Smart sensors and devices are breathing new life into industrial equipment from factories to farms, helping us navigate and plan for more sustainable urban cities and bringing the power of the cloud to some of the world’s most remote destinations. With the power of artificial intelligence (AI) enabling these devices to intelligently respond to the world they are sensing, we will see new breakthroughs in critical areas that benefit humanity like healthcare, conservation, sustainability, accessibility, disaster recovery and more.
We call this next wave of computing the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud. When we take the power of the cloud down to the device – the edge – we provide the ability to respond, reason and act in real time and in areas with limited or no connectivity. As Satya shared at our Build developer conference, it’s still early days, but we’re starting to see how these new capabilities can be applied towards solving critical world challenges:
Increasing the world’s food supply: The world will need 70 percent more food according to the U.N., to feed a global population of 9.6 billion in 2050. Farmers like Sean Stratman in Carnation, Washington, are using the intelligent edge to do precision agriculture with real-time intelligence on soil, even in remote areas with unreliable connectivity. Using Microsoft’s FarmBeatssolution, which combines intelligence trained in the cloud to run on a drone, Sean created a heatmap of his land that served as a guide for him to plant the crops that will best perform in specific locations.
Ecological research and conservation: The intelligent edge creates opportunities to collect more accurate data in our research of natural disasters and threatened habitats. Smart sensors can collect data and act on events as they happen, providing researchers greater fidelity in their models and enabling them to take specific actions and make predictions that could improve conservation efforts. Disney Animal Kingdom is leveraging the intelligent edge to study the purple martin bird. They worked with Microsoft to develop hundreds of tiny “smart houses” in Disney’s Animal Kingdom to learn more about the species and help inspire a new generation of conservationists in the parks. The scientists have unprecedented insight now into the nesting behavior of the purple martins.
Reducing waste and improving safety in energy: The world depends on natural resources to produce energy for the world. Because these resources are limited, it is also critical that energy companies leverage technology to increase efficiency. Schneider Electric is using the intelligent edge in oil fields to monitor and configure pump settings and operations remotely, only sending personnel onsite when necessary for repair or maintenance when, for example, intelligent pump monitoring indicates that something will go wrong. This contributes to overall worker safety and improved resource management.
We need to give all organizations and developers the tools to build these kinds of increasingly ambitious solutions that span the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud. Moreover, these tools must give developers strong security foundations and help them to place security at the very core of their solutions. Devices on the edge handle some of our most sensitive business and personal data in our homes, workplaces, and sometimes in physically remote places.
To protect data wherever it lives, security needs to be baked in from the silicon to the cloud. This has been one of the central design principles of Microsoft’s intelligent edge products and services. Azure Sphere is our intelligent edge solution to power and protect connected microcontroller unit (MCU)-powered devices. There are 9 billion of these MCU-powered devices shipping every year, which power everything from household stoves and refrigerators to industrial equipment. With more processing power than traditional MCUs and a holistic security approach, we believe Azure Sphere will make our increasingly connected world safer. In addition, Azure IoT Edge enables you to run cloud intelligence directly on IoT devices and includes security from device provisioning and management to hardware and cloud services that run on top of the devices. Azure Stack, just one of our many tools to power hybrid scenarios, offers customers the flexibility to securely deploy in the cloud, on-premises or at the intelligent edge.
On July 23, Mendez Gandica’s team will join thousands of other Microsoft employees and interns all over the world as they gather to form the largest private global hackathon. They’ll work across organizations and technologies, and some will collaborate with students, teachers, and people who work at nonprofits to solve problems and advance ideas.
Mendez Gandica might not have had the same opportunity to jump-start a passion project like this five years ago, on her own time and resources. An outlet for innovation and making a difference on this grand scale wasn’t yet available to Microsoft employees everywhere.
In 2014, the company had just embarked on a culture change: a quest to become a place where employees take risks to change their world for the better. Launched that July, Microsoft’s Hackathon was one way to help make that culture change happen: one place for everyone to come together, experience creative and fast-paced collaboration, make a difference, and drive the culture forward.
A hackathon is a mishmash of two terms: “hacking” and “marathon.” Typically known as a coding competition that happens over a few days and involves sleep-deprived engineers, Microsoft’s Hackathon is different. All employees, not just coders or makers, bring their unique skill sets to a project. While the technical motivation is still a driver, many teams won’t write a single line of code at all. Plus, they get to work on the project as much as they want to beforehand. And many projects continue well after Hackathon tents come down.
“Hackathon is special because all employees worldwide can spend time contemplating and executing in a learn-fast environment,” said Mendez Gandica. “Hackers don’t have to be engineers. Any employee can contribute with their own unique set of skills.”
Fueled by bottomless caffeinated beverages, buffets of energizing grub (bacon cupcakes!), the excitement of a deadline, and their own driving curiosity, employees experience a whirlwind break from their typical work days to do Hackathon.
Team Pengram. From left to right: Bill Zhou, Will Huang, Vedant Saran. (Microsoft Photo)
Bill Zhou wanted to be able to help his mom fix the WiFi router when she called. The only problem? He was at school in Berkeley, Calif., and she was not.
“So I try to send her links online or send her videos or try to do a phone call with her, but it’s not really clear,” Zhou said. “And sometimes I wish I could just teleport my presence back home just for five minutes, show her what’s going on, and then teleport back to Berkeley to do whatever I’m doing.”
That personal desire was part of the inspiration for Pengram, an augmented reality tool for remotely assisting and collaborating on projects such as fixing equipment or assembling furniture. The Pengram team, made up of University of California, Berkeley graduate students Zhou, Vedant Saran, and Will Huang, will be one of 49 teams competing in the world finals of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup student competition starting Monday in the Seattle region. Imagine Cup brings together high school and college students who are “innovating and addressing some of humanity’s biggest problems.”
Pengram uses both augmented and virtual reality to “holographically teleport” an expert to assist on a task involving a physical object in another location. The expert, wearing a virtual reality device, can work in the virtual world on a virtual model of the object that needs fixing, such an engine. Whatever the expert does to that virtual engine will be reflected on the other person’s side, except in augmented reality, with an avatar representing the expert demonstrating on the physical object.
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“The operator will be able to see the expert as if he was actually there,” Zhou said.
Saran said the platform uses Microsoft Azure to deliver the content via the HoloLens device. Pengram allows users to watch experts in real-time or in previously recorded videos.
Though personal use was one part of the team’s vision for Pengram, inspiration also came from what the team noticed businesses needed. Companies worked with much more complicated machines, like wind turbines or locomotive engines. Zhou said that often, to repair the machines, they would have to fly out an expert because field technicians wouldn’t know how to fix them.
“So what they’re looking for is actually a remote assistance solution where the expert can teleport their presence to the field to assist their technicians anywhere in the world,” Zhou said.
Pengram has worked with companies like smartphone maker HTC to explore the possible uses for the platform. Zhou explained that any company could use Pengram’s capabilities in a unique way suited to their needs. HTC, which supports trade schools in China, finds pre-recorded assistance helpful in training students.
Flashes of Pengram’s capability can be seen in Microsoft’s own Holoportation project, which Microsoft revealed in 2016. Holoportation, like Pengram, uses the HoloLens as a tool to holographically transport 3D models into a physical space in real time, as if all participants were in the same space. In another demonstration, Microsoft showed how someone using a tablet in one location could annotate the real world for someone using a HoloLens in another, such as a plumber showing a homeowner how to fix a sink.
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The Pengram team, who have known each other for three years and met through the VR@Berkeley club when they were undergraduates, began the project at a Cal Hacks hackathon a year-and-a-half ago. Pengram won the Microsoft Imagine Cup U.S. Finals to advance to the world finals.
On the other side of the world in Pakistan, Iqra Irfan, Areeba Kamil, and Sami Ullah are developing a wearable belt that monitors fetal health. The team, named Fe Amaan, consists of three undergraduates in their last year at the National University of Sciences and Technology. They wanted to tackle Pakistan’s miscarriage and stillbirth problem, which they described as one of their home country’s biggest issues.
“One of the major issues we found in the healthcare facilities in our country is that there is not enough access to facilities for expecting women,” Kamil said. “And the women who have to suffer the most are women in rural areas, and then they become the target of stillbirths. Later on we also realized that this problem is not just confined to Pakistan, but it’s also a worldwide issue.”
Fe Amaan works as a remote fetal monitoring device, helping ease the consequences of a lack of access to medical facilities. The belt and corresponding Internet of Things sensor device, which sits on the mother’s abdomen, can monitor fetal movements and heart rate. It sends the data to a mobile app, which analyzes it and generate alerts if it detects any anomalies. The device uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to host its applications and to predict the state of the fetus in advance, based on the data gathered.
The Fe Amaan team. From left to right: Areeba Kamil, Sami Ullah, and Iqra Irfan. (Microsoft Photo)
The hope is that precautionary measures can then be taken before it’s too late.
“We believe it’s the right of every woman to have good medical facilities and we want to make sure it’s our aim to eliminate the risk of having a stillbirth,” Irfan said.
The three have were friends prior to the project, and decided to work on Fe Amaan as part of their senior projects for university. Fe Amaan has gone through clinical trials, which the team cites as the most difficult part of the process. The team participated in the Pakistan national finals and won the Middle East and Africa finals to advance to the world finals.
The Microsoft Imagine Cup World Finals will take place in Seattle next week, from July 23 to 25. The annual student technology and innovation competition requires participants to submit their software, instructions, and give live presentations on the team, the project, the target market, and how the team plans to bring the project to market.
Forty-nine teams, including Pengram and Fe Amaan, will compete on the world stage after winning national and regional competitions throughout the year. The winning team will get $100,000 and a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
This year’s Imagine Cup, the 16th annual competition, includes awards for projects in artificial intelligence, big data, and mixed reality. The judges include Microsoft executive vice president of business development Peggy Johnson, coding community Glitch CEO Anil Dash, and software package management company Bitnami co-founder and COO Erica Bresica. Snowboarder and Olympic gold medalist Chloe Kim will also be a special invited guest at the competition.
Today, we welcome more than 3,500 customers and partners to our inaugural Microsoft Business Applications Summit in Seattle. Over the next two days, this community will come together with the engineering teams that build Dynamics 365, Power BI, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow to connect, share, learn, and be the first to know where we’re going and what’s coming next across the Business Applications landscape.
This event is all about making the community more successful: enabling our customers to be more agile in their adoption of transformational technology, to help them grow and drive better experiences for their customers and employees, ultimately unlocking insights and actions from their data, to discover new opportunities and stay competitive.
Earlier this year we committed to delivering major product releases twice a year, to offer predictability around new capabilities and a clear roadmap to enable adoption of new technology for our customers and partners. Today we’re making available the October 2018 release notes, which details hundreds of new capabilities and features across all our Dynamics 365 applications and the Power Platform.
Infusing intelligence and AI throughout our applications, enabling new modern experiences with mixed reality and deeper integration across Office 365, LinkedIn, and Azure are key focus areas for the October 2018 release. We’ll be showing these new capabilities throughout the event. Some of the highlights include,
Dynamics 365 AI for Sales, the first of a new class of AI applications that delivers unique out-of-the-box insights by unifying data and infusing it with advanced intelligence to guide decisions and empower organizations to take informed actions. For Sales, in particular, we’ll show how AI can help salespeople prioritize their time to focus on deals that matter most, provide answers to the most common questions regarding the performance of sales teams, offer a detailed analysis of the sales pipeline, and surface insights that enable smarter coaching of sales teams.
Enhanced Azure IoT Central integration with Dynamics 365 for Field Service will enable proactive and predictive service. Building on previous integration, we’ll now support bi-directional flows. For example, sending commands from Field Service through IoT central to the device. The power of IoT is also extended to the technician with embedded IoT Central visuals and measurements within the Field Service mobile app.
New enterprise credit management, revenue recognition and new dual accounting currency capabilities in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations to give businesses a real-time view of global financials. In addition, enhanced process-based integrations across Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations with Dynamics 365 for Field Services, Project Service Automation, and Talent, will give customers end to end visibility across departments.
Continued integration across Office 365 and LinkedIn, there are dozens of new features coming with the October release. For example,
Integration between Microsoft Teams, giving sellers access to Dynamics 365 for Sales within Teams for enhanced collaboration, while also taking advantage of the built-in Teams bot capability to provide new intelligence and self-service capabilities.
Deeper LinkedIn integration with Dynamics 365 for Marketing that brings interactions information for smarter segmentation and lead scoring.
Integration with Skype and video streaming within the interview process using Dynamics 365 for Talent to keep your hiring team in the know about candidates while also delivering a providing them with the ability to utilize Skype, video streaming, and submit mobile feedback.
We continue to enhance and add even more new capabilities to Power BI to enable everyone in an organization to work from the same data platform and deliver intuitive tools so teams can leverage vast quantities of data quickly to reach new and compelling insights. New preview features for Power BI will begin appearing in the service this month (July).
Mixed Reality is another area of investment with promising new scenarios from helping a frontline worker resolve an issue hands-free, to a retail store manager designing the best layout to make their products more appealing to customers. Earlier this year, we demonstrated the mixed reality Remote Assist application that would help our customers collaborate remotely with heads-up, hands-free video calling, image sharing, and mixed-reality annotations. We will show this technology in action at Business Applications Summit and share more details in the coming months.
The impact technology can have on businesses is evident. The connections between customers, products, people with data and intelligence at the center are creating feedback loops that enable businesses to transform. Microsoft is uniquely positioned in the market to enable that feedback loop and help our customers unlock their next opportunity.
I invite you to watch this morning’s keynote and learn more about Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. You’ll see how Microsoft is using Dynamics 365 to modernize our hiring processes as well as hear from some of our customers including Polaris, Macdonald Miller, and Auto Glass/ Belron that are on the cutting edge of technology and will share how they are transforming their businesses.
My journey with accessible technology at TD started more than 10 years ago, when I was called in to help incorporate a screen reader and Braille display into our retail environment for a new employee who was blind. Back then, it was a steep learning curve for the IT department. That’s not the case today. Over the intervening decade, we have created an inclusive corporate culture that celebrates everyone, including people with disabilities, and provides us with huge business potential. For example, one in seven people* in Canada identifies as having a disability, and there is an increasing incidence of age-related disabilities among our growing elderly demographic. Making sure our services are easily accessible is key to earning the business of this considerable segment of the population.
