Note: In Part 2 of a two-part series, Rick Wagner shares Microsoft Federal’s 2020 progress in delivering solutions and tools for digital transformation and efficient mission-focused operations. Please see Part 1 for examples of federal agencies achieving success in addressing pandemic impacts and meeting diverse missions.
In Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s 2020 letter to shareholders, he reflects on the past year and the opportunity ahead. I was struck by one of his statements, which captures why I’m honored to lead Microsoft Federal: “I’m proud of how our ecosystem of customers and partners has stepped up over the past year to help people and organizations in every country use technology to be resilient and transform during the most trying of circumstances.” This is especially true in the United States, where our Microsoft Federal team and partners provide trusted leading-edge cloud and AI solutions to empower federal agencies in addressing extraordinary challenges, fulfilling demanding requirements and enabling secure, agile digital transformation. It’s also why our first-ever digital Government Leaders Summit on Dec. 7 will focus on mission and leadership resiliency.
Best-in-class technology
Looking back over the year, Microsoft has made significant progress in providing best-in-class technology for our federal customers to quickly achieve commercial parity while meeting the highest levels of government security and compliance. We’re delivering the latest cloud and AI innovation directly to U.S. federal agencies. For example:
We’re excited to join other companies in supporting the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), the U.S. Air Force’s top modernization priority. Our technologies will help integrate the Air Force ABMS capabilities into the larger Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the Department of Defense concept to connect sensors from all military branches into a single network.
FedScoop recently reported that the U.S. Navy is working to integrate all telework capabilities into a long-term solution powered by Microsoft 365. According to the article: “The goal is to be able to sync up more features, including a link between email and calendars,” and “by 2021 to have as many services as possible be digital and cloud-native to support both teleworking and in-person needs once more workers can come back to bases and the Pentagon.” Microsoft 365 is a great example of a product that enables remote government access, empowers cross-agency collaboration and complies with stringent security requirements.
Last month, Microsoft took the next giant leap in cloud computing – to space. Azure Space is aimed at making Azure the platform and ecosystem of choice for the mission needs of the space community – on or off the planet. By combining a new set of offerings, a partner ecosystem and a global strategy focused on innovation, Azure Space will offer an integrated cloud and satellite experience connecting to almost any device anywhere. It also will serve as the bridge between the Pentagon and satellite providers.
In late March, we confirmed that Azure Government Secret achieved provisional authorization to host government data classified as secret, meeting Department of Defense (DOD) Impact Level 6, Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 503 and facility accreditation ICD 705. We also announced:
A new third secret region to provide increased availability for national security missions to stay ahead of unique threats.
The release of 48 new Azure Government services, bringing our total FedRAMP High services to 101.
It’s worth noting that this most recent Azure Government news comes after a three-year series of news highlighting significant advancements to meet government and DOD requirements:
As the world around us continues to evolve in unpredictable ways, we’re seeing dramatic shifts in how the federal government is embracing technology with speed and agility to achieve objectives, better serve citizens, and further efficiency and effectiveness. The government customers I talk with are focused on digital transformation and seizing opportunities at the accelerated pace required to deliver modern mission outcomes. Microsoft Federal and our partners are committed to supporting the success of U.S. government agencies by continuously investing in our trusted cloud and AI capabilities.
You’re invited: Microsoft Government Leaders Summit
Another part of our investment is the Microsoft Government Leaders Summit,10 a.m. to noon ET, Dec. 7. On behalf of our Microsoft Federal team, it’s my pleasure to invite you to a digital event dedicated to helping federal government leaders reimagine a future of innovation and transformation to advance our nation.
Three years ago, Microsoft President Brad Smith joined North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum in downtown Fargo to launch a new project called Microsoft TechSpark. This civic initiative was formed to foster economic impact and job creation through deep partnerships and collaboration. Corporate engagements with communities are nothing new, but the pivot here was to dive deep in just six specific regions, and focus on rural and remote communities, a change from often traditional outreach in larger, more urban metropolitans.
If we could find communities that embraced collaboration and would help test new resources and technologies, we knew we would learn a great deal. To gain a greater understanding of these differing ecosystems, we selected six regions with varying backgrounds, sizes, and demographics. We chose Cheyenne, Wyoming, Southern Virginia and central Washington State as they housed Microsoft data centers, while Fargo was a natural fit with an already large Microsoft employee campus. We wanted to engage a few regions, too, where we had little to no Microsoft presence. Given their strong engagement in our computer science education efforts, we also launched TechSpark in northeast Wisconsin, and then moved south to El Paso, Texas, before quickly adding in bordering Juarez, Mexico, to explore bi-national projects.
Microsoft President Brad Smith, left, talks to North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum during the launch of TechSpark
One essential ingredient in this plan was to find and hire TechSpark managers who lived in and knew the community. Some might have thought it would have been easier to send a team from company headquarters or rotated in visiting experts, but that’s not what we were going for. We’ve found that a member of the community who has resided in, worked alongside these neighbors, and previously led some of the region’s organizations, accelerates the work instantly with established credibility, presence, trust, network and awareness. This 24/7 approach to community engagement ensures constant communication, and many TechSpark ideas and approaches began with a conversation in the grocery store line or local coffee shop.
The team was charged with driving community and economic development through partnership, and delivery of Microsoft resources, keying in on a few pillars, including:
Collaboration with local nonprofits, and empowering these community organizations to do more through tech enablement and digital transformation
Driving opportunities in these regions for reskilling, or skilling that leads directly to employability in the community
Connecting these local regions to high-speed internet and working with Microsoft’s Airband Initiative toward the goal of bringing broadband access to 3 million Americans living in unserved rural areas of the United States
Empowering local partners to help build a more signature regional project, larger in scale and scope, and created for sustainability and longer-term impact
Student participant at the TEALS Packers Fair in Wisconsin
These signature projects have underscored our mission of growing each region’s plan organically and collaboratively. Several local leaders have shared the phrase, “Meet the community where they are.” Three years in, we’re proud to see these signature projects in planning and/or execution in all six of our TechSpark regions:
Green Bay, Wisconsin celebrated the one-year anniversary of TitletownTech this summer. This partnership between Microsoft and the Green Bay Packers, has created an exciting venture lab and studio, across the street from iconic Lambeau Stadium, and is now shepherding more than 20 new startups into formation, with many beginning operations in Northeast Wisconsin.
In North Dakota, a partnership with the innovative organization Emerging Prairie, has started the Grand Farm. This farm of the future will bring together students, teachers and industry to explore precision agriculture on a 60-acre experimental farm and test bed, alongside a digital academy and plug and play agriculture accelerator.
Near our Boydton, Virginia, data center, and together with the MidAtlantic Broadband Corporation, the new Southern Virginia Innovation HUB will open its doors early next year (2021). The first new in the region for decades will house area nonprofits working to drive skilling, tech training and community partnerships.
This fall, companies from both Mexico and the U.S. are coming together weekly, for our third cohort in the El Paso-Juarez Bridge Accelerator. This unique bi-national project has tapped the network of the Juarez Technology HUB and local partners to unite manufacturers, startups and other regional companies, sharing resources, best practices and training over a 12-week program. Already, the Bridge Accelerator’s first two cohorts have produced nearly $4 million in new sales, over $500,000 in new VC investment, and 110 new jobs.
Cheyenne, Wyoming, is bringing together the great work of gener8tor to drive new business and startups in the state, and then leverage those new opportunities with the innovative curriculum of the Array School of Coding and the unique apprenticeship training of the Techtonic software and tech team.
And in central Washington state, skilling through remote training has become a key mission of rural resilience, in partnership with area leaders like the Greater Wenatchee Tech Alliance, the Columbia Basin Foundation and Washington State University.
Mike Egan, front left, with TechSpark managers J.J. Childress and Omar Saucedo with graduates from the launch of the Bridge Accelerator in Juarez, Mexico
The daily connection and communication with these communities has informed our processes, priorities and programs. To summarize a few learnings and key takeaways across all regions:
Partners before projects: The partner is key to any engagement. And finding the right partner first, and then building the plan and project second, is instrumental to every regional engagement. One can’t quickly recreate the relationships, know-how, infrastructure, network and knowledge that an established local partner brings. These organizations are already doing great work, and in some cases, are simply in need of additional resourcing, connections and a bright north star to dream bigger and accelerate their mission. Collectively, TechSpark has now partnered with 314 nonprofits across these regions, supporting more than 303,000 individuals.
Back to school: We have found a strong common denominator in every rural or remote region with the local university, community or technical college. These higher education institutions often serve as the barometer for future employment and local workforce trends. Strong collaboration with these schools has produced new curriculum, planning and training opportunities like mentoring, apprenticeship and distance learning. From larger schools like the University of Texas at El Paso, North Dakota State University, the University of Wyoming and the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay to great local community colleges like Washington’s Big Bend, Southside Virginia and Wyoming’s Laramie, we’re finding engaged faculties and innovative administrations willing to collaborate to educate the next workforce. Together, these TechSpark partnerships have impacted 52,000 college students. Additionally, the team has worked to help bring the TEALS computer science teaching program into 135 high schools in the TechSpark regions, training over 150 high school teachers and 7,500 students.
Connect: Access to high-speed internet is the electricity of this era, and in communities without strong internet, the struggle for business, education and health-care connections is exacerbated. Understanding the challenge with real numbers to identify demand, and incentivizing providers to move in, is a constant quest. From students doing homework in cars near new Wi-Fi hotspots, to agricultural projects growing through FarmBeats and data collection, the connection remains a foundational priority for economic and community growth. The work of Microsoft’s Airband team is helping to drive these projects across the globe, and finding partnership in states from Wyoming to Wisconsin, Texas to North Dakota.
No cookie cutter: The varying backgrounds of these diverse regions has demanded regional approaches and individual attention. As we began to work to land AI for Good grants in each community, we quickly learned that a small nonprofit organization with a staff of one or two may not have the bandwidth to quickly absorb and implement an AI project. A flexible toolkit, with resources to help enable technology, is essential and must be inventoried uniquely by each region. With the necessary support, TechSpark has delivered 14 AI for Good grants across these regions. As well, the continuing work with local partners, has delivered skills training and a path to employability, for over 54,000 individuals in these TechSpark communities.
Multiply: As the TechSpark program moves into year four, the ability to sustain these efforts and inspire replication becomes paramount. Our ability to multiply seed funding has become a metric across all these regions with a minimum goal of 3X. If we can help serve as a catalyst for other local and national partners, to help support a regional nonprofit, we’re a step closer to long-term sustainment. This work has already secured an additional $25m in funding from other partners (local and national) in addition to our TechSpark support, a 4X multiplier. Additionally, this effort underscores our hope for TechSpark-like projects to spring up in other communities across the globe. Providing a toolbox of best practices and lessons learned will spur other regions to scale through partnership.
More alike than different: As much as we focus on differences between rural and urban, we are often struck by the greater array of similarities we all share. Regardless of the region’s population, we’ve witnessed the same hope shared by many; to provide for and educate their family, leave behind a stronger community, and give their children a better future. Likewise, we are hearing from many young people and new graduates, who express an eagerness to return to their roots, find a home near extended family, and continue the community building of their parents. Many may leave for school or adventure, but that instinctual path back to the hometown is strong, if only they can find the workplace opportunity.
The pandemic has caused many to push a reset button, as we have heard daily from local nonprofits and small businesses, struggling for survival. We’ve been able to support over 100,000 individuals in these regions through Covid-19 relief projects and, now more than ever, the work is critical to expand these local recovery and rebuilding efforts.
After three years, it is clear to us that no one organization, public or private, corporate or nonprofit, can transform these challenges alone. It is also clear that the desire to build up these ecosystems, digitally enable local businesses, provide skills for 21st-century jobs and redistribute opportunity is at the forefront for community leaders at all levels. This mission transcends political stripes across the spectrum.
The reception from these communities continues to be both welcoming and beyond appreciative. We look forward to this ongoing learning, community engagement and economic development as the spark started three years ago in Fargo continues to light.
Mike Egan is the Senior Director of TechSpark for Microsoft. Mike began his career picking raspberries in the fields of his hometown Puyallup, Washington, and working at the State Fair.
It has been a big year for gaming fans. From the launch of a new generation of Xbox consoles, to a creatively diverse lineup of games that look and play best on Xbox, and a library of high-quality games available with Xbox Game Pass, there’s never been a better time than now to join the Xbox family!
We have seen overwhelming global demand from our fans for the next generation of Xbox consoles, and we encourage you to check in with your local retailers directly for more details on availability in your market. While Xbox Series X|S consoles are not part of our holiday deals, we’re thrilled to offer an incredible discount on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate – the must-have gift for the gamer in your life – and deals on games as well as Xbox controllers. As a reminder, at Xbox we’ve made a promise to compatibility; you can be assured that when you purchase Xbox One gaming accessories or a game on Xbox One today, your game library, progression and entire gaming legacy moves forward with you whenever you choose to jump into the next generation with Xbox Series X|S.
See below for the full lineup of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals you need to know about, and be sure to check with Xbox.com, Microsoft Store and participating retailers worldwide for more details on availability and pricing as deals will vary between regions and retailers.
Gift Over 100 Games with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate – Save Up to 40% Off Three Months
Available on Sunday, Nov. 22 – Monday, Nov. 30 [1] (See retailer for offer details and code distribution info) at participating retailers, you will receive up to 40% off when you purchase three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate! Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is the perfect way to discover your next favorite game. For just $14.99 a month, you can get all the benefits of Xbox Live Gold, over 100 high-quality games across Android mobile devices from the cloud (Beta), console and PC, and Ultimate Perks like a 30-day trial of Disney+.[2]
Also, EA Play is already available on Xbox consoles as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and beginning December 15, members with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate or Xbox Game Pass for PC subscription will be able to download and play games from The Play List on EA Play using Windows 10 PCs via the EA Desktop app (beta). That means more than 60 of EA’s biggest and best console and PC games like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, FIFA 20, Titanfall 2 and Need for Speed Heat are available for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and Xbox Game Pass for PC members at no extra cost. And, some of the best EA Play games will also be available for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members on Android devices via cloud gaming (Beta). Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is the gift that keeps on giving throughout the holidays and into the new year! It’s also the best way to have fun and stay connected with friends and family, together or apart.
Amp Up Your Library with the Hottest Titles for Console and PC – At A Discount
From Friday, Nov. 20 – Thursday, Dec. 3, on Xbox.com and Microsoft Store only, we’re offering up to 55% off select digital titles on some of the hottest games this season on your Xbox such as Far Cry 5, Forza Horizon 4, Marvel`s Avengers, Watch Dogs: Legion, FIFA 21 and NBA 2K21. And with Smart Delivery, supported titles like Forza Horizon 4 will deliver the best version when you’re ready to upgrade your console, at no additional cost.
To give you even more value in the leadup to the holidays, we’ll also be offering up to 60% off select PC titles such as Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, Forza Horizon 4 Standard Edition and Gears 5.
Take Your Gaming to the Next Level with a New Controller
This holiday, we have a new lineup of Xbox Wireless Controllers, giving you more options than ever to customize how you play. Available Sunday, Nov. 22 – Monday, Nov. 30 at the Microsoft Store and participating retailers, get up to $20 off select Xbox controllers including the new Carbon Black, Robot White, and Shock Blue, starting at $39.99.
Xbox has something for everyone on your list, at every price point. Be sure to scoop up these deals while they last and visit Xbox.com, Microsoft Store and participating retailers for more details on availability and pricing as deals will vary between regions and retailers.
[1] Valid through 11/22/20-11/30/20 at participating retailers while supplies last; exclusions apply. Limit 1 per person/account. See retailer for offer details and code distribution info.
[2] Valid for new Disney+ subscribers only. 18+ only. After trial, Disney+ automatically renews at the then-current monthly pricing until you cancel. Subject to Disney+ Subscriber Agreement https://www.disneyplus.com/legal/subscriber-agreement. Limited time offer. One per account. Available in AU, AT, BE, CA, DK, FI, DE, IE, IT, NL, NZ, NO, PT, ES, SE, CH, GB, US. Claim by 1/31/21. Redeem by 3/2/21.
For those of us who have transitioned to working from home over the course of the last year, we must navigate a strange new manifestation of mobility.
Far-flung colleagues appear almost magically in grid format on a screen right in front of our faces, despite their remote locations. Yet at the same time, a document, presentation, piece of content, or part of a running application already at our fingertips is awkward to share with others on the same video call.
It’s a paradoxical science fiction world where far is near, and the close-at-hand dilates impossibly beyond our reach. Perhaps these surreal distortions of time and space explain in part why “video-conferencing syndrome” feels so draining.
And even as we’re stranded within the confines of our improvised home offices, we’re somehow supposed to navigate this otherworldly place—a jumbled chaos terrain of home and work, personal and professional, private and semi-public.
Moving between these realities, sometimes moment by moment, makes us nimble in a way we’ve never experienced before: our activity is mobile even as we stay put in the same location. We work in the same physical spaces, but as we navigate these transitions, we’re not in the same human places.
While 2020 has accelerated this trend, perhaps it’s inevitable—and indeed, as we point out below, in many ways this strange new mobility has been a long time coming.
Microsoft researchers are creating technologies to help people succeed in this new way of life. We are working to develop systems that help us to navigate these changes. A new world where these transitions feel less strange—and more empowering. A place appropriate to our current task, locality, and context, where “mobility” means technology that rises to the universal human need to connect and work with others seamlessly.
To that end, Microsoft researchers have published three papers—two of which appear at this year’s ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2020)—on new technologies that redefine how we interpret this concept of place.
The first explores SurfaceFleet, a system to decouple computing from individual devices and places. The second presents Ambrosia, a system which uses resilient distributed programming techniques to unbind running programs and their state from any particular device (CPU). The third circles back on this notion of place, showing how nuanced social cues such as tilt and orientation of a display, on the adjustable Microsoft Surface Studio, can support elegant and natural transitions between different tasks and ways of using such a display.
SurfaceFleet: Mobility as transitions of user activity from one ‘place’ to another
What the Fleet system is in brief:
A distributed system leveraging a robust, performant declarative database foundation and building on the Ambrosia runtime
An exploration of novel implications for migration of user experiences across devices
A platform for Applets: lightweight, distributed user interface elements that unbind interactions from devices, applications, users, and time
A collaboration tool enabling people to work across devices and act at synchronous or asynchronous times.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the collision of home and work—of activity in limited physical spaces that must transition between different human places—to a critical juncture.
But two trends, manifested over the past decade already, are influencing the future of human experiences with computing technology.
The first trend concerns hardware and systems architecture. With Moore’s Law at an end, yet networking and storage exhibiting exponential gains, the future appears to favor systems that emphasize seamless mobility of data—favoring techniques that consume network and storage bandwidth rather than those using a particular CPU. Accelerated by pervasive cloud services and 5G, these computational shifts show no sign of slowing.
The second trend is one of human behavior. People now interact with more devices than ever before. Modern information work increasingly relies on multi-device workflows and distributed workspaces, with connected and interdependent devices—smartphones, desktops, tablets, and perhaps even emerging new form factors. The problem here lies in that transitioning from device to device, and more broadly place to place, can cost us precious efficiency or resources, like time or attention, leaving our activities marooned on islands of glass instead of creating a new interconnected world.
What’s needed is an ecosystem of technologies that seamlessly transitions from place to place, whether that “place” takes the form of a literal location, a different device form factor, the presence of a collaborator, or the availability of the pieces of information needed to complete a particular task at a given time. Such a “Society of Technologies” favors techniques that establish meaningful relationships between the members of this society, rather than with any particular device, to afford mobility of user activity from one place to another, in a very general sense of the word.
Through this lens, we can view the essence of mobility as the transition of user activity from one place to another. SurfaceFleet is a working system, development toolkit, and user experience that explores some implications of these challenges by decoupling computation—including its representation in the graphical user interface—from the current device.
Yet, once user interface mechanisms are decoupled from a single device, we discovered that this also has interesting carry-on implications for unbinding interaction from the current application, the current user, and the current time, as well. The Fleet system handles transitions in place—bridging the resulting gaps—across all four of these dimensions. See the embedded video above for demonstrations that show how user interfaces can “float” above the screen and transcend program state that is confined to the current device.
The Fleet system unbinds UI elements from not only the device but also the current application, user, and time. In the visible UI, Applets unbind controls from applications. Portfolios unbind tools, inputs, behaviors, and content from the current device and user. Promises unbind actions from time. Read more in the SurfaceFleet paper.
But authoring distributed programs is difficult and requires considerable expertise. How do we reimagine this notion of “device” that is so deeply baked into current development practices? This is where our journey crosses paths with a new distributed-systems technology known as Ambrosia.
Ambrosia: Programming as if failure doesn’t matter
What the Ambrosia runtime does in brief:
Introduces the notion of “virtual resiliency,” which allows programmers of distributed applications to program as if failure doesn’t matter
Facilitates recovery and replay of logged messages that include mechanisms to correctly handle non-determinism
Achieves highly performant remote procedure calls through database techniques such as batching, high-performance log writing, high-performance serialization concepts, and group commit strategies
Provides the technical foundation of the Fleet system
Programmers face complex decisions and coding tasks when coping with failure in distributed systems—especially when applications modify state that is shared across devices. Unfortunately, a lot can go wrong even in simple scenarios of passing messages between distributed services. Connections can drop. Distributed clients can crash at any moment. A remote procedure call (RPC) might even fail just as it sends a remote message, creating uncertainty of what has been sent or received that must be reconciled. All of these cases and error conditions must be correctly anticipated, handled, and implemented correctly, and in an efficient manner. This is why distributed services are so hard to program and deploy correctly.
But using Ambrosia, a developer can write the code for their client as if failure doesn’t matter. We call this virtual resiliency, similar to virtual memory, where one can author programs as if limits on physical memory don’t exist.
Virtual resilience for “Alice’s” running client, where the Ambrosia runtime intercepts all outgoing and incoming remote procedure calls and logs them to resilient storage, such as in the cloud, before Alice acts on them. Ambrosia automatically replays this log to recover from failures in a way that ensures deterministically ordered, one-time delivery of requests.
The developer simply wraps their service (“Alice” in the figure above) in the Ambrosia runtime. Ambrosia intercepts each message and logs it to resilient storage before sending it over the network via RPC. Whenever a remote service (“Bob”) responds, Ambrosia likewise logs these return messages before Alice’s code acts on their contents.
Ambrosia encapsulates the many possible failure conditions, factoring all the distributed-systems complexity of the resulting client code. If Alice goes down, Ambrosia automatically recovers by replaying the log, allowing Alice’s code to pick up where it left off. Likewise, if Bob crashes, the system can automatically recover from that, too, so long as Bob is wrapped in the Ambrosia runtime, as well. And since network connection state is also logged to resilient storage in the cloud via Azure, we also can automatically self-heal disruptions such as intermittent connections or changing network addresses via a subsystem known as the Common Runtime for Applications (CRA).
Programming distributed applications in this way, as if failure doesn’t matter, is a nifty trick. But the true secret sauce of Ambrosia is that it provides this virtual resiliency with high performance. It does so by applying decades-old wisdom that has been used to build performant, reliable, and available database systems. For instance, Ambrosia makes extensive use of batching, high-performance log writing, high-performance serialization concepts, and group commit strategies. It also includes mechanisms to properly handle non-determinism by logging any such events, as well. These carefully implemented techniques allow Ambrosia to deterministically provide virtual resiliency with little or no reduction in throughput, depending on message size, as compared to popular RPC frameworks that lack resilience mechanisms.
With a distributed system built on these abstractions, we end up with two coordinated instances of the Ambrosia runtime surrounding the running services Alice and Bob:
The running services “Alice” and “Bob” are encapsulated in coordinated instances of the Ambrosia runtime to ensure mutual resiliency of the distributed system.
This basic architecture not only encapsulates many types of distributed-system failures, but it also allows for interesting variations, such as standing up multiple active instances of a service (so-called active/active configurations) so that we can quickly failover to “Bob 2” or “Alice 2” if one of the services dies or is slow to recover.
But such a failover might not reflect a networking or system failure at all.
Perhaps it is a matter of choice—the end user’s preference.
Maybe a user of the Alice service shuts off their desktop at the end of a hectic day and picks up their tablet instead. “Desktop Alice” halts, and “Tablet Alice” resumes where they left off. Instead of a network or hardware crash, it’s simply a failover to their preferred device.
This leads us to a key insight. Circling back to the Fleet system, where we started, we can now cast transitions of user activity from one device to another as a special case of failover. In this case, it’s a transition from one device to another.
But migration of program state to a new device is just one special case of mobility. If we have the right feedback and user interface mechanisms in place, we can generalize this as transitions of user activity from one place to another, in many senses of the word place. How best to do this is still an open problem. Our work explores some possibilities and hints at solutions. This suggests that cross-device and distributed systems will have major impact on user interfaces going forward, even if the full vista of interactive systems and human experiences this makes possible has only just begun to dawn.
Next, we take this up a level by looking at a simple example of how sensing shifts in context—such as responding appropriately when a user tilts a display—can drive lightweight and natural transitions from one human activity to another.
Changes in display orientation as a nuanced transition in ‘place’
What tilt-responsive techniques for digital drawing boards do in brief:
Run on a Microsoft Surface Studio 2 using a C# module for sampling the sensors and implementing signal conditioning and a JavaScript-based client
Demonstrate how a variety of everyday applications can use sensed display adjustments to drive context-appropriate transitions, such as shifts between reading versus writing, displays of public versus personal information, face-to-face video versus screen sharing of documents in remote work, and other nuances of input and feedback contingent on display angle—with continuous interactive responses tailored to each use case.
During the long incubation and technical development of the distributed-systems advances discussed above, we kept circling back at odd intervals to another endeavor: we had outfitted the Microsoft Surface Studio with an extra sensor to detect its angle. The Microsoft Surface Studio is a 27” screen that supports multi-touch and pen input and can be adjusted smoothly from a vertical display to a drafting table–like 20 degrees. In this device, we saw a parallel between its use and people’s behaviors and expectations outside the digital world.
In everyday life, people naturally reposition objects, such as paper documents, to allow shared visibility, partial viewing, and even concealment. Such motions are completely natural and perhaps even subconscious. How we position an object depends on what we intend to do. For example, a doctor might hold a medical chart “close to the vest” at first, but then turn it toward their patient when ready to share particular results. Similarly, the appropriate display orientation depends on the task and situation at hand. A vertical monitor makes for easier reading but not necessarily easier writing with a stylus. Angled drafting tables in a design studio encourage sketching and freeform brainstorming, but the preference when presenting refined versions of those same ideas may be a vertical screen. Display angle is not one size fits all. We wondered, could we tap into our most natural ways of mediating information exchange by sensing the tilt of a display?
We explored system responses to the sensed tilt of an adjustable Microsoft Surface Studio display, such as during transitions from vertical to low-angled, drafting table–like postures. This transforms the current application’s user experience via continuous, interactive, sensor-driven transitions.
By adding an off-the-shelf tilt sensor to the Microsoft Surface Studio, we discovered a series of designs, techniques, and interactions that can respond appropriately to the user’s context of use, as sensed by the current display angle. In doing so, we begin to shift the burden of adapting the inputs, tools, modes, and graphical layout of applications from the user to the system. For example, one demonstration we built explores a teleconferencing scenario in which the typical talking-head video feed of “person-space” appears when the screen is vertical but transitions to a shared document that users can mark up with a digital pen when the screen is tilted down like a drafting board. As the display tilts, we fade out the camera feed to let the user avoid unbecoming video angles. This also selectively focuses the remote audience’s attention on the shared document rather than the video feed—in effect, a remote way of steering a remote participant’s attention in a manner analogous to angling a paper document toward a collaborator nearby.
As the demo reel above illustrates, displays can respond to tilt by transitioning between reading and writing, public versus personal, authoring versus presenting, and other nuances of input and feedback—and in ways that often can delight and entertain, as well.
Amid our above distributed-systems research, this curiosity-driven work was a completely unrelated side project. Or so we thought. After we finished writing up tilt-responsive techniques for publication, we had an epiphany. As you adjust the angle of a display, you’re:
In the same physical location.
On the same device.
Using the same screen.
Running the same application.
But the new screen orientation doesn’t afford the same tasks and activities—you’ve transitioned to a different place.
This subtly shifts your expectations of what is appropriate. And with just a tiny bit of awareness, well-designed software could provide a sort of intelligence by responding appropriately in kind. That is, the angle of a digital display is just another form of mobility. Here, the mobility is on the micro-level, moving from one screen orientation to another, as opposed to the more macro-level transitions that are the current focus of the Fleet system, such as moving from one device to another or across local and remote locations.
Closing thoughts
We have discussed how the Fleet system explores new ways to think about mobility, and we’ve shown how it builds on an exciting new distributed-systems technology known as Ambrosia. These technologies work to build and implement applications that not only go beyond the current device, but also unbind other dimensions of mobility—the current user, the current application, the current time—as well. Beyond that, as hinted at by our final example above, our research shows how sensors can bridge transitions from the current (sensed) context to another—by responding appropriately to natural human activity.
At the highest level, these advances hint at how devices can be better together—complementing one another across an ecosystem of technologies—instead of competing to add ever more complexity with each new device or service.
Our public sector and enterprise customers regularly need to move their data between countries, regions and continents. Today, we’re announcing new protections for our public sector and enterprise customers who need to move their data from the European Union, including a contractual commitment to challenge government requests for data and a monetary commitment to show our conviction. Microsoft is the first company to provide these commitments in response to last week’s clear guidance from data protection regulators in the European Union.
Every day, our customers move data through their global networks to serve their clients, work with suppliers or partners, and manage payroll for their global workforce. These cross-border data transfers have been the subject of recent litigation and regulatory action including a ruling earlier this year from the Court of Justice for the European Union and draft recommendations issued last week by the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) about how companies can comply with this ruling.
With today’s announcement, we are moving to be the first company to respond to the EDPB’s guidance with new commitments that demonstrate the strength of our conviction to defend our customers’ data. Microsoft has already demonstrated that we provide strong protections for our customers’ data, we are transparent about our practices and we defend our customers’ data. We believe the new steps we’re announcing today go beyond the law and the EDPB draft recommendations, and we hope these additional steps will give our customers added confidence about their data.
First, we are committing that we will challenge every government request for public sector or enterprise customer data – from any government – where there is a lawful basis for doing so. This strong commitment goes beyond the proposed recommendations of the EDPB.
Second, we will provide monetary compensation to these customers’ users if we disclose their data in response to a government request in violation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This commitment also exceeds the EDPB’s recommendations. It shows Microsoft is confident that we will protect our public sector and enterprise customers’ data and not expose it to inappropriate disclosure.
We call these protections Defending Your Data, and we will begin adding them to our contracts with public sector and enterprise customers immediately.
Defending Your Data makes a substantial addition to our foundational privacy promises, and builds on the strong protections we already offer customers.
We use strong encryption: We encrypt customer data with a high standard of encryption both when it is in transit and at rest. Encryption is a critical point in the draft EDPB recommendations. We do not provide any government with our encryption keys or any other way to break our encryption.
We stand up for customer rights: We do not provide any government with direct, unfettered access to customer data. If a government demands customer data from us, it must follow applicable legal process. We will only comply with demands when we are clearly compelled to do so. Our first step is always to attempt to re-direct such orders to customers or to inform them, and we routinely deny or challenge orders when we believe they are not legal.
We are transparent: We have, for many years, published information about government demands for customer data. We sued the U.S. government over the ability to disclose more data about the national security orders we receive seeking customer data and reached a settlement enabling us to do so. As a result, twice a year, we disclose more detailed information about these national security orders across all our businesses (consumer, enterprise, and public sector), in addition to our regular Law Enforcement Request Report.
We have a track record of legal success. We have more experience than any other company going to court to establish the limits of government surveillance orders, and we have even taken one case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Our efforts have provided customers with greater transparency and stronger protections. No commitment to challenge access orders can assure victory, but we feel good about our record of success to date.
Some of the public discussion about the impact of U.S. government data demands focuses on U.S.-headquartered companies. But it is clear that U.S. laws regarding government access to data apply to companies that do business in the U.S., even if they are headquartered in Europe or elsewhere.
Privacy is a core value for us at Microsoft because we believe people will only use technology if they can trust it. That’s why we were the first cloud provider to work with European data protection authorities for approval of Europe’s model clauses, the first to adopt new technical standards for cloud privacy, and enthusiastic supporters of the GDPR since it was first proposed in 2012. We have extended core rights under the GDPR to consumers around the world, and we have honored core rights of the California Consumer Privacy Act for all our consumers in the United States. In addition, we have launched the Tech Fit for Europe initiative to develop digital solutions based on European values and rules.
We hope the steps we have announced today demonstrate to our enterprise and public sector customers that we will go above and beyond the law to defend their data, and the data of their users.
As we enter the holiday season, it’s been inspiring to see organizations condense years of transformation into just a few short months. Many of you are adopting new digital technologies, transforming your business processes, and fundamentally rethinking how work will get done going forward. Throughout all of it, we’ve been focused on studying how work is changing and listening to you, our customers, so we can prioritize features and capabilities that will help you adapt to these changes and improve your workflows.
This month, we’re thrilled to announce that many of your top requested features—like background noise suppression in meetings—are coming to Teams and other Microsoft 365 services. Read on for details on those, plus the highly anticipated Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention and other new features across Microsoft 365 to help make it easier to pick up where you left off, keep track of your notes and tasks more easily, sketch out Amazon Web Services (AWS) application architectures in Visio for the web, and more.
New apps, noise suppression, and more for Teams
This month, we’re announcing the general availability of Teams apps for meetings, expanded Forms integration, and new capabilities that make it easier to build apps and bots right within Teams.
Enrich your meeting experience with Teams apps—Typically, collaborating with an app during a meeting required someone sharing their screen while they updated tasks, set reminders, managed requests, and more. This month, we’re excited to announce that you can now bring the capabilities of many of these apps directly into the meeting experience for everyone to interact with, making the time your team spends together more effective and collaborative before, during, and after your meetings. Checkout the new Teams apps for meetings now available in the Teams app store, including Asana, HireVue, Monday.com, Slido, and Teamflect (with more on the way), as well as familiar apps built by Microsoft such as Forms. If you’re a partner or developer, learn more about creating Teams apps for meetings in our documentation.
Quickly gather feedback in Teams meetings with polls—Polls are a great way to turn passive listeners into active participants. Forms’ integration with Microsoft Teams now brings the power of polls to meetings, helping you conduct more engaging, informative, and productive meetings. Meeting presenters can prepare polls in advance and launch the polls during meetings that attendees can easily view and answer. The new Forms polls for meetings is currently rolling out and will reach you soon. You can get started by updating your Teams app and adding the Forms app to your meeting tabs.
Remove unwelcome background noise in Teams meetings—Earlier this year, we released the ability to minimize distracting background noise in videos on Microsoft Stream. We are excited to share that we’re bringing this technology to Teams meetings. This real-time noise suppression will help remove unwelcome background noise during your meetings, making easier to hear speakers in loud and distracting environments. Noise suppression is rolling out to all users now.
Automate routine tasks without leaving Teams—Also new this month is the Power Automate app for Teams. The app provides a lightweight designer experience and a number of templates to help you quickly get started building workflows right within Teams. This new app makes it even quicker and easier to automate routine tasks within Teams. To get started, make sure you’re running the latest version of Teams.
Easily build and deploy apps and intelligent chat bots in Teams—In September, we announced a new Power Apps and a new Power Virtual Agents app for Teams, running on a built-in low code data platform, now called Microsoft Dataverse for Teams— making it easy for creators to quickly build and deploy apps and bots for Teams—now those apps are generally available. Teams users can easily build applications and bots directly within Teams without needing to deal with connecting to storage, managing integrations, or switching applications. Dataverse for Teams makes the back-end tech logistics of creating and deploying business process solutions in Teams easier than ever. Built-in security and governance features provide seamless control of access to apps, bots, and flows, as well as their underlying data.
Find and share information more quickly
New capabilities help make it easier to find notes while working across Microsoft 365, capture and share content, and pick up where you left off.
Easily reference your notes when working on a OneNote page—Last month, we announced the OneNote feed for Outlook on the web, which conveniently combines your notes across Sticky Notes, recent OneNote pages, and even Samsung Notes so you can easily reference them while composing your mail. This makes it easy to reference your notes when working in a OneNote page and capture any new thoughts you have by creating a Sticky Note in your feed without having to leave OneNote. The OneNote feed is available in OneNote, OneNote on the web, OneNote for Windows 10, Outlook on the web, and Outlook.com. To get started in OneNote, click the Open feed icon in the top right corner of the OneNote app window to display the feed pane.
Capture and share web content and more in Microsoft Edge—This month, we released two new features to help make you more productive and find information more easily. First, Web capture in Microsoft Edge lets you easily capture and mark up web content, and then save or share it—simply drag a box to select what you want to capture even if you need to scroll. Second, we’ve added news and information from your favorite content providers in a new “My Feed” section within the enterprise new tab page. This customizable feed sits alongside your Office 365 content and is designed to keep you connected to information most relevant to your industry or your company.
Quickly pick up where you left off on recent files and more in OneDrive for iOS—A new home experience on the iOS mobile app for OneDrive will help you quickly pick up where you left off on recent files and easily re-discover memories from the past. Plus, you can now add a OneDrive widget to your iPhone home screen that displays your photo memories on this day across previous years. See your recent files and On This Day photos as soon as you open the OneDrive app. To get started, update your OneDrive iOS app.
OneDrive family and group sharing now available
OneDrive family and group sharing now available—OneDrive has always made it easy to share docs, photos, videos, albums, and folders. But until now, sharing to a group of people meant typing in the names of all the people you wanted to share with. Last month, we simplified the process with one-click sharing to family and groups. Once you predefine your family or friend group, you’ll be able to share a photo, album, or important document to your group with one click. Family and group sharing are available in OneDrive for the web and included in all free and paid OneDrive consumer plans, as well in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans.
Hear Office documents read aloud to you on Android phones—As you move through your busy day, sometimes it’s easier to hear your document read aloud to you. Now you can use Read Aloud to do exactly that in Word for Android phone and in Word on the Office app for Android. New voices offer a more natural and pleasant listening experience. You can easily pause and resume Read Aloud as well as adjust the voice speed. To get started, open the Word or Office app on your Android phone, go to the Review tab, then tap Read Aloud.
Get Yammer notifications in your Teams activity feed and more—This month, we’re announcing several new and upcoming features in Yammer. Coming soon, notifications from your Yammer announcements and mentions will show up in your Microsoft Teams activity feed if you have the Communities app installed. We’re also now rolling out an updated experience in the Yammer Tab for Teams that brings modern capabilities like pinning, cover photos, live events, and more. Finally, also released this month is support for Yammer Q and A insights in Microsoft Productivity Score, an interactive guide to get the most out of Yammer, and an updated experience for topics and hashtags in Yammer.
Prevent data loss and diagram your IT solutions
New capabilities make it easier to prevent data loss on endpoints and sketch out IT solutions build on ASW.
Protect sensitive information on your endpoints—In July, we announced the public preview of Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention (DLP) which extends our data protection capabilities to devices. Now generally available, Endpoint DLP enables organizations to enforce policies that identify and prevent risky or inappropriate sharing, transfer, or use of sensitive information consistently across cloud, on-premises, and endpoints. We’re also adding new capabilities to a public preview based on feedback from customers—such as adding enforcement actions and locations-based sensitivity, a new dashboard in Microsoft 365 compliance center to manage DLP alerts, and more.
Sketch your Amazon Web Services (AWS) architecture in Visio for the web—Diagrams are a great way for cloud architects to visualize the design, deployment, and topology of IT solutions built on AWS. We’re excited to announce that we’ve added support to build AWS diagrams for various topologies and service interactions in Visio for the web. More than 400 shapes are available to help architects redesign existing infrastructure diagrams, conceptualize application architecture, or visualize the current state of your cloud environment and plan for the future. To help you get started easily, we’ve provided a few starter diagrams using various AWS services. Go to the Visio web app homepage and select your preferred diagram template to quickly start visualizing your AWS infrastructure.
As you continue your navigation to a more sustainable, hybrid workplace, we are committed to developing technologies that help your people and teams thrive. From building low code apps right within Teams to new AI capabilities to help you manage tasks more easily, all of these updates are aimed at enabling your people to collaborate productively, securely, and safely from anywhere.
Nearly two years into Microsoft’s Affordable Housing Initiative, it has become apparent that in order to close the affordable housing gap in our region we need fresh, innovative approaches to housing finance – in our home state of Washington and nationwide.
Despite continued rapid growth in greater Seattle, our community is not providing enough housing that is affordable for people who live here – particularly low- and middle-income households. For example, between 2011 and 2019 jobs grew 24% while housing only grew 12%, and, while median household income increased by 34% median, housing prices increased by 78%. This challenge is compounded by the deep economic crisis of Covid-19 we continue to live through, and the historical inequity faced by communities of color.
That’s why, today, Microsoft is announcing a set of investments totaling $65 million (of our overall $750 million commitment) to help support the creation of more than 1,000 new affordable housing units for greater Seattle. This includes:
A new initiative with Urban Housing Ventures supported by Freddie Mac, Stream Real Estate, WaFd Bank and Washington Trust Bank to reduce rents in existing market-rate housing in Bellevue and Kirkland, Washington, quickly creating more affordable living options. We are contributing $40 million to Urban Housing Ventures for this effort
Continuing our work with the Washington State Housing Finance Commission (WSHFC) to expand a land acquisition program that accelerates the development of new affordable housing. We are providing $25 million to the WSHFC for this program
Together, these investments will deliver more low- and middle-income housing units for greater Seattle by accelerating and extending how capital is leveraged and invested, and in turn attract more capital to the middle-income housing market.
Working closely with these leading regional and national housing organizations, we are pushing ourselves to think creatively and leverage our collective resources in new ways; simply put, the scale of this problem is massive, and we know money alone will not solve the problem.
Perhaps even more importantly, we are confident that these new programs can be replicated in other parts of the country that face similar housing affordability issues. Here’s a more detailed breakdown of what we’re announcing today.
Keeping rent affordable for middle-income households
Typically, affordable housing is built from the ground up, takes years to accomplish and doesn’t address the region’s immediate shortage. The problem gets worse when existing housing developments are purchased and rents are raised for existing tenants. Through this program, Urban Housing Ventures will immediately lower rent on 40% of units so they are affordable to middle-income workers, creating a model that remains attractive for investors. In an expensive city like Bellevue, Washington, this might mean that a teacher in the Bellevue School District or a nurse at Overlake Hospital has a greater opportunity to live in a home close to where they work.
Using this program, we’ve invested in the first project led by Stream Real Estate with the support of Freddie Mac, WaFd Bank and Washington Trust Bank. Microsoft is contributing $40 million to Urban Housing Ventures, which purchased three market-rate apartment buildings in Bellevue and Kirkland, Washington. The reduction in rents at one of these buildings, for example, could save a family of three up to $7,890 per year vs. a market-based rental. Through the collaboration with Freddie Mac, this project did not require any local public subsidies or financing.
Providing land acquisition loans to enable new affordable housing development
The second program Microsoft is supporting is the Expanded Land Acquisition Program (ELAP), which provides access to bridge loans for affordable housing development. This program addresses the availability and cost of land, which is another significant barrier to developing affordable housing, especially in competitive markets like Bellevue, Redmond and Kirkland in Washington state. Because of the region’s dynamic real estate market, would-be affordable housing developers often miss out on opportunities to acquire land because they are unable to compete with the speed and resources of market-rate, commercial developers.
Microsoft is initially providing $25 million to the Washington State Housing Finance Commission (WSHFC) to offer affordable housing developers financing that allows them to compete in a tough market. This partnership builds upon WSHFC’s successful Land Acquisition Program by expanding to middle-income housing development and opening it to both nonprofit and for-profit developers to enable maximum use on the greater Eastside region outside Seattle. If the projects result in applicable improvements to local land use and housing policy – such as zoning reform, permit streamlining and parking requirement reduction – the program will trigger an interest rate reduction of up to 3%. ELAP’s first pilot loan was provided to GMD Development for their 136-unit, low-income housing development in Renton.
Building an innovative future
Innovation in housing finance is only one part of the solution. We’re also seeing the creative thinking and broad collaboration needed for our region to move forward. Five of the projects we’ve announced so far as part of Microsoft’s Affordable Housing Initiative were only achieved through shared problem solving by Microsoft, the public sector and the private sector. And the housing sector is taking notice. On October 27, the WSHFC was recognized with the Management Innovation: Financial award by the National Council of State Housing Agencies for its partnership with Microsoft in creating a line of credit programs to preserve and recycle tax-exempt bond allocations, which we announced in January 2020.
More must be done, particularly with public policy reforms that encourage affordable housing development at a local and regional level. But we recognize that truly impactful change takes time, and we stand ready to accelerate progress in this area. Nationally, our work with Freddie Mac and others represents a meaningful step forward when it comes to practical strategies that can work for other communities around the country.
Microsoft launched its affordable housing initiative in January 2019 because we believe everyone in our community regardless of income level should have a place they can afford to call home. To close the housing gap, we all need to come together in new ways and act with greater urgency, creativity and shared accountability.
Throughout the pandemic, educators continue to adapt and find ways to keep their students engaged and learning while remote, at school, or a combination of the two. But being more distant can make it harder to connect and help each individual student grow and succeed. That is why we’re delighted to announce updated capabilities to Education Insights in Microsoft Teams for Education. Insights are designed for and inspired by educators to help understand, identify, and take action to support the individual student’s needs.
Now educators can see a new, tailored view that distills the key story and trends behind the data to better inform engagement with students and class outcomes. With Insights, educators can closely track the engagement and progress of students over time and across their classes. This includes seeing the number of inactive and active students per day, missed online classes, and missed assignments. And when needed, educators can see the specific engagement data within the overview.
Educators can see insights into student engagement across classes
Within a specific class, educators can see spotlight cards to show trending student behaviors they may want to take action on. These spotlight cards are rolling out now and will be fully available by mid-December. With access to data showing how students are engaging—like meeting participation, communication, and assignment activities—educators can monitor progress and make faster, informed decisions on which students need immediate learning support.
Spotlight cards highlight engagement trends and help educators take action to support student learning
Here is what educators are saying about Insights:
“Insights for classroom Teams has become an essential part of how I understand and connect with my students. It offers world-class actionable learning analytics, deployed in one click, that is deeply integrated into the way we communicate with students. It has helped me connect with struggling students on a personal level, and to understand the broader trends in my classroom. Every teacher, professor or instructor on Teams has something to learn from Insights.”
– Dr. David Kellermann, School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, UNSW
“Our teachers think Insights is extremely useful to gauge, evaluate, and customize their instruction for each student’s individual growth. Teachers can help make sure each student is communicating, connecting and learning in class. They can clearly see their student’s educational day including assignments, posts, and meetings in Microsoft Teams.”
– Jeni Long and Sallee Clark (aka Jenallee), EdTech Consultants and Instructional Technologists with Eagle Mountain Saginaw ISD
“Insights is a game-changer for how we teach and help our students. We can see the data behind how our students are engaging and use it to personalize learning to meet their needs. It’s especially critical now with many of our students learning from home, or going between home and the classroom. We can still gauge how they’re doing.”
– Alberto and Mario Herraez, eTwinz and Global Educators
Insights ensures security and protection of students’ sensitive information. Classroom data is only available to approved staff members given permissions by the IT admin, and the information collected and shown meets more than 90 regulatory and industry standards, including GDPR and the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). For more technical information, visit the Insights IT support page.
To learn more about how to use Insights in the classroom and find professional development resources, visit this in-depth post. To learn how to get started today, visit the Insights support page.
The end of the year is almost here and for me it’s a time to reflect on everything our team has accomplished, celebrate successes and prepare for the year ahead. We launched the new Microsoft Edge last January and since that time we’ve come a long way – but we’re just getting started. With the new Microsoft Edge we’re challenging the status quo when it comes to the web and the browser, focusing on better privacy, stronger performance, saving time and providing value back.
With December only two weeks away, there’s no more putting off the decorating, the cooking and the holiday shopping. This holiday, many of us are trying to keep our family traditions alive, even at a distance, while saving money where we can (myself included). If you’ve already started your holiday shopping, you’re way ahead of me 😊. If not, there’s still time to tick everything off your list while saving time and money with Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Bing – we’ve got your back!
Microsoft Edge is the best browser for shopping this holiday. In fact, Microsoft Edge is the only browser with built-in tools to help you save time and money while shopping online with new features like auto-fill coupons and more proactive price comparisons. And this month, our new shopping hub, Shop the Look, and deals hub in Microsoft Bing make shopping even easier and quicker than before. And with many of us online more than ever, we want to be sure we’re safe when shopping online. Microsoft Edge is more secure than Chrome and Firefox by offering better protection against phishing and malware attacks on Windows 10. Just another reason to switch to Microsoft Edge. If you haven’t yet tried the new Microsoft Edge, launch it on your Windows PC and give it a spin. If you’re on a Mac or mobile device download it and let us know what you think!
Now for what’s new this month in Web Experiences:
Save time and money with coupons in Microsoft Edge on desktop and mobile
Coupons and promo codes are a great potential way to save money but they often require a lot of work to find, and too often they don’t work when you need them. That’s why I’m super excited to announce our new coupons feature in Microsoft Edge for desktop and mobile[1], which makes finding coupons faster and easier since the feature is built into the browser. When I visit a retailer site, Microsoft Edge will alert me if there are any coupons available for that site. I can view the list of coupons at any time by clicking on the blue shopping tag in the address bar. The real magic is that it proactively surfaces these coupon codes when I’m ready to checkout; all I have to do is copy and paste a code or have Edge auto-populate and try them all to determine which one will save me the most.
Help find the lowest price when shopping in Microsoft Edge
Last month, we unveiled price comparison in Collections to help you find the best price online. I’ve been using Collections to organize my gift ideas for the holidays, so having this built-in has been really helpful in saving me time. Today, we’re launching an even more proactive price comparison experience[2] that meets you where you shop. Now when you’re shopping for an item like a book, a cool sweater, or even the new Xbox your kid has been asking for, Microsoft Edge will check the prices at competing retailers to let you know if a lower price is available elsewhere. Click the blue price tag to see a list of prices along with direct links to the product page on those sites. If we determine you already have the lowest price, Microsoft Edge will let you know that too, saving your precious time and energy.
Shopping features like price comparison and coupons adhere to our privacy policies and are on by default. You can turn them off at any time by using the “…” button in the top right of the shopping flyouts or by going directly to Settings > Privacy, search, and services.
New tab page enhancements help you uncover holiday shopping deals
Growing up, I was always told that “if it’s not on sale, you can’t buy it!” This lesson has been seared into my memory and to this day, I’m always on the hunt for deals! This month on the Microsoft Edge new tab page, we’re launching new tools[3] to help bring the shopping deals to you. Once you’ve enabled this feature, you’ll get a customized set of up-to-the-minute retailer discounts to check out. To get started, on the new tab page in the Top Sites section, click on the plus sign and select Deals. You can also add the new Daily Brief suggestion under Top Sites to keep up with breaking news. This month, we’ve also added voice search capabilities to the new tab page. Just click on the microphone in the search box and start speaking.
Save money with our Deals Hub on Microsoft Bing
Microsoft Bing’s Deals Hub[4] also helps you when you’re hunting for savings. The Hub lets you browse the latest online deals across various retailers, sorted by popular products, brands, product categories and more. The deals featured on the Hub encompass retailer offers, price drops, Bing Rebates offers and more, to ensure you can see a variety of cost-saving opportunities all in one place.
Find the perfect holiday gift with our new curated shopping hub on Microsoft Bing
If you need some inspiration to find just the right holiday gift this year but don’t know where to start, we’ve thought about that too! Sometimes I don’t exactly know what my mom wants and I want to get inspired with new ideas. With our new shopping hub[5] on Microsoft Bing, I can browse and discover curated categories like home décor, gift ideas, clothing, jewelry and more. Visit Bing.com/shop to get your shopping on.
Quickly find outfits you’re looking for with Shop the Look
If you’re like me, you like to buy outfits of items that go together, and not just clothing items one at a time. Now you can use Shop the Look[6], which builds off previous Microsoft Bing visual search technologies to help you find your next favorite look. For example, if you need a new warm coat for the winter, you can search for “coats”; Microsoft Bing will show you a variety of different outfits to find the one you want. These results link right to the retailer’s page, so you can easily make your dream outfit a reality. We are currently working to expand this feature for all of our users and for more products.
Save time by seeing comprehensive product information in one place on the Bing Shopping tab
There are lots of items you might like to get detailed information on before you buy, such as when you’re looking into upgrading your devices. In these cases, you can quickly get comprehensive product details[7] on Microsoft Bing, which aggregates into a single view information like ratings from multiple top reviewers, item price trends over time, product specifications and user reviews on important product elements. Simply search for items you’re curious about on the Bing Shopping tab, click “Track price” or add it to your wish list, and from there click to see the details you need to buy the right device for you at the right price.
Easily take screenshots and mark them up directly in Microsoft Edge
Last month we announced web capture, an easy way to take screenshots of web pages within Microsoft Edge. Our next version of web capture is now generally available, adding the ability to digitally ink and annotate directly onto screenshots so you can edit and draw to your heart’s content. This has been our top requested feature and we are excited for you to use it. It’s very useful for students to capture online articles and annotate while studying, and also for sending not-so-subtle gift hints to your loved ones for the holidays. It’s also nice to have this capability native within the browser so there’s no longer a need to download or use a separate app! Later this month, you can also expect to see the ability to capture a full webpage with a click. That means no more scrolling or stitching together multiple screen grabs. To get started, select Web capture from the “…” menu in the top of the browser or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + Shift + S.
Annotate and add text to PDF documents in Microsoft Edge
People love reading PDFs in the browser, and now in addition to being able to highlight, this month we’ve added the ability to add text notes to your PDF within Microsoft Edge. This has been one of our most requested features and we’ve listened to your feedback. Now it’s really easy to read, annotate and add text to PDF files, perfect for students and for busy professionals. I just wish I had this back in grad school, it would have saved me so much time.
Enterprise users also get a revamped new tab page to stay dialed in at work
The new tab page doesn’t just help you find the best shopping deals after work – it also helps you optimize your workday. Previously, you had to choose between Office 365 content and news for your new tab experience; now, you’ll get the best of work and news in a single view when signed into Microsoft Edge with your Azure Active Directory work account. You can easily toggle between Office content and the new “My Feed” section, which brings you relevant work and industry news content that can be further personalized based on your interests. So whether you want to hop back into a shared PowerPoint from the Office 365 section or want to read the latest industry news in “My Feed,” just open a new tab in Microsoft Edge and stay in your flow. You can read more about this great feature.
Say goodbye to those long, ugly URL links
Imagine you are on a website with a great holiday gift idea and you want to email it to your friends. When you cut and paste the URL into Outlook or a Word doc, it’s super long with a ton of letters and numbers. It doesn’t look too good and you have to take the extra step of typing descriptive text in the doc, clicking on that text, and then adding a hyperlink to make it look good. Or you have to go download an extension or use another shortening tool from somewhere else out on the web. Waste of time! This month we are releasing a feature called friendly URLs, to help make things way easier. Now, when you paste a link that you copied from the address bar, it will automatically convert from a long, nonsensical URL address to a short hyperlink with the website title. If you prefer the full URL, you can convert to plain text using the context menu. Your doc or email looks clean without all the effort. In life, it’s sometimes the small things that make a huge difference.
Two screens are better than one. Experience the Microsoft News App and Microsoft Edge on Surface Duo
With the launch of Surface Duo last month, people are getting to experience Microsoft’s vision for the new way to get things done. With the flexibility of two screens, you can open an article without losing your place on a list of headlines, drag and drop to save videos to a playlist, or just make an article or gallery full-screen to take advantage of Surface Duo’s beautiful displays. Maybe my favorite feature though is book mode – where one article is sized just-right for reading across both screens, just like the pages of a book. It just feels natural with this device to flip pages, makes it easy to focus on one thing at a time, and the weight of the device will have you getting lost in headlines or videos without needing to change devices. I can’t wait to work my way through my book list this holiday season.
In addition to the news experience on Surface Duo, Microsoft News is built into Microsoft Edge, integrated into the Microsoft Launcher for Android and is available as a free standalone app. To read more about how Microsoft Edge works on Surface Duo, check out this post.
We hope you and your family have a wonderful holiday, and that Microsoft Edge and Bing help you save time and money this year!
[1] Coupons are currently available in U.S. markets and now available on desktop and iOS. Coming soon to Android.
[2] Price comparison is currently available on desktop versions of Microsoft Edge in U.S. markets.
[3] Deals on the new tab page are currently available in U.S. markets.
[4] Microsoft Bing’s Deals Hub is only available in U.S. and U.K. markets.
[5] Microsoft Bing Shopping Hub is only available in the following markets: U.S., U.K., A.U., C.A., D.E., F.R.
[6] Microsoft Bing Shop the Look is only available in U.S. markets.
[7] Microsoft Bing product details are only available in the following markets: U.S., U.K., A.U., C.A., D.E., F.R.
Note: In Part 1 of a two-part series, Rick Wagner shines a spotlight on federal agencies demonstrating resiliency to respond and rebound from 2020 challenges and reimagine a future of innovation and transformation.
As we look ahead to the close of 2020 and the beginning of a new year and administration, I’m more excited than ever to be leading our 3,000-member Microsoft Federal team. Formed in July – the same time I came aboard – this new organization reflects Microsoft’s commitment to, and investment in, federal government agencies and the specialized partners who join us in supporting their mission-critical work.
In this year of unprecedented challenges, we’ve seen U.S. government agencies respond to the health and economic crisis posed by a global pandemic, civil unrest over policing and racial justice issues, raging wildfires, catastrophic hurricanes and more. Unlike the private sector, the business of government is always open, especially during times of uncertainty, adversity and disruption. I’m inspired by the speed of federal agencies to address evolving demands while advancing government and our nation. I’m also proud that Microsoft Federal kept pace with our customers in using technology as a core enabler for innovations that serve everyone.
Leadership, resiliency, momentum
Federal agencies are demonstrating leadership, resiliency and momentum in building solutions for some of the most pressing issues of 2020. That’s why our Microsoft Government Leaders Summit digital broadcast on Dec. 7 is focused on empowering mission and leadership resiliency. With our trusted cloud, AI and other leading-edge capabilities, federal organizations are quickly tackling coronavirus issues to ensure seamless delivery of important services and continuity of operations. For example:
Roll Call and FedScoop reported on the DOD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center integrating supply-chain data to better inform the military’s response to the pandemic. In weeks, Project Salus produced an Azure- and AI-powered prototype with data from 150-plus sources to quickly assess national supply chains and identify potential shortages of water, medicines, food and other essentials.
Meeting diverse missions
While the pandemic requires great agility and resiliency, federal agencies also moved forward across several fronts to better meet their diverse missions, such as:
Veterans Affairs, Microsoft, Medivis and Verizon joined forces in February as Project Convergence to establish the nation’s first 5G-enabled hospital at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. Not only will this public-private partnership result in 5G-based innovations, but it will create opportunities to improve veteran healthcare by leveraging the power of Microsoft HoloLens 2 and our Azure cloud. USA Today recently highlighted this initiative, with Susie Adams capturing its impact: “Doctors will be empowered to plan and perform live surgeries, see ultrasounds in 3D, and train doctors, surgeons and nurses to learn and understand human anatomy in new ways.”
Microsoft is partnering with the U.S. Air Force to support its mission through more modern IT solutions, including Microsoft 365, Teams and Azure. The move is allowing the Air Force to scale more easily, improve cloud performance, and empower better cross-agency collaboration and communication while complying with strict DOD requirements.
With two tropical storms headed for the Gulf Coast, we partnered with a U.S. Navy team over the Aug. 22–23 weekend to successfully deploy an enhanced weather model in a production-like Microsoft Azure environment. Capable of rapidly scaling weather and ocean pattern predictions on demand, the system confirmed the potential of using our secure cloud to deliver faster, real-time tropical cyclone forecasts.
We’re working with the federal government to accelerate progress in other ways, such as The First Five Consortium with the Department of Energy to develop disaster-response AI tools that help first responders quickly address floods, wildfires and windstorms. The Wall Street Journal explained the name as a reference to “the importance of the first five minutes in responding to a natural disaster,” and Susie Adams noted our Azure cloud and AI models will be used to analyze massive and disparate data sets in real time to help first responders better allocate resources or inform the public.
Microsoft Federal and our industry team are pleased to collaborate with the DOD in advancing microelectronics technology and strengthening the American microelectronics industrial base through the Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes (RAMP) using Advanced Commercial Capabilities Project. We believe RAMP is vital to protecting national security, maintaining U.S. technological leadership and strengthening the economy.
We also hope the path is soon cleared to begin the essential work on the DOD’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), providing fast, responsive, flexible and adaptive cloud services to users at all classification levels. Originally announced Oct. 25, 2019 but stymied by litigation, we remain committed to delivering the best technology, the greatest value to our women and men in uniform, and the highest speed to adoption, innovation, capability and scale.
Respond, recover, reimagine
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been widely attributed with seeing the world going through three pandemic phases: respond, recover and reimagine. As evidenced by the above examples, federal agencies have successfully responded to initial COVID-19 impacts and are now rebounding through collaboration and modernization with secure cloud and AI solutions. We’re also seeing great strides to shape a future of economic growth, transformation, and increased public trust and confidence.
For more than 40 years, Microsoft has supported federal agencies as they fulfill missions and create more efficient, effective government. Microsoft Federal is fully dedicated to continuing our company’s history of serving as the trusted partner to government customers as they digitally transform, reimagine tomorrow and achieve more for all of us.
Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Brad Smith, Toni Townes-Whitley, myself and others discussing the government landscape and what’s needed to address the most pressing issues for federal agencies.
Federal leaders who are responding to change and recovering through collaboration and modernization.
Author and historian Walter Isaacson, sharing insights on the leadership and resiliency strategies that powered great historic transformations during challenging times – and how these lessons can provide a roadmap for leaders in times of extreme disruption.
