“Kindness comes in many different forms, including patience, forgiveness, and through simple acts that lead to positive connections.” — Christine McKee, Emerging Technology Consultant, Edmonton Catholic Schools, Alberta, Canada
This year, teachers, students, and parents have done an incredible job adapting to remote and hybrid learning. They’ve brought positivity to every interaction, made online learning engaging, found ways to stay connected, and shared acts of kindness throughout rapidly changing situations.
World Kindness Day is November 13, and it’s the perfect time to reflect on and appreciate the positive power of kindness—and recognize the heroes who model it all year round!
As part of our celebration, we are highlighting tips and lessons from teachers, educators, and parents, including you, on what you’ve learned about kindness during remote and hybrid learning. To make this easy and engaging, we’re using Flipgrid to record and display your responses. You can visit the World Kindness Day Flipgrid topic to see them all and add your own! There are already some great messages posted, and we’ve put some of our favorites so far on a one-minute Kindness Sizzle Reel.
Here are some more quick and easy-to-use ways to spread kindness and promote well-being:
New praise badges in Microsoft Teams and sticker packs in OneNote and Whiteboard
Praise badges were released not long ago, and we’re already hearing some great stories of how teachers and students have been using them to build up one another.
Cindy Ramirez, a teacher from the US, was excited to share that her students are celebrating their classmates with praise badges; Patrick O’Callaghan from Ireland said his students really like when he recognizes their hard work with a badge; and students in Sacha van Straten’s class in England surprised him with a badge to thank him for a great lesson.
Donald Gillespie, a teacher in Scotland said, “The pupils really appreciate receiving them and we find they really motivate not just the recipient but others who see the praise being given out.”
Reflect Messaging in Teams
More than ever, it’s important for teachers to understand how students are feeling. It can be hard to gauge well-being during distance learning, but with tools like Reflect Messaging in Teams, educators can create a quick and engaging check-in to get insights on the well-being of their students and classes.
These tools can have a tangible impact on students’ social and emotional health. My eleven-year-old son Max’s school used Microsoft Forms to create a Mood Meter check-in that students use to identify their emotions, and he says it makes him feel better just to be asked how he’s feeling. He also thought it was helpful to take the time to reflect on and better understand his emotions, and that it helped him learn how to navigate them.
As a recent article about social-emotional learning in TechRepublic shared, “At any age, the key to dealing with complexity, ambiguity, and change is emotion. Checking in to ask what emotions someone is experiencing is one of the simplest and kindest things you can do.”
Kindness Cards
Kindness Cards are available in many different languages, and each card has ideas, reminders, or inspiration teachers can use to model kind behaviors. Teachers can keep them handy to share with students or a colleague!
As educators, teachers, and students continue to model empathy and spread kindness around their classrooms and around the world, we’re working to support their incredible work with easy-to-use and personalized resources that amplify their voices. For more information, as well as support and guidance on the best tools to use for social and emotional learning, take a look at the social and emotional learning resource page.
As Brian H. Smith, Ph.D, a member of the Born This Way Foundation’s Research Advisory Board says, “When kindness is a norm, a strong value we hold, it can help guide how we approach the rest of the world.”
I sincerely hope that every small and large act expands the reach of positivity, and brings people of all ages together.
Remember: one kind word (or Praise badge) can change someone’s entire day. Wishing everyone around the globe a Happy World Kindness Day!
The Custom Translator journey to be on the leading edge of machine translation technology continues.
In early August 2020, we started our Custom Translator upgrade from Long Short-Term Memory (aka LSTM) based neural machine translation architecture (or V1) to our Microsoft Translator’s state-of-the-art Transformer based architecture (or V2). V2 is the same translation architecture which powers the standard uncustomized Translator API, as well as translation in Microsoft Office 365, Speech, Bing.com/translator, Edge, and more.
The August release enabled customers to use the dictionary (phrase or sentence) document type to build custom models on top of the V2 platform for a quick translation quality improvement over the V1 platform.
Today, Custom Translator completed the full V2 platform upgrade to deliver an even bigger translation quality gain than before. Customers can now build custom models with all document types (Training, Testing, Tuning, Phrase Dictionary and Sentence Dictionary) using full text documents, like Office documents, PDFs, HTML and plain text.
With this release, enterprises, small and medium sized businesses, app developers, and language service providers can build advanced custom neural translation systems that respect their defined business terminology and seamlessly integrate those systems into existing or new applications, workflows, and websites to attract customers and grow the business.
We put every new baseline language model through a rigorous human evaluation process to ensure the translation quality continues to meet high standards on generic input across all domains. However, with custom trained specialized translation systems, customers can achieve much higher adherence to the domain-specific terminology and style by training a custom translation system on previously translated, in-domain documents. These previously translated documents allow Custom Translator to learn the preferred translations in context, so Translator can apply these terms and phrases when the context calls for it, and produce a fluent translation in the target language, respecting the context-dependent grammar of the target language.
Benefits of the upgrade
We use BLEU score (a standard way in the research community) to measure the translation quality of a newly trained baseline model. A one or two BLEU point gain is a worthy achievement. The Custom Translator V2 platform upgrade will deliver significant improvements when compared to the previous V1 platform. The bar chart below depicts the translation quality BLEU score improvement for some domains and the impact of training dataset size.
Sample domains translation quality BLEU score when using standard Translator, Custom Translator V1, and Custom Translator V2. Training dataset size in thousands (‘auto-28k’ means 28,000 parallel sentences for the automotive domain)
It is important to note that actual quality improvement is dependent upon customer data quality, training dataset size, and domain coverage.
“We’re hoping that translation through a neural network will not only boost quality and speed, but also offer advances in the evaluation of big data,” said Nikolas Meyer-Aun, Head of Quality and Supplier Management for Languages at Volkswagen AG
Custom Translator will offer FREE upgrade to V2. You can retrain one model per project in a workspace to the V2 platform at no charge. When you view a project, you should see a message if you still have free upgrade credit for that project. The offer starts today and ends on January 31, 2021. After January 31, 2021, normal training charges apply for each retraining.
You can learn more about the upgrade to version 2 in the FAQ below.
FAQ
What are you releasing in V2? We are releasing a Custom Translator platform upgrade (V2) to deliver significant translation quality improvements using Microsoft’s state-of-the-art neural machine translation architecture. The user experience remains the same as in V1. There is nothing new to learn, just better translations. For a quick refresher, please watch this Quick-Start video.
What is the benefit of upgrading a currently deployed model to the V2 platform? Significantly improved translation quality; the Custom Translator V2 platform upgrade will deliver significant improvement over standard Translator and the previous V1 platform. The bar chart above shows the translation quality BLEU scores for some common domains and the impact of training dataset size.
How do I use my FREE upgrade to V2 credit? When you view a project details, a free credit message becomes visible (see images below) and will continue to be visible until you either successfully retrain a model or the offer ends on January 31, 2021.
How do I upgrade my deployed (or undeployed) custom models to the V2 platform? If you have a deployed or undeployed dictionary-only model that was retrained after August 3, 2020, it has already been upgraded to the V2 platform. Otherwise, you should launch a new model training. Once the new model is successfully trained, the “Swap” button will be visible. Click “Swap” to deploy the new model. Note: “Swap” button enables no-downtime deployment. That is, all translation requests will continue to be served by the previous model until the new model is deployed and functional, then the new model will serve new translation requests and the previous model will be undeployed.
Can I continue to re-deploy V1 custom models after the V2 platform upgrade? Yes. We understand there may be reasons customers would want to continue using models trained on the V1 platform. V1 models can run on the V2 platform. In the future, V1 models will not be re-deployable. Note: Once you retrain a V1 model, the new model will be on the V2 platform. The “Model” tab will show all new (V2) and previous (V1) models.
Thanks to you, the launch of Xbox Series X|S is now the most successful debut in our history. While we missed the emotional spark of being together with you in person, it was incredible to celebrate a new generation of gaming with the millions on our celebration livestream and everyone who participated in our global launch across 40 countries.
Your support, and what you accomplished in the first 24 hours of launch, inspire us and demonstrate the connective power of play is more important than ever.
More new consoles sold than any prior generation, with Xbox Series S adding the highest percentage of new players for any Xbox console at launch
More games played, 3,594 in total, spanning four generations, setting a record for the most games ever played during an Xbox console launch
Next gen means more ways to discover and play, 70 percent of Series X|S consoles are attached to new and existing Xbox Game Pass members
As none of this would be possible without great games to play, we also want to thank our development partners around the world and congratulate them on their own respective launches this week, including delivering more than 40 new and Optimized games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Destiny 2: Beyond Light, Dirt 5, The Falconeer, Tetris Effect: Connected, Watch Dogs: Legion and Yakuza: Like a Dragon to players on day one, 30 of which support Smart Delivery.
We know that not everyone was able to get an Xbox Series X|S immediately and are working tirelessly with our partners around the world to bring as many new consoles to as many of you as possible over time and encourage you to check in with your local retailers directly for more details on availability in your market.
Your early reaction and excitement for the next generation of Xbox has us feeling grateful and energized to continue building the future of gaming with you. On the behalf of Team Xbox: Thank you.
Two global issues will help shape people’s memories of this time in history – Covid-19 and the increased use of the internet by malign actors to disrupt society. It’s disturbing that these challenges have now merged as cyberattacks are being used to disrupt health care organizations fighting the pandemic. We think these attacks are unconscionable and should be condemned by all civilized society. Today, we’re sharing more about the attacks we’ve seen most recently and are urging governments to act.
In recent months, we’ve detected cyberattacks from three nation-state actors targeting seven prominent companies directly involved in researching vaccines and treatments for Covid-19. The targets include leading pharmaceutical companies and vaccine researchers in Canada, France, India, South Korea and the United States. The attacks came from Strontium, an actor originating from Russia, and two actors originating from North Korea that we call Zinc and Cerium.
Among the targets, the majority are vaccine makers that have Covid-19 vaccines in various stages of clinical trials. One is a clinical research organization involved in trials, and one has developed a Covid-19 test. Multiple organizations targeted have contracts with or investments from government agencies from various democratic countries for Covid-19 related work.
Strontium continues to use password spray and brute force login attempts to steal login credentials. These are attacks that aim to break into people’s accounts using thousands or millions of rapid attempts. Zinc has primarily used spear-phishing lures for credential theft, sending messages with fabricated job descriptions pretending to be recruiters. Cerium engaged in spear-phishing email lures using Covid-19 themes while masquerading as World Health Organization representatives. The majority of these attacks were blocked by security protections built into our products. We’ve notified all organizations targeted, and where attacks have been successful, we’ve offered help.
These are just among the most recent attacks on those combating Covid-19. Cyberattacks targeting the health care sector and taking advantage of the pandemic are not new. Attackers recently used ransomware attacks to target hospitals and healthcare organizations across the United States. Earlier in the pandemic, attacks targeted Brno University Hospital in the Czech Republic, Paris’s hospital system, the computer systems of Spain’s hospitals, hospitals in Thailand, medical clinics in the U.S. state of Texas, a health care agency in the U.S. state of Illinois and even international bodies such as the World Health Organization. In Germany, we recently saw the resulting threat to human health become tragic reality when a woman in Dusseldorf reportedly became the first known death as a result of a cyberattack on a hospital.
Today, Microsoft’s president Brad Smith is participating in the Paris Peace Forum where he will urge governments to do more. Microsoft is calling on the world’s leaders to affirm that international law protects health care facilities and to take action to enforce the law. We believe the law should be enforced not just when attacks originate from government agencies but also when they originate from criminal groups that governments enable to operate – or even facilitate – within their borders. This is criminal activity that cannot be tolerated.
The good news is that we’re not alone. Our voice at Microsoft is just one of many speaking up from the multi-stakeholder coalition that will be needed to make progress. In today’s virtual Paris Peace Forum event addressing an audience of international leaders, Brad will discuss these issues with France’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves le Drian, Ambassador Guilherme de Aguiar Patriota of Brazil and Ambassador Jürg Lauber of Switzerland. Ambassador Patriota is chair of the UN’s Group of Governmental Experts, and Ambassador Lauber is chair of the UN’s Open-Ended Working Group – both important bodies in determining the future of cyberspace.
In the leadup to this year’s Paris Peace Forum, more than 65 health care-related organizations have joined the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace. They include organizations like Merck working on vaccines, top hospitals like Hospital Metropolitano in Ecuador, and government health institutes like Poland’s National Institute of Public Health. There is no question the attacks we’ve seen in recent months are creating energy for action across the health sector. The Paris Call remains the largest multi-stakeholder coalition addressing these issues, and its first principle is the prevention of malicious cyber activities that threaten indiscriminate or systemic harm to people and critical infrastructure.
In May, a 136-strong group of the world’s most prominent international law experts, in what has become known as the Oxford Process, issued a statement making it clear that international law protects medical facilities at all times. In August, the Oxford Process issued a second statement emphasizing that organizations that research, manufacture and distribute of Covid-19 vaccines are also protected.
Earlier this year, the CyberPeace Institute and International Committee of the Red Cross led an effort by 40 international leaders calling on governments to stop the attacks on healthcare. They included former secretary of state Madeline Albright, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town Desmond Tutu, former Member of the European Parliament Marietje Schaake and former Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon among many others.
Organizations are also taking steps to protect themselves. In April, we announced that we were making AccountGuard, our threat notification service, available to health care and human rights organizations working on Covid-19. Since then 195 of these organizations have enrolled in the service and we now protect 1.7 million email accounts for health care-related groups. Any health care-related organizations that wish to enroll can do so here.
At a time when the world is united in wanting an end to the pandemic and anxiously awaiting the development of a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19, it is essential for world leaders to unite around the security of our health care institutions and enforce the law against cyberattacks targeting those who endeavor to help us all. You can learn more about what Microsoft is doing to advance cybersecurity here.
Nearly two years ago, we released a Garage project created by a passionate engineer who channeled his classical architecture training and love for drawing into a 360 sketch app. Sketch 360 enables artists to create full, 360-degree, panoramic sketches with ease, using an innovative grid design. Originally released on Windows and designed around Surface Laptop, Surface Go, and the power of the Surface Pen, the app is now available on Android, leveraging the unique, two-screen form factor of the Surface Duo for on-the-go artists, architects, VR game designers–or anyone who wants to capture their imagination in 360 degrees.
“Throughout my career, my passion has been for building and using creative toolsso my imagination comes alive with a dual-screen, pen/touch capable device that folds out from my pocket to the size of my typical journal page.”
–Michael Scherotter, Principal Program Manager and Sketch 360 creator
Bringing Sketch 360 to the Surface Duo
Sketch 360 creator and Principal Program Manager Michael Scherotter outlines his experience re-imagining the UWP app for the Duo in full detail, featured on the Surface Duo Dev Blog. Michael and a team of volunteer hackers brought Sketch 360 from a hack project to a releasable experiment and are extending an invitation to external collaborators by open sourcing the Android application.
“I was up for the challenge of moving my native C# UWP app to a C# Xamarin Forms. When the Microsoft Garage sponsored an internal hackathon to encourage employees to build or adapt apps for the Surface Duo, I jumped at the chance,” shares Michael, who is a multi-year hacking veteran. The largest company hacking event takes place at the Microsoft Hackathon each July, drawing thousands of employees and hack projects, but hacking culture thrives all year round. When Michael entered his prototype into a dedicated Surface Duo hackathon, his project was selected among three winners that would go on to share their prototypes with experts and leaders of the Surface business.
In addition to demoing Sketch 360 adapted for Duo, Michael and the other teams were able to share their experience and feedback about adapting or creating experiences from scratch for Duo. “Xamarin forms made the process of creating a cross-platform mobile creative app straightforward, and with the additional tools in the XamarinEssentials, I was able to make it as functional and performant as a native app. For most of the development, using the Surface Duo Emulator enabled my volunteer team of hackers and me to build the app without having a physical device in-hand.”
A hacking culture enables ideas, diverse perspectives, and organic collaboration, to flow laterally and vertically through an organization to fuel innovation.
Developers can find a detailed outline of Michael’s experience, reimagining the app for Android, on the Surface Duo Dev Blog.
Mobile productivity, powered by two screens
The Microsoft Surface Duo offers a new way to get things done while on the go. Open two screens and discover a better way to get things done. View two apps at once or span one across both screens, drag and drop between screens, and say goodbye to constant app switching.
Room to focus. Open and view different apps on each screen to easily reference and compare content. Say goodbye to constant app switching on your mobile device.
Enhanced apps built for two screens. Dual-screen enhanced apps* respond to you and magically reorient to make best use of both screens.
Create your favorite combos with App Groups. Unique to Surface Duo, pair and launch any two apps at the same time. It’s completely custom to you.
Drag and drop to effortlessly move images, text, files, and more between screens so you can get things done quicker (only available on supported apps)
Learn more about the power of two screens on a Surface Duo.
Try it out or contribute to the open source project
Sketch 360 is now available to download for your Duo device on the Google Play Store. Share your feedback or contribute to the open source project on GitHub.
With the school year well underway, educators have settled into remote and hybrid learning routines. As focus turns to concluding the fall semester, we’re sharing a few Microsoft Teams resources that can help create a more inclusive learning environment.
Microsoft Teamsis where everything comes together for your classroom. With on-demand resources and trainings available, there are many ways to use this comprehensive learning hub to create an engaging learning environment from anywhere.
Here are seven ways Teams can help create a seamless distance learning experience—this semester and beyond.
1. Microsoft Lists: These virtual to-do lists make it easy for both teachers and students to stay organized, keep track of assignments and resources, assign responsibilities for group projects, manage their schedules, and more.
2. Cross-posting Messages: The cross-posting feature saves teachers time by letting them reach students through multiple Teams channels at once. The demo below shows how easy it is for educators to share information with multiple classes in just a few clicks.
3. Reflect: This application enables teachers to check in with their students to evaluate how they are feeling. The confidential survey can regularly check in on students’ social-emotional learning, helping teachers to use the feedback to adjust lesson plans, assignments, and projects accordingly.
4.Spotlight: This feature allows the meeting organizer or presenter to pin someone’s video—whether it’s themselves or a student—so the person presenting is the main video people see. This helps students focus on who is speaking and on the content being shared.
5. Assignment Notifications: These allow teachers to notify students in specific Teams channels about assignments. With this feature, teachers have more flexibility in how they choose to communicate with students and assign them projects.
6. Rubrics: Teachers can use the rubrics tool in Assignments to create customizable, reusable rubrics so students can understand the criteria they’ll be graded against, and teachers can better evaluate their students’ work.
7. Live Captions: This accessibility feature creates real-time captions that appear on the bottom of your Teams screen as participants talk in a meeting. The captions are only visible to those who turn on Live Captioning, allowing individual students to personalize a meeting experience by selecting the setting that best suits their needs.
One quiet chat in the middle of a war thrust Dr. Jennifer MacDonald’s career into motion.
It took place 10 years ago at a troop clinic on the U.S. military base in Basra, Iraq. That day, a soldier walked in, complaining of joint pain. MacDonald, then a third-year medical student stationed on the base, decided to dig deeper into the soldier’s story. The real problem soon surfaced.
Amid her fourth combat tour, the soldier was merging long duty shifts with grueling gym sessions – all to work through some conflicting emotions. She missed her family, she said, but worried going home might be even harder. That moment marked a mental breakthrough for the soldier and an epiphany for MacDonald.
“It shaped my concept of transition for veterans and my desire to serve,” says MacDonald, who deployed to Iraq as a member of the Minnesota Army National Guard. “From a medical perspective, it shaped my desire to offer physical healing – and healing from a holistic perspective.”
Dr. Jennifer MacDonald testifying before Congress on behalf of the VA. (Courtesy of Dr. Jennifer MacDonald)
Today, those same commitments still fuel MacDonald, a family medicine physician in Washington, D.C. and an executive at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), where she serves as chief consultant to the deputy under secretary for health.
At the VA, MacDonald spends “most of the day, every day,” she says, helping to monitor and manage the agency’s pandemic-era efforts to protect 9 million VA-enrolled veterans. (There are more than 18 million veterans in total in the U.S.) MacDonald also helps to maintain quality health care at 170 VA Medical Centers (VAMCs) and at more than 1,200 VA sites of care.
Early in the pandemic, at the height of uncertainty over COVID-19, MacDonald and other VA leaders, including senior executives at the VA Office of Information and Technology, began collaborating with industry partners to address new and existing challenges highlighted by the national emergency. One of those partners, Microsoft, was called upon to help transform key VA business processes and accelerate modernization efforts already underway across the agency.
Now, to track and react to active COVID-19 cases among veterans, as well as current bed space at VA hospitals, MacDonald and other VA leaders rely on a series of cloud-based dashboards, built with Microsoft’s Power BI, Bing Maps Platform and Azure App Service. The dashboards offer a first-hand view at near real-time data across the largest integrated health care system in America.
A VA health care employee at work during the pandemic. (Courtesy of the VA)
An executive-level dashboard provides VA leaders with situational awareness of COVID-19 cases and virus impacts in an aggregate view across the entire department. Another dashboard delivers mission-critical information to health care system leaders who manage the 170 local VAMCs. The final dashboard summarizes what is known about the status of COVID-19 patients who have been tested or treated at VA facilities.
These tools access a single, authoritative VA data source built on Microsoft’s SQL Server technology. The system harmonizes VA data on patient information, system capacity, staffing and inventory.
“It gives us a common operating picture and decisional information in near real time,” MacDonald says. “Our early planning and the early development of tools like these have enabled us to keep veterans safe. Veteran safety has been the true north of our response.”
The pandemic also prompted the department to activate its crucial but little-known “Fourth Mission.” During national emergencies, the VA can be activated to provide support to national, state and local efforts spanning emergency management, public health, safety and homeland security.
“VA is committed to helping the nation in this effort to combat COVID-19,” VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said earlier this year. “Helping veterans is our first mission, but in many locations across the country we’re helping states and local communities. VA is in this fight not only for the millions of veterans we serve each day; we’re in the fight for the people of the United States.”
MacDonald, center, sings with Iraqi people. During her tour of duty in Iraq, she performed music to help boost troop morale. (Courtesy of Dr. MacDonald)
The executive-level dashboard is a key tool in that fight, MacDonald says. In addition to offering an interactive map of current coronavirus cases at each VA Medical Center, the tool shows supply-chain and hospital-capacity metrics at every facility. Equipped with that data, the VA can shift resources as needed.
“That near-real-time information from the COVID-19 dashboard enables us to make decisions as we look cohesively at the COVID-positive patients we have hospitalized in a specific location, the number of beds there, our staffing and our inventory of ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE),” MacDonald says.
“As we see COVID-19 take root in more areas, we have requests from states to hold open beds for potential civilian cases,” she adds. “As community hospitals reach capacity and need to transition civilian patients to our system to free up more capacity, we have been able to meet those needs.”
In Florida, for example, the VA recently dispatched 15 clinical support teams to assist 82 long-term care facilities with an estimated 8,863 patients.
VA headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kiyoshi Tanno, iStock/Getty Images Plus)
As of Nov. 5, the VA had provided more than 870,000 pieces of PPE, including gowns, gloves, masks and face shields. It also has supplied respirators to civilian medical facilities. And VA Medical Centers have admitted 345 non-veteran civilians for care.
Meanwhile, the VA also is working to help individual veterans and their families remain healthy and to provide them timely information.
“At the end of the day, it’s about enabling processes and allowing VA to provide benefits to veterans,” James Gfrerer, the VA’s assistant secretary for information and technology, and chief information officer (CIO), recently told MeriTalk. “I have the benefit of being a veteran myself … and really know what the challenges are.”
As part of that effort, the agency launched a public-facing coronavirus chatbot that offers a symptom checker and gives around-the-clock responses to questions like, “If I need to leave my house, how do I stay safe?”
The chatbot was built in less than a month by leveraging the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service on Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing service. The chatbot also answers queries about COVID-19 testing, stimulus payments and how to get a prescription refill.
These tools serve as a first-line safety valve for patients, providing them with a sense of security – a critical value to health providers, says Dr. Michael Uohara, who advises Microsoft’s federal health care initiatives.
A veteran undergoes an eye exam at a VA medical facility. (Courtesy of the VA)
“Early in the pandemic response, the provider community was challenged to uncover approaches that provided support and care, while keeping patients socially distanced,” says Uohara, who previously worked in general surgery and clinical research.
“The adoption of the coronavirus chatbot by the VA was one of the techniques that served this purpose. To that effect, the VA, and a few early adopters like the CDC (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), foreshadowed the use of these technologies. The Microsoft Healthcare Bot has now been embraced by dozens of large provider organizations, and there are now over 2,000 healthcare bots with tens of millions of users,” Uohara adds.
From an employee perspective, the most pivotal piece of all social-distancing efforts involves the ability to work from home. To help enable that shift within the department, the VA deployed Microsoft Teams and Windows Virtual Desktop.
Before the pandemic, on any given workday, about 60,000 VA employees performed their jobs remotely, according to Gfrerer.
During one spring weekend, the VA launched “the largest single-day deployment of Microsoft Teams,” bringing about 400,000 users onto the platform, Gfrerer has said.
The number of Teams users within the VA now exceeds 500,000 users, who hold video conferences, share documents and collaborate from the safety of their homes.
“When it comes to telework and our business model,” Gfrerer told the Federal News Network in September, “the theme is very similar to what you hear across (the) commercial sector and certainly around the rest of the federal government … it’s a new day, we’re not going back.”
Top photo: A veteran speaks with his doctors from home via a telemedicine call. (Photo by adamkaz/Getty Images)
REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 11, 2020 — Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday named Christopher Young as executive vice president of business development. Young will report directly to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella.
A respected voice in technology and cybersecurity, Young most recently served as chief executive officer of McAfee, one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the world. In 2017, Young led the initiative to spin McAfee out of Intel as a standalone company and has since spearheaded McAfee’s mission to protect systems and data of customers around the globe. Previously, Young held senior leadership positions at Cisco, VMware, RSA and AOL.
“I’ve known Chris for many years and have admired his accomplishments as a leader. His experience and skills are an invaluable addition to our company and the senior leadership team,” Nadella said. “We know that for our customers and partners, the next decade of economic growth will be defined by the digital investments made today. With Chris’ leadership, the Business Development team will continue to be a key accelerant for our partnerships and new growth opportunities.”
Young will be responsible for developing Microsoft’s global business development strategies that drive growth across the company. This includes leading the evaluation and execution of strategic partnership opportunities, including alliances, venture investments and joint ventures that align with corporate strategy.
“The pace of change in our world is accelerating, and technology-driven experiences that are more connected, interactive and intelligent are the drivers,” Young said. “It is great to be joining Microsoft, to help lead this transformation in the way we work and live.”
Young holds an A.B. from Princeton University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He serves as a member of the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC) and sits on the boards of directors of American Express and Snap Inc.
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications, (425) 638-7777, [email protected]
Like many this year, our Microsoft workforce had to quickly transition to a work from the home model in response to COVID-19. While nobody could have predicted the world’s current state, it has provided a very real-world test of the investments we have made implementing a Zero Trust security model internally. We had about 97 percent of our workforce at the peak successfully working from home, either on a Microsoft issued or personal device.
Much of the credit for this success goes to the Zero Trust journey we started over three years ago. Zero Trust has been critical in making this transition to a work-from-home model relatively friction-free. One of the major components to our Zero Trust implementation is ensuring our employees have access to applications and resources regardless of their location. We enable employees to be productive from anywhere, whether they’re at home, a coffee shop, or at the office.
To make this happen, we needed to make sure most of our resources were accessible over any internet connection. The preferred method to achieve this is through modernizing applications and services using the cloud and modern authentication systems. For legacy applications or services unable to migrate to the cloud, we use an application proxy service which serves as a broker to connect to the on-premise environment while still enforcing strong authentication principles.
Strong authentication and adaptive access policies are critical components in the validation process. A big part of this validation process included enrolling devices in our device management system to ensure only known and healthy devices are directly accessing our resources. For users on devices that are not enrolled in our management system, we have developed virtualization options that allow them to access resources on an unmanaged device. One of the early impacts of COVID-19 was device shortages and the inability to procure new hardware. Our virtualization implementation also helped provide secure access for new employees while they waited for their device’s arrival.
The output of these efforts, combined with a VPN configuration that enables split tunneling for access to the few remaining on-premises applications, has made it possible for Microsoft employees to work anywhere in a time when it is most critical.
Implementing an internet-first model for your applications
In this blog, I will share some recommendations on implementing an internet-first approach plus a few of the things we learned in our efforts here at Microsoft.Because every company has its own unique culture, environments, infrastructure, and threshold for change, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Hopefully, you will find some of this information useful, even if only to validate you are already on the right path.
Before I jump in, I just want to mention that this blog will assume you’ve completed some of the foundational elements needed for a Zero Trust security model. These include modernizing your identity system, verifying sign-ins withmulti-factor authentication (MFA), registering devices, and ensuring compliance with IT security policies, etc. Without these protections in place, moving to an internet-first posture is not possible.
As previously mentioned, your apps will need to be modernized by migrating them to the cloud and implementing modern authentication services. This is the optimal path to internet accessibility.For apps that can’t be modernized or moved to the cloud (think legacy on-premises apps), you can leverage an app proxy to allow the connection over the internet and still maintain the strong authentication principles.
Secure access via adaptive access policies
Once your apps are accessible via the public internet, you will want to control access based on conditions you select to enforce. At Microsoft, we use Conditional Access policies to enforce granular access control, such as requiring multi-factor authentication, based upon user context, device, location, and session risk information. We also enforce device management and health policies to ensure the employee comes from a known and healthy device once they have successfully achieved strong authentication.
Depending on your organization’s size, you might want to start slow by implementing multi-factor authentication and device enrollment first, then ramping up to biometric authentication and full device health enforcement. Check out our Zero Trust guidance for identities and devices that we follow internally for some additional recommendations.
When we rolled out our device enrollment policy, we learned that using data to measure the policy’s impact allowed us to tailor our messaging and deployment schedule. We enabled “logging mode”, which let us enable the policies and collect data on who would be impacted when we moved to enforcement. Using this data, we first targeted users who were already using compliant devices. For users that we knew were going to be impacted, we crafted targeted messaging alerting them of the upcoming changes and how they would be impacted. This slower, more measured deployment approach allowed us to monitor and respond to issues more quickly. Using this data to shape our rollout helped us minimize the impact of significant policy implementation.
Start with a hero application
Picking your first application to move out to the public internet can be done in a few different ways. Do you want to start with something small and non-critical? Or perhaps you want to “flip the switch” to cover everything at once? We decided to start with a hero application that proved it works at scale. Office 365 was the obvious choice because it provided the broadest coverage since most employees use it daily, regardless of what role they are in. We were confident if we could implement Office 365 successfully, we could be successful with most of our portfolio.
Ultimately, it will boil down to your environment, threshold for support engagements, and company culture. Choose the path that works best for you and push forward. All paths will help provide valuable data and experience that will help later.
Prioritize your remaining apps and services
Prioritizing the apps and services you modernize next can be challenging, especially without granular visibility into what employees are accessing in your environment. When we began our journey, we had theories about what people were accessing but no data to back it up. We built a dashboard that reported actual traffic volumes to applications and services still routing to on-premises applications and services to provide the visibility we lacked. This gave us much-needed information to help prioritize apps and services based on impact, complexity, risk, and more.
We also used this dashboard to identify which application or service owners we needed to coordinate with to modernize their resources. To coordinate with these owners, we created work items in our task tracking system and assigned the owner a deadline to provide a plan to either modernize or implement a proxy front end solution. We also created a tracking dashboard for all these tasks and their status to make reporting easier.
We then worked closely with owners to provide guidance and best practices to drive their success. We conduct weekly office hours where application and service owners can ask questions. The partnership between these application and service owners and the teams working on Zero Trust helps us all drive towards the same common goals—frictionless access for our employees.
A quick note on what we learned through the dashboard—the on-premises applications and services people were still accessing were not what we were expecting. The dashboard surfaced several items we were unaware people were still using. Fortunately, the dashboard helped remove a layer of fog we were unaware even existed and has been invaluable in driving our prioritization efforts.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, every company is unique. As such, how you think about Zero Trust and your investments might be different than the company across the street. I hope some of the insight provided above was helpful, even if it is just to get you thinking about how you would approach solving some of these challenges inside your own organization.
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For millions of students around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought about a seismic shift in the way they study, socialize and receive a formal education. In fact, we know that more than 1.6 billion students globally have experienced a disruption to the traditional learning experience. Unfortunately, we also know that the impact of this disruption will be borne disproportionately by the world’s most vulnerable learners.
During this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference, I mentioned that we would be looking at open data to solve challenges related to broadband access and education. Today, I’m happy to announce the launch of our Education Open Data Challenge, in partnership with the Open Data Institute and with support from BroadbandNow, to help generate solutions to close the digital divide in K-12 education (ages 5-18).
To help explain how the Education Open Data Challenge will work and who is eligible to participate, I’d like to answer a few key questions:
What is the Education Open Data Challenge?
The Education Open Data Challenge is an opportunity for teams to evaluate the current state of the global digital divide in K-12 education and suggest innovative solutions to close that divide. Participating teams will be asked to identify gaps in digital infrastructure that affect the delivery of education services online, pinpoint potential impacts on learning outcomes, and suggest innovative and realistic solutions to address these gaps in a cost-efficient way.
Who can participate?
The challenge is open to teams and individuals based anywhere in the world, and we encourage those interested in data analysis, education and closing the digital divide to learn more here.
Are there parameters around the solutions that teams will work on?
The solutions that each team comes up with should focus on:
The steps governments, education providers, businesses or society can take to help students gain equal access to education in areas affected by a lack of digital infrastructure
How education system leaders can most effectively improve digital access to enable equal learning for all students
How to develop the skills needed to make online learning tools and platforms inclusive and effective to students from disadvantaged communities
Are there prizes?
Yes! The winning team will be invited to elect a nonprofit organization of their choice to receive a £50,000 ($66,000) award, with the runners-up electing nonprofit organizations of their choice to receive £30,000 and £20,000 awards.
What is the deadline for registration, and when will we know who the winners are?
Individuals can pre-register starting today and the challenge will open on December 10, 2020. Proposals are due by January 31, 2021. Winning teams will be announced on May 1, 2021. More information about the timeline and upcoming activities can be found here.
More than ever, reliance on access to broadband has the potential to determine whether students thrive or struggle in their educational journeys. If we want to level the playing field so all students have access to the technology and connectivity they need to be successful, we need to work together and collaborate around data that has the potential to unlock truly promising solutions. I look forward to sharing updates on the challenge and its participants in the weeks and months ahead.
