The second and final closed beta for Bleeding Edge is available starting at 11 a.m. PT today
The Bleeding Edge closed beta will also be available through the Project xCloud preview on Android phones and tablets
Join the Xbox On team today from 12:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. PT (7:00 p.m.-10 p.m. GMT) as they host the Bleeding Edge Rumble on Mixer!
The final Bleeding Edge closed beta is upon us and kicks off later today and runs through March 16! If you’d like to get involved, you can pre-order on BleedingEdge.com or play with Xbox Game Pass.
The Bleeding Edge closed beta will also be available through the Project xCloud preview on Android phones and tablets! If you’re interested in signing up to participate in the Project xCloud preview, please visit xbox.com/projectxcloud.
Can I pre-install?
Yes! The beta app is now ready for pre-install for Xbox One,
Windows 10, and Xbox Game Pass. All players will need to pre-install or update
their beta app, even if you were playing in our February beta.
When can I play?
The beta starts on Friday March 13 and will run until Monday, March 16. For your local start and end times, check the map below or use your preferred conversion tool.
What’s new in the second beta?
We’ve made some changes and added new features to the second beta based on your feedback from the first beta. Your feedback goes a long way to helping us make Bleeding Edge awesome, so please continue to share your thoughts with us via the Discord or the forums!
In-game music (experimental)
Improved pacing of Power Collection game mode
Variety of performance optimisations: lag,
stability, frame rate
If you pre-order Bleeding Edge, you’ll be granted access to this upcoming closed beta, and you’ll also get the bonus Punk Pack of in-game cosmetic items! The Punk Pack contains the following:
Punk Rock Niđhöggr Skin
Butterpunk Buttercup Skin
Outrider ZeroCool Skin
Rioter’s Hoverboard
Make Your Mark in-game Sticker Pack
Three bonus emotes
If you play Xbox Game Pass in the launch week (between March
24-31) you’ll also be entitled to the Punk Pack!
Join us live with Xbox On!
We’re joining forces with the Xbox On team on Friday, March 13 at 12:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. PT (7:00 p.m.-10 p.m. GMT) to host the Bleeding Edge Rumble! The Rumble will pit four special guests against the community in the Bleeding Edge battle arenas. There will be goodies to give away, quizzes, 4v4 combat carnage, and guaranteed shenanigans. Watch live at mixer.com/xboxon.
We hope you’ll join us in the closed beta this weekend, and we’ll see you later this month for the launch of Bleeding Edge on March 24!
On Tuesday, March 17 at 11:35 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. PT, Xbox will host and stream a special panel focused on the importance of inclusivity in game design. Titled “Intentionally Inclusive Design: Building a Welcoming Future in Games,” the panel will feature relevant takeaways and tips for anyone who makes games, and will be streamed live via Mixer (includes closed captioning), GameStack.com, YouTube and Twitter.
Why is inclusive game design important? With more than 2
billion gamers worldwide, a “typical gamer” simply doesn’t exist; gamers come
from a variety of backgrounds and have differing interests and abilities. As an
industry, it’s important that gaming is welcoming to all who want to play.
Because at Xbox, we believe that when everyone can play, we all win.
Hosted by Katy Jo Wright, Director of Gaming for Everyone at
Xbox, the panel will discuss how technology and community can come together to
make gaming better for everybody. Panelists represent AAA to independent game development
studios and will share their unique experiences implementing inclusive design
into the creation of titles including Forza Horizon 4 and Tell Me Why:
Dan Greenawalt, Creative Director, Forza Racing Franchise
Elise Baldwin, Audio Director, Tell Me Why
Dave Evans, Studio Director, Falling Squirrel
Key topics the panel will cover is the myth that inclusive
features cause a game to “lose its edge,” and how to tell different stories in
a true-to-life and authentic way. Additionally, the panel will explore how a
“Gaming for Everyone” philosophy and inclusive design can help make gaming
better in subtle but important ways to ensure that everyone feels welcome to
play.
As Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has said previously
said, “whether you’re new to gaming or are a diehard esports fan, you are
welcome to play and welcome to all the fun and skill-building that comes with
gaming,” and we invite others to join us in this mission.
You do not want to miss the “Intentionally Inclusive Design: Building a Welcoming Future in Games” on Tuesday, March 17 from 11:35 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. PT live via Mixer, GameStack.com, YouTube and Twitter. Tune in and learn more about how you can implement inclusivity into your own upcoming titles.
Technology can play a vital role in reducing the impact of COVID-19 on people and organizations, including helping people stay productive at work when they’re not able to be there physically. Across the global economy, we’re making sure employees can work remotely without sacrificing collaboration, productivity or security.
As countries around the world take steps to contain COVID-19, many schools and universities are moving classes online. Educators are working hard to ensure their students continue learning even when they’re not able to sit side-by-side in a classroom. Learn about innovations and strategies that can help keep everyone connected and engaged.
As public officials take necessary and unprecedented steps to protect public health, we recognize the broad economic and societal price being paid by members of our community. We’re working to do our part to address the impact of COVID-19 on the communities we live in and that we depend on for our success.
With many people, from office workers to students, now working remotely — in some cases for the first time — there will be increased usage of new technologies. We’re supporting our customers by reducing the friction of adopting new tools and helping them get the most out of them.
Last week, as COVID-19 cases continued to spread around the world, millions of people moved to remote work. We were right there with them. From Milan to Puget Sound, tens of thousands of Microsoft employees in impacted areas have begun working from home. Many of our customers have asked us to share the details of how we enable remote work for such a large workforce. My colleague Nathalie D’Hers is the exact-right person to do just that.
Nathalie and her team are part of Microsoft’s Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO), our internal IT team that builds and operates the systems that run Microsoft. They have spent the past few years transforming end-user productivity across the company and learning so much along the way. Here, she walks us through the top ways CSEO is enabling remote work. Over to you, Nathalie.
When people ask me about my job, I tell them my team and I make sure every Microsoft employee has the tools, resources, and solutions to be as productive, creative, and secure as possible—working from any location and on any device. For the last few years, that’s meant overseeing Microsoft’s journey to the cloud. Getting there has required that we manage identity and network access for all users; help ensure devices used to access the network are secure and healthy; and provide users access to the productivity-enabling apps they need.
Below, I’ve identified some of the top ways we are enabling remote work at Microsoft. I hope you find them useful, but I also understand that Microsoft has IT resources that many IT leaders may not. What is more, every company is at a different stage of their journey to the cloud. Maybe identity and device management are your top priorities, or you are digging into long-term projects like multi-factor authentication (MFA) or desktop virtualization. Maybe you are working to empower access to resources via a browser. Every IT leader needs to define the priorities to enable productivity from anywhere across their organization’s workforce. We get that, and we want to help. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find a link to our new Enabling Remote Work Tech Community. I hope you’ll join and share your own journey there. With that, let’s get into the top 9 ways our team is enabling remote work.
User identity and access It all starts with managing identities. We have a hybrid environment that helps us both retain and expand existing systems while using a cloud-based control plane to enable people to work productively and securely. Whether they are an employee, partner, or supplier, every user who needs to access the corporate network receives a primary account synced to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). To learn more about our identity and access management practices, check out our IT Showcase covering user identities and secure access.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) MFA is required to access any corporate resource at Microsoft. When a user connects remotely to our domain using their Microsoft work credentials on a device that we manage, MFA is almost transparent. We offer three authentication methods: certificate-backed virtual and physical smart cards, Windows Hello for Business (with PIN or biometric sign-in), and Azure Multi-factor Authentication. To learn more about enabling Azure MFA to support remote work scenario, check out this tutorial.
Managing devices At Microsoft, we manage a wide range of devices, including Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. Like many of you, we are making the transition to a fully cloud-based management environment. As we make that shift, we are using a co-management approach with Microsoft Endpoint Manager (MEM). MEM integrates Microsoft Intune and Configuration Manager into a single console where you can manage all your endpoints and apps and take action to ensure they are secure and reliable.
With more employees working remotely and across devices, it’s important to support bring-your-own-device (BYOD) scenarios. We offer self-service enrollment so users can quickly and easily join Azure AD and enroll in MEM to access company resources. Once enrolled, MEM then applies appropriate policies, for example, to ensure that a device is encrypted with a strong password and has certificates for access to things like Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and WiFi. MEM can also ensure that devices are adhering to policy by checking-in the device’s health compliance status to Azure AD as it processes the user’s authentication. For guidance on deploying and using MEM, your teams can check out our MEM documentation and tutorials.
Productivity applications With this foundation in place, we are driving our employees to work in the cloud. This is particularly important for our large population of information workers working remotely. Microsoft 365 enables users to access resources and share files with Office apps across the web, mobile, and desktop, storing their content in the cloud by default. Outlook mobile, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive are deployed on all of our corporate devices, so people can access their emails, calendars, and files within File Explorer on Windows, Finder on Mac, and Office Apps on mobile devices. We’ve made it easy for users to save their files to OneDrive the same way they traditionally saved files to their C: drive; this has been key to getting files to the cloud. Our users are also now able to do real-time coauthoring and commenting in documents in the cloud, which has proved extremely useful for a distributed workforce.
Meetings and collaboration All of us at Microsoft use Teams daily for chat, meetings, calls, and collaboration. Now that we find ourselves working remotely, we’ve been able to stay productive because we are accustomed to a digital workspace. Every meeting is now a Teams meeting, often with video. We‘re using features like background blur to block out our naughty kids, our barking dogs, and our mismatched furniture. As we rally to help our customers prepare for remote work, we’ve found that the ability to record meetings has become essential. All attendees can access recordings of meetings they’ve missed and then listen in to the most relevant parts. We also rely on the Microsoft 365 environment to empower employees to collaborate through self-service creation of Office 365 Groups or teams within Teams while ensuring appropriate security, compliance, and manageability are in place. To learn more about our experience enabling remote work with Teams, check out our IT Showcase post.
Access to line of business (LOB) applications Microsoft has migrated most of our legacy applications to the cloud. But even with most applications accessible in the cloud, some still require VPN. Additionally, we are in the process of rolling out Windows Virtual Desktop and are scaling up this offering to support the devices that our developers want to use (more on this later in the post). To get stated with Windows Virtual Desktop, you can point your teams to this tutorial.
Service monitoring With the increased load and usage from so many people working remotely, service monitoring has proven crucial to making sure everything is operating as it should. We carefully monitor application and network performance and we’ve built product telemetry monitoring into every solution so that we can check reporting for user satisfaction metrics and changes to service behavior.
Culture and change management Remote work can create challenges to maintaining a healthy work culture and managing change. Modern social and engagement platforms can help make sure messages are heard, leadership is visible, and best practices are shared. In our company, Satya Nadella and other executives connect with the organization using live events and Yammer. Our team recently held an 18-hour global live event to drive employee connections, engagement, and learning. And we educate employees to use Yammer to build communities that connect people across teams. For example, we recently set up a work-from-home (WFH) Yammer group with tips and tricks for making the switch to remote work.
Here are some of the main points we emphasize in our end-user education:
Save files to the cloud so you can coauthor within the Office 365 suite of products. Users should save individual documents and drafts in OneDrive, where files are private by default but can be shared. They should save shared documents to the Teams or SharePoint sites where your group works.
Share links rather than attachments in email to make sure everyone’s using the latest version of a document.
Use Teams to the fullest. We tell users to think of Teams as a virtual office. Hold every call and meeting on Teams. Use channels, rather than email or group chats, for team-level conversations. Turn on your camera to connect during meetings. Use Live Events for larger gatherings. If your organization allows, record meetings to access the transcript later. We also remind the Teams meetings aren’t just for 1:1s or small standups. They can range from informal “coffee breaks” in channels, to highly collaborative quarterly planning offsites with a hundred employees or more.
Designing for specific roles A lot of the resources we’ve discussed benefit information workers most. It makes sense, we have a lot of those at Microsoft. But it’s important to enable other types of workers to work remotely as well.
Developers: Engineers need to be able to collaborate on code and build their workflows into Teams for remote collaboration. We have a number of developers who typically work exclusively on desktops. We are providing them with laptops with a WVD solution so they can remote into their dev environment.
Call center and help desk: At Microsoft, we have walk-up help desks as well as online technicians. They all have Microsoft-managed PCs, which enables those who typically work onsite to switch instantly over to a remote work model and remain productive.
Firstline Workers: It’s key to connect all workers so that they are equipped with the knowledge to take appropriate steps for themselves, customers, and the community. Teams serves as the single productivity hub for retail employees and managers across Microsoft Stores, connecting remote sites, digitizing workflows, and ensuring workers have real-time access to the right information at the right time. During the COVID-19 outbreak, they’ve used the Store Portal application in Teams to communicate latest policies and procedures including sanitation updates, staffing changes, and event status. Additionally, the Stores team uses Teams to run daily standup meetings and for Q&As with associates and team members that drive dialogue and collaboration on key topics.
Enabling a team to work remotely is an ongoing challenge, and we get that this challenge is different for every organization. I hope that reading about our approach has been useful to you, and as I wrote earlier in this post, I’d love to learn more about yours. To share your experiences, ask other IT professionals and partners for advice or information, and find additional resources, join the new Enabling Remote Work Tech Community. Let’s keep the conversation going there!
It’s an unusually frigid December morning in Gurugram and I’m sitting with Ranveer Chandra, chief scientist, Microsoft Azure Global, at Microsoft India’s tenth floor office. Down below, a monorail train cuts through the haze, which is now almost permanently suspended over the city. Later in the week, the region will witness the coldest day in more than a century.
“Climate change will affect small-holder farmers the most. Even a few degrees of change in temperature or untimely rainfall will create havoc in their lives,” he says.
Chandra is the founder of FarmBeats, which started as a Microsoft Research project in 2014 to enable data-driven farming and is now available as a platform for digital agriculture in the form of Azure FarmBeats.
According to the United Nations, the world population is projected to reach 9.8 billion by the year 2050, which means there will be more mouths to feed with same or lower arable land and unpredictable weather patterns due to climate change.
“We need to grow more food. But not just food, we need to grow more nutritious food without harming the planet. We need to do all this with an amount of land that isn’t increasing and water levels that are receding,” Chandra explains.
Taking the guesswork out of farming
Be it a farmer from the Great Plains region in the United States or Punjab in India, many of the farming decisions are taken by guesswork. From the amount of fertilizer to be used to when one should sow, water, and harvest the crops, some of the most critical decisions in agriculture are based on experience and instinct.
With Azure FarmBeats, Chandra has two goals. First is to remove the guesswork in agriculture and provide farmers with data-driven insights. The second phase is to make data-driven agriculture more affordable.
“Last year’s yield is not going to tell you how much nitrogen is needed in different parts of the field. Even though farmers know the benefits of data-driven agriculture, the technology didn’t exist,” Chandra tells me.
The team has already delivered on its first goal with Azure FarmBeats which is now out in preview. The system creates a digital map of a farm with drone or satellite imagery as well as a grid of sensors spread across the farm that monitor multiple parameters in the soil ranging from temperature and moisture to carbon and nitrogen levels.
Armed with all the data, farmers can get actionable insights with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based models, which are built by partners on Azure FarmBeats. The solution is already live in some farms in the United States, where farmers are starting to see the benefits.
Building non-existent tech
Chandra’s interest in agriculture wasn’t a coincidence. While growing up in Jamshedpur in eastern India, he’d spend his summer and winter vacations at his grandparents’ village in Bihar, one of India’s most impoverished states.
“Back then, I hated agriculture like anything. The farms in the village would have no electricity, not even toilets. You had to go out in the fields even in cold weather like this,” he recalls. “But as it happens, I spent a lot of time in the village in the first 18 years of my life. I have seen extreme poverty and those images have stuck to my mind.”
“What can we, as technologists, do to improve the lives of these farmers?” he asks.
In its current avatar, Azure FarmBeats works for large farms that are spread over tens or hundreds of acres. The AI models are built to ingest satellite and drone imagery and churn out insights about the farm’s health. These are combined with data from a network of sensors buried in the soil that provide real-time information from ground zero.
Unfortunately, current technologies for getting data from the farm are too expensive for small-holder farmers like those in India to be able to afford.
“One of the things we’ve noticed is these farmers grow multiple crops in the same acre or two of land that they have. Satellite images cover thousands of acres planted with the same crop, where every acre corresponds to just tens of pixels, which are not enough to see the leaves or pests or weeds to get meaningful insights,” Chandra explains.
To solve this challenge, the FarmBeats team came up with a solution called “Tethered Eye”, which replaces drones with helium filled balloons and a smartphone with its camera facing down, flying at a height of 200 feet. The assembly is tethered on to a stick and one can have a person walk the length and breadth of the field to create an aerial map of the field using computer vision algorithms.
These Denisovan discoveries were based on statistical models created by Cox and his colleagues and run on Microsoft Azure, which proved a key factor in their project’s success. Massey, unlike many other universities, does not have its own on-premises computer facility to carry out big data-based research.
“These are big, costly computers, but their capacity is limited. Lots of people want to use them, and that means that it is very hard to get the compute time you need when you need it. You have to wait in line,” Cox explains.
In this case, the team went with a Microsoft cloud option. “Azure works well for us. It has scalability and flexibility. It gives us the freedom to work at the pace that we need to get answers.”
Science moves fast
Cox estimates that if the team had instead used an in-house IT facility, their work might have taken an extra six months, year, or more to complete.
“It’s hard to say. But actually, it might have been never. That’s because the amount of computing time we needed would have meant that someone else probably would have got to the answers before we did, and they would have published before us. Science moves fast, and the questions would have been addressed by others if we hadn’t got there at the speed we needed.”
Businesses and bureaucracies routinely use the power of the cloud to sift through, analyze, and harness mountains of big data in fast, secure, and flexible ways. Cox says cloud computing brings the same benefits to the laboratory. “Processing so much data can be boring and laborious,” he says. “Azure frees us to do other things to develop our research.”
New technologies and solutions that operate in the cloud and leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning promise to accelerate the pace of research. And the ability to process lots of data quickly can also open up new directions for scientific inquiry as it did for Cox and his colleagues.
Over the past two weeks, we’ve published a series of blog posts aimed at helping our customers during the COVID-19 outbreak. In one of them, I shared a letter from Lily Zheng, our friend and coworker in Shanghai. Lily’s letter included lessonsshe’d gathered from China-based Education customers who moved to 100 percent remote learning back in February.Faced with delaying the term, these schools sprung into action, quickly migrating their entire curriculum online. And as countries around the world are impacted by the outbreak, many more educational organizations will need to do the same.
We want to help.My colleague Barbara Holzapfel and her team focus on creating technology for schools and universities, and they count a number of remote-learning educators among their customers. She has asked some of theseexperts to share the remote-learning tips that they’ve gathered over the years. From preserving student-teacher 1:1s to bringing lessons to life in the virtual classroom, it’s rich with useful advice for any educational organization that may soon be moving online. Take it away, Barbara.
Making remote learning effective and engaging with Microsoft for Education
In the weeks since the COVID-19 outbreak first hit China, our Education customers in the region have done amazing things to keep students learning while they transition to learning remotely. From e-learning innovations to keeping students’ spirits high with photo and cooking challenges, teachers and students have shown extraordinary resilience during this difficult time.
Now, as countries around the world take steps to contain the virus, many schools and universities globally are moving classes online. Teaching and learning from home is a big change for most students and educators. Without a physical classroom, how can you check that students are engaged and progressing? How do educators and faculty stay connected?
We want to help ease the transition, so we have asked experienced online educators—including Catholic Education Western Australia (CEWA) and O’Dea High School here in Seattle—to share the tips they’ve gathered over years in remote education.
But we also want to do more. Microsoft Teams is available for free to educational institutions through the Office 365 A1 offer. In addition, as schools in the U.S., Italy, Japan, and South Korea transition to remote learning, we’re providing faculty and staff a six-month subscription of Office 365 A5. This gives them free access to live events and audio conferencing and helps them expand their reach by hosting meetings for up to 10,000 attendees and help ensure access for students in low bandwidth areas by including public telephone network dial-in information for their online classes.
Moving to a virtual classroom
As schools move to a remote learning environment, Teams can provide an online classroom that brings together virtual face-to-face connections, assignments, files, and conversations into a single platform accessible on a mobile device, tablet, PC, or browser.
To help make this process as simple as possible, we have created a best practices guide for school leaders and IT to get up and running quickly, so their students and staff to begin communicating remotely.
Once Teams is set up, educators and staff have the ability to create their own class in Teams, add selected students, share lessons, create assignments, collaborate virtually in real-time, and do grading and provide personalized feedback all in one hub.
A few quick tips from expert educators to help you get started:
Have interactive discussions with your class by sharing your screen to present your lesson and encourage students to ask questions using the chat feature.
During a lesson, you can moderate the class discussion by muting students, making them presenters, or if needed, removing them from the meeting. Finally, record the lesson so students can review it on their own time.
Record a class session in case some students can’t join during the live session.
For assessments, you can easily create and grade quizzes in Teams using Microsoft Forms.
Let your students know your office hours and when they can reach you for questions.
Encourage students to use Immersive Reader in Teams to help them read messages and understand assignment prompts, enabling them to follow along and contribute.
Create a Fun Channel. Have a virtual science fair or poetry reading group. This will go a long way with students of all ages.
Getting support and training for educators and staff
We want to help support educators with practical guides, professional development, and how-to information that will help empower them and their students to stay motivated and engaged with learning. We have created a series of webinars that can be accessed on-demand for educators to get started on Teams, and resources in our Microsoft Educator Center to help new and existing users get up and running. We also invite you to join our newly launched Remote Learning Community where educators launching distance learning programs from around the globe are sharing best practices, and our Microsoft Education team is answering questions in real-time.
Continuing to drive student engagement and focused learning while outside of the classroom can be a challenge, especially for those moving to remote learning for the first time. Both educators and parents need support from their schools to help make this work. To help parents and guardians support their children, we have created a Remote Learning Guide for students and parents. For educators, tools like Flipgrid, Skype in the Classroom, and Minecraft: Education Edition can also help mix up the day and give students ways to communicate and demonstrate learning in new ways.
In addition, here are some tips we have heard from educators who have helped create healthy and effective learning environments that allow students to thrive in this new virtual setting.
Stay healthy and charged: Learning from home can be a new experience for students. Encourage them to take breaks between lessons to stretch, hydrate, or just unplug.
Stay focused: Find a quiet place where they can focus on the lesson with minimal distractions.
Stay connected: School is important from a social perspective. Not seeing their friends face-to-face every day can be hard for students. Help them adjust to this new reality by encouraging them to schedule a lunch session for classmates to stay connected. If they are out sick or can’t join class because of an appointment, remind them to change their status or set a status message so their classmates are also aware.
Motivate your class: Use Teams to encourage joyful challenges throughout the week by creating a Fun Activities channel. For example, hold a cooking contest and have students share their creations in the channel. Recognize your students by sending them Praise in the channel, inspiring more students to participate.
Bring lessons to life: Make a lesson interactive by enabling Whiteboard in Teams during a live lesson. Have students come up to the whiteboard and solve a math problem or demonstrate their art skills, just like they would in a physical classroom.
Connect with students individually: It can be difficult to gauge how students are faring without seeing them in person, so connecting individually is very important. You can support students 1:1 in a chat, creating a safe space for students to ask their questions and get the extra help they need.
I hope these tips from our educator community help you create an engaging remote learning environment in which both students and educators can stay connected.
We recognize navigating this new way of learning presents a set of challenges that are new to everyone impacted. Our team is available to answer questions you have around remote learning in our new Remote Learning Community. We hope to help make this transition as easy on you as possible.
How do you move tens of thousands of employees to remote work overnight? With the COVID-19 outbreak spreading around the world, that was the big question on our minds at Microsoft last week. Then, last Wednesday, we just did it—sending out an email that asked approximately 50,000 Microsoft employees in the Seattle area to work from home if they could. We were already heavy Teams users, but in our first fully remote days usage among Microsoft employees in the U.S. went up significantly. By the end of the day Thursday, chat was up 50 percent week over week and meetings were up 37 percent. And we’re seeing usage upticks among customers, too, as workers everywhere adjust to meeting, chatting, and collaborating exclusively online. We want to help everyone meet this challenge. As the team behind Teams, we have spent a lot of time learning about the best ways to make working from home productive and healthy. So I thought I’d share our top tips below.
A quick note before you read on: These tips are part of our ongoing effort to help everyone stay connected and productive during this challenging time. Last week, I shared how individuals and organizations can get Teams for free, along with our comprehensive plan for keeping services running smoothly through this crisis. We’ve also shared incredible stories from customers and employees around the world, including teachers and students in Hong Kong using technology for amazing e-learning innovations and customers in and around China who’ve found smart ways to keep work moving as well. But our customers are also asking for guidance on switching to remote work. We’ll continue to provide tips, information, and inspiring customer stories throughout the outbreak, so check back here for those in the days to come.
Getting started
As you move to remote work, a few key habits will set you up for success.
Set up your workspace
If you don’t have a home office, don’t worry. You can still work from home productively. In fact, we designed Teams as a virtual office you can take anywhere you go. While you may not have a printer, physical files, or a desk phone at home, you can pull up documents directly in Teams, securely store files where the right people can access them, and quickly jump into calls and meetings. That said, it’s important to have a dedicated home workspace where you can be productive and signal that you’re in do-not-disturb mode. A breakfast nook, a quiet corner of the bedroom, an underused game table in the rec room—any focus-friendly area can double as a workspace. And don’t worry if it gets a little messy throughout the day, you can always use background blur during video meetings so your teammates focus only on you.
Communicate, communicate, communicate
While many of us work from home at least part of the time, we still rely on rhythms and core hours that are built around our physical presence at the office. When working from home, your daily rhythm may change. This is especially true for those of us balancing work and childcare. Clearly communicate your working hours with your teammates and collaborators so that they know when to reach you. You can also set a status message in Teams to share this information proactively.
Also, make it a habit to offer frequent progress reports to your teammates. Fully remote companies tend to emphasize documentation, since it’s a key way to stay connected when you work apart. We recommend posting updates, insights, and helpful resources you’ve discovered in Teams channels, so your teammates can stay connected with what you’re up to even without the benefit of a chance hallway conversation. Later, they can search within the channel for ideas or content when they need them.
Maintain healthy boundaries
Without the usual workday signals—a walk to grab lunch, for instance, or a commute—unplugging can be a challenge. Remote workers sometimes find themselves working for long stretches without breaks for exercise, socializing, or a proper meal. This will quickly lead to stress and burnout. Remember: your health comes first. Make time for meals, drink plenty of water, and remind yourself to mentally “clock out” from remote work at the end of the day. These behaviors won’t just keep you healthy, they will also help you be more productive in the long run.
Running effective meetings
Embrace online meetings
In the absence of a physical conference room, bringing everyone together can feel like the biggest remote-work challenge of all. As you move meetings to Teams, make sure all meetings have a virtual “join” option to create an online conference room. Also, we suggest that all participants turn on video if they are comfortable doing so. The face-to-face interaction goes a long way to help everyone feel connected. Teams has a wide selection of certified cameras to choose from, as well as devices like headsets and speakerphones to make sure you and your coworkers can always communicate clearly.
Be mindful and inclusive
Moving to online meetings may remove some of the visual cues we rely on to see if a colleague has something to say in a meeting. And overcrowded conference calls can make it difficult for people to share their opinions. Meeting organizer should pause frequently to invite questions and remind attendees that they can also use the meeting chat window to share their thoughts.
Record your meetings
To compensate for lack of face time, some remote workers schedule extra meetings in order to stay connected with customers, partners, and coworkers. Double-bookings can be hard to avoid. If your organization allows it, record meetings in Teams so coworkers can catch up later. If you can’t attend yourself, remind the organizer to record in your absence. The automatically generated transcript is also super-useful when you’re trying to remember information covered in a meeting you attended. Want to learn more about Teams Meetings? Learn more tips here.
Staying connected
Make up for missing hallway talk
A lot of remote workers find the thing they miss the most about the office is casual conversations. Chats at the watercooler or snack shelf not only keep us connected, they often surface important information or insights we wouldn’t have guessed. Be deliberate about reaching out and connecting with your co-workers. Think of chat messages as your virtual watercooler and set yourself a reminder to check in with people regularly. Emojis, GIFs, and stickers are a fun way to keep the chatter fun and light.
Bring the team together
Working remotely can feel isolating. As a leader, it’s important to create opportunities for the whole team to get together virtually. Maintain your regular team meeting cadence or team lunches, just make them online. Use the “General” channel in Teams for discussions that might be of interest to everyone. For large brainstorms you can use the Microsoft Whiteboard app, which provides an infinite digital canvas for meeting participants to ideate and collaborate directly in Teams. We also suggest team leaders download the Crisis Communication Power App. You can use this customizable app to inform yourself and your team on everything they need to know throughout this outbreak.
Have fun!
With all the changes that come with moving to remote work, it’s important to foster and maintain team morale. There are many things you can do within Teams to keep people feeling positive and engaged. Share news and stories in your team chat, or hold a photo contest. One of our education customers in China hosted a cooking challenge for students that proved particularly popular.
I understand that every individual and team works differently. But I hope the tips from our team helps you stay productive and connected as you adjust to a new way of working. And remember, you can start using Teams today by signing in or signing up for free.
Be remote-work ready! Download our remote work checklist and share with your teammates.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps is available now with Xbox Game Pass and on Xbox One, Windows 10 PC and Steam.
Offering a new combat system and Easy, Normal and Hard modes alongside the beautiful visuals and music the series is known for, Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a one-of-a-kind adventure everyone can enjoy.
In celebration of Ori and the Will of the Wisps, players can pick up a new Xbox One X for $399, its best value price ever.
Today, we welcome Ori fans on a brand new adventure through the Forest of Niwen as Ori and the Will of the Wispscelebrates its worldwide release with Xbox Game Pass and for Xbox One, Windows 10 PC and Steam! We’re incredibly proud of the game we’ve created and couldn’t be more excited to deliver a spectacular new adventure to fans both old and new on the journey to unravel Ori’s true destiny.
“Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a game that everyone at Moon Studios has poured their hearts and souls into developing over the last five years so that our community can play the best version of the game possible,” said Thomas Mahler, Co-Founder of Moon Studios. “We believe we’ve delivered on that promise to players and are looking forward to the response from the community.”
Players embarking on Ori’s new adventure will become immersed in the beautiful visuals that the Ori series is known for, all with musical scoring composed by award-winning composer Gareth Coker. Along Ori’s journey, an improved combat system with new spirit weapons, skills, and a new shard system allows players to customize Ori’s powers in a unique way, making each playthrough unique. Meanwhile, players will be faced with larger-than-life enemies that deliver a brand-new sense of intense battles to look forward to that truly test Ori’s combat mettle. To top it off, players can customize the challenge they face, choosing from Easy, Normal and Hard modes and swapping their Spirit Shard loadout to complement their playstyle. Ori and the Will of the Wisps is truly a one-of-a-kind adventure that everyone can enjoy.
Yesterday, we teamed up with the San Diego Zoo Safari Park to celebrate the game and its characters with a special livestream event and reveal of the name you helped choose for the Park’s soon-to-hatch burrowing owl: Kuro! Keep an eye on the Mixer Burrowing Owl pop-up channel as hatching day for Kuro approaches! Yesterday’s Ori and Will of the Wisps livestream from the San Diego Safari Park supported the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research and their amazing Burrowing Owls Program. You can show your support for the zoo’s burrowing owls by donating to the Institute on Tiltify.
What’s more, today, iam8bit, in partnership with Microsoft and Moon Studios, announced that Ori and the Blind Forest and sequel Ori and the Will of the Wisps game soundtracks are coming to vinyl! In celebration of the launch of Moon Studios’ Ori and the Will of the Wisps today on Xbox One and Windows PC, each soundtrack will be released as a two-disc vinyl set and are now available for pre-order on iam8bit.com for $39.99 each.
Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is the perfect way to experience Ori’s next adventure on Xbox One and PC starting on day one, and you can get your first month for just $1. In addition to Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members have all the benefits of Xbox Live Gold and access to a library of over 100 high-quality console and PC games, including Ori’s first adventure Ori and the Blind Forest. For more information on which Xbox Game Pass membership is right for you check out XboxGamePass.com.
In addition to Xbox Game Pass, Ori and the Will of the Wisps is available both digitally and at retail for $29.99. In addition, players interested in showing off their love of Ori can purchase the Limited Collector’s Edition for $49.99. Alongside a copy of the game, Collector’s Edition purchasers will receive a golden feather SteelBook® case, a Piano Collections Ori and the Will of the Wisps soundtrack CD, a download code for the game’s soundtrack and “The Art of Ori and the Will of the Wisps” book.
Games play best on Xbox One X and Ori and the Will of the Wisps is no exception. Starting today, players can lose themselves in the immersive and beautiful world of Ori and the Will of the Wisps with HDR and in true 4K running at 60 fps on Xbox One X, now at its best value price ever for $399 USD. We’re always looking to give players more value, and there’s never been a better time to join the Xbox One family with Xbox One X.
To our Ori community, we cannot wait for you to jump in and play Ori and the Will of the Wisps. And if you’re brand new to Ori, we hope you’ll give it a try and we think you’ll find something to love. This game is a passion project for us and something we truly believe in, and we hope you enjoy it! Ori and the Will of the Wisps is available starting today with Xbox Game Pass and on Xbox One, Windows 10 PC and Steam. For more information on Ori and the Will of the Wisps, stay tuned to Xbox Wire, orithegame.com and follow @OriTheGame on Twitter.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Xbox Game Studios
☆☆☆☆☆62
★★★★★
Xbox One X Enhanced
PC Game Pass
Xbox Game Pass
Pre-Order now and get ready to embark on an all-new adventure to unravel Ori’s true destiny. Play with Xbox Game Pass on March 11, 2020. The little spirit Ori is no stranger to peril, but when a fateful flight puts the owlet Ku in harm’s way, it will take more than bravery to bring a family back together, heal a broken land, and discover Ori’s true destiny. From the creators of the acclaimed action-platformer Ori and the Blind Forest comes the highly anticipated sequel. Embark on an all-new adventure in a vast world filled with new friends and foes that come to life in stunning, hand-painted artwork. Set to a fully orchestrated original score, Ori and the Will of the Wisps continues the Moon Studios tradition of tightly crafted platforming action and deeply emotional storytelling.
We’re excited to share that Forrester has named Microsoft as a leader in the inaugural report, The Forrester New Wave™: Function-As-A-Service Platforms, Q1 2020 based on their evaluation of Azure Functions and integrated development tooling. We believe Forrester’s findings reflect the strong momentum of event-driven applications in Azure and our vision, crediting Azure Functions with“robust programming model and integration capabilities”, and also confirm Microsoft’s commitment to be the best technology partner for you as customers call out the responsiveness of Microsoft Azure’s “engineering and support teams as key to their success.”
Best-in-class development experience
Azure Functions is an event-driven serverless compute platform with a programming model based on triggers and bindings for accelerated and simplified applications development. Fully integrated with other Azure services and development tools, its end-to-end development experience allows you to build and debug your functions locally on any major platform (Windows, macOS, and Linux), as well as deploy and monitor them in the cloud. You can even deploy the exact same functions code to other environments, such as your own infrastructure or your Kubernetes cluster, enabling seamless hybrid deployments.
In their report, Forrester noted Azure Functions programming model“supports a multitude of programming languages with extensive integration options, … and bindings for Azure Event Hub, and Azure Event Grid helps developers build event-driven microservices.”
Enterprise-grade FaaS platform
Enterprise customers like Chipotle love the velocity and productivity that event-driven architectures bring to developing applications. We are committed to building great experiences that enable the modernization of those enterprise workloads, and the Forrester report states that “strategic adopters of Azure will find that Azure Functions helps integrate Microsoft’s fast-expanding array of cloud services”, making that transformation journey easier. Some of our latest innovations are focused on the needs of enterprise customers, such as the Premium plan to host functions without cold-start for low latency workloads or PowerShell support enabling serverless automation scenarios for cloud and hybrid deployments.
In their report, Forrester also recognized Azure Functions as “a good fit for companies that need stateful functions” thanks to Durable Functions, an extension to the Azure Functions runtime that brings stateful and orchestration capabilities to serverless functions. Durable Functions stands alone in the serverless space, providing stateful functions and a way to define serverless workflows programmatically. Forrester mentioned specifically in the report that “clients modernizing enterprise apps will find that Durable Functions offers an alternative to refactoring existing business logic into bite-size stateless chunks.”
