Recent News – Page 113

Posted on March 2, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft Power Automate to add robotic process automation in April

In case you missed our announcement at Ignite 2019, we launched the preview of UI flows, the new robotic process automation (RPA) capability in Microsoft Power Automate.

Today we’re announcing that UI flows will be generally available worldwide on April 2.

Power Automate already helps hundreds of thousands of organizations automate millions of processes every day. With the addition of RPA, Power Automate will help these organizations to also automate their legacy apps and manual processes through UI-based automation. The key Power Automate capabilities we are announcing today include RPA general availability for attended and unattended scenarios, along with a flexible business model to support any business scenario.

Automate legacy and modern apps on one platform

Power Automate—the most comprehensive cloud-based automation platform—unlocks analog data with AI, automates UI with RPA, and automates cloud applications and databases with built-in connectors. This comprehensive set of capabilities represents the next generation of automation and will be accessible to everyone in an organization including coders and non-coders alike through a low code development environment and uniquely affordable licensing.

With Power Automate, we’re putting automation into the hands of all workers so that everyone can automate repetitive tasks across legacy and modern applications, and simplify how they work in a scalable, more secure way.

Completing the low-code automation portfolio with robotic process automation

Across the software industry, numerous technology solutions help people do their job. But the widespread adoption of technology also means that businesses can end up with disconnected solutions that require them to patch together processes across siloed applications. In the past, joining disparate systems together was difficult or too costly because it required professional developers, especially when some of the data could still be on paper or locked in decades-old Windows or web applications.

Power Automate provides a single solution for end-to-end automation that spans on-premises systems and the cloud. This approach addresses three primary areas:

Intelligent understanding of data: Structured and unstructured data from paper-based invoices to images can be easily understood and integrated with other critical business applications. With AI-driven capabilities like forms processing in AI Builder, end users can parse data from analog sources.
Connecting to over 300 modern apps and services: It is easy to work with information stored in the cloud or on-premises apps and databases. We offer native connectivity to common apps or a company’s APIs with over 300 connectors out-of-the-box and a no-code way to connect to any internal services.
RPA connects to enterprise applications without APIs: Some applications are too old or expensive to support API connectivity. With UI flows, end users can automate their work in these applications by recording manual tasks such as mouse clicks, keyboard inputs, and data entry, and then automate the replay of these steps to integrate with more complex process automations.

The ability to use AI, API connectors, and RPA make Power Automate the most comprehensive automation platform available in the cloud today.

Ingram Micro, one of the world’s largest distributors and IT leaders in technology products, is using Power Automate to improve and automate workflows spanning multiple systems and functions such as new account creation and onboarding, management of customer credit lines, transportation optimization, event management, and integration of external partner data into their internal processes and workflows.

“With Power Automate, we’ve been able to improve the customer and internal associate experience, and at a much faster rate than before, with 75% of Power Automate projects completed in less than 30 days. We are excited to see that Microsoft is investing and delivering in the area of RPA as Power Automate has been an important factor in modernizing our business and we look forward to exploring opportunities with the new RPA capabilities coming this spring.” – Jim Annes, Vice President of US Business Operations and Transformation, Ingram Micro

Democratizing automation for all organizations with attended and unattended RPA

Power Automate offers both attended and unattended RPA. This means you can record and playback actions with or without human interaction (attended and unattended, respectively). And, just as we democratized access to app development with Microsoft Power Apps, and BI with Microsoft Power BI, we are democratizing RPA with Power Automate.

RPA capabilities will be licensed as part of two new Power Automate offers that provide organizations with the flexibility to address a range of attended and unattended scenarios. UI flow authoring and bot orchestration and management are included in both offers, with no add-ons required.*

Attended RPA

The per user with attended RPA plan provides the ability for users to run an attended RPA bot on their workstation. Priced at $40 per user/month, the plan is optimized to span legacy and modern applications by enabling users to combine UI and API-based automation. Additionally, attended RPA includes access to several AI Builder capabilities like forms processing, object detection, prediction, text classification and recognition, and more.

Unattended RPA

An unattended RPA add-on will be available for the new per-user plan with attended RPA, as well as the existing per-flow plan. Each unattended RPA bot is priced at $150 per month, and organizations can choose to scale the number of bots running autonomously as needed.

Both the Power Automate per-user plan with attended RPA and the Power Automate unattended RPA add-on will be available early April. Visit our pricing page to learn more.

Get started now!

Watch an overview of RPA in Power Automate and visit the UI flows web page to learn more about getting started with the RPA preview by clicking ‘Try preview‘. Be sure to stay tuned to the blog for updates like these and future updates to Power Automate and the Power Platform.

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*All pricing information provided is intended solely to be a non-binding estimate as of the date this guidance is provided. It does not constitute an offer by Microsoft. The actual pricing will be reflected on the EA Price List, when this offering becomes available.

Posted on February 28, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft for Healthcare at HIMSS 2020: What to look for at March 9-13 event

Health professionals sitting around a table looking at clipboards and tablets

Our Microsoft for Healthcare team and partners are excited to join health organizations, leaders, and experts at the HIMSS 2020 Conference to build a brighter future for the global health ecosystem so that everyone, everywhere has access to care that works. Join us for 20-minute health talks at our Microsoft Learning Hub, sponsored by LinkedIn Learning and delivered by subject matter experts on a variety of topics including AI as part of your diversity and inclusion plan; Transform patient experiences across your care teams; Using LinkedIn to connect with global health communities, and so much more. Additionally, you can sign up on the HIMSS 2020 event page for a one-on-one meeting with Microsoft executives, or onsite Envisioning sessions that are designed to help you reimagine the possibilities in your transformation journey.

The rate of disruption for health continues to accelerate. Healthcare organizations worldwide have implemented a breadth of technology solutions to transform how they enable personalized care for their patients, empower care teams and employees, secure and protect health information and use data insights to improve operational outcomes.

At Microsoft, we refer to that as tech intensity and believe that it’s not only about what technology health organizations want, but also what capabilities they can build to support access to value-based care into the future. The focus is the move from using the cloud to increase economies of scale to extracting insights from data that can encourage innovation and create an informed and empowered community of providers, payors, innovators, and individuals that will enable an ever-improving state of health throughout the world.

In the healthcare industry, we’re beginning to see steps to make that possible with the establishment of interoperability standards like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), the rise of data-driven technologies like AI, machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as ways of promoting data transparency, such as blockchain. At Microsoft, we’ve made investments like Azure API for FHIR to enable health system interoperability and sharing data in the cloud. This year we reaffirmed an interoperability commitment along with leading cloud providers to enable the frictionless exchange of health care data for patients and the industry. We continue to accelerate the ability to integrate health care data from medical devices and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) to empower those working with data from medical devices to securely ingest and transform that data into the FHIR standard. Finally, we are committed to enabling our partners and customers to create new use cases and workflows using an FHIR-based data model.

The ability to unlock data is foundational to any healthcare organization’s digital transformation. Organizations achieving the greatest success are doing more than just implementing existing tech, they are developing their own digital capabilities and proprietary solutions that use data and AI to address the challenges faced by their communities, and seizing new opportunities to reimagine healthcare throughout the patient care journey. In essence, they are becoming change agents and, in the process, placing themselves at the forefront of innovation in this industry.

Examples of change leaders can be seen through customer stories, such as Providence St. Joseph Health creating personalized patient experiences; Northwell Health using data insights to improve operational outcomes; St. Luke’s University Health Network transforming clinical collaboration through their secure, cloud-connected workforce; Humana who’s using AI and predictive care solutions to reimagine health for aging populations and their care teams; and Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), who’s reimagining the delivery of health care services by delivering innovative platforms that enable next-generation health networks, integrated digital and physical health care experiences and new care management solutions.

Healthcare organizations looking to drive change in their health ecosystem have turned to Microsoft and our vast partner ecosystem to help them transform. We believe it’s not just about what technology they want from Microsoft, but also what culture and unique capabilities they are building to take their healthcare organization into the future. It’s about having a technology partner you can trust to make you independent with your own technology. Our mission as a company to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more is fundamentally centered on how we increase the tech intensity of every organization that we work with. At Microsoft, we are honored to be a partner in this exciting transformation and I’m excited to showcase Microsoft’s and our partner solutions at HIMSS 2020.

Posted on February 28, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

PIM, PAM, MIM, MAM… Check out our guide to identity acronyms

As a security advisor working with one to three Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) each week, the topic of identity comes up often. These are smart people who have often been in industry for decades. They have their own vocabulary of acronyms that only security professionals know such as DDoS, CEH, CERT, RAT, and 0-Day (if you don’t know one or several of these terms, I encourage you to look them up to build your vocabulary), but they often find themselves confused by Microsoft’s own set of acronyms.

This is the first in a blog series that aims to lessen some confusion around identity by sharing with you some of the terms used at Microsoft. Terms like MFA, PIM, PAM, MIM, MAM, MDM, and a few others. What do they mean and how do they relate to each other?

Multi-Factor Authentication or MFA

Let’s start with what identity means to Microsoft. Identity is the ability to clearly and without doubt ensure the identification of a person, device, location, or application. This is done by establishing trust verification and identity verification using what Microsoft calls Multi-Factor Authentication or MFA. This is a combination of capabilities that allow the entity to establish trust and verify who or what they are.

MFA is an authentication method in which a computer user is granted access only after successfully presenting two or more pieces of evidence (or factors) to an authentication mechanism: something the user and only the user knows (such as a password or PIN), something the user and only the user has (such as a mobile device or FIDO key), and something the user and only the user is (a biometric such as a fingerprint or iris scan).

Microsoft does this with technologies such as Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) in the cloud combined with Windows Hello. Azure AD is Microsoft’s identity and access management solution. Windows Hello is a Windows capability that allows a user to verify who they are with an image, a pin, or other biometric. The person’s identity is stored via an encrypted hash in the cloud, so it’s never shared in the clear (unencrypted). A cryptographic hash is a checksum that allows someone to proof that they know the original input (e.g., a password) and that the input (e.g., a document) has not been modified.

Privileged Identity Management or PIM

What is Privileged Identity Management or PIM? Organizations use PIM to assign, activate, and approve privileged identities in Azure AD. PIM provides time-based and approval-based role activation to mitigate the risks of excessive, unnecessary, or misused access permissions to sensitive resources.

Key features of PIM include:

Just-in-time privileged access to Azure AD and Azure resources.
Time-bound access to resources.
An approval process to activate privileged roles.
MFA enforcement.
Justification to understand why users activate.
Notifications when roles are activated.
Access reviews and internal and external audit history.

Privileged Access Management or PAM

What is Privileged Access Management or PAM? Often confused with PIM, PAM is a capability to help organizations manage identities for existing on-premises Active Directory environments. PAM is an instance of PIM that is accessed using Microsoft Identity Manager or MIM. Confused? Let me explain.

PAM helps organizations solve a few problems including:

Making it harder for attackers to penetrate a network and obtain privileged account access.
Adding protection to privileged groups that control access to domain-joined computers and the applications on those computers.
Providing monitoring, visibility, and fine-grained controls so organizations can see who their privileged admins are and what they are doing.

PAM gives organizations more insight into how admin accounts are being used in the environment.

Microsoft Identity Manager or MIM

But I also mentioned MIM… What is this? Microsoft Identity Manager or MIM helps organizations manage the users, credentials, policies, and access within their organizations and hybrid environments. With MIM, organizations can simplify identity lifecycle management with automated workflows, business rules, and easy integration with heterogenous platforms across the datacenter. MIM enables Active Directory to have the right users and access rights for on-premises apps. Azure AD Connect can then make those users and permissions available in Azure AD for Office 365 and cloud-hosted apps.

OK, so now we know that:

PIM is a capability to help companies manage identities in Azure AD.
PAM is an on-premises capability to manage identities in Active Directory.
MIM helps organizations manage users, credentials, policies, and on-premises access.

Mobile Application Management or MAM

What’s left… Oh yes: Mobile Application Management or MAM. MAM is important because if organizations can only manage identities—but not the apps then they miss a key aspect of protecting data. MAM is connected to a Microsoft capability called Microsoft Intune and is a suite of management features to publish, push, configure, secure, monitor, and update mobile apps for users.

MAM works with or without enrollment of the device, which means organizations can protect sensitive data on almost any device using MAM-WE (without enrollment). If organizations enable MFA, they can verify the user on the device. MAM also helps manage that apps the trusted user or entity can access. If you add in the Mobile Device Management or MDM feature of Intune, you can force enrollment of devices and then use MAM to manage the apps.

It’s well known that Microsoft has a lot of acronyms. This is the first in a series of blog posts aimed to assist you in navigating the acronym forest created by companies and industry. The Microsoft Platform includes a powerful set of capabilities to help encourage users to make the right decisions and gives security leadership, like you, the ability to manage and monitor identities and control access to critical files and network assets.

Posted on February 28, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Cryptography in the era of quantum computers

The promise of quantum computing is that it will help us solve some of the world’s most complex challenges. When designed to scale, quantum systems will have capabilities that exceed our most powerful supercomputers. We’re seeing this begin to take shape even today, with early breakthroughs in material design, financial risk management, and MRI technology. As the global community of quantum researchers, scientists, engineers, and business leaders continue to collaborate to advance the quantum ecosystem, we expect to see quantum impact accelerate across every industry.

However, this same computing power that will unlock solutions to complex challenges will also break some of today’s most sophisticated cryptography. By anticipating the technology of the future, Microsoft Research – in collaboration with academic and industry partners – is getting ready to accept the challenge it poses by preparing customers for a post-quantum world, today.

Cryptography today

Cryptography – the science of encrypting and decrypting data – ensures the confidentiality of the private communications of individuals and organizations online. Encryption is used to protect everything from sending text messages to your friends, to banks transferring billions of dollars to other banks, and these transactions happen in a matter of milliseconds. Online encryption scenarios typically use a combination of two techniques: symmetric-key cryptography and public-key cryptography. In symmetric-key cryptography, the sender and the recipient must know (and keep secret from everyone else) a shared encryption key that is used to encrypt and decrypt the messages to be sent. Public-key cryptography, in contrast, allows two parties to send and receive encrypted messages without any prior sharing of keys. It was the discovery of public-key cryptosystems (by Merkel, Diffie, and Hellman in 1976 and Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman in 1978) that allows us to connect securely with anyone in the world, whether we’ve exchanged data before or not, and to do it so fast that we don’t even realize it’s happening.

Classical vs. quantum computing

The public-key cryptosystems that we use today are based on certain hard mathematical problems. For example, the security of the RSA public-key cryptosystem rests on the difficulty of factoring products of two large prime numbers – if we take two 300-digit prime numbers we can easily multiply them together to get a ~600-digit product, but if we start with just the product it is difficult to figure out the two smaller factors, no matter how much classical computing power is available for the task.

In the early ’90s, Dr. Peter Shor at AT&T Bell Laboratories discovered an algorithm that could factor products of two large prime numbers quickly, but his algorithm requires a quantum computer in order to run. Now known as “Shor’s Algorithm,” his technique defeats the RSA encryption algorithm with the aid of a “big enough” quantum computer. A quantum computer with enough stable qubits to use Shor’s Algorithm to break today’s public-key cryptography is fairly far out, but the risk is on the horizon. Further, an adversary could be recording encrypted internet traffic now for decryption later, when a sufficiently large quantum computer becomes available. In this way, future quantum computers are a threat to the long-term security of today’s information.

Post-quantum cryptography

To address this threat, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – whose charter is to promote innovation and industrial competitiveness across a broad spectrum of technologies and endeavors, including cybersecurity – has begun the process of standardizing new public-key cryptographic algorithms that cannot be attacked efficiently even with the aid of quantum computer. With participants from around the globe, this project’s goal is to identify new cryptographic algorithms that are resistant to attacks by quantum computers and then standardize them for broad use.

NIST’s initial call for proposals attracted sixty-nine total submissions from around the world for key exchange and digital signature algorithms, including four proposals co-submitted by Microsoft Research. In January 2019, NIST selected twenty-six of those proposals to move forward to Round 2 of the selection process, including all four of the Microsoft Research co-submissions. Here’s a list of the proposals in which Microsoft Research is a partner:

Key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs):
Digital signature schemes:
- Picnic: A digital signature scheme based on zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge and multi-party computation.
- qTESLA: A lattice-based signature scheme.

How do we protect our customers?

It will be several more years before NIST finishes its process of selecting and standardizing new post-quantum algorithms. In the meantime, we need to get to work today to begin protecting our customers and their data from future attacks. We know it will take time to migrate all of today’s existing services and applications to new post-quantum public-key algorithms – replacing cryptographic algorithms in widely deployed systems can take years and we need a solution that can provide protection while that work is ongoing.

One approach Microsoft Research is exploring is applying the new post-quantum cryptography to network tunnels. By using both current algorithms and post-quantum algorithms simultaneously – what we call a “hybrid” approach – we comply with regulatory requirements such as FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) while protecting against both today’s classical attackers and tomorrow’s quantum-enabled ones.

To test this technology, Microsoft is turning to Project Natick, a years-long research effort to investigate manufacturing and operating environmentally-sustainable, prepackaged datacenter units that can be ordered to size, rapidly deployed and left to operate, lights out, on the seafloor for years. While tunneling can certainly be tested in dry environments, by putting this technology to the test under more difficult circumstances (underwater), on non-production data (safe to test), we have a good representation of what an actual data center customer experience would look like, under stress.

Photograph of Project Natwick underwater datacenter — Project Natick underwater datacenter

As Karen Easterbrook, Senior Principal PM Manager at Microsoft Research says, “If we can get this to work underwater, then we can get this to work anywhere… We want post-quantum cryptography to be running on every link between every Microsoft datacenter and ultimately between every Microsoft datacenter and every Microsoft customer. And this is a necessary first step toward being able to make that happen.”

Getting ready for a post-quantum world

Dr. Brian LaMacchia, Distinguished Engineer and Head of the Security and Cryptography Group at Microsoft Research, says, “The best way to start preparing is to ensure that all current and future systems have cryptographic agility – the ability to be easily reconfigured to add quantum-resistant algorithms.”

By working in partnership with collaborators around the world to develop post-quantum cryptographic algorithms and then applying them to common internet security protocols and use cases, we can use the power of quantum computing to tackle the large-scale problems facing our planet while also ensuring that all of our information remains safe and secure.

Learn more about quantum computing, quantum algorithms including Shor’s algorithm, and Microsoft Quantum:

Posted on February 28, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

What’s new to Microsoft 365 in February: improved collaboration across apps, customized experiences

We live in exciting, but busy, times. As we try to navigate a rapidly changing and complex workplace, little things can make or break our experience—including the tools we rely on. At Microsoft, we get it, and we’re listening. We’re working hard to incorporate your feedback and requests—from simple tweaks to new tools—into the Microsoft 365 experience. It’s all about building the best productivity service to help you and your organization get more done, and we’re committed to making sure your experience only gets better with time.

This month, we’re introducing capabilities to help you work on the go, collaborate on content more easily, interact with apps in more ways, and customize your productivity experiences. The new Office app is now generally available for Android and iOS. We added collaboration capabilities to PowerPoint comments and brought coauthoring and Microsoft Teams integration to Visio. Word now has an improved speech-to-text functionality that supports more languages, while added inking features and Dark Mode make it easier to capture and read notes in OneNote for Android. Meanwhile, organizations can now customize their employees’ productivity experience—from search results pages and All Company Yammer feeds to a private preview of the new Microsoft Fluid Framework.

Read on for all the exciting Microsoft 365 updates this month. And for a deeper dive into the news, be sure to check out the second episode of the Modern Workplace podcast. This month, host Alex Bradley and I go in-depth on teamwork, the new Microsoft Fluid Framework, and more.

Be productive on the go

Work from anywhere with the new Office app—The Office app is a fully redesigned experience to help you be more productive from anywhere. It combines Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single app, adds new capabilities to help you create content in uniquely mobile ways, and has integrated Actions that help you accomplish common mobile tasks. The result is a simpler, yet more powerful, Office experience for mobile devices. Read this blog post to learn more about the new Office app, now generally available worldwide on Android and iOS.

Improve collaboration across your favorite apps

New tools in PowerPoint and Visio make it easier for teams to work together.

Collaborate more fluidly in PowerPoint—Starting next month, we’ll roll out an updated comments feature in PowerPoint. Team members can now anchor comments to objects, use @mention notifications, discover and add comments more easily, and more. The new comments experience will be available to all Office 365 users with the latest update.

Coauthor Visio drawings in more ways—Visio for the web now allows collaborators to create, edit, and comment on drawings simultaneously. With live coauthoring and a simple presence indicator, teams can work seamlessly together to brainstorm and develop their ideas. Visio Plan 1 and Plan 2 users can visit visio.office.com to create and share Visio files today.

Team members can also use these capabilities directly in Teams. Now you can share your Visio drawings with colleagues, since files stored in your Team’s file library are accessible to every member—making it easy for colleagues to edit and comment on your work. To get started, click the Files tab above the conversation window in your Teams channel and select New > Visio drawing.

Personalize the way you work

Updates to Word and OneNote let users work the way they want.

Save time and simplify work with improved speech-to-text—It’s now easy to create content with your voice in Word thanks to a new dictation toolbar, suggestions experience, and auto-punctuation support. You can also now work in six new preview languages: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Japanese. The new Voice Dictation in Word for the web is rolling out to all Office 365 users now.

Capture and take notes with ease—OneNote for Android phone and tablet now supports Dark Mode, enabling you to switch from bright white to a more subtle black and dark gray color scheme for easier reading. Additionally, we refreshed the inking experience to support bright new colors and continue leveraging pen types, highlighters, and erasers. And don’t miss the Lasso tool, which resizes and repositions objects on the page. These updates are rolling out to all OneNote users on Android phones and tablets.

Customize user collaboration experiences

New capabilities help you tailor your productivity tools to fit your enterprise brand and environment.

Create custom search results pages for Microsoft Search—You can now create custom search results pages in SharePoint Online. Use this new feature to control the layout and design of search results to tailor your SharePoint Online experience for your enterprise environment. The new feature will be available to all SharePoint Online subscribers. To get started, choose the site area where you would like to configure a custom results page and select Site Collection Settings > Search Settings.

Choose which “What’s new” features are visible to your users—You can now manage which features are shown or hidden from users in the “What’s New” Office desktop app. This content highlights a list of new features, accompanied by descriptions and guidance to help customers use the features. You can access this management tool using the Microsoft 365 admin center and the Office 365 Client Configuration Service.

Begin creating fluid collaboration experiences today—Microsoft Fluid Framework is a new component-based document model designed to enable new ways to collaborate on content creation. Now anyone with an Office 365 Enterprise subscription can check out the early preview. To get started, simply sign in with your organizational account ID at fluidpreview.com.

Strengthen your enterprise branding in Yammer—New capabilities in the current Yammer experience allow you to customize the All Company feed name, upload a community cover photo, land key messaging, welcome new members, promote organizational initiatives, and reinforce company values. Pair this with custom avatars to bring your branding and culture into your All Company feed. These new capabilities will be available to admins soon.

Manage Yammer eDiscovery from within the Microsoft 365 admin center—Yammer now supports eDiscovery for networks in Native Mode. Now admins will have access to all messages and files posted in their Yammer networks through the same eDiscovery tools they use to manage data throughout the rest of the Office 365 suite. This simplifies eDiscovery tasks and streamlines compliance obligations. To get started, make sure your Yammer network is running in Native Mode and then navigate to the eDiscovery module of the Security and Compliance Center.

Additionally, now all new files uploaded to Yammer communities connected to Office 365 are stored in SharePoint. With this change, your files will adhere to the rich security and compliance features policies that you’ve implemented for SharePoint—including eDiscovery, data loss protection, in-geo residence for files at rest, and others.

Also new this month

Navigating work and life today requires great tools that are constantly evolving and improving. Our goal is to build the productivity experiences that enable you and your organization to succeed. We can’t do it without you, so please reach out with feedback, requests, or questions. We’re here to help.

Posted on February 27, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Get your Minecraft Festival tickets starting March 6

You know that feeling just before the guests arrive at your epic house party? You’ve spent hours polishing the place, changing outfits half a dozen times (“does this cape go with my mood and my complexion?”) cutting perfectly cube-shaped pieces of cake, and digging through your floordrobe for the first time in years (“look, there are wooden blocks down here!”) It’s almost time, and you engage the doorbell in a death-stare contest in the hopes it won’t chime until everything is perfect.

Well, that’s basically us right now, but on a slightly larger scale and extended timeline! It’s only February, and we’re already working around the clock to prepare for Minecraft Festival at the end of September. Perhaps that sounds overzealous, but remember – our version of a house party will be a fully-fledged Minecraft experience with thousands of guests, featuring interactive exhibits, inclusive gameplay, fiercely competitive tournaments, intense live entertainment, exclusive merchandise, creativity-sparking panels and the opportunity to meet your favorite content creator or Mojang developer. Aaand it will go on for three days. So we do have a few things on our mind!

Over the frantic pounding of hammers, scribbling of pens and explosions of Creepers going on here, let me tell you about a few things we have planned for you. Minecraft Festival is a party where you are the guest of honor! It’s a celebration of the epic adventure we’ve all shared for the past 10 years, and a sneak peek at the journey ahead. Mojang will bring all Minecraft games (many playable!), and exhibitors from around the world plan to show what they have been working on.

Oh, and remember MINECON Live? The globally available live show featuring all the biggest Minecraft news? We’ve even squeezed that into Minecraft Festival! This portion of the event is now called Minecraft Live and is still the place for epic announcements, nail-biting excitement and deep-dives into the past, present and future of Minecraft. We’ll stream it live, directly from Minecraft Festival. And who knows, some lucky Festival attendees may even get a seat in the studio audience!

Are we forgetting something? Creepers? No, mentioned those. Canapes? Nope, not that kind of party. Capes! Ah, yes, capes! Every attendee will get an exclusive Minecraft Festival cape, compatible with both Java and Bedrock.

“Everyone is welcome!” says Lydia Winters, Chief Brand Officer at Mojang. “We think of Minecraft Festival as a place to meet, hang out with, and learn from like-minded players – all in an interactive space full of surprising experiences and opportunities for discovery.”

Well, that sounds exciting, but let’s get specific! First, jot down the dates September 25-27 in your calendar or on some other reasonably flat surface, because that’s when we’ll be at Orange County Convention Center in sunny Florida. There will be exciting goings-on throughout the three days, so make it a long weekend if you can! If not, there will also be the opportunity to swing by for a single day. Here is a breakdown of the various ticket options available:

Posted on February 27, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Bose Frames bring hands-free way to use Microsoft Soundscape app for people who are blind or have low-vision

Microsoft Soundscape is a research project and mobile application that explores the use of innovative audio-based technology to enable people – particularly those who are blind or have low vision – to build a richer awareness of their surroundings, thus becoming more confident and empowered to get around.

Today we are delighted to announce that Microsoft Soundscape now supports Bose Frames, an audio wearable that combines the protection of sunglasses with the functionality and performance of wireless headphones.

Frames have a proprietary open-ear design that doesn’t block the wearer’s ears, allowing them to hear ambient environmental sounds – such as traffic and other people –while still hearing directions, music and other content streaming from a mobile device. Frames use a 9-axis head-motion sensor and the device’s GPS to provide audio information based on location and the direction the wearer is facing. Coupled with Microsoft Soundscape’s audio feedback and descriptions of one’s surroundings, Bose Frames offer the wearer an immersive and hands-free way to navigate the world around them.

Our ears are naturally very well attuned to three-dimensional (3D) sound. For example, when we hear a dog bark across the yard, we know exactly in which direction to look. In other words, when we listen, we instinctively make subtle head movements to locate the origin of the sound. The sensors embedded in Bose Frames allow Soundscape to sense those subtle head movements and help the wearer pinpoint the location of the ‘landmark’ using 3D audio cues generated by Soundscape, offering improved awareness of one’s environment and enhanced navigational support. Early testers of this experience have shared that this combination feels incredibly natural and makes them feel significantly more aware of their surroundings.

Our close collaboration with Bose is a key milestone for Soundscape’s journey to enhance one’s sense of independence when out and about by enhancing their perception of the environment around them with spatial 3D audio.

We look forward to what the future will bring with this new frontier of Audio AR experiences as Soundscape continues to push boundaries to empower people to do more.

As always, we can’t wait to hear what you make of this new experience so we encourage users to share their thoughts and questions directly with soundscapefeed@microsoft.com.

Posted on February 26, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft scholarship program fosters collaboration with academia

Cecily Morrison wants to build technology that enables people to live their lives the way they want and accomplish things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

The Principal Researcher landed on the personal mission years before joining Microsoft Research. Experiences first teaching children robotics and then working with the United Kingdom’s National Health Service applying existing technology to healthcare scenarios ignited the desire. Since then, she’s helped develop a system for monitoring the progression of multiple sclerosis in patients and a physical programming language for children who are blind or have low vision. She’s currently working on visual agent technology, including a new project in which she’ll explore computer vision and spatialized audio to help children born blind develop social and learning skills that children with sight cultivate through visual cues.

Principal Researcher Cecily Morrison

“I am passionate about demonstrating in the real how AI can fundamentally change people’s lives,” says Morrison, who is collaborating on the work with Oussama Metatla of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

Advancing research like Morrison’s through collaboration and strong relationships between Microsoft Research Cambridge researchers and academia is at the core of the Microsoft Research PhD Scholarship Programme in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). Morrison and Metatla’s “Using AI to Develop Joint Attention in Blind Children” is one of 15 projects that have been selected this year to receive the scholarship, which provides financial support for up to three years. Their work joins the more than 400 projects since the program’s inception in 2004 that have helped drive innovation in the lab’s key research areas: All Data AI, Cloud Infrastructure, Confidential Computing, Future of Work, Game Intelligence, Healthcare Intelligence, and Biological Computation. This year’s other projects include conversational user interfaces for mental health status reporting, failure detection in machine learning models, and learning local forward models in complex 3D games.

Microsoft researchers are developing visual agent technology like the above system, which is designed to help people who are blind or have low vision find and identify people in their vicinity, as part of Project Tokyo. Principal Researcher Cecily Morrison will be collaborating with a PhD supervisor from the University of Bristol to build on that work through the Microsoft Research PhD Scholarship Programme in EMEA.

The value of collaboration

As part of the program selection process, Cambridge researchers invite a PhD supervisor at an EMEA institution to collaborate. Often, they have a preexisting relationship with the supervisor or an interest in working with them. Together, the pair writes and submits a proposal. Proposals are reviewed and selected by Microsoft researchers in a two-stage review process. The researchers and supervisors of the selected proposals then choose a PhD student to work on the project.

The collaborative nature of the program supports all parties involved in important ways. The program, for example, gives researchers a chance to conduct more exploratory research than they might normally be able to undertake in their day to day and to draw on the unique perspectives and knowledge of and students. PhD supervisors and students—encouraged to attend meetings at Cambridge’s lab, where they get to experience firsthand the breadth and depth of research at Microsoft—are introduced to such professional opportunities as visiting researcher positions for faculty and internships for students.

The program also allows for resource sharing. PhD supervisors and students can benefit from Microsoft technology and computational power such as cloud services while academia offers facilities and equipment researchers don’t have access to.

“I see this as a way to do longer-term research than we can do in Microsoft Research, but that couldn’t be done in academia because they don’t have access to the technology,” says Morrison.

Principal Scientist Sara-Jane Dunn

For Microsoft Principal Scientist Sara-Jane Dunn of the Biological Computation Group, who was selected to the program this year with Graziano Martello of the University of Padua, Italy, working with PhD students is particularly valuable.

“Being able to co-supervise brilliant young researchers is rewarding in many ways: being able to foster new research, mentor talent, develop new ideas, and learn new techniques,” she says. “It’s invaluable as a seasoned scientist.”

Dunn and Martello’s project, “The Pluripotency Program in Human Embryonic Stem Cells,” builds on the pair’s work in stem cell research. They’ll focus on how personalized stem cells are generated, a greater understanding of which could help inform new medical diagnostics and treatments.

Over the next several months, selected researchers and PhD supervisors will be recruiting students for their projects. For more information or to apply, visit the program home page. Positions will be posted as they become available.

EMEA PhD Award

As a complement to the EMEA PhD Scholarship Programme, Microsoft Research is excited to announce the Microsoft Research EMEA PhD Award, a new research grant for PhD students in computing-related fields who are in their third year or beyond at universities in EMEA.

Award recipients will receive the following:

$15,000 to put toward their doctoral thesis work for the upcoming academic year
an invitation, including travel and accommodations, to attend the two-day Microsoft Research PhD Summit workshop in North America, where they will present their work and be mentored by Microsoft researchers
an offer to intern at the Cambridge lab

Applications are due by 11:59 UTC on April 1. To find out more, including how to apply, visit the EMEA PhD Award home page.

Posted on February 26, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Teaching 100 teachers: Teenager turns the tables with Minecraft

Namya Joshi, a 13-year-old, loves training teachers.

The seventh grade student has been helping teachers of her school convert their class lessons into interactive Minecraft sessions.

“Minecraft is a great platform. If a child does not like reading books, for example, you can make them in Minecraft and get the child interested,” the student from Sat Paul Mittal School in Ludhiana, says very matter-of-factly.

It all started two years ago when her mother, who is the IT Head at the school, signed up to become a global Minecraft mentor, as a part of Microsoft Innovative Educator program.

“I didn’t know much about Minecraft when I signed up. I had some exposure in our school during Microsoft’s Hour of Code but that was all I knew about it. I started researching about it and was initially shocked to see how a game could be integrated into the school’s curriculum. I wasn’t convinced,” says Monica Joshi, Namya’s mother.

A Microsoft Expert Educator herself, Joshi thought she’d learn how to use Minecraft on her own gradually, but all that changed when one day she found Namya playing with Minecraft: Education Edition, a special edition of the game customized for the classroom environment, on her laptop.

“I’d seen Minecraft installed on my mother’s Windows 10 laptop and started trying it on my own. After understanding the basics, I watched some tutorials and got myself familiar with it,” Namya says with pride.

Recovering from the initial shock, Joshi asked her daughter to create her upcoming lesson in the Minecraft world. It was a creative writing lesson and Namya had to write about her recent trip to the hills. The result convinced Joshi about using Minecraft in her school.

Posted on February 25, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft Intelligent Security Association doubles in size (again), adds more products

Another RSA Conference (RSAC) and another big year for the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA). MISA was launched at RSAC 2018 with 26 members and a year later we had doubled in size to 53 members. Today, I am excited to share that the association has again doubled in size to 102 members.

New members expand the portfolio of MISA integrations

Our new members include a number of ecosystem partners, like RSA, ServiceNow, and Net Motion, which have developed critical integrations that benefit our shared customers and we look forward to deepening our relationship through MISA engagement.

New MISA member RSA is now using Azure Active Directory’s risky user data and other Microsoft security signals to enrich their risk score engine. Additionally, RSA also leverages the Graph Security API to feed their SIEM solution, RSA NetWitness with alerts from the entire suite of Microsoft Security solutions.

“RSA is excited to showcase the RSA SecurID and RSA NetWitness integrations with Microsoft Security products. Our integrations with Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Graph Security API, Azure AD, and Microsoft Azure Sentinel, help us to better secure access to our mutual customer’s applications, and detect threats and attacks. We’re excited to formalize the long-standing relationship through RSA Ready and MISA to better defend our customers against a world of increasing threats.”
—Anna Sarnek, Head of Strategic Business Development, Cloud and Identity for RSA

The ServiceNow Security Operations integration with Microsoft Graph Security API enables shared customers to automate incident management and response, leveraging the capabilities of the Now Platform’s single data model to dramatically improve their ability to prioritize and respond to threats generated by all Microsoft Security Solutions and custom alerts from Azure Sentinel.

“ServiceNow is pleased to join the Microsoft Intelligent Security Alliance to accelerate security incident response for our shared customers. The ServiceNow Security Operations integration with Azure Sentinel, via the graph security API, enables shared customers to automate incident management and response, leveraging the capabilities of the Now Platform’s single data model to dramatically improve their ability to prioritize and respond to threats.”
—Lou Fiorello, Head of Security Products for ServiceNow

Microsoft is pleased to welcome NetMotion, a connectivity and security solutions company for the world’s growing mobile workforce, into the security partner program. Using NetMotion’s class-leading VPN, customers not only gain uncompromised connectivity and feature parity, they benefit from a VPN that is compatible with Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS devices. For IT teams, NetMotion delivers visibility and control over the entire connection from endpoint to endpoint, over any network, through integration with Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Microsoft Intune).

“NetMotion is designed from the ground up to protect and enhance the user experience of any mobile device. By delivering plug-and-play integration with Microsoft Endpoint Manager, the mobile workforce can maximize productivity and impact without any disruption to their workflow from day one. For organizations already using or considering Microsoft, the addition of NetMotion’s VPN is an absolute no-brainer.”
—Christopher Kenessey, CEO of NetMotion Software

Expanded partner strategy for Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

The Microsoft Defender ATP team worked with our ecosystem partners to take their rich and complete set of APIs a step further to extend the power of our combined platforms. This helps customers strengthen their network and endpoint security posture, add continuous security validation and attack simulation testing, orchestrate and automate incident correlation and remediation, and add threat intelligence and web content filtering capabilities. Read Extending Microsoft Defender ATP network of partners to learn more about their partner strategy expansion and their open framework philosophy.

New product teams join the association

In addition to growing our membership, MISA expanded to cover 12 of Microsoft’s security solutions, including our latest additions: Azure Security Center for IoT Security and Azure DDoS.

Azure Security Center for IoT Security announces five flagship integration partners

The simple onboarding flow for Azure Security Center for IoT enables you to protect your managed and unmanaged IoT devices, view all security alerts, reduce your attack surface with security posture recommendations, and run unified reports in a single pane of glass.

Through partnering with members like Attivo Networks, CyberMDX, CyberX, Firedome, and SecuriThings, Microsoft is able to leverage their vast knowledge pool to help customers defend against a world of increasing IoT threats in enterprise. These solutions protect managed and unmanaged IoT devices in manufacturing, energy, building management systems, healthcare, transportation, smart cities, smart homes, and more. Read more about IoT security and how these five integration partners are changing IoT security in this blog.

Azure DDoS Protection available to partners to combat DDoS attacks

The first DDoS attack occurred way back on July 22, 1999, when a network of 114 computers infected with a malicious script called Trin00 attacked a computer at the University of Minnesota, according to MIT Technology Review. Even after 20 years DDoS continues to be an ever-growing problem, with the number of DDoS attacks doubling in the last year alone and the types of attacks getting increasingly sophisticated with the explosion of IoT devices.

Azure DDoS Protection provides countermeasures against the most sophisticated DDoS threats. The service provides enhanced DDoS mitigation capabilities for your application and resources deployed in your virtual networks. Technology partners can now protect their customers’ resources natively with Azure DDoS Protection Standard to address the availability and reliability concerns due to DDoS attacks.

“Extending Azure DDoS Protection capabilities to Microsoft Intelligent Security Association will help our shared customers to succeed by leveraging the global scale of Azure Networking to protect their workloads against DDoS attacks”
—Anupam Vij, Principal Product Manager, Azure Networking

Learn more

To see MISA members in action, visit the Microsoft booth at RSA where we have a number of our security partners presenting and demoing throughout the week. To learn more about the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association, visit our webpage or the video playlist of member integrations. For more information on Microsoft security solutions, visit our website.