Recent News – Page 133

Posted on November 12, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

From new Microsoft Teams experiences to the all-new Project Cortex—here’s what’s coming soon to Microsoft 365

Today at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, we announced new Microsoft 365 innovations in six key investment areas: productivity, knowledge, workflow, security, compliance, and management. Microsoft 365 is the world’s productivity cloud, and the consistent theme across these new features is how we’re using artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver amazing new experiences that push the boundaries of productivity. From new Microsoft Teams enhancements to the first new service we’ve launched since Teams, we have a lot to share with you—so let’s get to the news.

Productivity

Microsoft 365’s productivity tools use AI to help people create, collaborate, analyze, write, present, organize, and manage their work. Our innovations in core productivity are focused on two opportunities: creating entirely new experiences that take advantage of the latest innovations and breathing new life into familiar apps and experiences with powerful cloud services.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork. In response to requests from Teams customers, we’re pleased to announce Private channels, Multiwindow chats, meetings and calls, pinned channels, and task integration with To Do and Planner. We’re improving collaboration capabilities between Outlook and Teams, making it easy to send an email thread to a Teams channel for further discussion.

And we’re bringing the Yammer app into Teams, adding the ability for users to pin the app to the left-hand rail and making Teams the hub for both focused team collaboration and broad, open communities. We are also delivering new industry-tailored innovations and experiences including tools for Healthcare and Firstline workers. Healthcare providers can now schedule and conduct B2C virtual consultations through Teams with new Virtual Consults capabilities, and new features like SMS Sign-In and Global Sign-Out make it quick and easy for Firstline workers to securely access Teams from their mobile devices.

The New Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Bing are the web browser and search engine for business. We are pleased to announce that the general availability of the all-new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser is targeted for January 15, 2020. You can download the release candidate today.

The all-new Microsoft Edge offers the enterprise new tab page, where you’ll have direct access to your Microsoft 365 files, sites, and intranet search, making every tab you open a portal to productivity. And with the new Microsoft Search in Bing integration, searching for information at work is as easy as searching the web. You can now access files, people, office floorplans, acronym definitions, and more company information from across your Microsoft 365 ecosystem right from the search bar.

Finally, Microsoft Edge is now available across all your devices—including Windows 10, Windows 8x, Windows 7, macOS, iOS, and Android. Your passwords and favorites will roam seamlessly across all your devices—and with native Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) sign-in, you can search for work files right from your phone.

The Office mobile app

We all want to be able to work on the go from mobile devices and we’re always looking to simplify and improve the experience. Today, we’re announcing a new mobile experience for Office that combines three of the suite’s most popular apps—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—into a single go-to app for mobile productivity. Now you no longer need to download each app separately and will have everything you need to be productive on the go. And with the new Actions pane, you can intuitively complete a variety of common on-the-go tasks, such as creating and signing PDFs and sharing files between devices.

The new Office app uses the unique advantages of mobile devices to make content creation easier. You can snap a picture of a document and turn it into an editable word file, for instance, or transform tables from a printed page into an Excel spreadsheet. Launched today as a public preview, the Office app is available to Android users through the Google Play Store and to iOS users through Apple’s TestFlight program.

Fluid Framework

At Build 2019, we announced Fluid Framework, a new technology and set of experiences that will make collaboration seamless by breaking down the barriers between apps. It offers three key capabilities. First, experiences powered by the Fluid Framework will support multi-person coauthoring on web and document content at industry-leading speed and scale. Second, it provides a componentized document model that allows authors to deconstruct content into collaborative building blocks, use them across applications, and combine them in a new, more flexible kind of document. Third, the Fluid Framework makes room for intelligent agents to work alongside humans to translate text, fetch content, suggest edits, perform compliance checks, and more.

Today, we are announcing a public preview of the Fluid Framework end user experience and a private preview for developers. Over time, we expect these capabilities to light up in experiences across Microsoft 365, including within chat in Teams, mail in Outlook, portals in SharePoint, notes in OneNote, and documents in Office.

Cortana

We’re using AI to bring you personalized experiences in Outlook and making Cortana your personal productivity assistant. Today, we announced Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS to help you catch up and act on emails hands-free. With new natural voice and language recognition, Cortana can intelligently read out your new emails and share changes to your day. A masculine voice option is also now available with Play My Emails, further customizing your personal productivity assistant experience. We’re also announcing that Scheduler in Outlook is shipping in preview; you can use it to hand off scheduling meetings and coordinating participants to Cortana.

Beginning next month, Cortana can also help you prepare for your day by sending you a briefing email that includes a summary of your meetings, relevant documents for your day, and reminders to follow up on commitments you’ve made in email.

AI in Office

You’re busy and have a lot on your mind—and even more on your to-do list. We get it, and over the past year, we brought the magic of AI to Office to help you get more done. With innovations that include entering data into Excel with a digital pen, audio transcription in Word—which converts a new or existing audio file into a written transcription—and Presenter Coach in PowerPoint (in public preview for the web), which helps business professionals, teachers, and students become more effective presenters, we committed to enlightening Office with AI to help you be more productive.

Today our journey continues. Now Excel supports natural language queries, so users can now ask a question of their data, just like they would if they were talking to a person, and get quick answers—all without having to write a formula. Available to Office Insiders, this new natural language ability is another step towards making data insights and visualization more approachable and accessible to users with various levels of Excel experience.

We’re also making it easier for you to plan time away from work and continue to improve your work best practices. For example, MyAnalytics can help you prepare for time off by automating out of office notification setup, informing collaborators of your time away, resolving meetings you’ll miss, and more. Integrated into the Insights pane in Outlook, MyAnalytics is now able to encourage best practices like booking meetings promptly, adding an agenda, and meeting follow ups, and adding new AI-powered suggestions in Outlook that allow you to delay email delivery when working outside the recipient’s working hours.

Microsoft Project

Last week, we announced a major step toward achieving our new vision for project management with the general availability of the new Microsoft Project. The new Project offers a redesigned user experience that is simple and intuitive. Teams can quickly add new members and set up tasks, and then easily switch between grids, boards, or timeline (Gantt) charts to track progress. And because Project is part of the Microsoft 365 family, project teams can save time and do more with built-in connections to familiar apps like Teams and Office. In addition, the new service provides greater visibility into your projects and powerful tools to help you anticipate future needs. Create stunning interactive reports in Power BI, so you can visualize every aspect of each project at a glance. And get the big picture view of all your projects across your organization with visual, interactive cards.

Over the next year, we’ll release more exciting capabilities in the new Project, including resource management, budget analysis, and time and expense tracking. These powerful features will enable you to streamline more complex initiatives and help your business maximize ROI.

Knowledge

We’re excited to announce a brand-new investment area for Microsoft 365—knowledge. Moving your productivity infrastructure to the cloud has many benefits, including cost savings and streamlined operations. But it also unlocks new scenarios. Using AI, Microsoft 365 will now be able to identify, organize, and deliver knowledge across your organization—providing just the right information at just the right time. Productivity isn’t just about being more efficient. It’s also about aggregating and applying the collective knowledge of your organization so that together you can achieve more.

Project Cortex

Today, we’re announcing Project Cortex, the first new service in Microsoft 365 since the launch of Teams. Project Cortex uses AI to create a knowledge network that reasons over your organization’s data and automatically organizes it into shared topics like projects and customers. It also delivers relevant knowledge to people across your organization through topic cards and topic pages in the apps they use every day.

In addition, Project Cortex enables business process efficiency by turning your content into an interactive knowledge repository—with innovations in smart content ingestion—to analyze documents and extract metadata to create sophisticated content models; machine teaching, to allow subject matter experts to teach the system how to understand semi-structured content; and knowledge retrieval, to make it easy for people to access the valuable knowledge that’s so often locked away in documents, conversations, meetings, and videos. Building on the content you already have in SharePoint, Project Cortex connects content across Microsoft 365 and external systems and enables you to manage information and streamline processes with built-in security, compliance, and workflow.

The new Yammer

Yammer has been completely redesigned, with dozens of new capabilities that empower people to connect, build communities, and share knowledge across the organization. The new Yammer delivers a beautiful, intelligent experience across devices and introduces new integrations with Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook. You can now use Yammer to broadcast live and on-demand events with a streamlined production option that uses webcams and desktop sharing. And you can also share video shorts directly from the Yammer mobile app. In addition, we’ve now centralized e-Discovery, data governance, and Yammer administration in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Microsoft Search

Today, we announced new innovations for Microsoft Search to enhance productivity; empower greater discovery of information, insights, and people; develop search driven applications; and extend the benefits of Microsoft Search to content outside of Microsoft 365. We recognize search works best when it brings together information from across your organization. Now with over 100 new Microsoft Search connectors from Microsoft and our partners, you can consolidate information from disparate system into a single search experience in Microsoft 365.

In addition, you can use our new Graph APIs to develop custom applications on top of Microsoft Search to tailor search to your organizations’ needs. We’re also bringing more powerful search experiences to Microsoft 365, including advanced people search using attributes and skills, video search, acronym search, and semantic search.

Microsoft Stream

Video is an increasingly powerful medium for capturing and sharing knowledge and learning. Microsoft Stream applies AI to unlock the content in video—including meeting recordings—with automatic transcription. AI also powers the new voice enhance feature, allowing you to focus on the spoken word by reducing background noise. And now people can create short videos from mobile devices and share in Yammer, Teams, and PowerApps, mainstreaming video as the new content type for communications and learning.

Workplace Analytics

Workplace Analytics is making it even easier to gain knowledge about the way people work and its impact on business and organizational outcomes. Business leaders will get at-a-glance insights to quickly understand and improve meeting culture, manager practices, organizational networks, and customer relationships. Industry benchmarks help contextualize common patterns that influence productivity, such as focus time and the ability to unplug outside of working hours. We also enriched the analyst toolset. AI-driven process analysis uses key words like “quarterly business review” to shed light on time and resources invested in specific business activities, enabling improvement over time.

Workflow

Workflow innovations empower you to streamline and improve business processes with little or no code. This approach not only saves time and money, it also ensures process automation is done by the people who are closest to the way things actually work.

Power Platform integration with Teams

With Power Platform, users can automate routine tasks, create custom apps, and easily engage with data. Power Platform integration with Teams makes these tools more discoverable and accessible to users and unlocks a conversational approach to streamlining productivity scenarios—from managing approvals directly in chat to pinning a custom app where a team needs it.

Today, we announced new features to enhance these capabilities. Power Apps creators can now publish their apps as Teams apps, and users will be able to pin those apps to their left rail in Teams. We’re also adding new Power Automate triggers and actions, allowing users to streamline the completion of common team and personal tasks, such as setting custom message actions and sending notifications. And coming soon, rich Power BI previews in Teams chat and an enhanced Power BI tab will allow users to see all their data in Teams and effortlessly discuss data, to speed data-driven decision making.

Office Scripts

Office Scripts simplifies clunky processes and automates repetitive tasks so you can work less while doing more. Today, we introduced scripting in Excel, a new process automation feature that allows you to record your actions inside a workbook and save it to a script. The saved script can then be integrated with Power Automate and scheduled to run automatically or integrate with a larger flow. Office Scripts will be available as a public preview by the end of the year.

Security

New AI-powered features make it easy for you to secure your organization’s valuable assets while empowering employees to collaborate freely.

Microsoft Authenticator

Any customer with any Azure AD plan, including a free plan, can now use the Microsoft Authenticator app for secure, passwordless access to both Microsoft and non-Microsoft apps. Passwords continue to be the weakest link in cybersecurity. With Azure AD and Microsoft Authenticator, enterprises can go passwordless for a great user experience and lower support costs while also implementing two-factor or multi-factor authentication (MFA) for greater security. Deploying MFA reduces the risk of phishing and other identity-based attacks by 99.9 percent and is the best thing you can do to improve your security. Customers with more than 150 seats can also now contact Microsoft to set up the capability via FastTrack.

New value in Azure AD

Azure AD Cloud Provisioning now makes it easier to move identities to the cloud by eliminating the need for an on-premises sync server though a lightweight on-premises agent. This enables provisioning from multiple, disconnected on-premises Active Directory (AD) forests and harnesses the power of the cloud to tackle common directory challenges like sync complexity and data transformation logic. This capability addresses one of the top needs for large enterprise customers that manage complex organizations or mergers and acquisitions and enables greater availability and decreases implementation and operation costs.

Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

Microsoft Defender ATP endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities are now available in preview for Mac OS devices. We’ll be adding support for Linux servers next. This is part of our commitment to extending multi-platform coverage in our threat protection solutions. Our customers depend on Microsoft for world-class endpoint protection and EDR capabilities for Windows, and most large organizations manage a complex mix of technology platforms, including several operating systems. They need coverage for the full breadth of their environment. This ongoing investment gives them the breadth of coverage they need, with a single unified view for administrators and security operations professionals, enabling enterprise-wide investigation and response to security incidents.

Application Guard for Office

Now available in private preview, Application Guard for Office provides hardware-level and container-based protection against potentially malicious Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. It utilizes Microsoft Defender ATP to establish whether a document is either malicious or trusted.

Compliance

Simplify and automate risk management with new innovations that use AI as a force multiplier to keep you one step ahead of the increasingly complex compliance requirements and ever-evolving insider threats.

Insider Risk Management

A staggering 53 percent of organizations have experienced an insider attack in the last 12 months. The effort required to identify these risks and violations is not trivial, and it requires effective collaboration across security, human resources (HR), and legal—as well as a balanced approach across privacy and risk management. Today, we announced Insider Risk Management in Microsoft 365 to help organizations quickly identify and remediate insider threats, risks, and code of conduct policy violations across Office, Windows, Azure and third-party apps such as HR systems. Insider Risk Management leverages the Microsoft Graph and other services to intelligently correlate multiple signals to identify hidden patterns and potential risks, and provide real-time insight into file activity, communications sentiment, and abnormal user behaviors. Insider Risk Management includes a set of configurable playbooks tailored specifically for risks—such as digital IP theft and confidentiality breach—to help you effectively identify threats and take action. We also designed for privacy, so display names for risky users can be anonymized by default at early stages of investigation.

Compliance Score

It’s more important than ever to have the knowledge and tools you need to work across compliance and risk management teams to effectively assess and monitor risks. To help you implement more effective data protection controls, we’re announcing the public preview of Microsoft Compliance Score, which enables you to simplify and automate risk assessments. With Microsoft Compliance Score, you can now continuously assess and monitor data protection controls, get clear guidance on how to improve the score, and leverage the built-in control mapping to scale your compliance efforts across regulations and standards.

Even if you’re not an expert in complex regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or ISO 27001, you can still quickly learn the actions needed for compliance and contribute towards progress. We also introduced new assessments for California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and for other GDPR-style regulations. Compliance Score is available now in public preview for all Microsoft 365 enterprise plans in the Microsoft 365 compliance center.

Management

With new management innovations, Microsoft 365 puts the cloud and AI to work to help you set-up, secure, monitor, and manage all your devices.

Microsoft Endpoint Manager

Microsoft Endpoint Manager is an integrated solution to centrally and securely manage all the endpoints in your technology estate. Bringing together Microsoft Intune and System Center Configuration Manager functionality and data—plus new intelligent actions and analytics—Endpoint Manager delivers seamless, end-to-end management for Windows, Android and Apple devices, apps, and policies without the complexity of a migration or disruption to productivity. Look for Microsoft Endpoint Manager features and experiences to appear in the product over the coming months. And, to help ensure that all our customers are able to take advantage of Microsoft Endpoint Manager, we’re making Intune available to our existing SCCM customers for Windows PC management. Starting December 1, 2019, you can co-manage these devices in Microsoft Endpoint Manager, and start using cloud-powered features like Autopilot and Desktop Analytics.

Microsoft Productivity Score

Microsoft Productivity Score focuses on two areas: the Employee experience and the Technology experience. Both provide visibility into how your organization works, insights to identify where you can enable improved experiences, and actions you can take to update skills and systems—so everyone can do their best work.

The Employee experience shows you how Microsoft 365 is helping to create a productive and engaged workforce. By quantifying how people are collaborating on content, working from anywhere, developing a meeting culture, and communicating with each other, you can see the different ways that work gets done. Meanwhile, the Technology experience provides insights by assessing policies, device settings, and hardware and application performance within the organizational environment and recommends actions in Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

Managed Meeting Rooms

Productive meetings are essential to success in the modern workplace. Coupled with the rise in remote collaboration, business leaders increasingly associate more effective meetings with having the right meeting room technology and environment. Today, we’re announcing a private preview of Managed Meeting Rooms from Microsoft, a new offer for managing meeting rooms. This cloud-based IT management and security monitoring service ensures that Teams meeting rooms are secured, up to date, and proactively monitored for a great in-room experience. To date, we’ve been working with more than 100 customers to manage more than 1,500 meeting rooms. Now, a private preview is opening this experience to more of you! If you’re interested in participating, let us know.

Global reader

You told us you want to improve your security posture by scoping admin permissions to only those needed to do their jobs. In fact, this is one of our top customer requests. We’re announcing new admin roles in Azure AD and the Microsoft 365 admin center to help you reduce the number of Global admins in your organization. For example, the Global reader role lets an admin view information across Microsoft 365, but does not allow the admin to change any settings or data. Now you can assign the Global reader role to admins in your organization to support reporting, planning, audits, and investigations, without having to grant a higher level of privileges than is necessary. The Global reader role can also be combined with other administrative roles (for example, Exchange admin) to more granularly control and scope the assignment of admin privileges in your organization.

Onboarding Hub

You also told us that you want guidance from Microsoft for improving security and increasing admin efficiency. The Onboarding Hub, in the Microsoft 365 admin center’s setup area, includes new experiences to help you discover, learn about, and use features across Microsoft 365, including Azure AD and other admin portals such as the Security and Compliance Center. We provide intelligent recommendations—based on your current configuration and admin activities—to help you improve your security posture, maintain compliance with data regulations, keep apps up to date, and reduce costs.

New recommendations in the Microsoft 365 admin center (admin.microsoft.com).

Using the Global reader role to access the Onboarding Hub is a powerful and safe way to perform planning and auditing activities for Microsoft 365, as a Global reader can view and assess the recommendations, learn about implementation steps and user impact, and see current administrative assignments without making any tenant or configuration changes.

Office 365 Groups

Office 365 Groups is the membership service that powers collaboration and drives teamwork across Microsoft 365. It’s a core underpinning of more than 20 applications, including Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, Yammer, Microsoft Stream, and more. We’re pleased to announce a number of improvements to the Groups admin experience with new lifecycle management and compliance capabilities, including the ability to quickly create teams for a group, browse and restore deleted groups, edit the group email alias, and use sensitivity labels. You can also enable self-service group creation and management, which empowers users to create teams and Yammer channels that are controlled with guardrails and policies set by IT.

Send us your feedback

Every innovation we make with Microsoft 365, the world’s productivity cloud, is designed to help you and your organization unlock new forms of productivity to achieve more. We’re excited to share these new features with you, and look forward to your feedback and insights.

Posted on November 12, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

The new Microsoft Project rolls out to customers worldwide

With Microsoft 365, the world’s productivity cloud, we’re using the power of the cloud to help people and organizations achieve more. Last year, we shared our new vision for work management designed specifically to help teams collaborate on projects more efficiently and achieve more together. Today, we’re announcing a major step toward achieving this vision with the general availability of the new Microsoft Project along with a new subscription plan!

Collaborating in teams and projects has become an integral part of our work experience. Businesses increasingly rely on project teams to advance strategic initiatives, drive change, and solve tough problems. But keeping projects on track isn’t easy, especially when teams are working on multiple workstreams to achieve aggressive goals on tight deadlines.

The new Project is designed to be both simple and powerful, so anyone can get started quickly and take control of any project right away.

A fresh new experience

Project offers a redesigned user experience that is simple and intuitive. Teams can quickly add new members and set up tasks, and then easily switch between grids, boards, or timeline (Gantt) charts to track progress. And because Project is part of the Microsoft 365 family, project teams can save time and do more with built-in connections to familiar apps like Microsoft Teams and Office.

Collaboration made easy

Designed to do much more than just track progress, Project works with Teams to support collaboration and make it easy to manage all aspects of a team project, including file sharing, chats, meetings, and much more. Team members in scattered locations can even edit tasks simultaneously, so they can get more done together, no matter where they are. To help teams stay on track, Project offers an automated scheduling engine based on effort, duration, and resources.

Project with Teams.

Coauthoring in Project.

Insights at your fingertips

The new Project provides greater visibility into your projects and powerful tools to help you anticipate future needs. Create stunning interactive dashboards in Power BI, so you can visualize every aspect of each project at a glance. Get the big picture view of all your projects across your organization with the visual, interactive Roadmap feature.

Project data in a Power BI dashboard.

Extensible platform

Built on the Microsoft Power Platform, Project enables you to quickly connect to the apps and services you already use, and to create custom desktop and mobile experiences to meet the specific needs of every project team. Easy to use tools make it simple to create automated workflow processes that streamlines compliance and increases efficiency. Do all this and more with the confidence that comes with knowing you are building on the powerful security and compliance capabilities of Azure—the world’s most trusted enterprise cloud.

Introducing a new Microsoft Project plan for all users

As part of this launch, we’re also excited to announce a new subscription plan: Project Plan 1.

Project Plan 1 is for teams that need the essential capabilities of managing task-oriented projects like assigning tasks and dependencies and scheduling and tracking project work using lists, boards, and timelines. At just $10 per user per month, this subscription is an ideal way to get started with Project.

Project Plan 1 joins our current subscription offerings, Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium, now renamed to Project Plan 3 and Project Plan 5 respectively. Customers using Project Online can continue to do so with confidence knowing that we’re committed to your success no matter which Project service you choose.

The rollout of the new Project began in mid-October. If you already have a Project subscription plan, you should receive a notification inviting you to try the new Project experience. If you don’t have a Project subscription yet, we invite you to either learn more or try out Project Plan 1 today!*

What’s next?

Looking forward, we will release more exciting capabilities in the new Project, including resource management, budget analysis, and time and expense tracking. These powerful features will enable you to streamline more complex initiatives and help your business maximize ROI.

As we continue to innovate with the new Project, we rely on customers, like you, to help shape the direction of future releases. You can reach us via the Feedback button in the new Project UserVoice or through your Microsoft representative, to share your feedback and ideas on how Project meets your needs today and into the future.

Visit the Project blog on Tech Community and follow Microsoft 365 on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook for our latest news.

Microsoft Project

Streamline project, resource, and portfolio management with Microsoft Project to help you keep track of projects successfully.

See products and pricing

Frequently asked questions

Q. How does new Project compare to Microsoft Planner?

A. Planner remains the starting point for individuals and teams to collaborate on tasks. Many teams find that they need more power—like tracking task dependencies and scheduling—and the new Project is the right step up for them. Planner and the new Project have a similar look and feel, so that teams can move between both tools easily.

Q. Can I continue to use Project desktop app?

A. Absolutely, you can continue to rely on the full power of the Project desktop app.

Q. Does Project Plan 3 and Project Plan 5 include Project Plan 1 capabilities?

A. Yes, both Project Plan 3 and Project Plan 5 will include the Project Plan 1 capabilities.

*Plan 1 is available for purchase starting October 29, 2019 in the U.S. and select international markets. It will be available for purchase starting mid-November in other international markets (except for France and South Korea).

Posted on November 12, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Tune in to the biggest ‘Inside Xbox’ episode of the year Nov. 14

Summary

Inside Xbox will be jam-packed with news for all gamers, including 12 games from Xbox Game Studios
Watch live this Thursday, November 14 on Mixer, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter
The X019 celebration will continue live from London on Friday and Saturday with online programming

This week, we’ll be kicking off X019, our global celebration
of all things Xbox, with a special episode of Inside Xbox live from London on Thursday,
November 14, at 12 p.m. PT / 3 p.m. ET / 8 p.m. GMT. We’re incredibly
excited to be in London this week with our local community and those joining us
online from around the world. We resurrected our X0 event last year because
bringing everyone together to celebrate our shared love of games is very important
for us and, more importantly, our community.

Inside Xbox will be jam-packed with news for all gamers, including 12 games from Xbox Game Studios. Yes, that includes brand new game reveals, plus big news for Xbox Game Pass, Project xCloud and much more. Inside Xbox will welcome representatives to our stage from Rare, Obsidian, Ninja Theory, inXile, Mojang, and Xbox Publishing to name a few. Fans will also get to see what our friends at Respawn Entertainment, Annapurna Interactive, Devolver Digital, and other studios are working on. We can’t spoil the surprises just yet, but we can’t wait to show all our fans what we have in store.

The X019 celebration will continue live from London on
Friday and Saturday with online programming (including panels, Let’s Play
sessions, and much more) that celebrates and expands upon the announcements
from Thursday’s episode of Inside Xbox.

Watch live this Thursday on Mixer,
Twitch,
YouTube,
Facebook,
and Twitter,
or check out highlights and the full show on-demand after it airs. Inside Xbox
is also available with American Sign
Language (ASL) for the hearing-impaired, Audio Descriptions for the
visually-impaired, and is subtitled in Spanish,
French, Brazilian Portuguese and German.

For more on Inside Xbox and X019,
including show times and ticket, visit the Official
X019 hub.

Posted on November 11, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

CVP James Phillips: Our vision for the Microsoft customer data platform

Empowering organizations everywhere to gain insight from all their data sources and deliver personalized customer engagement

There is a fundamental change occurring across industries and organizations: Data now comes from everywhere and everything. As customers have access to more content, purchasing channels, and brand options than before, the touchpoints become exponential—every website visit, use of a product, and interaction with a customer service representative creates an observation or generates data. But this data is often siloed across multiple systems and organizational departments, making it difficult to gain a single source of truth.

With such an overload of information and choices available, organizations must demonstrate they both understand and value their customers. To this end, we’ve been working to bring customer experiences to the forefront of the business conversation with a new set of intelligent applications with our modern, unified, intelligent, and adaptable business applications. Today, I’d like to dig into our vision and strategy for Microsoft’s customer data platform—a critically important investment from Microsoft. Specifically, how it is helping organizations overcome data silos and leverage artificial intelligence to guide decisions and empower organizations to take meaningful actions for their business.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights: Microsoft’s customer data platform

Unify all your customer data across the full range of sources to get a single view of customers. Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP) is an intuitive and flexible solution to unlock insights and power personalized customer experiences.

Historically, the customer interaction with a brand ended the moment they completed the purchase and walked out the door—limiting an organization’s understanding of why or how its customers are using its products and services. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables organizations to gain the most comprehensive view of their customers by unifying data across diverse sources—be it transactional, behavioral, or observational data—as well as uniquely enriching profiles with market insights and real-time product usage.

From data analysts to marketing, sales, and service professionals, every employee in an organization can leverage AI-driven insights. These include churn risk, customer LTV, and recommended next best action, to power business processes across the customer journey that help boost personalization and build richer relationships.

The Microsoft CDP enables breakthrough experiences for customers while maintaining the strictest compliance and security standards so that all customer data is securely managed and adheres to GDPR regulations. Built on a hyper-scale Microsoft Azure platform, the application allows organizations to run powerful analytical capabilities using Microsoft AI and Azure-based machine learning models. Customer Insights can easily extend and customize with the Microsoft Power Platform for even richer data processing and customizations. Customers can benefit from the Microsoft partner ecosystem for development of custom applications and solutions to fit specific industry or business needs.

Let’s look at a few organizations using our CDP to deliver business outcomes and rich customer experiences:

Empowering organizations worldwide

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) works tirelessly in over 190 countries and territories to save the lives of millions of children. As private donors and volunteers are increasingly hard to find and retain, UNICEF Netherlands found that personally engaging supporters increased their overall commitment to the organization. Key details on donors, such as their contact information, philanthropic interests, and donation history, were housed in disparate data silos, making it difficult to gain a unified view of the donor base and personalize interactions at scale. To solve this problem, the team adopted Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to quickly and easily combine data from multiple sources, analyze the data to derive insights, and activate the insights via marketing and communication channels. Customer Insights’ out-of-the-box interoperability with Dynamics 365 Marketing helps the team create and optimize marketing campaigns on-the-fly, enabling UNICEF to better develop a customer lifetime value model, which will help it identify and optimize engagement with high-impact donors. Learn more in the UNICEF video below.

American Electric Power (AEP)—a competitive retail energy solutions company serving more than 400,000 residential, small-business, and commercial customers nationwide—is using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to deliver efficient and sustainable energy solutions to customers. Previously, AEP faced cumbersome manual processes that required lots of analysis and input to piece together various customer information for a holistic view of its customer, which was both timely and costly. With a cloud-first approach, using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, AEP can now easily migrate large data sets across various systems of record into a single, unified customer profile. As a result, AEP can better understand its customer needs, identify gaps in product offerings, and ensure both front and back-end operations are focused and efficient to deliver quality, tailored experiences to its customers. Learn more in the AEP video below.

What’s next?

Thus far, we’ve seen great momentum and impact resulting from the customer data platform and how businesses are evolving customer engagement and experiences. Looking ahead, we will continue to innovate on the platform and plan to deliver more opportunities and features in the coming months.

Posted on November 11, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Democratizing agriculture intelligence: introducing Azure FarmBeats

For an industry that started 12,000 years ago, there is a lot of unpredictability and imprecision in agriculture. To be predictable and precise, we need to align our actions with insights gathered from data. Last week at Microsoft Ignite, we launched the preview of Azure FarmBeats, a purpose-built, industry-specific solution accelerator built on top of Azure to enable actionable insights from data.

With AgriTechnica 2019 starting today, more than 450,000 attendees from 130 countries are gathering to experience innovations in the global agriculture industry. We wanted to take this opportunity to share more details about Azure FarmBeats.

Azure FarmBeats is a business-to-business offering available in Azure Marketplace. It enables aggregation of agriculture datasets across providers and generation of actionable insights by building artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) models based on fused datasets. So, agribusinesses can focus on their core value-add rather than the undifferentiated heavy lifting of data engineering.

Figure 1: Overview of Azure FarmBeats

With the preview of Azure FarmBeats you can:

Assess farm health using vegetation index and water index based on satellite imagery.
Get recommendations on how many sensors to use and where to place them.
Track farm conditions by visualizing ground data collected by sensors from various vendors.
Scout farms using drone imagery from various vendors.
Get soil moisture maps based on the fusion of satellite and sensor data.
Gain actionable insights by building AI or ML models on top of fused datasets.
Build or augment your digital agriculture solution by providing farm health advisories.

As an example, here is how a farm populated with data appears in Azure FarmBeats:

Figure 2: Boundary, sensor locations, and sensor readings for a farm

Figure 3: Drone imagery and model-generated precision maps (soil moisture, sensor placement)

For a real-world example of how it works, take a look at our partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). In a pilot, USDA is using Azure FarmBeats to collect data from multiple sources, such as sensors, drones, and satellites, and feeding it into cloud-based AI models to get a detailed picture of conditions on the farm.

Azure FarmBeats includes the following components:

Datahub: An API layer that enables aggregation, normalization, and contextualization of various agriculture datasets across providers. You can leverage the following data providers:

Available now:

o Sensor: Davis Instruments, Teralytic

o Drone imagery: DJI, EarthSense, senseFly, SlantRange

Coming soon: DTN, Pessl

Datahub is designed as an API platform and we are working with many more providers – sensor, satellite, drone, weather, farm equipment – to integrate with FarmBeats, so you have more choice while building your solution.

Accelerator: A sample solution, built on top of Datahub, that jumpstarts your user interface (UI) and model development. This web application leverages APIs to demonstrate visualization of ingested sensor data as charts and visualization of model output as maps. For example, you can use this to quickly create a farm and easily get a vegetation index map or a sensor placement map for that farm.

While this preview is the culmination of years of research work and working closely with more than a dozen agriculture majors, it is just the beginning. It would not have been possible without the early feedback and validation from these organizations, and we take this opportunity to extend our sincere gratitude.

Azure FarmBeats is offered at no additional charge and you pay only for the Azure resources you use. You can get started by installing it from Azure Marketplace in Azure Portal. In addition, you can:

With Azure FarmBeats preview, we are pioneering a cloud platform to empower every person and every organization in agriculture to achieve more, by harnessing the power of IoT, cloud, and AI. We are delighted to have you with us on this global transformational journey and look forward to your feedback on the preview.

Posted on November 11, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

SRL Diagnostics-Microsoft consortium creates new AI tool to diagnose cervical cancer faster

A cytopathologist at SRL Diagnostics’ Central Reference Laboratory in Mumbai, screens a Pap smear sample for the screening of cervical cancer under his microscope. His trained eyes work with an apparent effortlessness. However, there is an unspoken urgency in his actions as he strives to complete the set of samples for the day. Along with his team of five members, he screens about 200 slides for cervical cancer every day, apart from another 100 slides for diagnosing other types of cancers.

SRL Diagnostics, the largest diagnostics laboratory company in India, has been witnessing an increase in the demand for cervical cancer screening.

According to estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO), cervical cancer is the fourth most frequent cancer among women worldwide. India accounts for 16% of the global burden of the disease. Unlike breast cancer, which is more prevalent in urban India, cervical cancer is frequent in the rural regions of the country where literacy and awareness of the fatal disease is low. Effective screening and early detection are the key measures to reduce its incidence.

“The proportion of cytopathologists in India is very low with respect to the number of patients. At SRL Diagnostics, we receive more than 100,000 Pap smear samples every year and there are only a few trained cytopathologists who are supposed to examine such slides. What’s more, nearly 98% of these samples are normal and it’s only the remaining 2% that requires further intervention. We were looking for ways to ensure our cytopathologists were able to find those 2% abnormal samples faster,” says Dr. Arnab Roy, Technical Lead – New Initiatives & Knowledge Management, SRL Diagnostics.

In September 2018, SRL Diagnostics partnered with Microsoft to create an AI Network for Pathology to ease the burden of cytopathologists and histopathologists. The idea was to co-create an AI-powered API that would do the first-level check and offload normal slides to help cytopathologists spend more time on what matters most – slides that show signs of abnormality.

“SRL Diagnostics has always been committed to championing innovation in the field of clinical diagnostics in India and has led the industry by embracing change as early adopters of many in vitro diagnostics technologies. Our partnership with Microsoft to co-create solutions having the potential to generate both social and business value, is another first-of-its-kind effort in the Indian diagnostics industry,” says Arindam Haldar, CEO, SRL Diagnostics.

“We looked at various elements of histopathology and homed in on the early detection of cervical cancer because it is a leading killer disease for women and cervical smear based screening, which is the gold standard, is patchy in implementation across the planet. We thought it was a good opportunity to apply AI and automation to drive efficiency and save lives,” says Prashant Gupta, Program Director, Microsoft Azure Global Engineering.

Building the cervical cancer image detection API

Developing the Cervical Cancer Image Detection API required the AI algorithm to assess smear tile images (region of interest) as a trained cytopathologist would examine them. To enable this, cytopathologists studied digitally scanned versions of Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) slides manually and marked their observations, which were used as training data for the AI model.

Initially, SRL Diagnostics appointed one cytopathologist to annotate the image slides. Each WSI comprises as many as 1,800 tile images and it was difficult for a single individual to interpret a large quantity of image tiles from each slide in ways that can be consumed by the AI algorithm. And, then, there was the challenge of subjectivity too.

“Different cytopathologists examine different elements in a smear slide in a unique manner even if the overall diagnosis is the same. This is the subjectivity element in the whole process, which many a time is linked to the experience of the expert,” reveals Dr. Roy.

A digitally scanned version of a typical cytopathology slide — A digitally scanned version of a Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) slide, which is used to train the AI model.

“We wanted to create an AI algorithm that could identify areas that everybody was looking at and create a consensus on the areas assessed,” adds Manish Gupta, Principal Applied Researcher, Microsoft Azure Global Engineering, who worked closely with the team at SRL Diagnostics to develop the Cervical Cancer Image Detection API.

The project was then expanded to include five cytopathologists across multiple labs and different locations. Their efforts resulted in the annotation of thousands of tile images of cervical smear, each comprising about 300-400 cells. The issue of subjectivity was addressed by creating discordant and concordant notes on each sample image. The images for which annotations were found to be discordant – that is if they were viewed differently by three team members – were sent to senior cytopathologists for final analysis.

The collaboration has already started showing results with the first API for screening cervical cancer ready for internal preview at SRL Diagnostics.

As part of the new workflow, the large digital WSI scans from Device Image Scanners are uploaded to Azure where the Cervical Cancer Image Detection API runs. The AI-powered Cervical Cancer Image Detection API can quickly screen liquid-based cytology slide images for detection of cervical cancer in the early stages and return insights to pathologists in labs.

The AI model can now differentiate between normal and abnormal smear slides with accuracy and is currently under validation in labs. It can also classify smear slides based on the seven-subtypes of cervical cytopathological scale. The classification includes interpretations ranging between normal and the pre-cancerous to cancerous stages. The purported use of the model lies in assisting cytopathologists to review fewer areas, 20 as of now, on a whole slide liquid-based cytology image and validate the positive cases thus bringing in greater efficiency and speeding up the initial screening process.

“The API has the potential of increasing the productivity of a cytopathology section by about four times. In a future scenario of automated slide preparation with assistance from AI, cytopathologists can do a job in two hours what would earlier take about eight hours!” exclaims Dr. Roy.

Posted on November 11, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Nov. 19 Microsoft Education TweetMeet to focus on computer science and future-ready skills

Announcing the November 19 TweetMeet

When you think of the Class of 2030, their future jobs will be significantly different from the ones we know today. Microsoft Education research shows that to be life-ready, today’s students need to acquire different skills. Of all future jobs, an estimated 70% will require skills in the field of STEM, coding, computer science, data analytics, artificial intelligence and computational thinking. In addition to these, students also need the types of skill that focus on communication, collaboration, creativity, critical and analytical thinking, in addition to social-emotional well-being, self-regulation, resilience and empathic awareness.

That’s why it’s important to rethink education and empower students as they prepare for their future.

TweetMeet on Future-Ready Skills & Computer Science starting at 10 a.m. PST

This month’s TweetMeet is all about the future of teaching and learning. Why do today’s students need STEM, coding and other computer science skills to align to the workforce? What role do social-emotional well-being and self-awareness play?

Hosted by 15 educators who are extremely passionate and experienced in the topic, this Twitter conversation invites you to share and learn from the best ideas, tips and resources. Our hosts will provide you with ideas how you can bring Future-Ready Skills & Computer Science into your classrooms while keeping your students inspired and engaged.

With all this in mind, we welcome you to a 75-minute TweetMeet on Tuesday, November 19 at 10am PST.

TweetMeet Fan? Show it off on your Twitter profile!

Show your passion for this month’s Future-Ready Skills & Computer Science-themed TweetMeet by uploading this month’s #MSFTEduChat Twitter Header Photo as a banner on your own Twitter profile.

Twitter Header Photos are available in many languages and time zones.

Create your own TweetMeet Friend Card

Another way to share your enthusiasm about Future-Ready Skills, Computer Science and the TweetMeets in general is to create a TweetMeet Friend Card. Share your own version of this image anytime anywhere, for example when introducing yourself at the start of a TweetMeet. Just follow the steps in the TweetMeet Friend Card PowerPoint.

Here’s an example:

Looking back on the October MSFTEduChat on STEM and NASA

We captured highlights for this TweetMeet event in a new @MicrosoftEDU Twitter Moment. There’s even a comprehensive collection of all tweets from this event in this Wakelet Collection.

Welcoming TweetMeet newcomers

Do you know someone who’s new to the TweetMeets? Our brand-new You can join a #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet video is especially created for newcomers, so please share it with friends and colleagues who might be interested to join:

Video for Future-Ready Skills & Computer Science – #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet on November 19

For educators who are totally new to Twitter and who could use an introduction, we recommend the Twitter EDU tutorial ebook by David Truss @datruss.

Why join the #MSFTEduChat TweetMeets?

TweetMeets are monthly recurring Twitter conversations about themes relevant to educators, facilitated by Microsoft Education. The purpose of these events is to help professionals in education to learn from each other and inspire their students while they are preparing for their future. The TweetMeets also nurture personal learning networks among educators from across the globe.

Former host James Kieft wrote the following blog post describing why educators should consider participating in Twitter chats, and how to get started: Twitter chats explained.

When and how can I join?

Join us Tuesday, November 19 from 10:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. PST on Twitter using the hashtags #FutureReadySkills, #CS, #MSFTEduChat and #MicrosoftEDU. Be sure to double-check your own local event time. You can find the event time for 215 countries with this time zone announcer.

Our next recommendation for you is to set up Twitter dashboard TweetDeck and add columns for the hashtags and for your favorite educators. If you are new to TweetDeck, then check out this brief TweetDeck tutorial by Marjolein Hoekstra.

When a tweet appears that you want to respond to, press the retweet button and type your comments.

Additional tips are offered in this animated GIF that you’re most welcome to share with newcomers:

Too busy to join at event time? No problem!

From our monthly surveys we know that you may be in class at event time, busy doing other things or may even be asleep – well, no problem! All educators are most welcome to join any time after the event. Simply look at the questions below and respond to these at a day and time that suit you best.

You can also schedule your tweets in advance. In that case, be sure to include the entire question in your tweet and always mention the hashtag #MSFTEduChat so that everyone knows to which question in which conversation you are responding.

To allow everyone to prepare for the event, from now on we provide the question timings as a text table:

PST	#	#MSFTEduChat TweetMeet question timings
10:00am	Event begins	Welcome. Please introduce yourself. Use #MSFTEduChat.
10:04	1	What do Future-Ready Skills mean to you and your students? Why are they important?
10:18	2	How do you design learning experiences to promote Future-Ready Skills in your subject?
10:32	3	What place do Computer Science and Future-Ready Skills have in your curriculum?
10:46	4	How can any teacher get started with Future-Ready Skills and Computer Science? Share ideas, tools and resources.
11:00	5	What are you willing to do tomorrow to prepare your students for the future?
11:15	Event closes	Announcing the next event and Participant Survey.

SuperWakelet: resources curated by this month’s hosts

Wakelet is a useful web service to bookmark, curate and annotate resources, images, tweets and other content.

We’ve invited our hosts to share their personal favorite resources and introduce their resource collections with a Flipgrid video. Find all of these resources in our new Future-Ready Skills & Computer Science SuperWakelet, live-embedded here:

Introducing our hosts

Please meet the 15 hosts for this month’s TweetMeet. After going through weeks of preparation for this TweetMeet, they are thrilled to engage with you on their favorite topic: Future-Ready Skills & Computer Science.

Check out all the hosts, see what they are tweeting about and consider following them:

https://twitter.com/TweetMeet/lists/msfteduchat-2019-11/members

List of host names and their profiles

Adrien Rouxel @Adrien_Rouxel (Development Manager at Epitech, MIE Expert, passionate about technology and education. Developing creativity and digital literacy among students – Montpellier, France)
Aedamar Frawley @aedamar_frawley (MIE Expert, Mathematics Advisor, Mathematics, English & Coding Teacher, Designer and Facilitator of CPD – Sligo, Ireland)
Becca Gratz @regratz87 (Computer Science Facilitator (Elementary), MIE Expert, Integrator of MinecraftEdu & Scratch, Driven to change education through Computer Science – Loudoun County, VA, USA)
Daniela Bunea @DanielaArghir (Teacher of English as a Foreign Language, MIE Expert, National Geographic Certified Educator, eTwinning and Scientix Ambassador, passionate about STEAM – Sibiu, Romania)
Eli Sheldon @elisheldon (Computational Thinking Specialist, HS Computer Science Teacher, Founder @ShowcaseEdu student portfolio platform, formerly @Microsoft – Seattle WA, USA)
Fatma Bouaziz @hadoulti (Computer Science Teacher, Europe Code Week Ambassador, European Robotic Week Coordinator, CoSpaces Edu Ambassador, Flipgrid Ambassador, MIE Expert, Minecraft Global Mentor, Skype Master Teacher – Sfax, Tunisia)
Henar Lanchas @turtleforward50 (Computer Science Teacher & IT Coordinator. MIE Expert. STEM (STEAM) passionate. Teaching my students to be good problem solvers. – Madrid, Spain)
Jennifer Brown @Techisforgirls (Technology Resource Teacher, NCCE Professional Learning Specialist, MIE Expert, Skype Master Teacher, Code.org CSD Facilitator, Wonder Workshop Wonder Squad member – Hillsborough County, FL, USA)
Kimberly Mecham @kimberlymecham (School leader, MIE Expert, World Affairs Council Fellow. Obsessed with the intersection of education, leadership, and innovation. Passionate about equity in education – Bellevue, WA, USA)
Maria Sorrentino @MraSorrentino (STEM Teacher, MIE Expert, MIE Trainer, MIE, Expert ICT trainer, Educator Community Influencer, eTwinner, Digital Animator, ThingLink Certified Educator, Code.org Teacher – Naples, Italy)
Marianna Tarné Éder @TarMarianna (Primary school teacher, MIE Expert, MIE Trainer, Codeweek leading teacher; I love using Teams, Minecraft, Micro:bit, and Scratch in my projects – Budapest, Hungary)
Melissa Dandy Walker @APSITMelissa (@APSUpdate @APSInstructTech Digital Learning Specialist, MIE Expert, MIE Trainer, Minecraft Global Mentor. Believer in touching hearts & empowering minds. – Atlanta, GA USA)
Mohammed Abo Hassan @mabohassan781 (English Teacher, MIE Expert, MIE Fellow, Minecraft Global Mentor, Skype Master Teacher and an EU Code Week Ambassador – Manama, Bahrain)
Phill Ruffell @phillr (Enthusiastic and passionate about the power of technology, creativity and accessibility to empower all for current and future skills. MIE Expert, Master Trainer, Skype Master Teacher, OneNote Avenger and Surface Classroom Pro. – Hertfordshire, UK)
Steve Sherman @livingmaths (MIE Expert, Skype Master Teacher, run a STEM-based NGO, coordinator of International Math Olympiad, host of online STEM interviews, take Astronauts to schools and show students why STEM is Awesome – Cape Town, South Africa)

Next month’s event: Best of 2019

The theme of December 17 will be Best of 2019. We’re very much looking forward to this event and hope you’ll spread the word!

Got questions about the #MSFTEduChat TweetMeets?

Please connect with TweetMeet organizer Marjolein Hoekstra @TweetMeet on Twitter if you have any questions about the TweetMeets or about what it takes to be a host on a future event.

Posted on November 8, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Standing up for every Dreamer

They came to the United States as children, brought into the country undocumented by parents with dreams of a better life. Many were so young when they arrived that they have no recollection of their place of birth. We call these young people Dreamers – students, employees and military soldiers who aspire to make the country where they have lived most of their lives a permanent home.

In 2012, the United States created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to protect these young people from being deported. Yet just five years later, the program was rescinded, putting close to 700,000 DACA recipients at risk of being banished from the only home they’ve ever known.

More than five dozen of these DACA recipients at risk are Microsoft employees. These young people contribute to our company and serve our customers. They help create our products, secure our services, and manage our finances. And like so many young people across our nation, they dream of making an honest living and a real difference in the communities in which they reside. Yet they now live in uncertainty.

We’ve told our Microsoft Dreamers that we will stand up for them along with all the nation’s DACA recipients. We’ll represent them in court and litigate on their behalf. That’s why we joined Princeton University and Princeton student Maria De La Cruz Perales Sanchez to file one of the three cases challenging the DACA rescission that will be heard on Nov. 12 by the United States Supreme Court. We will be there in person, along with a group of our employees, to show our support for DACA recipients.

For Microsoft, the decision to bring this case was straightforward. We believe Dreamers are worth protecting. The case speaks to the impact the rescission has on our business, company, employees and the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers across the country. It also has a broader impact on the country’s flow of talent and innovation economy, a perspective that we share with Princeton. Like all research- and innovation-focused organizations, both Microsoft and Princeton depend on the ability to attract talent from around the world. It’s essential not just to us, but also to our country’s ability to compete on the world stage.

Amidst this broader discussion, we also need to remember the individual stories of Dreamers and the contributions that they make. While the number of Dreamers is large, every number is a person and each person is an individual. In short, behind each number there is a unique and important story.

For example, one of the nation’s Dreamers is a young woman, a Microsoft service and security engineer, who was born in Mexico and brought to the U.S. at the age of 4. She thought she was an American citizen until the day, years later, when she asked her mother to sign a permission slip for a school experience in Japan. That was the day that, with tears in her eyes, her mother told her she could never leave the country because she would not be allowed to come back. Inspired by her mother’s sacrifices for her and her siblings, in 2012 she followed her passion for technology through DigiGirlz, a program supported by Microsoft YouthSpark that gives girls the opportunity to learn about careers in technology. After years of commitment, further coursework, and unending grit, she is now building the next chapter of her story at our headquarters in Redmond with our Microsoft 365 team, thanks to DACA. At a time when cyber-attacks are increasing, she is using her skills and experience to help protect our customers across the country and around the world.

Another one of our employees is a Dreamer and software engineer who was born in Tepic, Mexico, and brought to the U.S. when he was only four months old. Growing up in Los Angeles, he and his family lived close to the poverty line for most of his childhood. He excelled in school and earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from California Polytechnic State University. His talents led to multiple offers for engineering roles at top technology companies, and we are thrilled that he is now part of our software development team near Seattle. Today he works to enhance productivity and performance for Azure, the cloud platform that is empowering customers of all sizes across the country – including government agencies – to transform their work. He is part of the team that helps make this transformation possible.

There are so many more stories like those, within and beyond Microsoft. For us, this fight is not just about our employees. It’s also about the potential impact of DACA rescission on the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers, on businesses across the country, and on the innovation economy that is central to the nation’s prosperity. Roughly three-quarters of the top 25 Fortune 500 companies have confirmed that they employ Dreamers.

While we are the only company among the plaintiffs of the consolidated cases now before the Supreme Court, we know we represent employers of all sizes in making the case to uphold DACA. Last month, more than 140 companies and associations showed their support in a brief filed before the Court. They wrote about the serious harm that would be inflicted on the economy if we were to lose the contributions of Dreamers.

While the case before the Supreme Court is of fundamental importance, we also appreciate that it is insufficient in addressing the permanent needs of the nation’s Dreamer population. The only path to stability for Dreamers is a pathway to citizenship. And citizenship in this case can only come from Congress.

We also recognize that the Dreamers are one part of the broader immigration challenges we face as a nation. We are committed to constructive steps to attract and retain talent that helps fuel innovation and grow our economy for the benefit of every American. This includes reducing the green card backlog and constraints on high skilled visas. Innovation has been vital to the nation’s history. It needs to be equally fundamental to the country’s future – a future that requires creating more opportunities for those born in the United States as well as long-lasting solutions that support individuals like the Dreamers that have come as children from other nations

To read our merits brief on the case, click here.

Posted on November 8, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Shannan and Ashe became best friends in the US Army. Find out how their unlikely friendship continues at Microsoft

Just one month into her job at Microsoft, Ashe actively looked to get involved with the company’s LGBTQI+ community. That’s how she came to organize the company’s presence in the Chicago Pride parade and is helping get a GLEAM (Microsoft’s employee-led LGBTQI+ group) chapter off the ground there.

Shannan volunteers as the communications lead for another employee-led group called Military at Microsoft, which supports and creates a sense of belonging for current and former military members and their families who now work at Microsoft.

This calling to help and to be a part of a team is what drew them both to Microsoft, too.

“My manager now at Microsoft—you’d think I’d have known him my entire life,” Ashe says. “He literally said to me, ‘You don’t work for me. I work for you. You tell me what you need and how to make your job easy.’ And I was like, ‘Where am I? Like where am I?’” she laughs.

*****

We pack up our stuff and head to a park to grab a few photographs outside of the two doing what they usually do together—laughing hysterically and generally enjoying each other’s company. Shannan lingers back to talk to me as Ashe cracks a joke with the photographer.

“Honestly, I didn’t know if Ashe was going to make it,” Shannan says, choosing her words slowly now and dabbing her eyes. “I was really worried. She was just so depressed.”

“Are you crying?” Ashe yells from up ahead where she’s scouted a good location overlooking Seattle. “Dude, stop bawling—you said you’d kill me if I let you cry.”

Shannan laughs and wipes her eyes.

“I’m not!” she hollers back.

We catch up with Ashe, and I ask her if the interview was torture.

“Absolutely,” she smirks, tossing her tattooed arm across Shannan’s shoulder. “Hated every minute.”

Posted on November 8, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft works with researchers to detect and protect against new RDP exploits

On November 2, 2019, security researcher Kevin Beaumont reported that his BlueKeep honeypot experienced crashes and was likely being exploited. Microsoft security researchers collaborated with Beaumont as well as another researcher, Marcus Hutchins, to investigate and analyze the crashes and confirm that they were caused by a BlueKeep exploit module for the Metasploit penetration testing framework.

BlueKeep is what researchers and the media call CVE-2019-0708, an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in Remote Desktop Services on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft released a security fix for the vulnerability on May 14, 2019.

While similar vulnerabilities have been abused by worm malware in the past, initial attempts at exploiting this vulnerability involved human operators aiming to penetrate networks via exposed RDP services.

Microsoft had already deployed a behavioral detection for the BlueKeep Metasploit module in early September, so Microsoft Defender ATP customers had protection from this Metasploit module by the time it was used against Beaumont’s honeypot. The module, which appears to be unstable as evidenced by numerous RDP-related crashes observed on the honeypot, triggered the behavioral detection in Microsoft Defender ATP, resulting in the collection of critical signals used during the investigation.

Microsoft security signals showed an increase in RDP-related crashes that are likely associated with the use of the unstable BlueKeep Metasploit module on certain sets of vulnerable machines. We saw:

An increase in RDP service crashes from 10 to 100 daily starting on September 6, 2019, when the Metasploit module was released
A similar increase in memory corruption crashes starting on October 9, 2019
Crashes on external researcher honeypots starting on October 23, 2019

Figure 1. Increase in RDP-related service crashes when the Metasploit module was released

Coin miner campaign using BlueKeep exploit

After extracting indicators of compromise and pivoting to various related signal intelligence, Microsoft security researchers found that an earlier coin mining campaign in September used a main implant that contacted the same command-and-control infrastructure used during the October BlueKeep Metasploit campaign, which, in cases where the exploit did not cause the system to crash, was also observed installing a coin miner. This indicated that the same attackers were likely responsible for both coin mining campaigns—they have been actively staging coin miner attacks and eventually incorporated the BlueKeep exploit into their arsenal.

Our machine learning models flagged the presence of the coin miner payload used in these attacks on machines in France, Russia, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Germany, the United Kingdom, and many other countries.

Figure 2. Geographic distribution of coin miner encounters

These attacks were likely initiated as port scans for machines with vulnerable internet-facing RDP services. Once attackers found such machines, they used the BlueKeep Metasploit module to run a PowerShell script that eventually downloaded and launched several other encoded PowerShell scripts.

Figure 3. Techniques and components used in initial attempts to exploit BlueKeep

We pieced together the behaviors of the PowerShell scripts using mostly memory dumps. The following script activities have also been discussed in external researcher blogs:

Initial script downloaded another encoded PowerShell script from an attacker-controlled remote server (5.135.199.19) hosted somewhere in France via port 443.
The succeeding script downloaded and launched a series of three to four other encoded PowerShell scripts.
The final script eventually downloaded the coin miner payload from another attacker-controlled server (109.176.117.11) hosted in Great Britain.
Apart from downloading the payload, the final script also created a scheduled task to ensure the coin miner stayed persistent.

Figure 4. Memory dump of a PowerShell script used in the attacks

The final script saved the coin miner as the following file:

C:\Windows\System32\spool\svchost.exe

The coin miner connected to command-and-control infrastructure at 5.100.251.106 hosted in Israel. Other coin miners deployed in earlier campaigns that did not exploit BlueKeep also connected to this same IP address.

Defending enterprises against BlueKeep

Security signals and forensic analysis show that the BlueKeep Metasploit module caused crashes in some cases, but we cannot discount enhancements that will likely result in more effective attacks. In addition, while there have been no other verified attacks involving ransomware or other types of malware as of this writing, the BlueKeep exploit will likely be used to deliver payloads more impactful and damaging than coin miners.

The new exploit attacks show that BlueKeep will be a threat as long as systems remain unpatched, credential hygiene is not achieved, and overall security posture is not kept in check. Customers are encouraged to identify and update vulnerable systems immediately. Many of these unpatched devices could be unmonitored RDP appliances placed by suppliers and other third-parties to occasionally manage customer systems. Because BlueKeep can be exploited without leaving obvious traces, customers should also thoroughly inspect systems that might already be infected or compromised.

To this end, Microsoft customers can use the rich capabilities in Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Microsoft Defender ATP) to gain visibility on exploit activities and defend networks against attacks. On top of the behavior-based antivirus and endpoint detection and response (EDR) detections, we released a threat analytics report to help security operations teams to conduct investigations specific to this threat. We also wrote advanced hunting queries that customers can use to look for multiple components of the attack.

Talk to us

Questions, concerns, or insights on this story? Join discussions at the Microsoft Defender ATP community.

Read all Microsoft security intelligence blog posts.