Announcing Intro to Tech Skills sessions at Microsoft Build 2022!
Once again, our premier developer conference, Microsoft Build, will feature a curated collection of sessions specially created for students and those looking to learn a new tech. From May 24 through May 26, Intro to Tech Skills sessions will give you the opportunity to learn about new technologies or areas of interest, figure out which ones are right for you, learn what to expect and how to get started. You’ll get a better understanding of how developer technologies and tools work along with learning resources that can help you further your career in tech. And speaking of your career in tech, we have tips for you on that too!
Join our Intro to Tech Skills sessions and pack your developer toolkit with tools that you’ll rely on time and time again.
Session title
Description
“Intro to Tech Skills”? Tell me more!
Find out about resources, programs, and upcoming sessions as hosts @SalmanMKC and @madebygps welcome you to 2 days of learning and fun for students and all learners.
A peek inside the developer’s toolkit
Get an overview of the common tools that developers use to write and share their code. This session covers the basics of Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and more.
So many programming languages, so little time–which should I learn?
Hear a panel of experts discuss a variety of popular programming languages including C#, TypeScript, Python, and low-code programming.
“Hello, World!” in 3 programming languages
New coders, get a taste for a few popular programming languages and even see them in action.
A guided journey into AI
Learn the differences between AI, machine learning, and deep learning along with popular practices and tools.
Driving inclusion and accessibility with dev tooling and AI services
Learn how you can help build the future of inclusion and accessibility with actions you can take to incorporate inclusivity into your product.
Tackling the technical interview
Prepare for your technical interviews–hear the questions and coding problems you’ll likely encounter in your interview.
Microsoft technologies and the dev community: Who’s building what? Get inspired!
Check out real-life scenarios created by students, MVPs, and Cloud Advocates with Microsoft Azure, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365.
Build your own resume website and stand out to recruiters
Create an impactful resume and create a website in this 2-in-1 session; come away with a resume published on your new website that you can immediately point potential employers to.
The New Developer’s Guide to the Cloud
Kickstart your cloud learning journey. We’ll look at cloud fundamentals from .NET to Java to Node.js to Python so you can start building on the cloud immediately.
We also have fun student-focused activities outside the sessions:
Minecraft time machine—build and share your vision of what your community or school will look like in 100 years!
AI match game—play our version of the popular card matching game using Azure Cognitive Services to analyze the tile images and identify landmarks, animals, and words, but here’s a warning—unlike the classic game, the pairs of images in our game are not exact matches!
Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge— Join the fun and compete against your peers while you learn new technology using Microsoft Learn‘s self-paced learning environment.
And make sure to tune in to the 2022 Imagine Cup World Championship on May 24 at 8:30AM PT during the keynote of Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella where you’ll find out which of the 3 remaining teams will take home the trophy and USD100,000!
Every year, Red Hat Summit features inspirational and actionable content, industry-shaping news, and innovative practices from customers and partners. From hybrid cloud, containers, and cloud-native app platforms to management, automation, and more, speakers from around the world, across industries, and sectors join to share how they’re using open tools to build better solutions for themselves and their customers. Microsoft is proud to sponsor and participate in Red Hat Summit 2022 which brings together communities who are passionate about open source in the enterprise.
Business is changing, and keeping up with fluctuations in markets and customer demands is not easy. Modernization is essential. Technologies like containers, Kubernetes, and hybrid cloud architectures are key components that provide the scalability, innovation, and flexibility you need to maintain a competitive edge, grow market share, and increase margins. Microsoft and Red Hat offer you the tools to reduce complexity and simplify your environment, innovate faster, deliver high-quality customer experiences, and expand and scale your infrastructure in any direction so you can be a disruptor in your industry.
Today, we’re announcing multiple enhancements to our Red Hat on Azure offerings that help customers accelerate their digital transformation with the power of the cloud. This includes the broad availability of our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure and Red Hat Open Shift Support for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.
Detailed updates include:
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure is now available to customers in North America with global availability coming soon. The Ansible Automation Platform 2.2 features are available for customers in the tech preview. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure enables IT organizations to quickly automate and scale in the cloud, with the flexibility to deliver any application, anywhere, without additional overhead or complexity. Achieve zero to automation in minutes by deploying the managed application directly from the Azure Marketplace.
Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance is now supported on Red Hat OpenShift. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers who need to run their data workloads outside Azure in their own datacenters or multicloud environments, we bring trusted Azure SQL and open-source software database services to meet them where they are. This database service unifies management and delivers mission-critical performance, high availability/disaster recovery at scale. With an evergreen SQL that has no end-of-support, customers can realize the best of Azure SQL on OpenShift, in any environment. Customers can enjoy fully automated updates and patches to innovate faster and be more secure.
“Red Hat has been a strategic partner in our Azure Arc partner ecosystem in lighting up the next-gen Azure data services to run anywhere. With this support, organizations can run Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance across any environment without worrying about the infrastructure underneath. The combination of RedHat OpenShift and Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance allows customers to use the platform they know and trust to accelerate innovation with faster time to market with enterprise-grade support.”—Peter Carlin, CVP Azure Database Platform
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 will be available on Azure from May 24. With demand for edge computing continuing to grow, RHEL 9 incorporates key enhancements specifically designed to address evolving IT needs at the edge. Edge management helps teams more securely manage and scale Red Hat Enterprise Linux on distributed devices from a single interface. RHEL 9 will include support for Red Hat Update Infrastructure 4 allowing for automatic updates.
Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux 3.0 will be broadly available from May 24. Through Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux 3.0, customers can migrate their on-premises RHEL servers to Azure by bi-directionally converting existing RHEL pay-as-you-go (PAYG) VMs on Azure to bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) billing, resulting in cost savings. In its latest iteration, support for custom images has been included. Read more about how Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux for additional information.
Learn more
Visit the Microsoft Red Hat on Azure page to learn more about our offerings and join us at Red Hat Summit.
In recent years, tied to Microsoft’s mission of empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, teams from across Microsoft have launched several products and features to make technology more inclusive and accessible. Today, as part of the 12th annual Microsoft Ability Summit, we celebrate a new and expanded Inclusive Tech Lab, powerful new software features, and are unveiling Microsoft adaptive accessories designed to give people with disabilities greater access to technology.
The security landscape has become increasingly challenging and complex for our customers. Threats have grown at an alarming rate over the last year, and cybercrime is now expected to cost the world USD10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from USD3 trillion a decade ago and USD6 trillion in 2021.1
As attacks increase in scale, so must our defenses. Last year, Microsoft Security blocked over 9.6 billion malware threats and more than 35.7 billion phishing and other malicious emails. Microsoft Security is actively tracking more than 35 ransomware families and 250 unique threat actors across observed nation-state, ransomware, and criminal activities, and our technology blocks more than 900 brute force password theft attempts every second.
But technology alone is not enough to defend against cybercrime. Technology is critical, but it’s the combination of leading technologies, comprehensive threat intelligence, and highly skilled people that makes for a truly effective security posture. The challenge is that in this critical moment when cybersecurity has reached an inflection point, our nation is facing a cybersecurity talent shortage with nearly one in three—or 2.5 million—security jobs vacant in the United States,2 pushing the time of detection for a breach to an alarming 287 days.3 And, even when talent is available, access to highly skilled expertise remains a challenge.
Our expertise is now your expertise
It’s getting harder every day for organizations to build and maintain a full security team, let alone one with the ever-expanding skillset required to meet the range of today’s security demands.
That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that Microsoft is expanding our existing service capabilities under a new service category called Microsoft Security Experts. Security Experts combines expert-trained technology with human-led services to help organizations achieve more secure, compliant, and productive outcomes.
Our vision is to deliver this new category of services across security, compliance, identity, management, and privacy. The first step on that journey is offering new and expanded services for security.
Video description: Microsoft Security Experts is a line of managed security solutions that combines human-led services with expert-trained technology to help organizations achieve better security outcomes. In this brief overview video, we highlight how this new suite of services delivers solutions across Microsoft’s security, compliance, identity, management, and privacy product categories.
Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help our customers and their partners meet today’s security challenges. We secure devices, identities, apps, and clouds—the fundamental fabric of our customers’ lives—with the full scale of our comprehensive multicloud, multiplatform solutions. Plus, we understand today’s security challenges because we live this fight ourselves every single day.
Now, our world-class security expertise is your security expertise.
New managed services from Microsoft Security
With input from our incredible partner ecosystem, we’ve designed three new managed services that can help you scale your team of experts to fit your needs—without the challenges of hiring and training them.
Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting is for customers who have a robust security operations center but want Microsoft to help them proactively hunt for threats across Microsoft Defender data, including endpoints, Office 365, cloud applications, and identity. Our experts will investigate anything they find and then hand off the contextual alert information and remediation instructions so you can quickly respond. With Experts on Demand, you can consult a Microsoft expert about a specific incident, nation-state actor, or attack vector with the simple click of a button. You will also get specific recommendations to help you understand and improve your security posture. Defender Experts for Hunting will be generally available in summer 2022, and you can request to be part of the preview now.
“Defender Experts for Hunting is like the tip of an iceberg. It is supported by all of the Microsoft applications, technologies, and cloud services overlaid with security tools that connect the entire system together, then powered by machine learning.”
Video description: Bridgewater Associates goes all-in on Microsoft Defender Experts, heralding a new age in managed security services.
Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR is for customers who need to extend the capacity of their security operations center. Defender Experts for XDR is a managed extended detection and response (XDR) service that extends beyond endpoints to provide detection and response across Microsoft 365 Defender, investigating alerts and using automation and human expertise to respond to incidents alongside your team. You stay in control and reduce costs, excess noise, and manual processes. Defender Experts for XDR will move into preview in fall 2022.
“Our engineers and security team are very pleased with results and learning they get from the Defender Experts for Hunting service. Our clients are happy that we have such a robust service in place, and our management team is happy with its high return on investment and our increased security posture.”
—Chad Ergun, Chief Information Officer, DGS Law
Video description: DGS Law raises the security bar and levels the playing field with Microsoft Defender Experts.
Large enterprises looking for more comprehensive, high-touch managed services from Microsoft experts will benefit from Microsoft Security Services for Enterprise. This comprehensive, expert-led service combines proactive threat hunting and managed XDR, leveraging Microsoft’s complete security information and event management (SIEM) and XDR stack to protect all cloud environments and all platforms. Dedicated Microsoft security experts manage onboarding, daily interactions, practice modernization, and incident response for you. Microsoft Security Services for Enterprise is sold through a custom statement of work and is available today. Interested enterprise customers should contact their Account Executive to learn more.
Existing security services
Through our Microsoft Industry Solutions group, we currently offer a broad set of services for incident response and advisory. These service offerings, designed to support customers in times of crisis and to help them modernize their security practices, are delivered by Microsoft’s global team of professional services experts, and will become part of the Microsoft Security Experts portfolio. Watch the mechanics video to learn more.
Microsoft Security Services for IncidentResponse supports customers before, during, and after a breach. Incident response and recovery experts will help you remove a bad actor from your environment, remediate your defenses after a breach, and build resilience against future attacks. Our global team of experts leverages Microsoft’s strategic partnerships with security organizations and governments around the world and with internal Microsoft product groups to respond to incidents and help customers secure their most sensitive, critical environments.
Microsoft Security Services for Modernization is for customers that want to take advantage of Microsoft best practices and know-how as they embrace new modern security capabilities and embark on their security transformation. It provides consulting services that help customers at any stage of their security journey modernize their security posture and embrace a Zero Trust approach. Our modernization services utilize extensive cybersecurity knowledge and industry expertise gathered over 35 years to keep your business secure.
Security for all, together with Microsoft partners
One of our core principles at Microsoft Security is security for all. Meeting the needs of all kinds of organizations means offering choice—not only in the types of services customers buy but in who they buy them from. At the end of the day, we know that a single provider can’t meet the unique needs of every organization.
That’s why Microsoft is fully committed to working with an ecosystem of partners and technologies that provide customers the flexibility to choose what works for them—and to leverage those trusted relationships for the best outcomes and returns on their investment. Founded in 2018 with 26 charter members, our Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) has more than 300 members that include more than 100 service partners.
“This collaboration with Microsoft highlights their commitment to the partner community. The transparency and visibility provided by Microsoft, coupled with the feedback given by Critical Start during the design phase, allowed us to focus on driving value and providing the best outcome for customers.”
—Randy Watkins, CTO, Critical Start
As an industry-leading security company with more than 785,000 global customers, we believe that Microsoft Security service partners offer an important path for customers to get the services they need, and we rely on these partners to help us scale.
Our goal is simple: we want to empower customers, not only by offering world-class security products but also by providing access to critical human expertise when they need it from the best cybersecurity experts in the world. As some of the best defenders in the industry, our partners are essential for this vision.
An invitation to our managed XDR partners
Gartner® predicts that 50 percent of organizations will be using managed detection and response (MDR) services to contain threats by 2025.4 We want to invite all our managed detection and response partners to expand their offerings to help meet the critical customer need for managed detection and response services that go beyond the endpoint.
To help enable you to meet this growing demand, we will be making an incremental multimillion-dollar financial investment this coming year in our managed XDR partner community in three key areas. These new investments will expand the way we integrate with our managed XDR partners and create exciting new go-to-market opportunities. Microsoft is committed to showcasing verified partners and their managed XDR solutions on our marketing websites, through our commerce marketplaces, and in direct sales conversations with customers. We will do that in a few ways:
A new managed XDR partner designation within MISA will unlock an expanded set of co-marketing benefits to ensure partner offerings are front and center in each customer conversation.
We are launching a new co-sell benefit for managed XDR partners. This worldwide investment represents millions of dollars that can help you build your business around Microsoft’s advanced security products.
Based on input from our design partners, our engineering teams are building new APIs to help ensure partners have access to Microsoft threat intelligence.
“We are thrilled to have been an initial design partner for Microsoft Security Experts. The future of managed services will rely on the unique combination of threat intelligence, product leadership, and human expertise aligned under Microsoft Security Experts. We are looking forward to providing security services to our mutual customers tailored to their needs through deep integration with Microsoft threat intelligence through APIs, co-sell, and marketing opportunities.”
—Milan Patel, Global Head of MSS, BlueVoyant
More information on the new partner investments will be available during Microsoft Inspire, our worldwide partner conference taking place in July 2022. There, we’ll share specifics on how to integrate with the new APIs and take advantage of the expanded program benefits and go-to-market (GTM) opportunities. You can also find more information on our Microsoft Security Experts Partner page.
“Our partnership with Microsoft to create this new category of services will enable organizations to get ahead of cyberthreats, deepen their security resiliency and minimize the impact of incidents. At a time when the need for detection and response capabilities has never been greater, our collaboration will make a genuine human impact for all.” —Rajiv Sagar, Cybersecurity Lead, Avanade
Looking to the future
Wherever you are in your security journey, Microsoft Security Experts will meet you there, whether you need additional security expertise, help with specific technologies, or guidance in navigating new security challenges. Leveraging industry-leading technology, the best defenders from Microsoft and our partner community, and the most comprehensive threat intelligence in the world, we can build a safer world for everyone, together.
To learn more, join me and Satya at Microsoft Security Summit on May 12, 2022, or come see us in a few weeks at RSA—spoiler alert: cool things will be happening at the Microsoft Security Hub!
Partners, please join us at Microsoft Inspire, where we will share specifics on how to integrate with the new APIs and take advantage of the expanded program benefits and go-to-market (GTM) opportunities. You can also find more information on our Microsoft Security Experts Partner page.
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
4Gartner, Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services, Pete Shoard, Craig Lawson, Mitchell Schneider, John Collins, Mark Wah, Andrew Davies, 25 October 2021.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Every day, we must do our part to protect our planet from the impacts of climate change, and technology has an important role to play.
This Earth Day, like every Earth Day, I am taking the time to reflect on what we all need to do to protect and sustain Earth’s natural systems. What is unique this year is that I am doing it in person with my team for the first time in a long time.
Collaboration is an essential part of solving our climate crisis: sharing data, creating space for the connections that lead to innovations, and rallying around a common mission and goal. At Microsoft, it is something we are keenly focused on with our employees, our customers, and our partners.
Today, my team is together, and we will take a breath of fresh air, and continue the hard work needed to fulfill our commitments of being carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030 all while protecting more land than we use and building a Planetary Computer.
As part of our mission to bring the joy and community of gaming to players wherever they are and to make gaming more accessible to people around the world, I’m excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Epic Games to make Fortnite available on supported browser-enabled devices for free with Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) in 26 countries.
This means, starting today, if you love Fortnite you only need two things to play in cloud-supported markets:
An iOS, iPadOS, Android phone or tablet, or Windows PC with internet access
With no installation or memberships required, all you need to do is go to Xbox.com/play on your web browser and sign-in with your Microsoft Account to party-up with friends or earn your next Victory Royale in Fortnite.
Whether you want to play Fortnite with native touch controls or a supported controller, it’s easy to jump into Fortnite with Xbox Cloud Gaming.
It’s an important step to add a Free-to-Play title to the cloud gaming catalog as we continue our cloud journey. We’re starting with Fortnite and will look to bring more Free-to-Play games people love in the future. At Xbox we want to make gaming accessible to the 3 billion players around the world, and cloud has an important role in that mission. Quite simply we want you to have more choice in both the games you play and the way you choose to play them.
For more information on how to play Fortnite via browser with Xbox Cloud Gaming, visit Xbox.com/play or check out the Support Page here.
Every day, we must do our part to protect our planet from the impacts of climate change, and technology has an important role to play.
This Earth Day, like every Earth Day, I am taking the time to reflect on what we all need to do to protect and sustain Earth’s natural systems. What is unique this year is that I am doing it in person with my team for the first time in a long time.
Collaboration is an essential part of solving our climate crisis: sharing data, creating space for the connections that lead to innovations, and rallying around a common mission and goal. At Microsoft, it is something we are keenly focused on with our employees, our customers, and our partners.
Today, my team is together, and we will take a breath of fresh air, and continue the hard work needed to fulfill our commitments of being carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030 all while protecting more land than we use and building a Planetary Computer.
With the pandemic raging across the world and a seemingly infinite supply of information coming from multiple sources about vaccine shipments, it was necessary to create a platform that could centralize information.
The Microsoft Bing team leveraged the full capabilities of the Bing Maps Platform to create a one-stop website for location mapping and visualizing critical information detailing worldwide cases, vaccine distribution plans, and vaccination deliveries.
Effective vaccination planning begins with valid and timely information for communicating critical details as a top priority. The COVID-19 tracker allowed visitors to find out everything they needed to know about the virus’s case distribution and vaccination plans of multiple countries at a glance. Drawing information from trusted sources like the CDC and WHO, the Bing Maps based COVID-19 tracker continues to update regularly and even supports drilling down into more granular data. This means that users today continue to have access to precise information at the county level.
The team used Location Intelligence features like the Location Recognition API and Spatial Data Service Geodata API to add important region-based features to the tracker. For example, users living in Northampton could view the number of cases in their county and scroll down to find the nearest vaccination centers. The API also pulls the latest local news about vaccines including public distribution and shipment plans from trusted sources in a bid to reduce misinformation.
Data-driven vaccination
As vaccine availability varied dramatically across different countries it became increasingly important for the tracker to deliver accurate vaccine data. The Bing Maps COVID-19 Tracker was designed to collate the different types of available vaccines, whether RNA based or more traditional inactivated virus versions, and assign them to the countries in which they’re available. The tracker even displays the current status of the vaccines, including current trials and regulatory approvals.
Microsoft Bing relies on Bing Maps in all location driven experiences. It is therefore no surprise that Bing Maps was leveraged to achieve the goal of providing aggregated COVID-19 and vaccination information from trusted data providers in an easy-to-navigate web experience.
The Location APIs were used to identify the distribution locations of planned state-wide vaccination centers and vaccine shipments. Similarly, Bing Maps also helped businesses meet demand surges during the pandemic with predictive traffic, Bing Maps Web SDK created a more personalized mapping platform to support finding not just vaccinations but other needed resources as well.
Visualizing vaccinations
For ease of use, the Bing Maps team used AnimatedTileLayer events to visualize vaccination and current case data for each state. The AnimatedTileLayer class allows developers to create dynamic map tiles that update at designated intervals, accompanied by an animation. For the COVID-19 tracker, this consisted of variable red circles to represent regional virality and green circles at varying levels of completion to represent the vaccination distribution in a particular area.
For maximum effectiveness, the COVID-19 tracker needed to automate data visualization and create up-to-date graphs for any region selected by the user. Bing Maps API’s native integration with other Windows apps, particularly Power BI and Excel, was instrumental in delivering customizable vaccination graphs.
Power BI with Bing Maps integration lets developers use existing data sets to create visualizations out of reports. Using the tracker, visitors can look at both cumulative and daily vaccinations at the national level. Thanks to high data granularity, users can plan ahead with vaccine distribution statistics at the state-level.
To create such a robust tracker with multiple features, the team needed a kit that could support extensive web development while still keeping the website lightweight. The answer was V8 Web Control, a developer kit that enables web development for a variety of browsers and contains useful map controls like Spatial Data Services.
Powered by HTML5, V8 Web Control provided the foundation for critical tracker features like AnimatedTileLayers and customizable map styles. The team was able to use it to make the tracker functional on mobile and desktop devices, delivering fast load times despite the massive amount of vaccination and case data involved.
Visualizing the future
Microsoft Bing continues providing up-to-date and accurate news promoting effective public health policy through vaccine delivery efforts as well as supporting better personal health decisions. By offering the ability to find out if the current COVID-19 status is in their county, the tracker empowered people to isolate effectively.
Bing Maps API provided the foundation for this informative planning platform that aided in the analysis of distribution of vaccinated people across the country and The Bing Maps platform’s comprehensive set of location aware APIs and multiple SDKs is available for your projects as well. Enterprises and individual developers can create similarly scalable mapping experiences using Bing Maps by just creating a key to get started.
It’s our mission at Xbox to bring the joy and community to gaming by putting players at the center of everything we do. We want to empower everyone around the world to play the games they want, with the people they want, on the devices they already own. We call this Xbox Everywhere.
As we look to make gaming more accessible to even more people, and reach the three billion players globally, we’ve invested heavily in the cloud – both for players so they can play the way they want, and for creators so they engage new, larger audiences and build, run and manage their games using best-in-class cloud tools and services. We’ve built this in partnership with Azure, which reaches more people than any other cloud provider.
Since launching in 2020, we’ve seen tremendous growth: So far, more than 10 million people around the world have streamed games through Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
Today we reach another key milestone as we expand our business model to make cloud available to more people in even more ways, going beyond Xbox Game Pass to provide our first free-to-play title. In partnership with Epic, Fortnite is available via Xbox Cloud Gaming so fans can play on an iOS device, Android phone or tablet, or Windows PC through web browser. This is just the beginning for us – we’re going to learn, implement feedback, and in time look to bring even more free-to-play titles to players through the cloud.
Our continued growth and ability to enable new business models has been driven by the way we’ve evolved cloud to make it part of the Xbox ecosystem. We started off on Android only running off Xbox One S servers in our datacenters. Since then, Cloud Gaming upgraded to Custom Xbox Series X servers, and launched on Windows PCs, Apple phones and tablets, Xbox One and Xbox Series S|X, and we’ve even started rolling it out on Steam Deck. We’ve also seen the community load it up on some unconventional devices via browser, although it looks like they were having a lot of fun. In total, players across all 26 countries have played on more than 6,000 types of devices, from various flavors of Android phones to a range of PCs and iPhones from all generations.
We’ve also enabled Cloud Gaming in more places, like Mexico, Japan, Australia, and Brazil. The gaming community has been phenomenal in all these new countries, and Brazil in particular has blown away our expectations. Adoption was so overwhelming in the first couple weeks that the demand from fans exceeded our server capacity to the point we had to quickly move to deploy more hardware to keep up with demand. The support we’ve seen going to new countries, paired with making more games available on more devices, has led to encouraging results. In the months ahead, you should expect cloud gaming to become available in even more places – we can’t wait to share more.
None of this would be possible without great content. We are in a unique position of not only having a first-party cloud that can deliver the games, but a rich history in gaming inclusive of expansive studios making titles across genres. Since launching under two years ago, we’ve worked with over 125 developers to make more than 350 games from the Xbox Game Pass catalog cloud enabled. We’ve also seen the power of cloud as a discovery mechanism by reducing the time to simply try out and play new games. On average, Xbox Game Pass players who use cloud, discover and play nearly twice as many games as Xbox Game Pass members who don’t play on cloud.
The way games are being delivered to devices has also evolved – when we began all of our games followed a lift-and-shift model to make it as easy as possible for studios to make games playable on cloud. Without the need to make any code changes, games would simply just work on our cloud platform. This has been a great way to build up the catalog with hundreds of games, and many games play wonderfully this way.
We’ve evolved over time and are also making it possible for games to be Cloud Aware; simple changes from the developer can enhance the whole experience. They may choose to add touch controls – either a basic overlay to fully custom controls like you see with Hades – or optimizing font size based on the device being streamed to. We launched cloud gaming with one cloud aware game: Minecraft Dungeons with custom touch controls. There are now more than 150 cloud-aware games featuring touch, and we’ve found games with touch controls lead to more engagement. On average, we see 2x increase in play for games that have touch controls, and 20% of Xbox Cloud Gaming users use touch exclusively.
Cloud aware titles also extend to more intensive games, making it possible to play Gen-9 titles on Xbox One via the cloud. A great example of this is Microsoft Flight Simulator. It became available via cloud on March 1, and quickly became the most played cloud game on phones, tablets, PCs and consoles for the month of March. Players who otherwise wouldn’t have access to Gen-9 titles now have the opportunity to jump in on the devices they own.
I’ll never forget the first time I played a console game on my mobile phone powered by the cloud; it was quite simply a magical experience. That was many years ago as we’ve been on this cloud journey for some time alongside a wonderful and engaged player community and incredible content partners. Together, we believe we have a bright future ahead for all players and creators.
We are excited to invite the education community to try the Microsoft Learn Educator Center. It is Microsoft’s centralized training and professional development platform where you can explore free resources for educators and learn about programs, professional development offerings, and Microsoft technologies that advance teaching and learning practices. Check it out for a variety of resources to assist educators, school leaders, and training partners in the changing education landscape.
The Microsoft Learn Educator Center has replaced the Microsoft Educator Center (MEC) as our new home for the education community. We spent the past year migrating your favorite courses and learning paths from the MEC. We have also expanded the content to include custom pathways to enhance your professional skills, provide free resources that support you along your skilling journey, and connect you with the content and certifications needed to enable students to develop 21st century skills for the jobs of tomorrow.
To ensure that your MEC achievements, certificates, and transcripts get migrated to the Microsoft Learn Educator Center, sign in using the same credentials you used on MEC. Once MEC is decommissioned on May 1, 2022, you have up to one year to migrate your MEC achievement records to the Microsoft Learn Educator Center, as long as you sign in with the same credentials you used on MEC.
You can use the Microsoft Learn Educator Center to:
Find and discover more than 360 modules, 21 learning paths, 80 modules, and 11 product pages. Educators and school leaders can easily search and discover all available learning content through the Browse page. It provides the ability to search and filter results by different tags, including:
Job role: educator, school leader, and student
Level: beginner, intermediate, and advanced
Products: Microsoft Teams, M365, Minecraft, Immersive Reader, and more
Experience Microsoft Learn’s instructional-based design, which includes principles that support the integration of technology into the teaching and learning environment for improved student outcomes.
Personalize your learning experience and share it with colleagues, students, and parents through Learn Collections, which allows you to curate a custom collection of content and share through social media platforms or a unique URL. Through your profile, you can create, name, manage, and share your collections.
To participate in the launch of the Microsoft Learn Educator Center:
Once sign-in and profile creation are complete, you will be presented with a modal asking if you would like to move your data to the Microsoft Learn Educator Center:
If you accept, your achievements, certificates, and transcripts will be moved to your Microsoft Learn profile.
If you do not accept, you can choose to delete your data.
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