Recent News – Page 68

Posted on November 6, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

What to expect during the Nov. 10 launch celebration for Xbox Series X|S

Next week, gamers around the world will be able to jump into the next generation of gaming with the release of the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. We’re very excited about the launch of our latest and greatest consoles, and used it as an excuse for celebrations, both live and virtual, around the globe. Don’t have that new console yet? Not to worry – you won’t need one to join us as we kick off the next generation in style!

Global Celebration Livestream

The biggest of our launch day events is our official livestream, which gives us an opportunity to celebrate and connect with our fans by doing what we all love to do: play games. On November 10, we’re inviting all Xbox fans around the world to celebrate, connect, and play together. So grab your device of choice and play alongside Team Xbox, your favorite creators, and our partners, right from your homes around the world. You’ll get to take a closer look at the next generation of games, hear the stories of people who make them, and play along with them.

We invite you to tune in to our global livestream in celebration of play on November 10 at 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook Gaming.

During the livestream, you’ll see more on lots of next-generation games, includingGears Tactics, Gears 5, Destiny 2, Forza Horizon 4, Watch Dogs: Legion, Tetris Effect Connected, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, The Falconeer, Grounded, The Medium, Dirt5, Halo MCC, Bright Memory, and Scarlet Nexus.

We’ll also be highlighting some of the member of the Xbox community, with testimonials from Xbox Ambassadors, MVPs, Xbox FanFest attendees, and our very own Team Xbox members about what this moment means to them.

Cyberpunk 2077 fans won’t want to miss Johnny Silverhand’s induction into the Xbox Walk of Fame. To celebrate the occasion, viewers will be able to control a 20-foot replica of Johnny’s iconic Silverhand live during the stream, using nothing but emojis.

Want to look fresh in some new gear? We’ll be sharing a first look at our new Xbox Gear Launch Collection, complete with timed discounts, exclusive products, and free gear drops. We’ll also be highlighting partners such as Taco Bell, Monster Energy Drink, Samsung, and the Foot Locker family of brands .

We’ve also got a special treat for fans who attend our virtual FanFest. Login or Register as an Xbox FanFest fan at https://www.xbox.com/fanfest and opt-in for a chance to win exclusive prizing such as a custom Xbox Series X Fridge, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

During the livestream, we’re partnering with our friends at Make-A-Wish® International to support communities around the world through Softgiving™. We’re bringing back #GiveWithXbox, and starting at 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET on November 10, every donation made to Make-A-Wish International during the livestream will automatically enter them for a chance to win a Game Pass Ultimate 3-month subscription or one of three HyperX Cloud Alpha headsets. For more information and to join in giving back to families, please visit the event donation page.

Finally, while we can’t be together in person, we will bring our fans together virtually. Fans will upload a selfie to create our launch fan mosaic, with the final image being revealed during the livestream.

Xbox Launch Celebrations Around the World

In addition to the global launch livestream, we’ll also have a number of events kicking off around the globe that fans can participate in. These include:

New Zealand: Due to international time zones, New Zealand will be the first country to globally celebrate the launch of the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Xbox ANZ is hosting a livestream countdown for its fans on both sides of the Tasman in Australia and New Zealand, as well as across the world. The live event will begin at 11 p.m. NZDT on November 9 and continue through midnight to officially usher in the next generation of gaming. An official Xbox takeover will also take place during the stream, where Queenstown will be transformed into ‘Greenstown’ to officially launch the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series S. Fans can tune in via Xbox ANZ’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Twitch.

France: On November 9, Xbox France will host a local livestream event, Xbox Dream Live. From 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. CET there will be a celebration with the community on Xbox France’s Twitch and Twitter, including Q&A, contest for prizes, and more. From 8:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. CET on November 10, the Xbox team will celebrate the new generation of gaming with takeovers from game streamers and entertaining activations.

Germany: Xbox Germany will celebrate the launch of Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S with the Xbox Dream Stream event on November 9 at 7 p.m. CET on Xbox Germany’s Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. Join the digital party with the local German, Swiss and Austrian gaming communities to celebrate the transition into the next gen with a spectacular livestream full of highlights and surprises.

Sweden: Xbox Sverige (Sweden) invites the world to tune in at 8 p.m. CET to Xbox Sverige: Launch Night Live as we bring a show packed full of content to celebrate the arrival of Xbox Series X and S. In partnership with DreamHack and Elgiganten, along with a roster of other amazing partners, the stream will serve to showcase every part of the next generation of Xbox gaming – from console, to PC and Mobile. Additionally, viewers are invited to preview games that are playable at launch, along with some special guests throughout the show. Be sure to tune in for all this and some exciting prizes to be won.

UK: At 6 p.m. GMT on November 9, Xbox UK and Xbox On will host a six-hour livestream, counting down to launch at midnight. Viewers are invited to preview games that are playable at launch, complete live interactive challenges, all while experiencing a spectacular installation that will be featured throughout the show. The rooftop display, set against the backdrop of London’s iconic skyline, will feature a countdown that will begin two minutes before midnight and includes a holographic installation to showcase the innovative features of the Xbox Series X.

Brazil: The Next Gen is Now two-hour streaming event will begin at 5 p.m. BRT on November 9. Catering to the local Xbox community in Brazil, the livestream is hoping to engage tech enthusiasts as well as casual and hardcore gamers of the like. Attendees will have the chance to interact with the stream in real time and decide what will be shown, whether it be an unboxing, gameplay with content creators, trailers (Cyberpunk 2077 & Assassin’s Creed Valhalla) or an extended view of the new console features for the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

Mexico: Xbox Mexico will welcome the next generation of Xbox gaming during a live stream event on November 9 at 7 p.m. CST. This digital event has been inspired by the dreams of the Mexican community and will be packed with great surprises, fun dynamics, important announcements, and appearances from influential gaming opinion leaders and content creators throughout the country.

Canada: In Toronto Ontario, Xbox Canada will usher in the Xbox Series X as we Power Your Dreams through a showcase of local artists’ dream interpretations depicted on a 40 ft console floating in the Toronto Harbour on November 9 and 10, in a nod to the iconic Xbox Series X reveal from last year’s Game Awards. Stay tuned to @XboxCanada and @Xbox for more information.

United States: A mysterious 40 ft monolith appearing in the dreamlike landscape of Washington State USA, in a nod to the recent Xbox Power your Dreams campaign creative. It will feature local artist’s dream-work imagery. The structure and it’s ever-changing content will be featured in companion streams, social content and giveaways hidden throughout the day. We will also make select artwork available to fans digitally following launch. Stay tuned to @Xbox for more information.

Tune in to the global livestream in celebration of play on November 10 at 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook Gaming.

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

Apple TV, streaming apps available on Xbox Series X|S at launch

We know our players love to catch up on the latest shows or listen to their favorite artists on their Xbox consoles when they aren’t gaming. At Xbox, our goal is to make the transition from playing games and streaming media on Xbox One to Xbox Series X|S as seamless as possible, so that you’re not missing out on the content you love when you jump into the next generation of gaming.

Just as we’re bringing forward all the games that play on Xbox One* today, we’re excited to announce that your favorite entertainment apps you enjoy today on Xbox One will be available on Xbox Series X and Series S. That means your favorite streaming apps like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Spotify, YouTube, YouTube TV, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, NBC Peacock, Vudu, FandangoNow, Twitch, Sky Go, NOW TV, Sky Ticket and more, will be waiting for you when you boot your new Xbox console on November 10.

Apple TV is coming to Xbox Consoles

When our all-new Xbox family of consoles launch worldwide on November 10, you’ll have more than just the entertainment apps you enjoy today on Xbox One. We’re excited to share that the Apple TV app is coming to Xbox One and Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on November 10.

The Apple TV app gives you access to thousands of shows and movies from one convenient location, allowing you to enjoy Apple TV+, Apple TV channels, brand-new and popular movies, and personalized entertainment recommendations.

Apple TV+ is your home for Apple Originals — award-winning shows, premiere movies, and stunning documentaries — from the world’s most creative storytellers.

Binge your heart out with hilarious, heartfelt and powerful shows like Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, See, Servant and Tehran. Grab your popcorn for movie night featuring Tom Hanks in Greyhound or the documentary Beastie Boys Story.

There’s so much more available on the Apple TV app. You can also subscribe to channels like Showtime, CBS All Access and AMC+. You can browse to buy or rent more than 100,000 movies and shows, with access to your library of previous movie and TV show purchases from Apple. You can watch online, ad-free and on demand through the app. In addition, Family Sharing lets six family members share subscriptions to Apple TV channels using their personal Apple ID and password.

If you’re ready to dive in, you can subscribe to Apple TV+ on the Apple TV app directly from your Xbox for $4.99 per month with a seven-day free trial starting November 10.See here for more details on everything Apple TV has to offer.

Watch like never before

It’s not just your games that play better than ever before on our new consoles, your favorite movies and shows are about to sound and look more immersive on Xbox Series X and Series S.

With our new consoles, immerse yourself with fuller colors, enhanced dynamic range, and spatial sound just as the filmmakers and creators intended on Xbox Series X|S with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, which are supported on apps like Netflix, Disney+, and Vudu. Together, these advanced audiovisual technologies will take your favorite entertainment to new heights through ultravivid picture quality – incredible brightness, contrast, color, and detail – alongside immersive moving audio that will transport you to new worlds.

It’s never been easier to browse the hundreds of entertainment apps available with the new Microsoft Store on Xbox, which was rebuilt with your feedback in mind. The Microsoft Store is twice as fast as before. We’ve cut the launch time of the Microsoft Store app to about two seconds so you can find your next favorite game, app, or movie easier than ever. As a reminder, you can access your apps in the refreshed Xbox dashboard experience (UX) in the My Games & Apps.

We also recently introduced a new Entertainment block for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S that showcases the latest content in movies, TV, and music across popular entertainment apps. For new Xbox owners, the Entertainment block is automatically pinned to Home. Existing gamers can scroll down to Add more > See all suggestions, select Entertainment, and add it to Home.

Eight days to go until you can experience everything we have in store for the next generation of gaming.

*Except for a handful of titles that require Kinect

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

Plan ahead to celebrate the holidays with loved ones virtually

Everyone has their own vision of what makes a perfect holiday, but there’s one thread that unites us all: coming together to celebrate with loved ones.

Carve out time to catch up with friends and loved ones

The holidays are the perfect time to comb through old memories and forge new traditions. Video calling makes it easy to spend time together, even when you’re time zones apart. Here are some ideas for how to spend your time while connecting:

Keep traditions alive. Light candles or lanterns, decorate your house or tree, open presents, sing carols around the piano, enjoy holiday baking sessions, and more. The memories you plan on making this year can still be shared with your loved ones via video call.
Give thanks. Make your holiday dinner an online party using Meet Now. You may not be able to pass potatoes in person, but you can share what you’re grateful for, swap stories, and enjoy time with your loved ones virtually.
Craft holiday fun. Whether it’s a gingerbread house with graham crackers or cutting out paper snowflakes, create your masterpieces together and then send and share your “nailed it” photos.

Don’t let distance get in the way of celebrating with your friends and family this holiday season. With Meet Now, you can easily get together on a video chat. From virtual holiday gatherings with your family or spontaneous chats with your friends, you can connect no matter where you are. The best part is you don’t need to download an app or sign up for an account to video chat! Just add the Meet Now link to the Outlook calendar invitation you created above.

Make a yearbook video

This has been a year like no other. Whether you want to document your life at home, work from home, or your adventures beyond your home, capture and share those moments with a Video Recap in Microsoft Photos.

Stroll down memory lane from different perspectives

See the events in your life from the eyes of your friends and family with Shared Albums in OneDrive. Invite everyone to combine their photos and videos to get fresh, unique perspectives of memories. Remember, unless it’s a selfie, the person most likely not to be in the picture is the photographer. So make sure everyone’s included with Shared Albums!

Design your own holiday card

Create and customize heartfelt holiday greetings for friends and family that you can mail, email, or text. In Microsoft PowerPoint, you can transform each card into something truly special with your own personal touches.

While this holiday season will be different, it can still be extraordinary. Group video calls, shared albums, and digital cards can help you stay in touch with your friends and family over the holidays. Use these tips to make and share new memories you will cherish for a lifetime.

*Calls up to 24 hours each, but just call back to start a new call and keep talking!

Posted on October 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month — there still is a lot to do

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM). And there is still a lot to do!

For the last 17 years, the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM) campaign, driven by the Department of Homeland Security, has raised awareness about the importance of cyber security across the Nation with the mission of ensuring that all Americans have the resources they need to be safer and more secure online.

In alignment with this noble mission, Microsoft Security is providing educational content and executive speakers to empower our customers, employees and families. Tune into the CyberTalks recap to listen to the keynoted delivered by @Ann Johnson, Corporate Vice President of Security, Compliance and Identity, on how to future proof your security strategy.

Cyber security podcasts

In addition to the blog series that is taking over our blog in October, Microsoft Security is also sponsoring two security podcasts in CyberScoop.com we want to encourage our community to tune in and listen to both conversations.

Available now: Enabling secure remote work by embracing Zero Trust—One of the greatest challenges we often hear from public and private sector CISOs, when it comes to achieving a Zero Trust IT operating environment, is the question of how to tackle such a massive undertaking—and where to begin. Tune in to listen to CTO, Steve Faehl, to learn more about Microsoft’s journey towards Zero Trust.
Available October 19: Risk Reduction—Podcast featuring GM, Alym Rayani who delivers an in-depth conversation about compliance and its connection to security.

Additional security blogs to read

Government agency audit traceability

The reality today for many government agencies is there is no audit traceability to determine which email messages and content an attacker may have seen during a breached session into a user’s mailbox. The standard level of Office 365 auditing includes events that a user logged into their mailbox but does not include detailed information on the activity that occurs within the mailbox. As a result, organizations have no choice but to assume all content within the mailbox is compromised whether sensitive data or PII was viewed by the adversary. To learn more about how using Advanced Audit can help improve forensic investigation capability, read this blog from Matthew Littleton, Principal Technical Specialist on this Public Sector blog.

What’s new in Microsoft Teams: live captions with attribution, individual spotlights and more

Welcome back! This month we have a packed blog with a lot of new features that are now generally available to improve your experience with meetings and calling, chat and collaboration, as well as a number of new updates to Microsoft Teams devices. This blog also contains a few industry specific items for Education, Firstline Workers, and our Government customers. We have updates on Teams platform capabilities and we’re introducing a new section called “App spotlight” that showcases 3rd party apps available in Teams.

What’s New: Meetings & Calling
Live Captions with speaker attribution
Microsoft Teams added speaker attribution to live captions so that you can see who is speaking along with what’s being said, making meetings more inclusive and easier to follow along.

Spotlight an individual video participant for all attendees in a Teams meeting
Presenters can now pin an individual video feed for all attendees to see during a Teams meeting. Once pinned, the individual identified as the spotlight will be the main video shown to all participants. This applies to PC, Mac, mobile (view only) and Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. Learn more

Prevent attendees from unmuting in Teams Meetings
Meeting organizers and presenters can now prevent attendees from unmuting during the meeting and enable specific attendees to unmute when they raise their hands. This can be helpful for press conferences and classrooms scenarios where you want to be in control of who’s speaking. Learn more

Advanced Production for Teams Meetings

Transform your Teams Meeting into a virtual stage with a new advanced production option for broadcasts. Network Device Interface (NDI) support for Teams allows event producers to convert each participant’s video into a discrete video source that can be used in the video streaming production tool of your choice. This functionality enables you to use Teams meetings in new ways, including bringing speakers into Together Mode or customized views, to deliver professional broadcasts to the end point of your choice and reach audiences wherever they are.

Microsoft Whiteboard read-only mode

Microsoft Whiteboard read-only mode is available in Teams allowing for more flexibility for you to either present the digital whiteboard in read-only mode, or to allow others to edit and collaborate when given access.

Meeting & Calling recordings stored in OneDrive and SharePoint
Teams meeting and call recordings can now be stored in your OneDrive for Business or in SharePoint, providing the ability to share recordings with guests or external users, access meeting recordings faster, and manage recordings with security and compliance controls available to other file types in Microsoft 365. Teams Admins can select their recording storage location by updating policies using PowerShell. Learn more

Updated functionality for downloading participant reports in Teams meetings
Meeting organizers, especially teachers and event organizers, often need to know who joined and how many people joined their Teams meetings. Now you can easily download a participant report after the meeting within the meeting chat. We’ve also added new data into the report that allows you to better manage your attendance. Learn more

Changes in Incoming IP Video policy (New Audio and Video Policies)
We are updating our meeting policies to allow IT administrators more control over how video is managed in Teams meetings. Current policy can only be set to prevent outgoing video. We have extended the Allow IP Video policy to prevent both outgoing and incoming video as needed. Tenant administrators can use this policy to manage bandwidth. Learn more

What’s New: Devices
ARM64 Native Teams App
Unleash the full power of Microsoft Teams on your favorite ARM devices with the new native ARM64 Teams client now generally available. Stay connected and organized while enjoying improved performance, reliability, and battery life in devices such as the Surface Pro X.

New capabilities coming to Microsoft Teams Rooms
Features beginning to roll out to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows include:

Spotlight support: Microsoft Teams Rooms now supports the spotlight feature in Teams meetings, which enables you as a meeting organizer or presenter to select a video feed as the spotlight for all attendees. Once selected, the individual identified as the spotlight will be the main video shown to all participants, which is great to make sure everyone focuses on, for example, the presenter.
Hard mute: This feature allows you as a meeting organizer to disable microphone controls for all meeting participants. This feature can be useful for scenarios like distance learning or executive board meetings where organizers want a higher level of control over who can unmute their microphone and when. Teams Rooms supports this setting and joins muted with microphone disabled unless granted permission.

Dell Meeting Space Solution for seamless onsite and remote collaboration
Dell’s newest Meeting Space Solution for Microsoft Teams Rooms offers a complete group collaboration ecosystem that includes the OptiPlex 7080 Micro running the Teams Rooms experience on Windows, Dell Large Format Monitors, plus Logitech Tap and ConferenceCams. With proximity detection and one-touch join, you can start a meeting while instantly projecting content in the room and to virtual participants.

EPOS announces two new headsets certified for Microsoft Teams
The IMPACT MB Pro 1 UC ML and 2 UC ML have now passed the rigorous reliability testing required to be certified for Microsoft Teams. You can now experience high end audio tools that provide optimal comfort, easy call handling and rich, natural sound – all while reliable, intelligent technologies filter out unwanted noise, enhance audio and boost efficiency.

See the latest in Teams Devices at http://aka.ms/teamsdevices

What’s New: Chat & Collaboration

Pinned Posts

Keep important information easily accessible and top of mind with Microsoft Teams. You can pin any message in a channel, and it will appear in the channel information pane for all members of the channel to see.

New offline presence status
Let others know when you are not available in Microsoft Teams. You can now change your presence to “Offline”. This allows you to have full access to Teams while signaling to colleagues that you are unavailable.

Language-aware proofing
Communicate using multiple languages in Microsoft Teams. If you write different messages in different languages, you now see spellchecking relevant to the language you use when typing a message in the Teams desktop app.

Templates for creation of a new Team
When creating a new team, you can now choose from a variety of customizable templates including event management, crisis response, as well as industry-specific templates like hospital ward and bank branch. Microsoft publishes a set of first-party templates and as an IT professional you can also create new custom templates for your organization, allowing you to standardize team structures, surface relevant apps, and scale best practices.

New file sharing experience
Team members share and work together on content from a single source of truth seamlessly with Microsoft Teams. You can now create a shareable link for any file stored in Teams and directly set the appropriate permissions. Additionally, you can also set permissions for files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive while composing a private chat or starting a channel conversation. Learn more

Updated SharePoint pages app
Using SharePoint pages is a great way to consolidate and share content in the right context using images, Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents, videos, links, Twitter feeds and more – all on the same page. And now you can more easily add your pages as tabs in Microsoft Teams. Learn more

New and simplified global notification settings
As a user you can now configure and customize your notification settings through a newly designed notification settings section. This new experience makes it easier to find the exact notifications you want so you can keep track of the activity you care about. To access, go to your profile picture > Settings > Notifications. We also added a new setting that allows you to turn off message previews in chat notifications if you desire more privacy.

What’s New: Teams for Education
Anonymous grading and marking in Assignments
Tackle unconscious bias and even the playing field in class with Anonymous Grading. When enabled in the assignment detail view, students’ names are anonymized and avatars are temporarily removed, presenting a random list of students. This allows you as an educator to review work with identities hidden, no shuffling of paper involved.

View assignments across all classes
Being able to see what’s upcoming, whether you’re an educator or student, is critical to getting a handle on your week, month, or year. Now both educators and students can once again view upcoming and turned in assignments by class or view them across all classes. Just visit Assignments in your app bar on the left-hand side of Teams to view assignments across all classes. Students can also filter by category, see the due date, and assigned value of the assignment and more.

What’s New: Firstline Workers
Off-shift access controls
With off-shift access controls, IT administrators can now configure Teams to alert you when you are accessing the app on your personal device outside of working hours. The feature prompts you to accept that you will not be getting paid for time spent on Teams to help ensure that you are not involuntarily working while not on shift and helps your employer to comply with labor regulations. The feature does not require active usage of the Shifts app, but it does require Shifts being configured and schedule data being inside the app; either added natively with Excel import or including workforce management API connectors like Kronos, BlueYonder and more. Learn more

What’s New: Government
These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD).

Priority notifications
Share urgent messages and time-sensitive information more effectively with Teams. Priority notifications alert a recipient of an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices until a response is received, every two minutes for up to 20 minutes. IT admins can manage this feature as part of messaging policies in Teams. Priority notifications are now available in GCC, GCC High, and DoD. Learn more

Read receipts
Now available in GCC, read receipts in private chats allow senders to know that a message was read by the recipients. IT admins can configure messaging policies from the Microsoft Teams admin center to enable or disable this feature for users. Learn more

File viewer upgrades
Teams file viewer is being upgraded for Gov clouds from legacy to OneUp for non-Office file types and to unified app for Office file types (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel).

Together mode
Together mode, now available in GCC, uses AI segmentation technology in meetings to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else.

Large Gallery view (Preview) – see up to 49 participants
Large Gallery is providing a new way to view video up to 49 participants at once on a single screen (7×7). This feature rolled out to production with the new multi-window experience. To take advantage of this new view, users will need to turn on the new multi-window meeting experience. Large Gallery is now available in GCC.

Spotlight an individual video participant for all attendees in a Teams meeting
We are delivering the ability for presenters to lock on an individual video feed for all attendees to see during a Teams meeting. Once selected, the individual identified as the spotlight will be the main video shown to all participants. This applies to PC, Mac, mobile, and Microsoft Teams room systems. The spotlight feature is now available in both GCC and GCC High.

Improvements to meeting notes
Meeting notes now support 100 users by default. Also, if anyone joins your meeting past after it is scheduled and, doesn’t have access to notes, they can now request access from the note’s owner in one click. Meeting notes are now available in GCC, GCC High, and DoD.

Changes in Incoming IP Video policy (New Audio and Video Policies)
We are updating our meeting policies to allow IT administrators on GCC more control over how video is managed in Teams Meetings. Current policy can only be set to prevent outgoing video. We are extending the Allow IP Video policy to prevent both outgoing and incoming video as needed. Tenant administrators can use this policy to manage bandwidth. Learn more

What’s New: Healthcare
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
Earlier this week we announced the general availability of our first industry-specific cloud offering, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, including the new Microsoft Teams EHR connector for Epic EHR. This allows clinicians to launch a virtual visit in Teams from within their electronic health record system. Learn more about how and about the many new features now available as part of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

What’s New: Platform
Microsoft Teams and Power Automate – Simpler automation for everyone
A new Power Automate app for Teams makes automating workflows easier than ever with new templates and a simplified editor experience.

Organizational branding for line-of-business Teams app catalog
IT Admins can now customize their Teams line-of-business app catalog using their organization’s branding. This enhances the user experience for end users and increase organic discovery and use of an organization’s line-of-business apps. Learn more

Resource-Specific Consent now generally available on the Microsoft Graph v1.0 endpoint
We are excited to announce that Resource-Specific Consent (RSC) is now generally available on the Microsoft Graph v1.0 endpoint! Your Teams app can now call Teams Graph APIs from the BETA endpoint without needing admin consent. This capability empowers Team owners to install an app for their specific team and restrict the app’s scope and access to data to only that one team, without needing the global IT admin to provision access. Learn more

App certification
Publishers building Microsoft Teams add-ins can now work with Microsoft to certify that their app – and its supporting infrastructure – protect the security and privacy of sensitive customer data. Certified apps receive a badge that is visible in AppSource and from within the Microsoft 365 tenant administrator’s console. We strongly encourage app publishers to take advantage of this program, and over time, expect to make it a requirement. Learn more

Publisher verification
It’s critical that IT Admins and end-users know that partner apps come from verified sources. Using a process that relies on a verified Microsoft Partner Network account, Microsoft now offers application developers a publisher verification service. Verified apps receive a badge that is visible in AppSource and in the consent dialog when a user or admin installs an application. Learn more

Teams App Spotlight

Clio is a cloud-based legal software that law firms trust to manage their practices and clients from intake to invoice. As the needs of legal professionals have changed over the last year, Clio has been focused on building solutions law firms need in this new digital-first reality. To make remote collaboration even easier, Clio customers can now check the status of their matter, scan recent communications, and plan for upcoming events all within Microsoft Teams. Learn more

Posted on October 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Putting differential privacy into practice to use data responsibly

Data can help businesses, organizations and societies solve difficult problems, but some of the most useful data contains personal information that can’t be used without compromising privacy. That’s why Microsoft Research spearheaded the development of differential privacy, which safeguards the privacy of individuals while making useful data available for research and decision making. Today, I am excited to share some of what we’ve learned over the years and what we’re working toward, as well as to announce a new name for our open source platform for differential privacy – a major part of our commitment to collaborate around this important topic.

Differential privacy consists of two components: statistical noise and a privacy-loss budget. Statistical noise masks the contribution of individual data points within a dataset but does not impact the overall accuracy of the dataset, while a privacy-loss budget keeps track of how much information has been revealed through various queries to ensure that aggregate queries don’t inadvertently reveal private information.

Since differential privacy was created, Microsoft has conducted research and developed and deployed technologies with the goal of enabling more people to participate in, contribute to and benefit from differential privacy. Last year, we partnered with Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) to announce the OpenDP Initiative, and earlier this year released the initial version of our open source platform. We chose to develop differential privacy technologies in the open to enable increased participation in the creation of tools that empower a larger group of people to benefit from differential privacy.

Introducing SmartNoise

In June, we announced that we would be renaming our open source platform to avoid any potential misunderstanding of our intentions for this project and the community. Language and symbols matter, especially when you are trying to build an inclusive community and responsibly enable AI systems.

I’m thrilled to share that this platform will be renamed SmartNoise. The SmartNoise Platform, powered by OpenDP, captures an essential step in the differential privacy process and follows best practices of renaming terms like whitelist and blacklist to allowlist and blocklist.

By using SmartNoise, researchers, data scientists and others will be able to derive new and deeper insights from datasets that have the potential to help solve the most difficult societal problems in health, the environment, economics and other areas.

How we’re using SmartNoise and differential privacy today at Microsoft

As we apply differential privacy to our own products and begin to work with customers to do so, we’re learning a lot about what works and what we need to explore further.

Our first production use of differential privacy in reporting and analytics at Microsoft was in Windows, where we added noise to users’ telemetry data, enabling us to understand overall app usage without revealing information tied to a specific user. This aggregated data has been used to identify possible issues with applications and improve user experience.

Since then, we’ve applied differential privacy in similar ways to understand data that benefits our customers and helps us improve our products. We’ve learned that differential privacy works best in cases where a query or dataset with a limited set of computations will be refreshed on an ongoing basis – in these cases the work required to apply differential privacy pays off because you can spend the time to optimize it and then reuse that work. An example of this is the Insights for People Managers within Workplace Analytics. These insights enable managers to understand how the people in their team are doing and to learn how to drive change by using aggregated collaboration data without sharing any information about individuals.

An application of differential privacy with limited parameters but that enables interactivity is advertiser queries on LinkedIn. Advertisers can get differentially private answers to their top-k queries (where k is a number representing how many answers the advertiser wants from the query). Each advertiser is allotted a limited number of queries, which helps to ensure that multiple queries can’t be combined to deduce private information. So, for example, an advertiser could find out which articles are being read by software engineers or employees of a particular company, but wouldn’t be able to determine which individual users were reading them.

Another key application area for differential privacy is in machine learning, where the goal is to produce a machine learning model that protects the information about the individual datapoints in the training dataset.

For example, in Office suggested replies, we use differential privacy to narrow the set of responses to ensure that the model doesn’t learn from any replies that might violate an individual user’s privacy.

During the training of a machine learning model, the training algorithm can add differentially private noise and manage the privacy budget across iterations. These algorithms often take longer to train, and often require tuning for accuracy, but this effort can be worth it for the more rigorous privacy guarantees that differential privacy enables.

To take this scenario further, we are also exploring the potential for synthetic data in machine learning, which is currently only an option if we know the specific task or question the algorithm needs to understand. The idea behind synthetic data is that it preserves all the key statistical attributes of a dataset but doesn’t contain any actual private data. Using the original dataset, we would apply a differential privacy algorithm to generate synthetic data specifically for the machine learning task. This means the model creator doesn’t need access to the original dataset and can instead work directly with the synthetic dataset to develop their model. The synthetic data generation algorithm can use the privacy budget to preserve the key properties of the dataset while adding more noise in less essential places.

SmartNoise and differential privacy going forward

We have learned so much about differential privacy, and we’re only scraping the surface of what’s possible – and starting to understand the barriers and limitations that exist.

We continue to make investments in our tools, develop new ones and innovate with new practices and research. On the technical side, there are a few areas we will pursue further. Most production applications are using a known limited set of computations, so we’ll have to go further in making differential privacy work well for a larger set of queries. We will further enable interactivity, which means dynamically optimizing so queries work well without hand-tuning. We will develop a robust budget tracking system that would allow many different people to use the data. And we will adopt security measures that would allow an untrusted analyst to query and use the data without having full access to the dataset.

There are also policy, governance and compliance questions that need to be addressed. For example, if we are allocating budget for a dataset across a diverse set of users and potential projects, how do we decide how much budget each researcher accessing the data gets? Going forward, we will strive to answer these important questions with the help of the open source differential privacy community.

And synthetic data is a particularly exciting area for exploration because anyone could access and use it without privacy ramifications. However, there are still many research questions on how to effectively implement differential privacy – while still providing accurate results – when we don’t know what the analysis will look like in advance.

Many questions remain, and we know we will need help from the community to answer them. With the OpenDP Initiative and SmartNoise project, we announced our commitment to developing differential privacy technologies in the open to enable more people to participate and contribute, and we look forward to collaborating with and learning from all of you.

Gary King, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, had this to say: “We created OpenDP to build a far more secure foundation for efforts to ensure privacy for people around the world. We are proud to release SmartNoise with Microsoft and hope to build an active and vibrant community of researchers, academics, developers and others to fully unlock the power of data to help address some of the most pressing challenges we face.”

If you want to get involved in OpenDP and SmartNoise, find us on GitHub. We will also continue to openly share our technical and non-technical learnings as we deploy differential privacy in production across the company.

Sarah Bird is a principal program manager and the Responsible AI lead for Cognitive Services within Azure AI. Sarah’s work focuses on research and emerging technology strategy for AI products in Azure. Sarah works to accelerate the adoption and impact of AI by bringing together the latest innovations in research with the best of open source and product expertise to create new tools and technologies.

Posted on October 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Join the global livestream of the launch of Xbox Series X and S Nov. 10 at 11 a.m. PT

Gaming connects us even in the most difficult of times. In a year that’s consistently thrown challenge and change our way, games told us new stories, enriched our lives, and brought us together across physical and social distances. Your actions in games showed the power of play and the imaginative feats we can accomplish together.

To honor the launch of the new Xbox generation, we invite you to celebrate this power of play with us. On November 10, we invite you, players of all identities and backgrounds, console generations and devices, skill sets and tastes, to celebrate, connect, and play together. We invite you to grab your device of choice and play alongside Team Xbox, your favorite creators, and our partners, right from your homes around the world. We invite you to take a glimpse behind-the-scenes of the next generation of games, hear the stories of people who make them, and play along with them. We invite you to tune in to our global livestream in celebration of play on November 10 at 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook Gaming.

Think of our livestream celebration as a companion to your gaming plans for the day. We’ll host “Let’s Play” segments with the creators, showcase special launch highlights from around the globe and harness the power of gaming to raise vital funds for great causes. This will be a moment of play, not press releases, as next generation consoles begin to land in the hands of players around the world. Instead of big announcements, we will mark the beginning of a new era by gaming alongside one another. We will take this moment to have some fun and look forward to having you join us.

November 10 marks a formative moment, the very beginning of the new generation of play.

You will be able to experience many of its benefits right away – like the incredible look and feel of movement at 120fps, faster load times, richer gaming libraries, the mobile reach of cloud gaming, and new unforgettable game experiences. As creators tap into the power of the new Xbox console generation over the next decade, you will see gaming shake free from its former limits. Unique custom-designed innovations will make Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S highly coveted this holiday season, and we are working hard with partners around the world to bring as many new consoles to as many players as possible over time.

With the goal of empowering everyone to join this new generation and experience the power of play everywhere on the planet, gaming with Xbox will transform throughout the next decade as our investments across content, console, cloud gaming and PC evolve in harmony – with each other and with what players want. For the gaming industry, there’s no better measure of success than more people playing, and more players discovering games they love.

I can’t wait to celebrate with you on November 10, and I’m looking forward to experiencing what we will all create through play. See you on Xbox soon.

Phil

Posted on October 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

WHO and Microsoft study whether data can help speed our recovery from COVID-19

Addressing Covid-19 is just the starting point. Microsoft and the WHO are also collaborating on a project that could drive improved health outcomes for everyone. The World Health Data Hub, for example, will use artificial intelligence to create a global information center for disease surveillance and knowledge sharing that could help further the SDGs by providing a targeted picture of disease patterns and sharing insight into where particular health issues most need attention.

“The problem with Covid-19 is that it has redirected so many resources in the world that there are other issues being neglected,” says Spelhaug. “Like tropical diseases that kill millions of people each year, and the world has taken their eye off it, because we need to focus on Covid-19, but we’re very interested to make sure that, in the communities that suffer from neglected tropical diseases, which are the poorest communities in the world, we are advancing the analytics and the understanding of the patterns that are emerging in these communities, so we’re focusing on that on the data platform.”

In low- and middle-income countries, millions of children continue to die from preventable illnesses each year, and metrics such as stunting – impaired growth and development stemming from poor nutrition, repeated infection and inadequate social stimulation – will be included on the World Health Data Hub when it is rolled out in 2021. The goal is for the platform to be a nerve center for scientists, governments and aid organizations to help target not just Covid-19, but also treat chronic physical and mental health issues.

“The World Health Data Hub truly has the ambition and the support to be a game changer,” says Dr. Asma. “We are restless. We know we can deliver. It is our responsibility – collectively – and we know we can’t do it alone.”

The private and public sectors are increasingly partnering on global challenges. Alongside its WHO projects, Microsoft has recently been working with the World Food Programme on creating a digital identity for those – such as refugees – who don’t have the records needed to match them to the right food, medicine, support and services. It’s the kind of investment that has a multiplier effect, not just for the World Food Programme, but for every global aid organization.

Whether it’s in delivering food and medicine or battling disease, “we need to make sure that we’re taking a problem or opportunity-oriented approach,” says Spelhaug. “We’re not implementing technology for technology’s sake.”

“Covid-19 is a challenge, but also an opportunity,” adds Dr. Asma. “We were already trying to work out, over the past year, how we resolve the fragmentation, so that we can make data and create knowledge in a more structured, organized way [and] predict not only impending epidemics or pandemics, but also forecast where we will be in terms of scenarios, simulation, using AI and machine learning. There are so many possibilities that health has not really scratched even the surface of it.”

If tech can help global health concerns catch up after Covid-19, then the global ambitions for the SDGs – and our wider well-being – may yet be achievable. “What we’ve learned,” says Spelhaug, “is the impact we can have together when we frame the right strategic priorities.”

For more on Microsoft’s work with the UN, visit our UN Affairs page. And follow @MSFTIssues on Twitter.

Posted on October 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft named a Leader in the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms

Embracing digital transformation in Industrial IoT requires companies to rethink and shift business models and operations. Doing so, however, has become more difficult in the past six months due to production slowdowns, restrictions on employee movement with social distancing, and rapidly shifting market demands. Yet for many companies, the industry disruptions caused by COVID-19 have actually accelerated integral transformation in emerging technology directly linked to IoT, such as AI and edge computing. Manufacturers preparing for the future are rapidly building their operations around a digital core and actively integrating their value chain to the whole supply chain, doing so to increase efficiency and production capacity.

This why we are sharing that Gartner has positioned Microsoft as a Leader in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms.

A strong global ecosystem

Our vision is to support customers to connect, monitor, and manage their operations whether they want to build and manage their own IoT solutions with Microsoft Azure platform services such as Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, or Microsoft Azure Time Series Insights, or purchase solutions directly from Microsoft Azure Marketplace. As a founding member of the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP), an alliance founded in 2019 to help manufacturing companies accelerate innovation at scale through cross-industry collaboration, knowledge, and data sharing, we are also excited to share the Leaders quadrant in this report with two key Azure partners, Hitachi and PTC. Together, we are in a unique position to support thousands of customers all around the world to achieve better outcomes. The OMP was founded under the umbrella of the Joint Development Foundation, which is part of the Linux Foundation.

Global insights and IoT momentum

Despite these challenging times, we learned recently that looking ahead to the next two years, two out of three organizations are planning to use IoT even more than they do today. This is according to our latest global research, IoT Signals Edition 2 released October 2020, where we captured feedback from over 3,000 business decision makers, IT decision makers, and developers of which nearly 600 were IoT decision makers dedicated to industrial IoT solutions. We want to share three key drivers for Manufacturers according to our survey.

Learn more detailed insights in the free IoT Signals Editions 2 Report.

Improving efficiency is the primary driver for IoT adoption in manufacturing.
Manufacturing organizations are increasingly using AI as part of their IoT solutions.
Complexity and talent challenges exist and are slowing adoption.

For us, the seamless integration of AI, a smarter edge strategy, the security affording freedom to create, the flexibility, scalability, our partner network—these are the means we offer you to make more possible.

Believe more is possible, and make it a reality.

Next steps

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Posted on October 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

‘Leave positive tracks’: Wayve’s self-driving solution seeks to protect people and the planet

Let’s momentarily exit 2020 and pay an imaginary visit to 2029.

(If only we could, right? Anyway, back to our mental trek.)

Picture the world’s cities by the end of this decade: Streets, intersections and roundabouts are a safer, cleaner, quieter and vastly more organized stream of connected, self-driving electric vehicles. Block by block, their shared “driving brain” learns from roadway experiences to make traffic deaths tragedies of our messy past.

Rush hour jams? No chance. Horns? No need. Road rage? No more.

That’s how Alex Kendall sees our urban future. Kendall is the co-founder and CEO of Wayve, a London-based startup that’s building an artificial intelligence (AI) solution that will enable autonomous vehicles to operate not in a single city but in any urban environment, securely moving people and goods.

His vision blends cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities with heavy doses of human equity and healthy air to deliver a new transportation model that will be sustainable, affordable and accessible to people in all cities. He calls it: “Riding the Wayve.”

“One of our values is to leave positive tracks,” Kendall says, “so we exclusively work on electric vehicles.”

A Wayve vehicle drives down the street in London, collecting data via an array of cameras and sensors. — A Wayve vehicle drives down a London street, collecting data via an array of cameras and sensors.

To scale their solution, the three-year-old company is leveraging both Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft for Startups: Autonomous Driving program, which provides benefits like free Azure credits and access to Microsoft engineers and program managers to support the development of these complex workloads on the cloud.

Transform recently chatted with Kendall via Microsoft Teams to hear about our commutes of tomorrow.

TRANSFORM: Autonomous driving means different things to different people. What does it mean to you?

KENDALL: It means the start of a new era, creating artificial intelligence that we trust to move people and goods throughout our cities without requiring supervision by humans. We’re talking about a world of autonomous mobility services that disrupts private car ownership, that makes it more sustainable for people to move around cities and, ultimately, that reduces road deaths to zero.

TRANSFORM: Wayve aims to be the first company to launch its self-driving technology in 100 cities, not just one city. Tell me about that goal.

KENDALL: Across the self-driving industry today, many teams are trying to make it work in one place, just trying to get something out there as quickly as they can. This comes at the expense of what we call “generalization”: How quickly can the system go from working in one place to many places?

When humans learn to drive, they go from understanding how to drive in one city to quickly learning how to drive in other cities. In that same way, scaling our technology to other cities should just be a matter of adding a small amount of experience to adapt to each new place.

TRANSFORM: Where are some of those 100 projected cities?

KENDALL: We’re headquartered in London. That will be our first city. Beyond the UK, we are most excited about targeting a few cities in Europe as next expansion points. Next countries include the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

TRANSFORM: You mentioned how humans learn to drive. What does that mean?

KENDALL: Humans are interesting because they use many means of learning to learn how to drive. The dominant one is unsupervised learning. That is how humans watch and view the world.

Every time you’re sitting in a car or observing cars driving, you’re building an internal mental model about how things behave, how things move, how things interact. When you actually get in a car, it’s this internal model that makes it efficient for you to learn how to drive.

TRANSFORM: How will Wayve’s machine learning system mimic the human process?

KENDALL: Just like humans, our system learns most efficiently using many sources, including unsupervised learning, imitation learning and reinforcement learning.

First, we learn to drive (autonomously) by copying expert humans. We record the driving data from their vehicles. Based on the data, we learn to copy their expert driving. This is called imitation learning.

From that, we build a self-driving system and deploy it on the roads with safety drivers. (These are people who sit behind the steering wheel during testing and, if needed, immediately take control.) Every time the system makes a mistake, and the safety driver intervenes, we learn from that feedback. This is called reinforcement learning.

Finally, we use computer simulation to learn from the situations that are too dangerous or too rare to experience in the real world. Through these three steps, we build a safe and robust autonomous driver.

The dash board of a car holds a Surface laptop to the left of the steering wheel. — Wayve equips its fleet with Microsoft Surface devices.

TRANSFORM: Who are the expert drivers that you mentioned, and how do you record their driving data?

KENDALL: We deploy our self-driving platform with data-collection devices across large scale-commercial fleets.

We provide these vehicles with data-collection computers – fully integrated, self-driving, sensing suites – and small computers with a 4G connection. Integrated with Azure cloud and IoT services, this allows us to understand this data and send back interesting examples to the cloud, ultimately for our system to learn from. At scale, this will provide us access to millions of images per second.

TRANSFORM: In your computer simulations, are you estimating the accident rates?

KENDALL: We’ve built a scalable (simulation) system to extract insights from every part of the drive. We classify these into scenarios and look at the metrics for each one, whether that’s driving through traffic lights or going through a roundabout in the rain.

It gives us a good view on what we are and aren’t good at – and where we should focus our resources and our learning.

Within each of these scenarios, we can accurately estimate human-level performances and what we need to beat. For example, humans can pass through roundabout intersections without an accident causing injury 99.999 percent of the time. We want to be able to surpass this.

TRANSFORM: What has the Microsoft for Startups: Autonomous Driving program meant for your company and achieving your vision?

KENDALL: In the early days, we were building an autonomous car in our garage, driving it around the block and testing it.

We had nothing to show and everything to prove. Despite that, Microsoft was excited about what we were building. This early engagement was critical. More than the financial credit support, the engineering support around the backend and the quick turnaround to our requests and questions allowed us to get that speed of iteration we needed.

Because we had this speed of iteration, we were able to quickly graduate from a house and build a headquarters and an organization that ultimately decided to build our infrastructure at scale in Azure.

Computer vision shows a car driving down a city street. — Wayve’s technology models the real world with computer vision.

TRANSFORM: When your technology is fully deployed, how will this look in the real world?

KENDALL: We envision a world where we have large fleets of connected vehicles, all sharing experiences to improve and train a driving brain that ultimately learns from its mistakes and learns to adapt to society’s needs at a rapid pace.

TRANSFORM: And this self-driving network will be available to all who want to use it?

KENDALL: Yes, for people who are disabled, self-driving is a technology that should massively increase their mobility options. It should reduce the stigma and the cost (of today’s accessible transportation options).

Also, I don’t want to see self-driving only deployed in affluent areas with expensive infrastructure. I want to see self-driving address urban societies throughout the world. This requires a more intelligent autonomous driving system which is able to understand the world around it. This is only possible with machine learning.

TRANSFORM: When might this become part of everyday life?

KENDALL: Over the next few years, Wayve will get to a point where we have the safety case in place, where we’ll invite members of the public to experience riding the Wayve. They will do this, first, with a safety driver supervising the ride, then as an autonomous service.

By the end of this decade, I think riding the Wayve will be dominant within the multimodal transportation options we use in cities throughout the world. It will just be a matter of time before it is as prevalent as today’s ride-hailing services.

Top photo: Alex Kendall. (All photos courtesy of Wayve.)

Tag: Recent News

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Make a yearbook video

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It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month — there still is a lot to do

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM). And there is still a lot to do!

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What’s new in Microsoft Teams: live captions with attribution, individual spotlights and more

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Join the global livestream of the launch of Xbox Series X and S Nov. 10 at 11 a.m. PT

WHO and Microsoft study whether data can help speed our recovery from COVID-19

Microsoft named a Leader in the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms

A strong global ecosystem

Global insights and IoT momentum

Next steps

‘Leave positive tracks’: Wayve’s self-driving solution seeks to protect people and the planet