We’re relying more than ever on the technology in our homes. The refrigerator to keep our stocked-up food cold and safe to eat, the dishwasher to clean endless loads of dishes after eating meals at home, and our devices to keep us connected to the world outside.
For a lot of people, basic internet is no longer sufficient; calling and texting doesn’t seem like enough. Now people are working, learning, teaching, and connecting from home. Video chatting with family and friends. Streaming first-run movies, binge-watching TV, submitting daily class assignments, video conferencing with global participants—the needs are much more complex.
Is your older computer keeping up with what you want to do? If not, look at these simple tips to help you find a new computer so you can do more of what you want and what you love.
1. Make the most of your time with a faster device.
We know that you want to do what you want to do when you want to do it, and it needs to keep up with you, too. Whether that’s a faster response time when opening apps, streaming movies or music while you do your work, or surfing the web with all of your saved tabs open, we can help guide you to the device that will do just that.
With the latest Intel processors (the “brain” inside your computer) and solid-state drives (“SSDs” and the storage compartment within your device), starting up your device is up to three times faster than what you may be experiencing on an older device1. What does this mean? It means that you’ll have the speed and power you’re looking for when working, playing, connecting, or learning online.
How do you choose?
We can help determine the right processor for you, based on your needs. Whether you are looking for an entry-level computer to do the basics, or if you expect a higher level of performance from your device to work and play games, there is something for everyone.
What processor do you need?
Your needs influence what processor is right for you.
Best value, lowest price: The 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i3 processor is perfect if you’re looking for a sub-$500 computer for basic computing tasks.
Everyday requirements: If you’re looking to balance performance and cost, the 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i5 processor helps you find this balance.
Heavy work and play: If you’re a gamer or work a lot on your computer, 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 and i9 processors are worth the expense and peace of mind.
A solid-state drive or a hard disk drive?
Which choice is best for you? Differences are based on price, speed, and storage.
SSD: While these may cost you a little extra, they are worth it for the weight, speed, durability, and lower energy usage to have on your device.
HDD: Hard disk drives provide a bit more storage at less cost, however with this storage comes a significant impact on performance—so if you like a responsive computer, SSD is the way to go.
2. It’s easier to work, play, learn, and connect from anywhere.
On average, modern computers with solid-state drives (SSDs) weigh less than five pounds. And because SSDs consume less power, you’ll get longer battery life—on average, eight-plus hours of video playback.2 These portable powerhouses are just what you need to do whatever you want from wherever you are, with or without the cord—even if you are just moving from room to room.
What do you look for to meet these needs?
Consider a 2-in-1 laptop for complete flexibility, giving you the experience of a tablet, usually with a keyboard you can flip over and a touchscreen interface, with the software and computing capability of a laptop for when you need it.
Touchscreens are worth it. You love it on your phone, right? Especially with a smaller laptop, tablet or 2-in-1, you’ll love it there, too. Pinch and zoom, move things around, or just use it instead of a mouse or touchpad. Once you try it, you’ll wonder why you waited so long to get one.
3. You can find something that fits your style and budget.
Computers have more personality these days, and you can choose one that reflects yours.
Buying a device is an investment for today and in the future, but that doesn’t mean you have to break the bank. With the broad selection of devices available today, there is a computer that not only fits your budget and personal needs, but your style too. Whether you are looking for thin and light to make moving throughout your home easier, or a new color to match your home office, there are options available for everyone.
“In the era of big data, insights collected from cloud services running at the scale of Azure quickly exceed the attention span of humans. It’s critical to identify the right steps to maintain the highest possible quality of service based on the large volume of data collected. In applying this to Azure, we envision infusing AI into our cloud platform and DevOps process, becoming AIOps, to enable the Azure platform to become more self-adaptive, resilient, and efficient. AIOps will also support our engineers to take the right actions more effectively and in a timely manner to continue improving service quality and delighting our customers and partners. This post continuesourAdvancingReliabilityserieshighlightinginitiatives underway to keep improving the reliability of the Azure platform. The post that follows was written by Jian Zhang, our Program Manager overseeing these efforts, as she shares our vision for AIOps, and highlights areas of this AI infusion that are already a reality as part of our end-to-end cloud service management.”—Mark Russinovich, CTO, Azure
This post includes contributions from Principal Data Scientist Manager Yingnong Dang and Partner Group Software Engineering Manager Murali Chintalapati.
As Mark mentioned when he launched this Advancing Reliability blog series, building and operating a global cloud infrastructure at the scale of Azure is a complex task with hundreds of ever-evolving service components, spanning more than 160 datacenters and across more than 60 regions. To rise to this challenge, we have created an AIOps team to collaborate broadly across Azure engineering teams and partnered with Microsoft Research to develop AI solutions to make cloud service management more efficient and more reliable than ever before. We are going to share our vision on the importance of infusing AI into our cloud platform and DevOps process. Gartner referred to something similar as AIOps (pronounced “AI Ops”) and this has become the common term that we use internally, albeit with a larger scope. Today’s post is just the start, as we intend to provide regular updates to share our adoption stories of using AI technologies to support how we build and operate Azure at scale.
Why AIOps?
There are two unique characteristics of cloud services:
The ever-increasing scale and complexity of the cloud platform and systems
The ever-changing needs of customers, partners, and their workloads
To build and operate reliable cloud services during this constant state of flux, and to do so as efficiently and effectively as possible, our cloud engineers (including thousands of Azure developers, operations engineers, customer support engineers, and program managers) heavily rely on data to make decisions and take actions. Furthermore, many of these decisions and actions need to be executed automatically as an integral part of our cloud services or our DevOps processes. Streamlining the path from data to decisions to actions involves identifying patterns in the data, reasoning, and making predictions based on historical data, then recommending or even taking actions based on the insights derived from all that underlying data.
Figure 1. Infusing AI into cloud platform and DevOps.
The AIOps vision
AIOps has started to transform the cloud business by improving service quality and customer experience at scale while boosting engineers’ productivity with intelligent tools, driving continuous cost optimization, and ultimately improving the reliability, performance, and efficiency of the platform itself. When we invest in advancing AIOps and related technologies, we see this ultimately provides value in several ways:
Higher service quality and efficiency: Cloud services will have built-in capabilities of self-monitoring, self-adapting, and self-healing, all with minimal human intervention. Platform-level automation powered by such intelligence will improve service quality (including reliability, and availability, and performance), and service efficiency to deliver the best possible customer experience.
Higher DevOps productivity: With the automation power of AI and ML, engineers are released from the toil of investigating repeated issues, manually operating and supporting their services, and can instead focus on solving new problems, building new functionality, and work that more directly impacts the customer and partner experience. In practice, AIOps empowers developers and engineers with insights to avoid looking at raw data, thereby improving engineer productivity.
Higher customer satisfaction: AIOps solutions play a critical role in enabling customers to use, maintain, and troubleshoot their workloads on top of our cloud services as easily as possible. We endeavor to use AIOps to understand customer needs better, in some cases to identify potential pain points and proactively reach out as needed. Data-driven insights into customer workload behavior could flag when Microsoft or the customer needs to take action to prevent issues or apply workarounds. Ultimately, the goal is to improve satisfaction by quickly identifying, mitigating, and fixing issues.
My colleagues Marcus Fontoura, Murali Chintalapati, and Yingnong Dang shared Microsoft’s vision, investments, and sample achievements in this space during the keynote AI for Cloud–Toward Intelligent Cloud Platforms and AIOps at the AAAI-20 Workshop on Cloud Intelligence in conjunction with the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The vision was created by a Microsoft AIOps committee across cloud service product groups including Azure, Microsoft 365, Bing, and LinkedIn, as well as Microsoft Research (MSR). In the keynote, we shared a few key areas in which AIOps can be transformative for building and operating cloud systems, as shown in the chart below.
Figure 2. AI for Cloud: AIOps and AI-Serving Platform.
AIOps
Moving beyond our vision, we wanted to start by briefly summarizing our general methodology for building AIOps solutions. A solution in this space always starts with data—measurements of systems, customers, and processes—as the key of any AIOps solution is distilling insights about system behavior, customer behaviors, and DevOps artifacts and processes. The insights could include identifying a problem that is happening now (detect), why it’s happening (diagnose), what will happen in the future (predict), and how to improve (optimize, adjust, and mitigate). Such insights should always be associated with business metrics—customer satisfaction, system quality, and DevOps productivity—and drive actions in line with prioritization determined by the business impact. The actions will also be fed back into the system and process. This feedback could be fully automated (infused into the system) or with humans in the loop (infused into the DevOps process). This overall methodology guided us to build AIOps solutions in three pillars.
Figure 3. AIOps methodologies: Data, insights, and actions.
AI for systems
Today, we’re introducing several AIOps solutions that are already in use and supporting Azure behind the scenes. The goal is to automate system management to reduce human intervention. As a result, this helps to reduce operational costs, improve system efficiency, and increase customer satisfaction. These solutions have already contributed significantly to the Azure platform availability improvements, especially for Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs). AIOps solutions contributed in several ways including protecting customers’ workload from host failures through hardware failure prediction and proactive actions like live migration and Project Tardigrade and pre-provisioning VMs to shorten VM creation time.
Of course, engineering improvements and ongoing system innovation also play important roles in the continuous improvement of platform reliability.
Hardware Failure Prediction is to protect cloud customers from interruptions caused by hardware failures. We shared our story of Improving Azure Virtual Machine resiliency with predictive ML and live migration back in 2018. Microsoft Research and Azure have built a disk failure prediction solution for Azure Compute, triggering the live migration of customer VMs from predicted-to-fail nodes to healthy nodes. We also expanded the prediction to other types of hardware issues including memory and networking router failures. This enables us to perform predictive maintenance for better availability.
Pre-Provisioning Service in Azure brings VM deployment reliability and latency benefits by creating pre-provisioned VMs. Pre-provisioned VMs are pre-created and partially configured VMs ahead of customer requests for VMs. As we described in the IJCAI 2020 publication, As we described in the AAAI-20 keynote mentioned above, the Pre-Provisioning Service leverages a prediction engine to predict VM configurations and the number of VMs per configuration to pre-create. This prediction engine applies dynamic models that are trained based on historical and current deployment behaviors and predicts future deployments. Pre-Provisioning Service uses this prediction to create and manage VM pools per VM configuration. Pre-Provisioning Service resizes the pool of VMs by destroying or adding VMs as prescribed by the latest predictions. Once a VM matching the customer’s request is identified, the VM is assigned from the pre-created pool to the customer’s subscription.
AI for DevOps
AI can boost engineering productivity and help in shipping high-quality services with speed. Below are a few examples of AI for DevOps solutions.
Incident management is an important aspect of cloud service management—identifying and mitigating rare but inevitable platform outages. A typical incident management procedure consists of multiple stages including detection, engagement, and mitigation stages. Time spent in each stage is used as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to measure and drive rapid issue resolution. KPIs include time to detect (TTD), time to engage (TTE), and time to mitigate (TTM).
Figure 4. Incident management procedures.
As shared in AIOps Innovations in Incident Management for Cloud Services at the AAAI-20 conference, we have developed AI-based solutions that enable engineers not only to detect issues early but also to identify the right team(s) to engage and therefore mitigate as quickly as possible. Tight integration into the platform enables end-to-end touchless mitigation for some scenarios, which considerably reduces customer impact and therefore improves the overall customer experience.
Anomaly Detection provides an end-to-end monitoring and anomaly detection solution for Azure IaaS. The detection solution targets a broad spectrum of anomaly patterns that includes not only generic patterns defined by thresholds, but also patterns which are typically more difficult to detect such as leaking patterns (for example, memory leaks) and emerging patterns (not a spike, but increasing with fluctuations over a longer term). Insights generated by the anomaly detection solutions are injected into the existing Azure DevOps platform and processes, for example, alerting through the telemetry platform, incident management platform, and, in some cases, triggering automated communications to impacted customers. This helps us detect issues as early as possible.
For an example that has already made its way into a customer-facing feature, Dynamic Threshold is an ML-based anomaly detection model. It is a feature of Azure Monitor used through the Azure portal or through the ARM API. Dynamic Threshold allows users to tune their detection sensitivity, including specifying how many violation points will trigger a monitoring alert.
Safe Deployment serves as an intelligent global “watchdog” for the safe rollout of Azure infrastructure components. We built a system, code name Gandalf, that analyzes temporal and spatial correlation to capture latent issues that happened hours or even days after the rollout. This helps to identify suspicious rollouts (during a sea of ongoing rollouts), which is common for Azure scenarios, and helps prevent the issue propagating and therefore prevents impact to additional customers. We provided details on our safe deployment practices in this earlier blog post and went into more detail about how Gandalf works in our USENIX NSDI 2020 paper and slide deck.
AI for customers
To improve the Azure customer experience, we have been developing AI solutions to power the full lifecycle of customer management. For example, a decision support system has been developed to guide customers towards the best selection of support resources by leveraging the customer’s service selection and verbatim summary of the problem experienced. This helps shorten the time it takes to get customers and partners the right guidance and support that they need.
AI-serving platform
To achieve greater efficiencies in managing a global-scale cloud, we have been investing in building systems that support using AI to optimize cloud resource usage and therefore the customer experience. One example is Resource Central (RC), an AI-serving platform for Azure that we described in Communications of the ACM. It collects telemetry from Azure containers and servers, learns from their prior behaviors, and, when requested, produces predictions of their future behaviors. We are already using RC to predict many characteristics of Azure Compute workloads accurately, including resource procurement and allocation, all of which helps to improve system performance and efficiency.
Looking towards the future
We have shared our vision of AI infusion into the Azure platform and our DevOps processes and highlighted several solutions that are already in use to improve service quality across a range of areas. Look to us to share more details of our internal AI and ML solutions for even more intelligent cloud management in the future. We’re confident that these are the right investment solutions to improve our effectiveness and efficiency as a cloud provider, including improving the reliability and performance of the Azure platform itself.
In October, Microsoft Advertising began inviting small businesses to try Digital Marketing Center, a Microsoft Garage project. After working with many small businesses over the last few months, the team has received very encouraging feedback, has added additional features to serve user needs, and is now ready to extend the invitation to additional businesses. Small business owners can request an invitation to try Digital Marketing Center in this short, online questionnaire.
Digital Marketing Center provides small and medium businesses with a central platform to grow their business. The tool allows businesses to efficiently manage their online presence and marketing activities across paid search advertising, paid social advertising, and organic social media management. The one-stop-shop tool allows business owners to manage their digital marketing across not just Microsoft Advertising, but also leading advertising and social media platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and now, Twitter as well.
After working with small businesses from the first batch of the pilot, the Digital Marketing Center team added a number of new features to the solution.
In addition to adding support for Twitter, the team has also enabled private messaging on Facebook, a new home page experience aggregating social and ad metrics, and improved tools for ads. For example, users can now utilize a field for an extra headline, allowing advertisers to include more information in ads, leverage improved location targeting, and appeal most disapproved ads from Bing and Facebook.
The team is excited for additional feedback and would love to invite more small and medium business owners to attend. Request an invitation to join the experiment here. The tool is currently free to use—users can manage their social presence at no cost (pay only for search and social ads).
New Features
Social management inbox A one-stop shop for liking, replying, and direct messaging on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
Image ad suggestion With image ad suggestions, you can effortlessly create appealing image ads by just picking from suggested ads
Improved tools for ads Users can now utilize a field for an extra headline, allowing advertisers to include more information in ads and leverage improved location targeting
Appeal disapproved ads Appeal most disapproved ads from Bing and Facebook
A new home page experience The new home page aggregates social and ad metrics in one view
Digital Marketing Center is currently available for trial and feedback with select small businesses. If you’re interested in participating in this experiment you can fill out this short, online questionnaire. To get early access to insights from the Digital Marketing Center experiment, request to receive insights and the team will be in touch.
When it launches this holiday, Xbox Series X will be the most powerful console the world has ever seen. One of the biggest benefits of all that power is giving developers the ability to make games that are Xbox Series X Optimized. This means that they’ve taken full advantage of the unique capabilities of Xbox Series X, both for new titles built natively using the Xbox Series X development environment as well as previously released titles that have been rebuilt specifically for the console.
In our Inside Xbox Series X Optimized series, these creators will share the behind-the-scenes accounts of how they’re optimizing their titles for Xbox Series X and what that means for the future of gaming.
Today, we’ll be chatting with Manuel Fernández, Cofounder & Programmer at Out of the Blue about optimizing Call of the Sea for Xbox Series X.
Q: What excites you most about developing and bringing Call of the Sea to life on next-generation hardware?
A: It is always exciting to see how old limitations are overcome and try to find new ones. The feeling of adventure when exploring something new is what we like best.
Q: In addition to benefiting from the power and performance of Xbox Series X for quicker load times etc. what Xbox Series X features were you most excited to explore leveraging in the development of Call of the Sea?
A: Without a doubt, benefiting from the power and performance of the new generation is something that everyone is looking for, but it is not the only thing that calls our attention. We believe that some features like Smart Delivery are building the future of gaming by putting the players first and we are happy to be a part of this.
[embedded content]
Watch Major Nelson’s interview with Tatiana Delgado above for more on Call of the Sea.
Q: How will these enhancements impact a player’s experience with Call of the Sea?
A: With the Smart Delivery feature you’ll always have access to the best version of the game. Sharing settings and games between different systems. That makes you design the game thinking as a whole and not as something that is tied to a single platform. On the other hand the power and performance of Xbox Series X will allow us to offer the game at beautiful 4K at 60fps, leveraging the rich game environments and making the art really shine.
Q: Why did your development team choose to focus on 4K Resolution, 60FPS and DirectX Raytracing as enhancement areas for Call of the Sea?
A: We are focusing on delivering the most beautiful game possible. Although we have a stylized art style, we are giving it a next-gen look, full of visual effects and movement in the scene. With DirectX Raytracing, we will have the chance to make the island even more present, almost come to life. Players will have the opportunity to enjoy the island’s stunning environments in beautiful 4K, allowing for a greater immersion and an overall better experience.
The power of this new hardware allows us to not have to make compromises between frame rate and resolution. We can finally offer the best of the two worlds to Xbox Series X players!
Q: How do you expect fans of Call of the Sea will respond to playing it on Xbox Series X with these enhancements?
A: We hope fans are delighted by the visuals, spend more time in the game and enjoy exploring every corner of the island.
These enhancements will also allow us to tune the environments, weather, and make the environments evolve as the story does. We consider the island a character in Call of the Sea and enhancing all the visual effects helps us convey the player’s emotions in a fantastic way.
Q: What is it like developing on Xbox Series X?
A: We are still in the first stages of experimenting with the new hardware and we are exploring how far we can go. We are working in line with the advances in Unreal Engine, the engine in which we are developing the game, towards implementing them in the Xbox Series X version of the game. Both Microsoft and Epic Games are doing an excellent job of giving developers tools to make it as smooth as possible to develop on their platform.
Q: Which enhancement were you most excited about to explore leveraging for Call of the Sea on Xbox Series X?
A: The graphic power that allows us to show our scenarios in 4k at 60fps is something we are really excited about. Sometimes it allows us to take our visuals to where our only limit is creativity.
Q: What does Smart Delivery mean for your game and how you’re bringing Call of the Sea to fans?
A: We want our players to enjoy the game at its best, so we love the idea that those who have the game on Xbox One, can continue playing it on Series X when they will be ready to jump into the next generation. We love how easy it will be for players to do this transition without having to worry about their save game and game progression, as they will carry over between the two platforms. We love being part of this new norm as the generation shifts.
Q: What does Xbox Series X/next-generation development enable in current or future projects that you could not have achieved with the current generation of consoles?
A: We want to explore in future projects the opportunity to cross the barriers of the game itself, not as something that starts when you press play and ends when you go out, but as something that is alive inside the console and uses the new user interface to extend the game experience.
Since the last month’s update on “4 ways to save money”, we continue to see more shoppers search for products on our platform to get the best price, across sellers. In this update, we are excited to introduce new image-based search experiences on Bing Shopping.
Below are 3 tips that will significantly improve the product search experience of our shoppers. And the improved product discovery better enables the businesses on our platform.
Tip #1: Like a look? Find where you can buy it!
It’s so often that we like a look but have trouble thinking of a search term to find it. Welcome to visual search on Bing Shopping! With one click you can now discover products that match the visual design across all sellers in our platform. We’ve currently launched this for clothing and shoe departments, with plans to extend this to home décor soon. Give it a try: search for shoes right away!
Tip #2 Saw something on the web or have an image on your camera? Shop it!
Bing Shopping search box now comes with a camera icon. It allows you to upload or capture any product image to find the best price across all sellers in our platform. Try visual search now!
Tip #3: This goes well with that!
Bing Shopping now suggests what “goes well with” the dress you are searching on our platform. Don’t forget to check out Goes Well With the next time you plan to buy clothing online.
Thanks for using Bing Shopping. We will continue to help our shoppers with better product discovery and savings, from the larger array of stores in our platform.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created an economic crisis, putting millions of people out of work. As economies start to reopen and organizations of all sizes consider how best to work in a COVID-19 environment, we anticipate the increased use of digital technology, and therefore, a stronger demand for digital skills.
Tune in June 30 at 8 a.m. PT to hear more from Satya Nadella, Brad Smith, Ryan Roslansky and Charlotte Yarkoni about how Microsoft and LinkedIn plan to help people get the skills they need to succeed as the economy changes.
This month, as communities around the world move from “remote everything” to a more hybrid model of work and life, I’m excited to let you know that many capabilities from past announcements are reaching public preview or general availability. We can’t wait to get these, as well as some new updates, into your hands as we swiftly release new tools to further enable remote and hybrid work.
A couple of highlights: We’re releasing some much-requested features in Microsoft Teams for our education community. These include expanding the Teams grid view to 7×7 (more on that below). Also, Microsoft Graph Connectors are now available to help you connect disparate systems and make content more accessible. Some of your favorite app improvements are also now available on more platforms—including Presenter Coach on Android and Polls in Outlook for all devices. And finally, new privacy settings in Edge and Microsoft Search provide IT with the flexibility to help you meet compliance requirements without impacting productivity.
Expand your view of participants and more with Microsoft Teams
See more faces and break out in groups during meetings—This month, we announced new features for Microsoft Teams to help you create a more engaging, connected, and collaborative meeting experience. Coming to preview soon, we are expanding the Teams grid view to 7×7, which will accommodate up to 49 participants at once on a single screen. And coming this fall, Breakout Rooms will allow meeting organizers to split meeting participants into small groups to enable ideation, brainstorming, learning, and discussions.
Create recurrent surveys in Teams—We’ve heard from many of our customers that they’d like an easier way to manage routine surveys in their Teams channels—including sending “pulse surveys” to employees on a regular basis. We’ve listened to this feedback and today we’re releasing new workflows for common scenarios like employee sentiment, employee issues and challenges, and employee health status. These new workflows include templates and the ability for users to choose frequency and set reminders for each Teams channel, making these surveys easy to get started and manage going forward. To get started, click Create a workflow to automatically collect response in the Forms tab and select Scenarios.
Keep the focus on you during video meetings—This month, we released new custom background effects in Teams, one of our most requested features. Now, you can customize your background by uploading one of your own images or choosing one from the collections of backgrounds available online. This feature is available to all users.
Keep up with your work and personal life in one place—In March, we announced several new features coming to Teams to help you connect, stay organized, and collaborate with family and friends. Managing responsibilities across work and life can be challenging, with many of us relying on multiple apps and standalone tools to stay on top of it all. You can now create groups to plan trips with friends, connect in group chats or video calls, collaborate over shared to-do lists, coordinate schedules, and more—all in one place. We’re excited to announce these features are now rolling out to Microsoft Teams mobile app users in preview.
Microsoft Teams
The power to organize and connect with family and friends, all in one app.
New updates to Microsoft 365 make it easier than ever to find the information you’re looking for.
Make more data searchable with connectors—Microsoft Search indexes all your Microsoft 365 data to make it searchable for users. With Microsoft Graph connectors, your organization can index third-party data hosted on-premises or in public and private clouds, so they appear in your Microsoft Search results. We’re delighted to announce that customers in Targeted Release can now begin deploying Microsoft Graph connectors. To get started, select the Connectors tab on your Microsoft 365 admin center > Settings > Microsoft Search page (must be an admin and signing in from your tenant).
Find answers with natural language queries across apps—It’s no secret that asking simple, everyday language questions is easier than adapting your query to the “language” spoken by a given app, search engine, or other user-interface. We’ve been hard at work innovating in natural language across Microsoft 365 apps and services. We’re excited to share several new experiences that demonstrate our progress. In Microsoft Word, you can ask questions related to the document and get answers based on the contents of the document. In Outlook, short responses are suggested based on the context of the message. Next, Excel users can now perform an analysis by asking plain language questions. Finally, SharePoint users can now see an “At a glance” summary of a document’s content. All are now generally available.
Create and share content more easily
This month we announced new features across your favorite Microsoft 365 apps.
Hone your public speaking skills with PowerPoint Presenter Coach for Android Mobile—Last fall, we announced Presenter Coach in PowerPoint for the web. Today, we are excited to announce that it’s now generally available on your Android device—in both the PowerPoint app and in the new Office mobile app. Presenter Coach uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide on-screen guidance on your pacing, use of inclusive language or profanity, and use of filler words and culturally insensitive phrases. To get started, simply open any presentation in your PowerPoint stand-alone app or Office Mobile app, tap on the more options menu (three dots), tap rehearse with coach, and tap start rehearsing when ready.
Additionally, PowerPoint Live for PowerPoint for the web is now generally available. This new feature helps presenters deliver a more personalized presentation experience to each audience member, enabling viewers to connect from their device and move through slides at their own pace, provide instant feedback with live reactions, and enable live subtitles in their preferred language.
Experience the redesigned Yammer and other new capabilities—The new Yammer experience, built on our Fluid UI, is now in public preview. We’ve also added several new “All Company” community experiences based on customer feedback during private preview. Now, admins can change the name and cover photo to reflect their organization’s branding. And to help keep the group focused on corporate communications, you can now restrict who can post, to prevent users from adding unrelated posts. Finally, you can host live events and announce questions, polls, and praise with notifications to the entire “All Company” community—making it easier to share corporate updates, safety news, and other critical messages. Microsoft 365 Global Admins can configure access to the new Yammer preview through the Yammer admin portal by enabling the preview toggle.
Easily create polls, collect votes, and view results within an email—Polls are a way to quickly get a consensus from groups, but managing add-ons or including links to outside platforms can reduce response rates and effectiveness. Fortunately, Outlook users will soon be able to create a poll within Outlook without the need to find and install an add-in. Outlook on the web and Mac users will see this feature generally available this month, with Outlook for the Windows desktop app coming next month.
Create Visio diagrams in Excel with ease—This month, we’re announcing three new features to enhance the Visio Data Visualizer add-in experience. First, you can now access category-specific templates for basic and cross-functional flowcharts, plus organization charts directly in Excel. Next, single sign-on (SSO) integration allows users already signed into Excel to avoid a secondary sign-on to access the add-in. Finally, we added localization support that allows users to create diagrams in all of the languages already supported by Visio. These features will be enabled by the end of June.
Build database diagrams more easily and save diagrams as images in Visio for the web—This month, we’re announcing two new capabilities in Visio for the web. First, you can now design your database diagrams in Visio for the web. And to help get started more easily, we’ve provided a few starter diagrams to represent different scenarios for both Crow’s foot and Chen’s notation. To get started, visit visio.office.com, select the preferred diagram template, and start modeling your systems or databases.
Also, we’ve added the ability to save diagrams as an image file in Visio for the web. The Download as Image feature enables users to save time and easily customize the export of their Visio diagrams as image files for easy sharing with everyone—including those without a Visio license or subscription.
Stay secure and manage privacy
We’re committed to making Microsoft 365 a secure, end-to-end productivity solution. To meet that, we continuously add new built-in capabilities that help you improve your security posture, deliver more control over privacy, and automate routine tasks. This month, we’ve added new capabilities to help IT admins more effectively secure their organizations against malicious documents and manage privacy settings in Edge and the Microsoft Graph.
Verify documents are safe before they’re opened—Although opening documents in Protected View helps minimize risk from documents originating outside the organization, users often exit this protected sandbox to save time. We’re excited to announce that Safe Documents, which automatically checks against known risks and threat profiles before allowing documents to open, is now generally available. This built-in feature helps secure your organization against malicious content while delivering a more seamless, productive experience for end users. Safe Documents is now available worldwide to all customers with Microsoft 365 E5 and E5 Security.
Manage the types of data that sync for Edge users—Sync capabilities in Microsoft Edge allow users to sign in and get quick access to their personal data when using multiple devices or shared devices. However, some organizations might need to limit syncing of specific data—such as passwords—to meet compliance or company policy requirements. A new policy in Microsoft Edge allows IT professionals to precisely manage the types of data that sync for users—such as favorites, settings, addresses, extensions, and more. Check out our documentation on how to implement a policy to exclude data during sync.
Fine-tune your privacy settings for the Microsoft Graph—As the amount of data being generated in Microsoft 365 continues to grow, we’re continuing to invest in privacy controls that put you in control of your data. We’re pleased to announce a set of robust new privacy settings that provide the ability to configure the generation and visibility of Graph-derived insights, between users and other items in the Graph (such as documents or sites). These new settings will enable organizations to disable item insights for all users or just a subset of users. These new privacy capabilities will be available to everyone this summer.
Manage Microsoft 365 Groups more efficiently—We’ve released several updates to help streamline the management of Microsoft 365 Groups. First, we have enhanced the team creation experience with an updated user interface and improved error messages. Group information, including the Group ID, name, alias, and description, can now be exported as a .csv file using filtered properties or search results. Also, email addresses for a Microsoft 365 Group can now be edited, enabling group names to continue to evolve as needs change. Finally, you can now restore a deleted group directly from the Deleted Groups page. Visit the Microsoft 365 admin center to check out the new Groups management capabilities.
Also new this month
Forms for Excel is now generally available, making it simple and easy to collect info from users in the same organization. New features include metrics such as response time, responder name, images, videos, themes, and branching logic.
We also introduced Money in Excel, a dynamic, smart template and add-in for Excel that allows you to securely connect your bank, credit card, investment, and loan accounts to Excel and automatically import your transaction and account information into an Excel spreadsheet.
FastTrack has updated and improved the guides in the Microsoft 365 admin center to help customers save time on their configuration and deployment tasks. We’ve also released a new Remote Work Setup guide to help reduce the strain on your VPN infrastructure and optionally set up remote access for desktops and apps. Check out the new setup guidance page to get started.
All of the features and releases above reflect our commitment to building tools and experiences that enable our customers to be productive and secure while working and learning from anywhere. We will continue to listen and work towards releasing new experiences that meet your needs as situations continue to evolve.
If you want to learn to cook, but the most complicated recipe you’ve ever attempted is macaroni and cheese from a box, you can find plenty of resources online to help you master the basics or to take your skills to the next level. Try a Bing search for instructional videos like how to poach an egg, how to cook the perfect steak, or even how to sharpen your kitchen knife skills.
2. Figure out what to make.
Sometimes, the hardest part of cooking is figuring out what to cook. If you want a recipe to guide you, let Bing help you out. Start out with a very basic search like “recipe ideas” or try some searches using ingredients you want to use, such as:
Do you have a handful of ingredients on hand and don’t know what to do with them? Text a list of ingredients to Samsung’s Cook Magic recipe bot and it’ll respond with recipe links using those ingredients.
3. Organize your meal planning.
Years ago, if you wanted to look for a recipe, you pulled out a cookbook. Now, you can find almost any recipe you want online. But rather than opening a dozen tabs in your browser or trying to copy and paste links from Edge into Word or even Notepad, try making a recipe collection in Microsoft Edge.
4. Plan your shopping trips.
If you’re finding it harder to get to the store, you’ll want to make sure you remember everything when you do go shopping. OneNote notebooks are great for keeping track of your grocery lists, favorite items from specialty stores, weekly staples, or just today’s list of what you need for a specific meal. Add items to your list in OneNote with checkboxes, so as you’re cruising the aisles of your store, you can mark off what’s in your cart.
You can also share your notebook with others so if one person runs to the store, others in your household can add new items to the list as they shop, because OneNote notebooks are always in sync (as long as you have an internet connection).
5. Exchange recipes with friends and family.
Food is more than a way to sustain our bodies. Recipes and traditions are passed down through families and among friends. Now is a great time to create a OneNote notebook, share it with family members or friends, and encourage them to write down all of those recipes that they know so well. Whether it’s the sweet potato casserole you had as a child or that new chocolate chip cookie recipe you found last week, OneNote can help ensure your most meaningful recipes are always preserved.
You can also pass on your culinary creations when you create a cookbook or a series of recipe cards using our free Word templates and gift them to friends and family members who love your cooking.
6. Get creative and grow your skills.
Rather than starting from a recipe, start with your favorite sauce. Then mix-and-match to create different meals based on which protein, vegetable, fruit, and extras you have on hand. Jarred pasta, sauce, salsa, and condiments are inexpensive and can be used whenever you’re ready for them. Cooking creatively can reduce stress, and you can find some tips to get started here.
7. Share a meal—virtually.
Do you long for big dinners with family or friends? Why not have a virtual dinner party? You can use OneNote to keep a list of the recipes you want to make and share that with your virtual guests so they can cook along in their own homes.
Send out invitations to your dinner party that include a Skype link, and when it comes time to dine, start Skype, turn on your video camera, and share a meal with those you can’t join in person.
For three generations, the Bianchini family has been creating exceptional wines on their idyllic 5,000-acre Ciacci Piccolomini d’Aragona estate of rolling hills and lush forests in Montalcino, Tuscany. Following the passing of their father, Giuseppe, in February 2004, Paolo and Lucia Bianchini have run the winery, with Alex and Ester, Paolo’s children, also heavily involved in the day-to-day operations.
For the Bianchini family it’s been a balancing act to maintain the traditions of a historic estate while staying one step ahead of the latest developments in the world of wine. The recent COVID-19 pandemic put that ability to adapt to the test. With trade shows postponed and international travel impossible, the pandemic changed everything for small wine producers like Ciacci.
In a normal year, the release of a new vintage would be accompanied by international trips and face-to-face meetings with distributors and critics, as well as cellar tours at the estate. This year, facing an impending lockdown, Gabriele Gorelli, consultant and wine producer, and the rest of the Ciacci team, had to develop a new way to share their latest vintage with wine-lovers across the world and grow their business through the crisis. The Ciacci winery responded by turning to Microsoft Teams. The result was a perfect balance of tradition and technology.
Thanks to a pre-existing investment in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, Ciacci was able to act fast and develop a completely new way to share their wine with distributors, critics, and wine-lovers from around the world. Virtual wine tastings, held via Microsoft Teams, have changed how the winery does business, saving time, travel costs, and creating new and stronger connections with customers.
Our world is traditional, it’s all about human contact. Virtual tastings in Microsoft Teams helps us create a space to share even more aspects of our business with customers. When the pandemic hit, the tool did a fantastic job of helping us communicate with our distributors, critics, and even restaurants. Alex Bianchini, Head of Production, Ciacci Piccolomini d’Aragona
Using the communication hub in Microsoft 365, Ciacci employees moved quickly to replace in-person gatherings with virtual wine tastings using Teams meetings. The Bianchini family members also used Teams to work together and connect with partners and suppliers, to keep their business thriving.
Ciacci is also saving time and costs associated with travel by using Teams. A typical international sales trip would take at least a week, but with Teams, Ciacci simply ships its wine to the distributor and sets up a two-hour meeting in Teams to discuss it.
Although everyone is eagerly awaiting a return to normalcy in Italy, Ciacci is reimagining the future of its business. The ability to connect virtually with wine lovers across the world has opened up a wealth of possibilities to expand its customer base. Ciacci is already thinking about using virtual tours to invite fans from around the globe into the rarified world of the traditional Italian wine cellar.
The winery further plans on using Teams to create a direct line to customers, instead of relying so heavily on selling to distributors; something the winery is well-placed to do, thanks to its e-commerce site and the interactive potential of Teams.
With Teams we have the best of both worlds, you can stay connected with distributors and experts, but also create relationships with new customers, especially if you have your own platform for business to consumer. Gabriele Gorelli, Consultant and Wine Producer
The Ciacci winery may still age their wine in barrels in a historic cellar, but above ground, the business is embracing leading-edge technology to thrive through uncertain times. A previous investment in Microsoft 365, and Teams in particular, has meant this family-run business is able to adapt to a new reality. The result, a revolution in digital wine promotion and a new vision for the future.
Here at Xbox, we’re building the future of gaming by putting players first, ensuring that you are at the center and in control of your gaming experience. Whether you’re exploring an expansive library of Xbox Game Pass titles with more than 10 million of your fellow gamers or taking your gaming on the go with Project xCloud, it’s clear that the future of gaming is brighter than ever.
Nowhere is that more evident than with Xbox Series X, our fastest, most powerful console ever. Not only will Xbox Series X set a new bar for performance, speed and compatibility, it will empower the world’s greatest developers to create games that launch us into the future of gaming. Putting players first also means introducing a host of new features and technologies to improve their experience.
Optimized for Xbox Series X is the indicator for games that take advantage of the full power of Xbox Series X. Since Xbox Series X offers developers unparalleled power and speed, this empowers them to create the experiences they want and embrace a range of features and capabilities based on what is best for their individual titles. When you hear a game has been Optimized for Xbox Series X, you’ll know that the developer has either natively designed or fully rebuilt their game to take full advantage of the unique capabilities of our most powerful console ever.
Games featuring the Optimized for Xbox Series X badge can showcase anything from virtually eliminating load times via the Xbox Velocity Architecture, heightened visuals and hardware-accelerated DirectX raytracing powered by our custom, next generation GPU, to steadier and often higher framerates up to 120fps. Titles displaying the Optimized for Xbox Series X badge can include:
Brand new games built natively for the Xbox Series X such as Halo Infinite.
Previously released titles in which a developer has enhanced their title using the Xbox Series X development environment to dramatically leverage the power and features Xbox Series X has to offer, like Gears 5.
Let’s take a closer look at what you’ll be getting when you’re playing a game that’s been Optimized for Xbox Series X:
Groundbreaking Visual Fidelity Immerses You in Your Games
Powered by DirectX 12 Ultimate and with support for hardware-accelerated DirectX Raytracing—a first for consoles—select games will produce more dynamic, realistic environments. DirectX Raytracing means that you’ll see true-to-life lighting, accurate reflections and hear 3D spatially accurate acoustics in real time as you explore the game world. Ultimately, DirectX Raytracing enables developers to create more physically accurate worlds. To give a better feel for what this may look like in practice, we asked Manuel Fernández, Co-founder and Programmer from Out of the Blue to share what they’re most excited about for leveraging DirectX Raytracing in Call of the Sea:
“In Call of the Sea, the island has a great importance as we tell the story as a dialogue between the player and their environment. Thanks to the power of Xbox Series X and DirectX Raytracing, we will have the chance to make the island even more present, almost come to life. Players will have the opportunity to enjoy the island’s stunning environments in beautiful 4K, allowing for a greater immersion and an overall better experience.” – Manuel Fernández, Out of the Blue
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Next Generation Framerates Offer the Pinnacle of Precision
Games that have been Optimized for Xbox Series X use the power of the new console to deliver higher, steadier framerates, with a performance target of 60 frames per second at 4K resolution. Some games will even be able to support framerates up to 120 fps or variable refresh rates, allowing developers to offer players heightened realism and more precise controls for fast-paced action. We also talked to Technical Director at Codemasters David Springate about optimizing DiRT 5 for Xbox Series X, to give you a better feel for how increased framerates could improve next gen games:
“DIRT 5 is a fast, action-packed amplified off-road racing game and being able to play it with 120fps options on Xbox Series X is incredible. The power of Series X means that the game looks stunning at 60fps, and we’re also able to offer amazingly smooth, responsive gameplay at 120fps while still looking gorgeous. Racing fans know frame rate is king and DIRT 5 will deliver on this. Players will experience the strongest sense of speed and responsiveness at the highest frame rate. It’s such a great, smooth experience – I hadn’t experienced another racer like it.” – David Springate, Codemasters
Faster Load Times Will Get You Gaming More Quickly than Ever
Optimized for Xbox Series X isn’t just about gorgeous visuals and better framerates. It’s also about virtually eliminating in-game load times thanks to our Xbox Velocity Architecture technology. XVA combines a custom solid-state drive, custom hardware and integrated software to greatly decrease load times both in and out of games, meaning gamers will be able to spend more time playing and less time waiting. As an example, for titles that have large, open-world environments, these experiences will feel even more dynamic, as developers will be able to leverage the massive increase in processing power and the ability to stream assets in extremely quickly to not break immersion. Developers will also be able to effectively eliminate loading times between levels and create fast travel systems that are just that: fast. We talked with Mike Rayner, Technical Director at The Coalition to hear what he’s most excited about for leveraging the XVA for Gears 5 and here’s what he had to say:
“As a game developer one of the most exciting improvements that far exceeds expectations is the massive I/O improvements on Xbox Series X. With the Xbox Series X, out of gate we reduced our load-times by more than 4x without any code changes. With the new DirectStorage APIs and new hardware decompression we can further improve I/O performance and reduce CPU overhead both of which are essential to achieve fast loading. As we look to the future, the Xbox Series X’s Sampler Feedback for Streaming (SFS) is a game changer for how we think about world streaming and visual level of detail.” – Mike Rayner, The Coalition
Wondering which games are Optimized for Xbox Series X? Below you’ll find a list of titles confirmed to be Optimized for Xbox Series X to date. As this list grows in the weeks and months leading up to Xbox Series X launch, we’ll keep it updated to reflect any additions.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Bright Memory Infinite
Call of the Sea
Chivalry 2
Chorus
Cyberpunk 2077
Destiny 2
DiRT 5
FIFA 21
Gears 5
Halo Infinite
Hitman 3
Madden NFL 21
Marvel’s Avengers
Outriders
Scarlet Nexus
Scorn
Second Extinction
The Ascent
The Medium
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2
WRC 9 FIA World Rally Championship
Yakuza: Like a Dragon
We hope this gave you a better idea of what it means when you purchase a game that’s been Optimized for Xbox Series X, which ensure that the player is at the center of the gaming experience. We’ll be sharing more on Optimized for Xbox Series X and adding titles to the list above in the coming months.
