Blair Hanley Frank
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Blair Hanley Frank
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Microsoft delays its Azure Stack software until mid-2017
Azure Stack, Microsoft's system for building private clouds that run the same software it uses in its public cloud, has been delayed until the middle of 2017, the company announced Tuesday.Microsoft has changed its strategy and will provide Azure Stack through integrated systems built by hardware partners, rather than allowing companies to deploy the software on any compatible hardware they choose. Microsoft has been pushing Azure Stack as a differentiator of its cloud platform compared to many of its competitors in the public cloud arena -- especially Amazon. The change came about because the company wants to give businesses prevalidated hardware to simplify deployments of Azure Stack, according to Mike Schutz, the general manager of product marketing for Microsoft's Server and Tools division. At launch, Microsoft will be working with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Dell, and Lenovo. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft delays its Azure Stack software until mid-2017
Azure Stack, Microsoft's system for building private clouds that run the same software it uses in its public cloud, has been delayed until the middle of 2017, the company announced Tuesday.Microsoft has changed its strategy and will provide Azure Stack through integrated systems built by hardware partners, rather than allowing companies to deploy the software on any compatible hardware they choose. Microsoft has been pushing Azure Stack as a differentiator of its cloud platform compared to many of its competitors in the public cloud arena -- especially Amazon. The change came about because the company wants to give businesses prevalidated hardware to simplify deployments of Azure Stack, according to Mike Schutz, the general manager of product marketing for Microsoft's Server and Tools division. At launch, Microsoft will be working with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Dell, and Lenovo. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Surprise! Facebook is using Office 365 now
Facebook's staff of 13,000 employees are now Microsoft Office 365 users, the social networking giant announced Tuesday. "Do you want to know why we chose Office 365? It's because of Microsoft," Facebook CIO Tim Campos said in a video. "Microsoft got cool again." This is a big customer win for Microsoft because tech companies are often the core domain of Google's productivity suite. The news comes as Google has been pushing harder to try and pick up enterprise customers from Microsoft with offers aimed at getting them way from long-term contracts with the company. Office 365 met the company's needs for an office suite that is cross-platform, mobile, and secure, Campos said during a presentation at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft is selling a HoloLens ‘enterprise edition,’ but it’s not what you think
Microsoft’s HoloLens has been available to developers for some time, but what's less well known is that its augmented reality headset also comes in an 'enterprise edition.'CEO Satya Nadella talked up the HoloLens at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner conference in Toronto Monday, along with an app that Japan Airlines is using to train its engineers."We now have HoloLens available both as a developer edition as well as an enterprise edition," Nadella said.The reference to an enterprise edition caused some confusion initially, as Microsoft watchers speculated that the company had two versions of the product -- one for large businesses and another aimed at individual developers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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GE and Microsoft work together on IoT services in the cloud
GE and Microsoft have teamed up to bring the industrial giant's Predix platform-as-a-service offering to the Azure cloud, the two companies announced Monday. It's a move that helps add to the portfolio of Internet of Things services available through Microsoft's cloud platform, at a time when the company is pushing its service for IoT applications. The announcement came during Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, where GE CEO Jeff Immelt talked with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on stage.Predix is a platform-as-a-service offering that's designed for building applications that have industrial uses. Predix services that developers can tap into include asset management and anomaly detection offerings, among others. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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This is Microsoft’s vision of a holographic office
Microsoft made the biggest pitch to date for HoloLens as a business computing device on Monday during its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, Canada.When Arantxa Lasa Cid, a program director at the company, took the stage for a HoloLens demo, she pulled up a workspace that looked a lot like a massive, multimonitor desktop setup, complete with virtual monitors showing an Outlook calendar, email and two web browsers. It looked a lot like a traditional desktop setup, with one catch: Cid was standing in front of an empty table, wearing one of Microsoft's augmented reality headsets. And then, with the tap of her finger, she pulled up a model of a jet engine. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IT spending will shrink worldwide due to Brexit, Gartner predicts
Britain's vote to exit the European Union will depress global IT spending this year, as companies cut back spending over uncertainty about what the future holds, Gartner has predicted. "We're looking at a 2-5 percent reduction in IT spending in the UK," compared to Gartner's previous forecast of a 1.7 percent decline, analyst John-David Lovelock said in an interview. "That's going to be enough to tip the worldwide IT spending negative this year," he said. The "Brexit" vote has led to massive uncertainty about what the future holds economically for Britain and the entire European Union, which means that companies have scaled back on their strategic plans in the fifth-largest IT market in the world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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You can now send files with Skype when the recipient is offline
Microsoft stepped up its battle with the armada of mobile messaging apps on Tuesday, announcing that Skype users can now send files to each other without the recipient needing to be online.That means a user could tweak a presentation and send it to a colleague over the weekend, and have it waiting for them when they log into Skype on Monday morning.It's a big improvement over the previous functionality, which required both parties to be online. The new approach also lets users access the file across multiple devices, which means they can read the same document on their phone, computer or tablet, without having to request it over and over again.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft gives businesses a free tool for online meetings
Microsoft is giving small businesses a new way to hold meetings online with the launch of a free Skype Meetings product that's aimed at providing professional communication tools for free.Skype Meetings is free to use, and people can launch meetings for up to 10 people during their first 60 days of using it. After that, they're limited to only hosting meetings for three or fewer people. Those meetings can take advantage of a bunch of features, including the option to bring in participants using a hyperlink and present a PowerPoint slide deck live.The new service is something of a gateway drug to try and get people hooked on Skype for Business. That's why Microsoft imposed its user limit restrictions -- super-small businesses can use Skype Meetings without paying, and growing companies are encouraged to buy an Office 365 subscription to hold big meetings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft appears to be building a business app marketplace
Microsoft appears to be building a business app store. The company put online a test version of a service called AppSource that’s designed to help businesses find software that augments the Microsoft products they already use, such as Power BI and Dynamics AX. The AppSource site was available Tuesday night at appsource.microsoft.com), but is down now. A description on its homepage said that users would be able to use the site to find software-as-a-service offerings from Microsoft and selected partners that they could try for free before purchasing them. All of this appears to have come to light after someone developing the site at Microsoft accidentally made a test version of it available on the public Internet, where it was discovered by a prolific Microsoft leaker who goes by Walking Cat on Twitter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Box Shuttle makes it easier to ditch on-prem file storage
Businesses that want to get their files out of on-premises data centers and into the cloud now have a new option from Box. On Wednesday, the company launched Box Shuttle, which includes tools and consulting services to help businesses move potentially terabytes of data from legacy applications into the Box cloud.Box will work with customers to develop a migration plan for getting their data out of private data centers into its cloud service. It will help figure out what content customers should keep, archive and delete.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft’s big Windows 10 update launches on August 2
Microsoft's latest major refresh of Windows 10 will be released publicly on August 2, the company confirmed Wednesday morning. In a blog post, Microsoft outlined the full list of new features coming with the update, including security upgrades, improvements to Cortana and features aimed at making touchscreen devices with Windows 10 more useful. The news comes almost a year after the consumer launch of Windows 10, which has been one of the company’s major turning points under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella. The operating system has seen massive (if, at times, unintentional) adoption by both business and consumer users in that time, and these upgrades may further spur adoption across those markets as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft Sway gets its first paid features
After a year on the market, Microsoft’s Sway presentation software has received features available to paying customers.Office 365 subscribers will be able to lock their Sway presentations with passwords, load them up with more multimedia content, and conceal the software they used to make them with an update that Microsoft announced Tuesday.That last feature will be an important change for users who don’t want to have a big banner at the end of their presentations saying they were made with Microsoft Sway. This change means that the presentation software will be more useful for creating shareable, public-facing documents that are either presented live or published to the web.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Backblaze wants to eliminate tape-based storage
Online backup company Backblaze made waves last year when it announced a beta test last year of B2, a new public cloud storage service that would be cheaper than competing offerings from Amazon and Microsoft. B2 has now exited beta with some new features that may make it more appealing to business users. It now has a service level agreement guaranteeing 99.9 percent uptime for all data stored within it, matching the baseline offerings from Amazon Web Services’ S3 and Microsoft Azure’s Blob Storage service. In addition, users can now purchase expanded support from Backblaze, which will give them guaranteed rapid responses to support questions and – at the highest level – access to a phone number for around-the-clock support.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft’s open sourcing of .NET hits a major milestone
Microsoft's open source programming language push reached a new milestone Monday, with the company announcing the general availability of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0.Those two projects are an attempt by Microsoft to make the core elements of its programming language available for use on Linux and OS X, operating systems that previously didn't support it. To reach this milestone, more than 18,000 developers, representing 1,300 companies, contributed to .NET Core.It's all part of Microsoft's push to make .NET into a development platform that developers can use across platforms, whether on the desktop, on servers, or on mobile. To that end, the tech giant earlier this year acquired Xamarin, which makes a set of tools allowing developers to build mobile apps across iOS and Android using .NET, too.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Here’s how NASCAR is digitizing race day
When cars leave the starting line at Sonoma Raceway in California on Sunday for the start of the Toyota/Save Mart 350, they'll be taking part in the launch of a product designed to help NASCAR officials monitor and manage the 110-lap race.New race management software that NASCAR is launching on Sunday is designed to give officials a single screen to watch where cars are on the racetrack, manage penalties and share information with racing teams about what's going on.It arose from a partnership between NASCAR and Microsoft that started in 2014. It began with a mobile inspection app that let race officials see whether cars were in compliance with all the rules about how they have to be constructed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft helps troubleshoot Windows 10 activation with new beta
As Microsoft hurtles towards the release of its major Windows 10 Anniversary Update, the company has introduced a tool that's supposed to help PC owners resolve problems with activating the operating system on their computers.Microsoft has a complex system in place to ensure people are using a copy of Windows that hasn't been pirated. But that system sometimes gets too aggressive and ends up dinging people with authorized copies of Windows. The new Activation Troubleshooter is supposed to help. It should make it easier for people to reactivate their computers after changing hardware, such as swapping out their motherboard or hard drive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Here’s how Dropbox is changing its free tier with a major update
Dropbox made some major changes to its free tier on Wednesday, including support for read-only folders, as the company released a crush of new features aimed at enhancing its users' productivity. The biggest change users will notice: In order to automatically upload photos from their smartphones, they must install the Dropbox app on at least one Mac or PC. People who don't mind manually uploading their photos to Dropbox won't need to change anything.Dropbox won't say how many people it expects the auto-upload change to impact. The change is aimed at helping people improve the way that they manage photos, but the company wouldn't give additional information. It seems like the change is an attempt to get a group of users who are using Dropbox only for smartphone photo backup to either dive deeper into the storage service or ditch it entirely. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Dropbox enhances its productivity tools across the board
Dropbox just dumped a ton of new productivity features on users of its file storage and collaboration service that are all aimed at making it easier for people to get work done within its applications. Updates to the Dropbox app for iOS allow users to scan documents directly into the cloud storage service, and get started with creating Microsoft Office files from that app as well. The company also increased the ease and security of sharing files through Dropbox, and made it easier to preview and comment on files shared through the service.These launches mean that Dropbox will be more valuable to people as a productivity service, and not just a folder to hold files. It's especially important as the company tries to capture the interest of business users, who have a wide variety of competing storage services they could subscribe to instead. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Buy-in from top execs is key to cloud transitions, AWS executive says
As the head of Amazon Web Services, Andy Jassy has seen a lot of big organizations start using the public cloud. The biggest indicator of success for a cloud transition is simple, he says: Has the business' senior staff bought into it?In his view, organizations will usually stick with their status quo on-premises data centers unless leaders are ready to promote the use of public cloud services. "And it sounds a little bit simple, but the reality is that there's so much inertia all over these organizations in continuing to things the same way they've been done for the last number of years, for a variety of different reasons," Jassy said at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here