Blair Hanley Frank, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Blair Hanley Frank

Author Archives: Blair Hanley Frank

Microsoft to host education event May 2

Microsoft is hosting an education-focused event in New York City on May 2, and the tech titan is expected to reveal new software and hardware. The company sent out invitations a day after it launched the Windows 10 Creators Update, the latest major feature release for its current operating system.Microsoft is working to make its devices and services appeal to educators, especially as the company faces increased competition from Google’s G Suite and Chromebooks. Both companies are locked in a war over which business will power the future of productivity, and education is a major battleground for each. Microsoft Microsoft attached this image to the email it sent inviting journalists to its May 2 education event.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s new software tool helps enterprises evaluate cloud move

IT professionals who want help getting a handle on a potential cloud migration have a new tool from Microsoft. The company is offering a Cloud Migration Assessment service that walks customers through an evaluation of the resources they currently use, in order to determine what a move to the cloud would cost.Microsoft’s cost calculation is driven in part by the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit , which lets customers apply their existing Windows Server licenses with Software Assurance to virtual machines running in Microsoft’s cloud. That means customers only have to pay the base price for the compute resources they use.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Slack apps can now use drop-down menus

Apps that integrate with Slack can now include drop-down menus in the messages that they post to the service, as part of a push to improve the interactivity of third-party integrations.Slack's message menus let apps spawn clickable lists that users can choose from in order to take actions that developers have enabled. For example, using menus would allow users to pick a from a list of customers in a CRM system that integrates with Slack, assuming the developers have built their service to work with the new feature.Developing integrations with the broader universe of enterprise software is key to Slack’s longevity. Deeper integrations with a broad third-party ecosystem can help the service compete against Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts Chat, according to Gartner Research Vice President Mike Gotta.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft acquires Deis to boost its Kubernetes chops

Microsoft is acquiring Deis, a company that makes tools to work with the Kubernetes open-source container orchestration system. The deal, announced Monday, marks Microsoft’s continued interest in container orchestration.Deis creates tools that aim to simplify the development of modern, containerized applications. Containers allow developers to write an application for an isolated, portable runtime that is supposed to be easily transferrable from a workstation to a server environment.Tools like Deis’s Workflow, Helm, and Steward are supposed to ease the complex process of managing multi-container applications. They build on top of Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration system that Google released to the world in 2014. Deis plans to continue its contributions to those tools as part of Microsoft, company CTO Gabe Monroy said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US Department of Labor accuses Google of underpaying women

The U.S. Department of Labor says Google discriminates against female employees in pay at a level that's even worse than the tech industry as a whole.The department has found "systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce," Labor Department Regional Director Janette Wipper testified in a court in San Francisco on Friday, according to a report by The Guardian. Janet Herold, the department's regional solicitor, told the Guardian that pay discrimination against women was extreme.Wipper said that the DoL found pay disparities in a snapshot of salaries from 2015, according to the Guardian.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft launches Windows 10 beta program for business users

Business users get access to their own version of the Windows 10 beta program this week. On Friday, Microsoft unveiled the Windows Insider Program for Business, alongside its first post-Creators Update Windows 10 beta.The program will let business users sign up for beta updates with their Azure Active Directory credentials, rather than a personal Microsoft account. The new feature is designed to provide IT professionals with a path for giving Microsoft business-specific feedback on Windows 10 features. That, in turn, should help business users shape feature development.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tableau switches to subscription pricing for its BI products

Tableau is making a big change in the way it sells its business intelligence products. The company announced Thursday that all of its software will be available as a subscription, rather than a single license plus a service fee.Businesses will need to pay $70 per user per month for a license of Tableau Desktop Professional, and $35 per user per month for Tableau Server. That compares to the company’s boxed software prices of $2000 for Desktop, plus a $400 annual renewal fee for software updates, and $800 for Server, plus a $200 annual fee.It’s a move that will provide additional flexibility, scalability and risk mitigation for Tableau customers, according to Francois Ajenstat, the company’s chief product officer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google is helping to build another Asia-Pacific submarine cable

Google is investing in another massive undersea fiber-optic cable as a part of its plans to build out network connectivity around the world. The company announced Wednesday that it is helping to fund a project called Indigo, which will connect Jakarta, Singapore, Perth and Sydney to one another.The cable will run for approximately 9,000 kilometers (almost 5,600 miles) and provide a capacity of roughly 18Tbps (bits per second). It's being built to bring users more connectivity in a region that has growing internet needs.Google has now invested in five submarine cables in the Asia-Pacific region and seven overall. By investing in these cables, the company hopes to better compete with other cloud providers and consumer internet companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google is helping to build another Asia-Pacific submarine cable

Google says its AI chips smoke CPUs, GPUs in performance tests

Four years ago, Google was faced with a conundrum: if all its users hit its voice recognition services for three minutes a day, the company would need to double the number of data centers just to handle all of the requests to the machine learning system powering those services.Rather than buy a bunch of new real estate and servers just for that purpose, the company embarked on a journey to create dedicated hardware for running machine- learning applications like voice recognition.The result was the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a chip that is designed to accelerate the inference stage of deep neural networks. Google published a paper on Wednesday laying out the performance gains the company saw over comparable CPUs and GPUs, both in terms of raw power and the performance per watt of power consumed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s Espresso networking tech takes SD-WAN to internet scale

Google is working to accelerate the performance of its applications over the internet by building out a software-defined network at broad scale. On Tuesday, the company announced Espresso, a system that provides increased network performance to users of the company’s applications.It works by applying software-defined networking to the edge of the tech titan’s network, where Google connects to the peer networks of other internet service providers. Rather than rely on individual routers to figure out the best way to direct internet traffic, Espresso hands that responsibility off to servers running in the data centers Google operates at the edge of its network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s Espresso networking tech takes SD-WAN to internet scale

DigitalOcean adds free monitoring to its cloud virtual machines

DigitalOcean’s cloud platform became more useful to developers running production applications on Tuesday with the addition of monitoring capabilities for its virtual machines.Customers will be able to set alerts on the performance of their VMs, so that they’re notified via email or Slack when certain conditions are met. For example, users could set an alert to trigger if a machine is using more than 85 percent of its CPU capacity for five minutes.In addition, the monitoring service will let developers view logs of the performance of their VMs over time. The capabilities aren’t as advanced as some third-party offerings, but DigitalOcean is offering them to customers free of charge.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Office 365’s deskless worker package expands with new features

Microsoft is adding new capabilities to one of its cheapest enterprise plans for Office 365, in a push to capture a group of users traditionally underserved by the productivity suite.New to the Office 365 Enterprise K1 plan (the K stands for Kiosk) now includes 2GB of OneDrive for Business storage, along with access to Microsoft Teams, PowerApps and Flow. Users on the plan also get the ability to send instant messages using Skype for Business and participate in video meetings conducted over Skype Meeting Broadcast.Expanding the capabilities of this plan is part of Microsoft’s continued push to make Office 365 useful for employees who don’t spend all day in front of a computer. All of these capabilities are designed for people like retail employees and service workers. The K1 plan is also priced at $4 per user per month, drastically lower than the company’s other enterprise subscriptions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HelloSign branches out to fix frustrating forms

Getting set up at a new job can be a frustrating maze of forms that require overlapping information to be entered perfectly. Solving that is the idea behind HelloWorks, a new service from HelloSign designed to simplify the process of filling out forms.People using HelloWorks will be able to complete forms digitally rather than fill out PDFs on their computers or scan handwritten responses. Even if users have to work through several different forms, the system will automatically populate identical fields with the appropriate response. That way, people won’t need to fill in their address half a dozen times.The new service is an expansion for HelloSign, which got its start as a company with a service that let users send faxes over the internet. In the intervening years, the company expanded to offer e-signature capabilities that compete with companies like DocuSign and Adobe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Here’s how Microsoft is helping companies build IoT hardware

One of the biggest challenges with building connected hardware is getting from proof-of-concept (PoC) prototypes to devices that are ready for large-scale production rollout. Microsoft is aiming to help through labs that allow companies to come in and work with experts on building internet-connected hardware.Companies come into one of three Microsoft Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence (IoT/AI) Insider Labs with the hardware they’ve built so far and a plan for an intense two or three weeks of work. Visitors are paired with mentors who are experts in different areas and given access to machinery that can help them quickly work through different hardware designs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This company is turning FAQs into Alexa skills

People looking for an easier path to integrating with Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant have good news on the horizon. NoHold, a company that builds services for making bots, unveiled a project that seeks to turn a document into an Alexa skill.It’s designed for situations like Airbnb hosts who want to give guests a virtual assistant that can answer questions about the home they’re renting, or companies that want a talking employee handbook. Bot-builders upload a document to NoHold’s Sicura QuickStart service, which then parses the text and turns it into a virtual conversation partner that can answer questions based on the file’s contents. Right now, building Alexa skills is a fairly manual process that requires programming prowess and time to figure out Amazon’s software development tools for its virtual assistant. People who want to change the way that a bot behaves have to go in and tweak code parameters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Calendar finally comes to the iPad

Google’s Calendar app is making a long-awaited move to a new device: Apple’s iPad. You read that right: Until Wednesday, the tech titan hadn’t optimized its marquee calendar application to run on Apple’s tablets.The app provides users with a view of the calendars that they have and that are shared with them through Google’s service. In addition, they get a handful of features Apple’s native calendar app doesn’t have, like the ability to more easily find time and space for a meeting with other people inside their organizations.Making iPad users wait for a native Calendar app is hardly a surprise coming from Google, considering that it’s the company behind Android, and frequently ships new features first to apps for devices running its mobile operating system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10’s next major update arrives April 11

After months of waiting, beta tests, and trickles of information about new features, the next major update for Windows 10 will arrive on April 11. Microsoft announced Wednesday that the Creators Update, as it’s known, will start rolling out to users of the company’s latest operating system in roughly two weeks.The update includes a slew of new features, including changes to the Microsoft Edge browser, improvements to gaming on Windows 10 and more features for devices with touch screens. As the name implies, the Creators Update includes new tools for people who make and consume media on their PCs, including a new Paint3D app that updates Microsoft’s classic drawing tool to create three-dimensional models.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Excel for Windows finally gets real-time collaboration

Microsoft has brought live, collaborative editing to its Excel app for Windows through a beta update it launched on Tuesday. The new feature lets testers collaborate with one another on the same file from inside the app.Live collaboration has been a major focus of Office 2016, which Microsoft released roughly a year and a half ago. The suite first offered real-time co-authoring for the desktop version of Word, then expanded those capabilities to PowerPoint. It’s a major change for Microsoft’s client applications, which previously kept editing to a fairly solitary experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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