Blair Hanley Frank

Author Archives: Blair Hanley Frank

Skype for Business admins get tool to diagnose call problems

IT administrators managing fleets of Skype for Business users could have an easier time diagnosing and fixing problems. Microsoft unveiled the beta of a new Call Analytics Dashboard on Monday, which is supposed to provide admins with a diagnosis of issues that users are having on a call.There are several different issues that could arise and cause a degradation in call quality, which is why these analytics are helpful. If a user complains about a call only working intermittently, it can be hard to diagnose whether that’s an issue with their network connection, headset, Microsoft’s infrastructure, or something else.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft delays tools for third-party Cortana integrations

Microsoft has delayed the release of its tools for connecting other services to the Cortana virtual assistant, a decision that could cause it to lose ground in a crowded industry.The tech titan announced the Cortana Skills Kit in December of last year, saying at the time that it would be released to the public in February. As Microsoft watcher Brad Sams noted on Twitter, Microsoft missed that deadline, and the Skills Kit remains locked in a private beta with a select group of partners. Microsoft didn’t offer an explanation for the delay, saying in a statement that the kit will be coming soon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft expands connected car push with patent licensing

Microsoft's push into the connected car space has moved up a gear with a new patent licensing agreement with Toyota. The world's second-largest auto maker will have access to a range of Microsoft patents as part of the deal announced this week. Rather than trying to build a high-tech automobile of its own, Microsoft is focusing on providing carmakers with the tools they need to create smarter vehicles and the Toyota deal is the first of what it hopes will be a series of such agreements. Microsoft offers an entire suite of cloud services aimed at aiding the development of internet-enabled automobiles and is also integrating its Cortana virtual assistant into cars alongside PCs, phones and other devices. In the future, a connected car could become a rolling extension of a user’s office, with Office 365 integrations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trello connects to HipChat, BitBucket, Jira and Confluence

Trello is getting hooked into the entire Atlassian ecosystem with a series of integrations unveiled Wednesday. The new “power-ups” for the project management software connect it with BitBucket, Jira, HipChat and Confluence, to help customers get their work done more efficiently.Using Trello is supposed to help people keep their projects organized. The service lets people lay out virtual cards in columns on a workspace known as a board. Doing so can help with things like tracking the status of software bugs or tracking contracts through different stages of completion.Each of the connections announced Wednesday is supposed to help with the process of using Trello. Confluence users can now tie cards to new pages in Atlassian’s content management system, Jira users can connect issues from the bug tracker with cards and BitBucket users can better organize their code.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Slack channel names can be written in more languages

Slack’s international customers are now able to set channel names in their native tongue, thanks to an update the group chat service rolled out Thursday. According to an in-app bulletin, users will be able to set up rooms to discuss work and other topics using a wider variety of characters. As a result, users can name channels in Japanese, German, French and a wide variety of other languages. It’s an improvement over Slack’s previous set of heavy restrictions on channel names. The news comes the same week that Microsoft released its competing Teams group chat app to Office 365 customers worldwide. At launch, Microsoft touted that the service supports 19 languages, and a test of its channel creation feature shows that it at least supports channel names using Japanese Hiragana, Simplified Chinese and Cyrillic characters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google pulls virtual assistant ad after user outcry

Google Home users got a surprise on Thursday when their virtual assistants cheerily mentioned that the live-action remake of “Beauty and the Beast” is opening in theaters this weekend.The ad seems to pop up when users ask for a rundown of their day, which kicks off the Home’s “My Day” feature. That feature is supposed to offer users information about the weather, their calendars and relevant news. But at the end of the rundown, the Google Assistant offered the following unsolicited tidbit, according to a video posted to Twitter by Bryson Meunier :“By the way, Disney’s live action 'Beauty and The Beast' opens today,” it says. “In this version of the story, Belle is the inventor instead of Maurice. That rings truer, if you ask me. For some more movie fun, ask me something about Belle.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle promises IaaS growth as cloud business rises

Oracle’s third quarter financial results continue to show that the company’s future is in the cloud. On Wednesday, the company reported massive growth in its software- and platform-as-a-service businesses, promising further gains as its customers do away with their data centers.The company’s SaaS and PaaS revenue from December 2016 through February 2017 was a little over US$1 billion, up from $583 million during the same period a year prior. Its infrastructure-as-a-service business brought in $178 million during the same period, bringing the company’s total cloud revenue for the quarter to almost $1.2 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS offers Alexa developers free cloud credits

Developers interested in extending the capabilities of Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant have some more free tools in their arsenal, thanks to a program the company announced Wednesday.Developers with an active Alexa skill --  a service that expands the capabilities of the virtual assistant -- can apply for $100 in Amazon Web Services credits every month to help pay for what they’ve built. After that, they can receive up to $100 per month in additional credits if they incur usage charges for their skills.The credits are meant to build on AWS’s existing Free Tier, which offers developers a small bundle of free services every month, but charges them for any usage that goes over those low caps. According to a blog post by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, the move is supposed to make it free for developers to operate most Alexa skills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Hangouts won’t disappear for consumers despite enterprise focus

While Google Hangouts is making a shift to serve enterprise users, it won’t be vanishing for consumers.Last week, the company announced that it would be splitting the chat and videoconferencing service into Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat, which raised questions about what would happen for those people who still use it in their personal lives.Consumers will still be able to access Hangouts using their personal Google accounts. Hangouts will still appear in the Gmail sidebar on the desktop, even after it splits into Chat and Meet, according to Scott Johnston, director of product management for Hangouts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS follows Google with Reserved Instance flexibility changes

Customers who have Reserved Instance contracts with Amazon Web Services will be able to subdivide some of their Linux and Unix virtual machine instances while maintaining their capacity discounts, thanks to pricing changes announced Monday.Reserved Instances allow customers to lock themselves into paying AWS for a certain amount of compute capacity with the company's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in exchange for a discount off its list price. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft ratchets up group chat competition with Teams launch

Microsoft’s work chat app Teams hit general availability on Tuesday, as part of the company’s push to compete with Slack, HipChat, Google and other players in the group chat market.Teams is designed to help groups of people collaborate at work by letting them communicate in real time. Users can take part in multiple Teams, which provide space for group conversations in a series of channels.Each channel can include integrations of third-party developer content, so users can do things like manage Asana tasks, edit OneNote notebooks and view HootSuite social feeds without leaving Teams. In addition, teams can use the app for group audio and video meetings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Here’s why Google Cloud support is now priced per person

One of the key messages out of Google Cloud Next last week: The company has gotten serious about serving enterprise customers in a way that meets their needs. A key component of that is a new set of support plans for customers of its cloud platform.Instead of paying one big support fee, businesses will pay per user for support privileges, based on how quickly they will get a response. The new plan replaces a set of monolithic tiers that required businesses to pay a flat fee per month plus a percentage of their monthly product usage. In the past, Google wasn't exactly known for its support capabilities, but that's something the company has changed in recent years. Google engineers originally believed they could create great technology that was self-service and easy to use, and that would be enough for business customers, said Dave Rensin, the company’s director of customer reliability engineering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft updates Cortana for iOS with a fresh look

Microsoft gave its Cortana app for iOS a facelift Friday, replacing its old black and blue aesthetic with a new look that puts the assistant’s key features at users’ fingertips.The app now features Quick Actions, so that users can tap a couple buttons and get Cortana to create an alarm, set a reminder, or tell them a joke. That means users can get at key features without having to talk or type queries, and it also gives them a framework for what they can do with the app, without them having to discover it on their own.The virtual assistant market is a crowded one, between Cortana, Siri, Alexa and the Google Assistant all competing for users’ time and interest. Microsoft’s assistant is built deeply into PCs with Windows 10, but the company also needs to keep its apps for other mobile platforms up to date in order to meet users where they are.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google offers new ‘Always Free’ cloud tier to attract users

Google is letting its customers get a taste of its cloud for free, without a time-limited trial. The company quietly launched a new “Always Free” tier on Thursday that lets people use small amounts of its public cloud services without charge, beyond the company’s limited-time trial.The tier includes — among other things — 1 f1-micro compute instance, 5 GB per month of Regional Storage and 60 minutes per month of access to the Cloud Speech API. Using the free tier requires users to provide a credit card that Google can automatically bill for any use over the limits.In addition, the cloud provider expanded its free trial so that users get $300 in credits that they can use for up to 12 months. Google will halt users’ workloads if they eat up all of the credits before the end of 12 months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google launches official Gmail Add-on program

Google is making it possible for developers to bring their services into Gmail using new integrations called Add-ons.It’s built so that developers can write one set of code in Google’s Apps Script language and have their integration run in Gmail on the web, as well as inside Google’s Android and iOS apps for the service. For example, a QuickBooks add-on would let users easily send invoices to people who they’re emailing.  Google already offers Add-ons for its Docs word processing and Sheets spreadsheet software.This sort of system could be useful for users because it helps them get work done without leaving Gmail. It also helps draw users into Google’s official email app, rather than use one of the many other clients that can access the service, including Microsoft Outlook.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s Jamboard will cost $5,000 and ship to the US in May

Google is getting ready to put its smart whiteboard on sale. The company announced Thursday that the Jamboard, its big touchscreen that’s designed to serve as a digital collaboration space for business users, will be available in May. The board, which was first revealed last year, gives business users a large workspace to make notes, share content from the web, and more. It’s backed by a cloud service that can be accessed by users’ other devices so that people can collaborate on “Jams” without having to be in the room or touching the Jamboard. For example, one team in San Francisco could be using the Jamboard as a whiteboard, while another person is contributing using their iPad or Android tablet from New York, and a third team is looking on using a Mac or PC in London.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google goes after Slack with Hangouts overhaul

Google’s Hangouts work chat and videoconferencing service is undergoing some major changes to better serve businesses. The company announced Thursday that it’s going after the work group chat market as well as the group videoconferencing market even harder than before by splitting Hangouts’s functions in two.The company is diving deeper into workplace text conversations with Hangouts Chat, a service designed to provide teams a shared space to discuss work. It’s Google’s attack on Slack, HipChat, Microsoft Teams and other players in that growing market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Drive will let users stream files from the cloud

Google Drive users will be able to see all the files they have stored in the company’s cloud service on their desktop without downloading them, thanks to a new feature the company announced Thursday.The Drive File Stream offering will — as the name implies — show placeholder files on a user’s desktop, then download them only when a user needs to look at them. It’s similar to Dropbox’s Smart Sync feature, which recently entered beta .To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s new cloud service eases data preparation for machine learning

One of the challenges that data scientists face when running machine learning workloads is processing information before it’s ready for use. Google unveiled a new cloud service Thursday aimed at easing that pain. Google Cloud Dataprep will automatically detect data schemas, joins, and anomalies such as missing or duplicate values, without requiring coding. After that, it will help users build a set of rules for processing the information. Those rules are then built in Apache Streams format and can be imported into products like Google's Cloud Dataflow for processing information as it's imported into services like the BigQuery data warehouse service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google announces three new cloud regions, contract discounts

Google’s cloud regions are going places. The company announced Thursday that it’s launching three new data centers in California, Canada, and the Netherlands, in addition to the company’s existing footprint of 14 announced and live regions around the world.Adding more regions will help Google compete with other public cloud platforms like Microsoft and Amazon. The Canada region is important for serving customers who need to comply with data sovereignty requirements inside that market.On top of that news, the company is also changing its cloud pricing to let customers get discounts of up to 57 percent off list price in exchange for committing to buying a particular volume of CPU cores and memory. Customers must commit to either a one-year or three-year contract with the cloud provider in order to get the discounts, however.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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