Third-party developers have new tools to play with when building integrations with Microsoft’s Teams group chat app. The company announced a pair of new developer-oriented features on Thursday, aimed at giving greater utility to services that work with Teams.Using the Microsoft Bot Framework, developers can now build bots that interact with users inside a channel, in addition to interacting with users in one-on-one private chats. In addition, developers integrating their applications directly into tabs within the Teams client can now give users a way to link their colleagues to content buried deep in the integrated app.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Users of Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant can now ask it questions about the contents of their Microsoft-hosted calendars. On Wednesday, the assistant gained the ability to interact with calendars from Outlook.com and Office 365, similar to how it works with Google Calendar.Amazon didn’t make an announcement for the new feature. When asked about the change, a spokesperson for the company said that it was designed to only work with personal calendars.That said, it was possible for me to connect my Office 365 calendar, which is provided through an enterprise subscription. When asked about what’s on my schedule, Alexa answered with the contents of my work calendar. It’s unclear if Amazon plans to continue supporting that functionality, and it may break at any time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services got off to a slow start in January, taking its time to sleep off the New Year’s festivities. But the cloud provider got up to speed by the end of the month, launching a handful of new products for its customers to work with.Last year, the cloud provider launched 1,017 new features, according to the fourth-quarter earnings report Amazon released last month. Here’s the breakdown of what you need to know about Amazon’s January news:IoT Buttons dash into the enterprise
Last year, Amazon launched Dash buttons to consumers, small devices that people could program to reorder household products from the online retailer with a press. Now, the company is letting enterprises create their own.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has turned a database service that it uses to run some of its mission-critical products into an offering for its public cloud customers.On Tuesday, the company launched Cloud Spanner, a new, fully managed database that’s supposed to provide the transactional consistency of a traditional database plus the scalability and performance of a NoSQL database. It’s based on the same systems that run the company’s own Spanner database internally.Usually, businesses have to pick either a traditional or a NoSQL database, and each comes with particular trade-offs. Traditional databases provide better transactional consistency, but can be hard to scale. NoSQL databases are better at scaling but sacrifice consistency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is calling for a Digital Geneva Convention, as global tensions over digital attacks continue to rise. The tech giant wants to see civilian use of the internet protected as part of an international set of accords, Brad Smith, the company’s president and chief legal officer, said in a blog post.
The manifesto, published alongside his keynote address at the RSA conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, argued for codifying recent international norms around cyberwarfare and for establishing an independent agency to respond to and analyze cyberattacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is calling for a Digital Geneva Convention, as global tensions over digital attacks continue to rise. The tech giant wants to see civilian use of the internet protected as part of an international set of accords, Brad Smith, the company’s president and chief legal officer, said in a blog post.
The manifesto, published alongside his keynote address at the RSA conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, argued for codifying recent international norms around cyberwarfare and for establishing an independent agency to respond to and analyze cyberattacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies looking for a new video- and teleconferencing system have a fresh face to turn to in the market: Amazon Web Services.On Monday, the public cloud provider announced the launch of Amazon Chime, a new service that’s designed to compete with the likes of WebEx, Skype for Business and GoToMeeting. It’s a powerful swing at some very entrenched enterprise software players by the public cloud provider.AWS launched the service with native applications for Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android. Chime’s infrastructure is based in the U.S., but Gene Farrell, AWS’s vice president of enterprise applications, said that the service can be accessed worldwide.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Microsoft first unveiled its HoloLens augmented reality headgear, the company used a special camera to show viewers third-person images of the digital objects being rendered in the headset.Now, anyone who owns two HoloLenses can recreate the same setup, thanks to a project that Microsoft released on Monday. Called Spectator View, it lets users sync up information from a HoloLens about where augmented reality objects are and what they look like with footage from a camera. Using that makes it possible to create a third-person view of augmented reality action.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies concerned about cybersecurity have a fleet of new Microsoft tools coming their way. The company announced a host of new security capabilities Friday morning as part of the run-up to the massive RSA security conference next week in San Francisco.On the Windows front, the company announced that it's adding the ability to use on-premises Active Directory with Windows Hello, its system for allowing biometric-based logins with Windows 10. Microsoft also launched new tools to help organizations get more use out of mobile device management products by giving them tools to migrate group policy settings to cloud-managed devices.What's more, Microsoft has launched a new tool that’s designed to help customers configure the Surface hardware under their administration, doing things like disabling the tablets' cameras. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies concerned about cybersecurity have a fleet of new Microsoft tools coming their way. The company announced a host of new security capabilities Friday morning as part of the run-up to the massive RSA security conference next week in San Francisco.On the Windows front, the company announced that it's adding the ability to use on-premises Active Directory with Windows Hello, its system for allowing biometric-based logins with Windows 10. Microsoft also launched new tools to help organizations get more use out of mobile device management products by giving them tools to migrate group policy settings to cloud-managed devices.What's more, Microsoft has launched a new tool that’s designed to help customers configure the Surface hardware under their administration, doing things like disabling the tablets' cameras. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A Microsoft lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice over indefinite gag orders attached to search warrants can proceed, following a federal judge’s ruling on Thursday.The tech titan sued last year to end the government’s practice of indefinitely blocking it from informing customers of search warrants for their information. Microsoft alleged that such orders violate its First Amendment frees speech rights and the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of its users.The Justice Department argued that Microsoft couldn’t bring either of the claims in a motion argued in front of the judge two weeks ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A Microsoft lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice over indefinite gag orders attached to search warrants can proceed, following a federal judge’s ruling on Thursday.The tech titan sued last year to end the government’s practice of indefinitely blocking it from informing customers of search warrants for their information. Microsoft alleged that such orders violate its First Amendment frees speech rights and the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of its users.The Justice Department argued that Microsoft couldn’t bring either of the claims in a motion argued in front of the judge two weeks ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft wants to help its cloud customers feel better protected from intellectual property lawsuit threats. To that end, the company is launching a new feature that’s designed to give them additional shielding.The Azure IP Advantage program (the IP stands for intellectual property) provides a trio of benefits. First, Microsoft will indemnify all Azure customers from intellectual property infringement claims resulting from their use of Azure products, including open source components.Second, the company will allow customers that meet a set of criteria access to a "patent pick" program, which will allow them to transfer one Microsoft patent from a list of 10,000 to help them with defending against an infringement suit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Evernote decided last year that it wanted to move away from running its own data centers and start using the public cloud to operate its popular note-taking service. On Wednesday, it announced that the lion's share of the work is done, save for some last user attachments.The company signed up to work with Google, and as part of the migration process, the tech titan sent a team of engineers (in one case, bearing doughnuts) over to work with its customer on making sure the process was a success.Evernote wanted to take advantage of the cloud to help with features based on machine learning that it has been developing. It also wanted to leverage the flexibility that comes from not having to run a data center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google is wooing enterprise customers with the forthcoming launch of a service that will let employees find information they need from multiple sources.Cloud Search is a new service that will allow users to find content from their company email, cloud storage and directory. Directory lookup provides users not only with their colleagues’ contact details, but also information about shared files and calendar events. More than that, Cloud Search is also built to proactively help users access information they need.When users log into Cloud Search either on the web or on their Android device, they’ll be greeted by “assist cards” that are supposed to highlight key files. At launch, those cards are built to show users files that are relevant for their upcoming calendar events, as well as those that require attention based on recent edits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies building applications that leverage speech recognition have a new machine-learning based tool to improve their work. Microsoft is opening the public beta for its Custom Speech Service, the company said Tuesday.The service, formerly known as CRIS, allows customers to train a speech recognition system to work in a specific scenario, allowing it to produce more accurate results. For example, the Custom Speech Service can be trained to provide better results in a noisy airport or set up to work better with voices from a particular group, like kids or people with different accents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While Google has spent the past year trying to woo enterprises to its G Suite productivity apps, it’s still the underdog compared to Microsoft Office, at least among large businesses. So what’s keeping it from broader appeal?One of the biggest hurdles for Google achieving broader enterprise adoption is just the fact that the company’s products aren't identical to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and other Microsoft Office apps, Gartner Senior Research Analyst Joe Mariano said."Enterprises have been ingrained in the Microsoft stack for essentially the beginning of time, it feels like," Mariano said. "[Enterprises] have problems shifting away from that, because they have a lot of investments, either in customizations or how they're using the tools."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the next five years, the company behind Snapchat will pay Google at least US$2 billion in cloud bills.On Thursday, Snap revealed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it signed a five-year contract to pay Google at least $400 million a year for cloud services. That's a steep figure, considering that Snap made roughly $404 million last year. In return for the massive commitment, Snap will receive reduced pricing, though it’s not clear how deep the company’s discounts will be. Sinking a bunch of money into Google Cloud makes sense, because Snapchat began its life built on top of Google’s AppEngine platform-as-a-service offering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The rocketship of cloud growth continued at the end of 2016 for Amazon Web Services. The public cloud provider announced Thursday that it brought in a little more than $3.5 billion during the fourth quarter of last year, up 47 percent from the same period in 2015. Quarterly operating income rose 60 percent to $926 million, compared to $580 million during the prior year quarter. That's nothing to sneeze at, but AWS's revenue growth was the lowest it has been in the past two years. There are a number of potential explanations for that, including seasonal changes in cloud migrations, and increasing difficulties on Amazon didn't provide an explanation for that, but it likely has to do with AWS's growing revenue base overall.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Users of Microsoft's Outlook app for iPhone and iPad can now get work done quicker using third-party integrations.As of Thursday, Outlook for iOS supports add-ins, which let software companies build extensions to their own products that interact with emails in Outlook on a user’s smartphone and tablet. At launch, the app supports add-ins from Evernote, GIPHY, Nimble, Trello and Smartsheet, in addition to those that Microsoft has created.For example, users will be able to translate emails using a Microsoft Translator add-in, add cards to a Trello board straight from their email and quickly reply to an email thread with a funny animated GIF.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Blair Hanley Frank