Zinc, a messaging platform for businesses, announced Friday that it is launching a set of new features aimed at helping desk-less workers get the most out of enterprise instant messaging.
First off, the company is launching Broadcasts, a way for businesses to send employees rich notifications that block out all of the other messages and force users to close then before they can resume messaging. Administrators will be able to see which employees have seen and dismissed the notification.
In addition, the company rolled out support for Organizations, which let administrators subdivide all of the Zinc users in their company into a set of smaller groups.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Evernote CEO Chris O'Neill has had a long couple of days. The company he runs recently ignited a firestorm among its users when it announced a privacy policy change that would have required users to open up all their notes for analysis in order to take advantage of forthcoming machine learning features. "We let our users down," he said in an interview. "We really tactically communicated in about as poor a way as we could."Evernote is going back to the drawing board and reversing course on the proposed policy. Users won't have their data shared with employees to help with machine learning unless they explicitly opt in. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Evernote is changing its privacy policy to let employees read its customers' notes, and they can't opt out. Users have until Jan. 23 to move their notes out of the company's system and delete their accounts if they want to avoid the sanctioned snooping. Companies using Evernote Business can have their administrators opt out, but users won't have individual control over it.The change a push by the company to enhance its machine learning capabilities by letting a select number of employees view the private information of its users to help with the training of algorithms."While our computer systems do a pretty good job, sometimes a limited amount of human review is simply unavoidable in order to make sure everything is working exactly as it should," the company said in a support bulletin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Evernote is changing its privacy policy to let employees read its customers' notes, and they can't opt out. Users have until Jan. 23 to move their notes out of the company's system and delete their accounts if they want to avoid the sanctioned snooping. Companies using Evernote Business can have their administrators opt out, but users won't have individual control over it.The change a push by the company to enhance its machine learning capabilities by letting a select number of employees view the private information of its users to help with the training of algorithms."While our computer systems do a pretty good job, sometimes a limited amount of human review is simply unavoidable in order to make sure everything is working exactly as it should," the company said in a support bulletin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Docker is releasing Containerd (pronounced container-dee), a set of basic components designed to run containers, as part of an open source project.Containerd includes supervisor and executor components that work together to function as the core container runtime that underpins the company's Docker Engine software. It's designed to allow companies to build their own software for managing containers while using a consistent foundation.As the name implies, containers provide applications with a lightweight, constrained environment that makes them easy to migrate, scale up and scale down across different hardware. They've had increasing use over the past year, in part because they make it easier for developers to have a consistent environment for their software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft’s Cortana virtual assistant is getting a lot smarter. On Tuesday, the company announced a set of developer tools aimed at bringing it into the internet of things, and adding support for developers to build new functionality for it.The makers of IoT devices like speakers and cars will be able to use a Microsoft software development kit to integrate Cortana into their products. In addition, developers will be able to build custom integrations that add capabilities to Microsoft’s virtual assistant.Microsoft is also launching a new service designed to help users simplify the process of scheduling meetings. Cortana will help find openings on a user’s calendar and work with meeting participants to find a time that works for everyone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Finding customer service help online can be a pain. Filtering through a knowledge base to find the right answer to your question can be an exercise in fighting with nested frequently asked questions documents.Microsoft is aiming to help by making it easier for companies to create intelligent bots that can answer common questions.The QnA Maker, launched in beta on Tuesday, will let users train an automated conversation partner on existing frequently-asked-questions content. After that information is fed in, the service will create a bot that will respond to customer questions with the content from the knowledge base.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Spending time traveling can be a frustrating exercise in trying to find Wi-Fi. So much modern work often requires an internet connection, and while it’s possible to tether smartphones to PCs to help bridge the connectivity gap, that’s a clunky solution.Microsoft is aiming to help with that by supporting the installation of non-removable programmable SIM cards and data radios in PCs and Windows tablets. In the company's vision, users will then be able to purchase cellular data for those cards through the Windows Store. The announcement was made Thursday at the company’s WinHEC conference for device manufacturers in Shenzhen, China.By enabling the new form of internet access, Microsoft could give users an easy way to get online right from their computer, and encourage manufacturers to build cellular-capable devices. Users would also get settings to help them better manage the use of data plans, so it’s easier for them to control how much data apps can suck up.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Slack and Google have vastly deepened their partnership roughly a month after Microsoft announced its competitor to the popular enterprise chat service.Wednesday saw the announcement of several new features aimed at making G Suite, Google’s set of productivity software and services, more useful to people who use Slack. The functionality resulting from the partnership will make it easier to share and work on files stored in Google Drive using Slack.Slack and Google were early partners during the lifecycle of the chat service which gives business users a set of rooms where they can discuss work, share files and more. Microsoft recently announced Teams, a similar service integrated into Office 365 that’s currently in beta.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Users who need to make sure they can get access to files stored in Dropbox while they're on the go and away from the web have a new feature to help with that. The company announced Tuesday that users of its mobile apps will soon be able to save files locally for use offline.It's a move by the cloud storage company to better compete with the other players in the cloud storage space, and provide users with functionality that will help them be more productive when they're on planes, out in low-connectivity areas or just want to save their cellular data quota for other purposes. Here's how it works: users select a file or folder in the Dropbox app, tap "Make Available Offline," then wait for the app to download the requested files. After that, those files will be available for viewing, even if the phone or tablet storing them is without a connection to the web. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A few weeks ago, Microsoft unveiled its Windows 10 Creators Update with a focus on the software’s benefits for end users when it launches next year. On Tuesday, the company showed a different side of the next major patch for its new operating system, showing off features that will help IT professionals.Next year, IT folks will get new features focused on security, device management, and upgrade improvements. For one, Microsoft’s advanced security suite for Windows 10 is gaining additional remediation, detection and threat intelligence tools. Administrators will also get new analytics to see how their organization is using the new operating system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services' big Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas brought a plethora of new features and upgrades to its cloud platform. But there was one key set of upgrades that set the stage for Amazon's expansion outside its own public cloud data centers.Two years ago, AWS CEO Andy Jassy made a big splash at Re:Invent when he introduced Lambda, a service that lets developers write snippets of code that execute in response to event triggers. Amazon does the work to provision servers to run that code, so developers don't have to think about the infrastructure overhead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the big stories in security over the past year has been the rise of devastating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that have hit sites and organizations like DNS provider Dyn, the BBC and the website of security journalist Brian Krebs.Amazon Web Services is trying to help protect its customers with a new service aimed at mitigating DDoS impacts. It's called Shield, and the free entry-level tier is enabled by default for all web applications running on AWS, starting on Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the big stories in security over the past year has been the rise of devastating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that have hit sites and organizations like DNS provider Dyn, the BBC and the website of security journalist Brian Krebs.Amazon Web Services is trying to help protect its customers with a new service aimed at mitigating DDoS impacts. It's called Shield, and the free entry-level tier is enabled by default for all web applications running on AWS, starting on Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It can be hard moving large amounts of data to the cloud. Even with consistent 10 Gbps of data transfer, it would take years to get hundreds of petabytes from an on-premises data center to a public cloud provider.Amazon is aiming to speed that process up with a high-capacity data transfer product: a literal truck. The Snowmobile is a big, white semi-trailer that can hold 100PB of data. It will then get driven to an Amazon endpoint, and the data will be loaded into its public cloud storage.For smaller migrations that can also benefit from processing at the edge, Amazon also announced a new Snowball Edge appliance that provides 100TB of storage, local compute power, and migration for handling data transfer and processing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services continued to push its infrastructure offering forward on Wednesday with the launch of upgrades to its existing instance types and new tools for simplifying and accelerating computation tasks in its public cloud.AWS CEO Andy Jassy unveiled a new Elastic GPUs feature for the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that will let developers add flexible acceleration using parallel processing for their applications.On top of that, Amazon launched a new Lightsail service that’s aimed at giving customers an easy way to spin up a straightforward virtual private server without having to orchestrate a fleet of different AWS services. Finally, the company also unveiled upgrades to its burstable, memory intensive, high I/O, and compute intensive instances.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services gave its cloud customers a set of new infrastructure capabilities aimed at making its compute offering faster for complex applications that benefit from hardware acceleration.The F1 instance type, which entered beta on Wednesday, lets companies deploy applications that are accelerated by field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). FPGAs allow users to program hardware to perform a particular task quicker than a general-purpose processor would be able to.AWS CEO Andy Jassy positioned the new instances as a way to democratize access to the hardware needed to optimize speed for particular applications. Several other public cloud providers have turned to specialized hardware like FPGAs to try and accelerate the speed of their offerings. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While Amazon Web Services touts the self-service capabilities of its cloud, the company also works with a large number of channel partners to help companies migrate to and use its services.
The cloud provider announced a suite of updates to its partner programs at its Global Partner Summit keynote in Las Vegas on Tuesday. The updates are focused on helping customers get increased use of Amazon’s cloud services and getting partners to invest further in AWS.
The keynote was an opportunity for the cloud provider to make a hard sell to the companies that will help businesses adopt Amazon’s cloud services. Partners shouldn’t hedge their investment in the public cloud, but should instead commit to supporting one provider deeply and aggressively, AWS CEO Andy Jassy said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services made a series of price cuts on Tuesday and simplified what customers pay for its storage products. The company's popular Simple Storage Service (S3) has had its six pricing tiers cut down to three, along with a corresponding price cut of roughly 16 percent to 25 percent.Glacier, AWS's storage service for data that doesn't need to be accessed frequently, now has a trio of retrieval options. Companies can have quicker access to their data if they pay more or get cheaper access if they're willing to wait. Glacier users also get a 43 percent price cut.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google is acquiring Qwiklabs, a company that helps people learn how to use public cloud services to run applications without operating a data center.It's a helpful move for Google, which is trying to expand the use of its cloud platform and stands to gain when developers and IT professionals get a handle on making applications run in the cloud. The company will create tools to help get people up to speed on the Google Cloud Platform and G Suite productivity service, Jason Martin, the director of professional services for Google Cloud, said in a blog post.But there's a wrinkle to the acquisition, announced Monday: Qwiklabs's existing portfolio is entirely focused on educating people about offerings from Amazon Web Services, including Alexa skills. For the time being, those offerings will still be available.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Blair Hanley Frank