Blair Hanley Frank
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Blair Hanley Frank
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Google is trying to reinvent the whiteboard
What's big, red, and supposed to be the next big thing in workplace collaboration? Google's new Jamboard, a massive touch display and accompanying cloud service that's supposed to help business users brainstorm together. Jamboard works like a digital whiteboard, letting users sketch out ideas, attach digital sticky notes, plus bring in content from the web into a single, constantly updating workspace. People can use Jamboard to collaborate both on the 55-inch mega-display of the same name, or using accompanying tablet and smartphone apps for iOS and Android. The Jamboard is available in private beta for business customers of Google's G Suite productivity service offering starting Tuesday. The company expects to make it generally available early next year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Azure brings SQL Server Analysis Services to the cloud
SQL Server Analysis Services, one of the key features of Microsoft's relational database enterprise offering, is going to the cloud. The company announced Tuesday that it's launching the public beta of Azure Analysis Services, which gives users cloud-based access to semantic data modeling tools.The news is part of a host of announcements the company is making at the Professional Association for SQL Server Summit in Seattle this week. On top of the new cloud service, Microsoft also released new tools for migrating to the latest version of SQL Server and an expanded free trial for Azure SQL Data Warehouse. On the hardware side, the company revealed new reference architecture for using SQL Server 2016 with active data sets of up to 145TB.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Here’s how Google is overhauling its cloud storage offerings
There are big changes afoot for Google Cloud Platform's storage offerings. On Thursday, the company announced a complete overhaul of the storage options available to customers, complete with new storage tiers and reduced pricing.Customers that need incredibly high availability storage can use Google's new fully managed Multi-Regional Cloud Storage service, which will replicate data across multiple Google Cloud data centers in different areas for high-uptime access. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the company also launched a new Coldline storage service that's designed for data accessed less than once a year like backups.The storage changes are part of Google’s overall pitch to capture businesses in a highly-competitive cloud market. Managed, multi-region storage will be helpful for customers who don’t want to worry about reliability, and the new Coldline storage will help GCP compete with other cold storage offerings like Amazon Glacier.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google is turning spreadsheets, documents and presentations into to-do lists
Google is trying to do away with the tiring process of figuring out who's supposed to do what after a meeting wraps up. A new Action Items feature in G Suite for its Docs, Sheets and Slides apps lets users add a comment asking one of their coworkers to take care of something. Users can then see at a glance what documents, spreadsheets and presentations have action items attached that they need to take care of. Action Items is one of a handful of G Suite updates the company unveiled on Wednesday, alongside improvements to its Forms app. Slack is also integrating with Google Drive, making it easier for users of the popular chat app to collaborate on files stored in Google's service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Here’s how Zenefits is trying to reinvent itself
Zenefits had a rough year. The company -- previously a darling of Silicon Valley -- was rocked by a massive insurance scandal in February and has been fighting to regain the trust of customers and regulators since.David Sacks, the Yammer cofounder and former Zenefits COO, has been leading the charge after taking over the CEO role in February. The company made its biggest announcement under his tenure Tuesday, unveiling Z2, a redesign and upgrade of its capabilities.The marquee change of Z2 is a design that brings the app store model popularized by smartphones to the world of human resources. Zenefits's offerings, like vacation tracking, offer letter generation, and employee insurance, are still available as apps in the new Z2 platform. But now, users will also be able to add third-party integrations from a set of 17 services. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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I switched to Google’s Pixel phone and survived
Google made a splash earlier this month when the company announced it would be shipping a dongle with every Pixel phone it sold that helps iPhone users migrate to its Android flagship.As a lifelong iPhone user, I decided to put Google to the test and find out how well that process really works. And after spending a weekend working through it, I came to a nuanced and messy conclusion. Broadly speaking, migrating works fine, but the nitty-gritty details of the process are painful to deal with.I expected the transition to be far from frictionless. After all, I use iCloud Photo Library to sync my photos, correspond with my friends using iMessage, track my exercise with an Apple Watch and use a Mac. Migrating wasn't going to be easy, but I wanted to give it a shot anyway and see whether the Pixel XL lived up to Google's hype.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The VMware-AWS deal could drive more companies into the cloud
The cloud partnership AWS and VMware announced Thursday makes Amazon's public cloud even more attractive for enterprises by letting them take the popular virtualization platform with them.The appropriately named VMware Cloud on AWS , announced at a press conference in San Francisco, will bring cloud-optimized versions of vSphere, VSAN and NSX software to the cloud platform. When users spin up a VMware environment on AWS, they'll get a cluster running the entire Software-Defined Data Center stack in the public cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Azure roundup: FPGAs, new VMs and fresh Europe regions
Microsoft's big Ignite conference for IT pros wrapped up at the end of September, and that means the company dumped a ton of new cloud capabilities to attract people to Azure. Here's the run-down on all the major news you need to know about:Azure data centers in Germany and the UK go live In its continuing quest to expand the global reach of its public cloud platform, Microsoft announced the general availability of four new Azure regions: two in the U.K. and two in Germany. The UK data centers are fairly standard cloud regions, but data in the German DCs is under the control of T-Systems International, a German company that's a subsidiary of tech giant Deutsche Telekom.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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SkyGiraffe’s Tableau connector aims to ease business data visualization
While business intelligence software like Tableau helps companies better understand the data that they have saved up in systems of record like databases and CRM software, it can be hard to get the entire picture of a business from the plethora of different sources available.SkyGiraffe is launching a new connector Tuesday to help with that by allowing companies to take live data from a diverse set of systems of record and visualize it in Tableau. The connector is supposed to give businesses a single consistent means of visualizing data, without having to repeatedly configure a bunch of different integrations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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AWS September roundup: EC2 changes, new France region, and more
The days may be getting shorter up in the northern hemisphere, but that hasn't slowed the pace of updates to AWS. Amazon has kept on updating its cloud platform with a handful of quality-of-life changes, plus some major tweaks to how it handles Reserved Instances. Here's the rundown:Major changes to EC2 Reserved Instances One of the ways for customers to get discounts on compute capacity with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud is to sign up for Reserved Instances. Then they pay a set amount of money for the benefit of getting deep discounts on compute. It's something that Amazon introduced 8 years ago and has been an important part of the company's cloud offering since. Now, they're making some pretty big changes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Salesforce takes another swing at Microsoft with chatbot building tools
Companies have another set of tools at their disposal to build chatbots. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has begun touting a new LiveMessage service that's aimed at connecting his company's Service Cloud with messaging services like Facebook Messenger and SMS. Benioff is pitching the new service as a way to turn messaging apps into a user interface for Salesforce, in addition to serving as a tool for connecting people with their friends. It will power bots, in addition to direct communications between service representatives and customers. Right now, LiveMessage works with SMS, and it will be expanded to work on Facebook Messenger later this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Five questions about taking Google’s new phones to work
Google unveiled a massive strategic shift on Tuesday, announcing that it is officially getting into the business of designing and releasing its own smartphones. The Pixel and Pixel XL, announced at a special event in San Francisco, are the company's first forays into that market after working with outside manufacturers for several years to produce its Nexus line of devices. The phones are snazzy gizmos packed with some of the latest features that Google could come up with, like a new intelligent assistant and a high-quality camera. It feels like one of the best Android smartphones on the market and could be a serious contender to take on Apple's iPhone, especially for people looking to purchase a flagship smartphone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Salesforce kicks off its conference with mobile, IoT updates and more
Salesforce's annual Dreamforce mega-conference kicks off in San Francisco on Tuesday morning, and the company will announce a slew of updates to its apps and services. The company is enhancing its mobile apps, launching deeper integrations between Salesforce and Quip and improving its services for processing IoT data. All of these new features are aimed at leveling up Salesforce's feature set at a time when the company faces fierce competition from tech titans like Microsoft and Oracle, along with a fleet of startups. The Salesforce1 app for iOS will be updated to let managers see how their employees are matching up against their quotas and how sales are stacking up against projections and quotas. In addition, companies will be able to pay extra for a My Salesforce1 functionality that lets them deploy their own version of the app with their own branding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google rebrands Apps for Work as G Suite, adds intelligent features
Google rebranded and enhanced its productivity suite Thursday with new intelligent capabilities that help it better compete with Microsoft Office 365.G Suite is the new name for the group of applications that include Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. It's a group of apps that the company is trying to push on organizations looking to make their employees more productive, with an emphasis on collaboration capabilities.Docs, Sheets, and Slides are each getting new features aimed at making it easier to create files quickly with the help of Google intelligence. In addition, Google Calendar is getting an update to make it easier to schedule meetings, and Drive has a new feature making it easier for teams to use.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google will shore up one of its biggest cloud weaknesses next year
Google is making a major change to its cloud platform infrastructure that will help shore up one of the company's biggest weaknesses relative to competitors like Microsoft and Amazon.On Thursday, Urs Hölzle, the company's senior vice president of technical infrastructure, unveiled eight forthcoming regions around the world for the company's cloud services. The regions are all slated to launch in 2017 and will be comprised of multiple data centers for companies looking to run high-availability applications.Having a broad distribution of cloud infrastructure is important to Google's competitive chances. More and more countries are requiring that some types of data are stored in particular geographic locations. And even with high-speed networks, a large distance between where an application is hosted and where its users are located will lead to a slowdown.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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A new Microsoft tool shows how Win 10 might affect devices
IT administrators trying to figure out how to move their organizations to Windows 10 have a new tool that might change the game. This week, Microsoft released the Windows Upgrade Analytics Service, designed to make it easier to decide whether you can carry out a massive upgrade.WUAS gives administrators a sense of what drivers and applications are running in their environment, as well as how many devices are running Windows 10. Using Microsoft telemetry data, it decides whether those devices and the software running on them will be compatible with Windows 10 and suggest fixes for compatibility problems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft Azure networking is speeding up, thanks to custom hardware
Networking among virtual machines in Microsoft Azure is going to get a whole lot faster thanks to some new hardware that Microsoft has rolled out across its fleet of data centers.The company announced Monday that it has deployed hundreds of thousands of FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) across servers in 15 countries and five different continents. The chips have been put to use in a variety of first-party Microsoft services, and they're now starting to accelerate networking on the company's Azure cloud platform.In addition to improving networking speeds, the FPGAs (which sit on custom, Microsoft-designed boards connected to Azure servers) can also be used to improve the speed of machine-learning tasks and other key cloud functionality. Microsoft hasn't said exactly what the contents of the boards include, other than revealing that they hold an FPGA, static RAM chips and hardened digital signal processors. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft Azure networking is speeding up, thanks to custom hardware
Networking among virtual machines in Microsoft Azure is going to get a whole lot faster thanks to some new hardware that Microsoft has rolled out across its fleet of data centers.The company announced Monday that it has deployed hundreds of thousands of FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) across servers in 15 countries and five different continents. The chips have been put to use in a variety of first-party Microsoft services, and they're now starting to accelerate networking on the company's Azure cloud platform.In addition to improving networking speeds, the FPGAs (which sit on custom, Microsoft-designed boards connected to Azure servers) can also be used to improve the speed of machine-learning tasks and other key cloud functionality. Microsoft hasn't said exactly what the contents of the boards include, other than revealing that they hold an FPGA, static RAM chips and hardened digital signal processors. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft continues pushing hybrid cloud with new launches
Microsoft continued its push to get companies on the hybrid cloud train on Monday, with the launch of several products all tailored at helping bridge on-premises datacenters and the public cloud.The company announced that Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 will be available for purchase on October 1, and generally available in mid-October. On top of that, it unveiled new Azure functionality that makes it easier to monitor both public cloud infrastructure and on-premises datacenters in one control plane.The second technical preview of Azure Stack is now also broadly available, after Microsoft launched it in private beta last month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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These new features in Office 365 can help users work smarter
Microsoft is going big on features powered by machine learning in its productivity services, with the announcement of a handful of updates to Office 365 on Monday.As part of its Ignite conference in Atlanta, Georgia, the company unveiled a set of new capabilities for Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and Sway. Microsoft faces tight competition in the productivity space, and these services may help the company compete with Google for market share among businesses. Microsoft Microsoft Word's Tap feature makes it easier for users to bring information from other Office files into a document. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here