Daily Archives: June 1, 2020

With recent events leading to the worlds largest work-from-home shift, we could all use some assistance to stay caught up with work while juggling personal responsibilities. Were featuring updates available starting today with Cortana, your personal productivity assistant in Microsoft 365, to make it easier to get time back on your busy schedule and focus on what matters.

Stay on track with Cortana in Windows 10To help you save time finding what you need and stay focused, were releasing a new chat-based Cortana experience in Windows 10 focused on enhancing your productivity. With this, you can ask Cortana using natural language to quickly check your schedule, connect with people, set reminders, or add tasks in Microsoft To Do. You can also find local information, get definitions, and keep track of the latest news, weather, and finance updates with Bing as a Cortana optional connected service. Simply type or click on the microphone button and speak commands such as Am I free at 9?, Find time with Nestor to talk about the budget, Join my meeting, Remind me to review expenses every Friday at 3 PM, and more. This productivity focused experience is now generally available in English for customers in the United States with the Windows 10 May 2020 update. In the coming months, with regular app updates through the Microsoft Store, well enhance this experience to support wake word invocation and enable listening when you say Cortana, offer more productivity capabilities such as surfacing relevant emails and documents to help you prepare for meetings, and expand supported capabilities for international users.

Stay organized and connected with Play My EmailsTo help you manage your time and tasks while listening to new emails and changes to your day, were rolling out updates to the Play My Emails experience in Outlook for iOS. You will now be able to ask Cortana to schedule a meeting in response to an email and add an email to your tasks list, making it easier to get things done while you are away from your computer.We have also introduced voice commands and touch targets for sending responses to meeting invitations as well as an option to quickly join an active online meeting or send an Im running late message to the participants. These new task and time management updates are now generally available for customers in the United States with Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS. And, we are excited to confirm that Play My Emails will start to roll out in Outlook for Android in the coming weeks.

Start your day on track with the Briefing emailTo help you be well prepared for upcoming meetings and stay on top of commitments, were introducing the new Briefing email from Cortana. This personalized brief will appear automatically in your Outlook inbox near the start of your workday, providing intelligent, actionable recommendations of documents for you to review ahead of the days meetings and drawing your attention to pending requests or commitments from prior emails that you may want to follow up on. This email will also make it easy for you to reserve focus time during your workday for uninterrupted focused work with Microsoft Teams notifications silenced. Briefing is currently rolling out in First Release for Microsoft 365 Enterprise users with Exchange Online mailboxes in English.

As a personal productivity assistant that is a natural part of Microsoft 365, Cortana processes data safely and securely to fulfill your requests. Protecting your data and privacy is our highest priority, and we give you control over your data. These new Cortana experiences are delivered using services that fully comply with Office 365s enterprise-level privacy, security and compliance promises as laid out in the Online Services Terms, and are enabled by default. For a closer look at the user experience and information on admin configurations, watch this Microsoft Mechanics demo. Try these experiences for yourself today and stay tuned for more innovations coming with Cortana in Microsoft 365 to help you make the most of your time.

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Making it easier to stay caught up with Cortana in Microsoft 365 - Microsoft

Microsoft has been ranked the number one IoT platform provider ahead of Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to analysis from Counterpoint Research as the largest cloud providers see success in extending their IoT capabilities to the edge.

The report, put together using Counterpoints CORE rating competitive rankings and evaluation saw the Redmond giant take the gold medal based across eight components. Vendors were analysed on adoption and outlook, ecosystem growth, integrqation and scalability, application enablement, cloud and edge IoT components, edge orchestration and edge data processing.

Microsoft came top or joint top in almost all areas, including integration and scalability, scoring 43.6 out of 50, ecosystem growth (27/30), and app enablement (46/50). Huawei took the honours for the emerging yet critical area of edge IoT components (52.5/70), with scores in edge categories naturally seeing a lower average than other areas.

In total, Microsoft scored 276.6 out of 350, ahead of Amazon (254.8) and Huawei (249.1), with PTC and IBM completing the top five.

The IoT platform space is comprised of four main players. Cloud vendors, such as Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud which placed sixth alongside other cloud-first software players like Cloudera, saw success in the report because of the completeness of their offerings.

Hardware companies such as Huawei and Cisco also scored well overall, underpinning their networking expertise. The third category is more classic enterprise software vendors, such as SAP, PTC, and Software AG, which have been in the process of adding IoT application enablement platforms (AEP) to their businesses. Finally, a breed of edge-first IoT platform providers, such as FogHorn and ClearBlade, have emerged.

The latter, while not having the capability to challenge across all areas yet, are particularly interesting according to Counterpoint, due to their expertise in data ingestion, data processing and edge orchestration. Only Microsoft comes close to competing in this area. These vendors have gained preference and have driven successful edge IoT deployments across key verticals such as industrial, transportation and retail, among others, Counterpoint noted.

Emerging enterprise technologies, such as the Internet of Things, are being seen by the largest cloud infrastructure companies as the next wave of cloud services, with vendors deep pockets AWS broke $10 billion in revenues last quarter and huge market share enabling them to cannibalise this space. Blockchain is another example of this: a report by Everest Group in January assessing managed blockchain platforms saw IBM, Microsoft, AWS and Alibaba in the leaders zone, alongside SAP and Oracle.

Given AWS continued dominance in cloud infrastructure, with Synergy Research assessing it holds a third of the current market, this assessment can be seen as a minor coup for Microsoft.

The next wave of digital transformation will be driven by intelligent edge devices and corresponding highly scalable and secure IoT software platforms with edge computing capabilities, said Peter Richardson, VP research at Counterpoint. As a result, we are seeing multiple edge-first IoT platforms entering the market.

These players are looking to compete or partner with incumbent cloud-first IoT platform players who themselves have also been strengthening their edge IoT capabilities, Richardson added.

You can find out more about the report here.

Photo byGiorgio TrovatoonUnsplash

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this?Attend the co-located5G Expo,IoT Tech Expo,Blockchain Expo,AI & Big Data Expo, andCyber Security & Cloud Expo World Serieswith upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.

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Microsoft beats Amazon and Huawei to top spot for IoT platforms, says Counterpoint - Internet of Things News - IoT Tech News

Sony Will Reveal Additional PS5 Details On June 4.

Microsoft has made numerous disclosures regarding the upcoming Xbox Series X over the last few months, while Sony has been much more conservative about its messaging as it relates to the next-gen PlayStation 5. Sony, however, recently announced that it will be holding an event on June 4 @ 1:00PM (PDT) to reveal additional PS5 details and what it is calling The Future of Gaming. There will likely be many revelations this coming week, but few big surprises.

Fortunately for all gamers, Sony and Microsoft went with a much more PC-like approach with their respective console hardware configurations. The previous-gen Xbox One and PS4, and upcoming Xbox Series X and PS5, are all powered by semi-custom AMD chips, that were born from AMDs core PC CPU and GPU technologies. That move made it much easier for game and applications developers to produce their wares, since the underlying architectures for all of those consoles and the PC are so similar. There are significant differences between the consoles respective development kits, of course, but at their foundations they are all powered by similar AMD x86 processors and Radeon Graphics.

Sony probably knew beforehand that Microsoft was going to have the upper-hand this generation in terms of compute performance, and tailored its PS5 messaging up to this point to the upcoming game consoles strengths. Im not going to list the reported speeds and feeds for the Xbox Series X or PS5, because they can be tweaked right up until the last minute as both companies and partner AMD learn more about and further optimize the voltage and frequency curves for the semi-custom chips at playhere. If, however, current information holds true, Microsofts Xbox Series X will technically offer higher performance its CPU cores use a similar architecture (AMDs Zen 2), but are clocked higher, and its GPU will reportedly offer approximately 17% more compute performance.

The PS5's Wireless DualSense Controller

There has been lots of chatter regarding the Solid State Drive (SSD) Sony will be employing in the PS5 and Sony themselves have talked about the new DualSense wireless controllers and 3D Audio Technology capabilities of the PS5. And these are the areas Sony will likely focus on come this Thursdays event. The rest of the hardware-centric news, however, will likely be ripped from the PCs and Microsofts playbook. Let me explain...

One of the great things about the PC as a gaming platform is that it can cater to an extremely diverse array of gamers. If youre on a tight budget, lower-end, less-expensive hardware can be used, but hardcore-gamers with fat wallets can opt for ultra-powerful CPUs, GPUs, gobs of memory, and fast solid-state storage. But both a budget-build and world-class gaming PC can technically run the same games theyll just do it at differing image quality and performance levels. And thats exactly what will be happening with the next-generation consoles. Both the Xbox Series X and PS5 will be outfitted with much faster CPUs, GPUs, memory, and storage than their predecessors, while maintaining backward compatibility, so many existing games will likely be able to run with increased IQ and framerates and offer faster load times and smoother overall operation, thanks to the faster, lower-latency storage and increased memory capacity. So much of Sonys messaging as it relates to processor and GPU performance, and backward compatibility, is going to sound just like Microsofts.

In addition to seeing the final hardware design and potentially learning about some exclusive launch titles, well probably learn that the SSD in the PS5 offers significantly higher throughput than the standard NVMe in the Xbox Series X (Sonys target puts the drive around ~5.5GB/s). With a fast enough SSD in terms of both latency and bandwidth its possible that load times on the PS5 will be exceptionally fast, and streaming in new data in vast game worlds will be smooth and seamless, with no random pauses, jitters, and cut-scenes to mask loading.

As for the Tempest 3D Audio Technology, it will most likely be a derivative of or at the very least similar to AMDs TrueAudio Next ray-traced audio. TrueAudio Next is an AMD technology that allows for real-time, dynamic, physics-based audio rendering, enabled by the multi-threaded compute capabilities of the GPU.The video above will give you a sense how the technology works. But Sonys head-related transfer function (HRTF) will step things up a few nothces. Im eager to try this feature out with quality headphones or a surround-sound setup with a PS5, because it could provide a monumental leap in immersion. Audio doesnt often get the attention it should in games.

Ultimately, the games are what will decide who wins the next console war. To date, Microsoft has arguably had the better marketing and messaging. Sonys got momentum from the previous-gen on its side, though, and despite the Xbox Series Xs potential performance advantages, the PS5 is still going to be a major leap forward versus its predecessor. As a long-time proponent of the PC, Im just happy both companies stuck with PC-like approaches for their upcoming game consoles, because it makes porting games between the platforms significantly easier, which is a good thing for all gamers.

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Predictions For Sonys Big PS5 Reveal And Why Sony Will Have To Mimic Microsoft - Forbes

(Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for SiriusXM)

Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business. Did you miss them?

1 Microsoft is warning users of a massive phishing campaign that uses malicious Excel macros to hack PCs

Microsoft announced this past week that their Security Intelligence team put out a warning regarding a large phishing campaign that they have been tracking. The campaign tries to trick individuals in having a remote access tool installed onto their PCs by opening an email attachment that holds Excel 4.0 macros deemed to be malicious. The campaign is disguised as a COVID-19 report and is being sent out appearing to come from the Johns Hopkins Center. Through opening the Excel file NetSupport Managerthe remote access toolis downloaded onto the PC and allows hackers to have access to and run them. (Source: ZDNet)

Why this is important for your business:

The bad guys are really in full swing so far this year, with reports of phishing, malware and data breaches significantly rising. This is because so many people have been working from home and are less protected by corporate security. Its critical that you have an IT firm review your work-from-home employees security setup and provide some advice on avoiding phishing and other traps that may compromise their devicesand your network.

2 Xero partnered with Transferwise to help SMBs with cash flow.

Xeroa cloud accounting provider - has announced that they will be partnering with payments platform Transferwise in order to provide a broader set of finance-focused tools in order to assist SMBs with handling cash flow once businesses start to open back up after the pandemic. The new tools include features to assist businesses in managing their revenue by helping compare their numbers throughout various times, provide businesses ways to predict their balances one month ahead of time, and a way to pay several bills at once. (Source: Pymnts)

Why this is important for your business:

Xero is a great alternative to other online accounting applications and continues to grow its network of partner products to help their SMB clients with cash flow. If youre looking for a cloud-based application to handle your finances, this application should be one you investigate.

3 HPs WFH lineup includes a 3.1 pound workstation laptop and low blue-light monitors.

HP introduced its new computers this past week that are specifically geared toward employees who are working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The additions include monitors that give off a low blue-light and a workstation laptop that weighs 3.1 pounds. (Source: Venture Beat)

Why this is important for your business:

With HPs data revealing that half of individuals working from home feel they do not have the tools to they need, the idea behind the new additions from HP is to provide individuals working from home with the tools to help transform their at-home workspace into being a more secure place with the efficiency to collaborate and stay connected.

4 WhatsApp is enabling a remote thermoformer startup amid the coronavirus pandemic.

GN Thermoforming Equipment of Chester is a Novia Scotia-based manufacturer that focuses on plastic packaging and its production. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has had to find new avenues to install equipment due to social distancing guidelines. In order to continue training operators and installing equipment at their customers locations, GN will be utilizing WhatsApp in order to help their Eastern European and American customers install and be trained on the machine rather than have to postpone equipment being installed due to the various restrictions brought on by the pandemic. (Source: Plastics Today)

Why this is important for your business:

This is an innovative use of WhatsApp. Could you be using this free (and hugely popular) communications app to help your customers with installation, training, support and services remotely? Even companies in the plastics industry are finding ways to do this, so clearly there are many opportunities. Did I mention this is free? And popular?

5 A robot barista is helping a South Korean caf with social distancing.

A caf in South Korea is using a robot barista to help them transition back from the rigid social distancing rules. The coffee system utilizes a robotic arm that makes the coffee as well as a serving mechanism has the ability to make 60 variations of coffee and can even serve the beverages to customers while they are seated in the caf. The robot baristaadditionally is able to transmit and communicate its data to several other devices and houses self-driving tech to assist in figuring out the most efficient routes throughout the place (Source: Venture Beat)

Why this is important for your business:

Weve been reading about robots in the workplace and in stores and restaurants and its been pretty entertaining to date. But with CV-19 related health concerns, these types of machines are suddenly becoming a closely-watched technology to help both big and small businesses get work done without exposing employees to the virusand even helping owners reduce their payroll.

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Microsoft Warns Of A Massive Phishing CampaignAnd Other Small Business Tech News - Forbes

Spellcheck is one of my favourite features on my browser and word processors. Not because I cant spell, but because my fingers can be a bit clumsy and so typos creep in all the time. Thankfully, most of my errors can be quickly identified and corrected along the way, making it a lot easier for our honourable editor to not scratch his head in too much confusion trying to figure out what Im trying to say.

Spellchecking on Chrome and Edge are about to get better, and the reason for this is because both Google and Microsoft have decided to work together in implementing some changes across the browsers now shared Chromium open-source platform. The latest versions of Chrome and Edge will now be powered by the built-in Windows Spellcheck feature, rather than the previous Hunspell open-source implementation. The switch means spellcheck within Chrome and Edge will now have better support for URLs, acronyms, email addresses and an improved shared custom dictionary. Something which Microsofts Edge Team say came about through collaboration between both companies:

This feature was developed as a collaboration between Google and Microsoft engineers in the Chromium project, enabling all Chromium-based browsers to benefit from Windows Spellcheck integration

If youre not seeing the new spellcheck support show up in Chrome, then you may need to enable a flag to get it working. To do this, navigate tochrome://flags/and search for Use the Windows OS spell checker and enable this setting and restart Chrome. This is only for the latest version of Chrome though os if youre behind on your versions, dont confuse yourself too much trying to do this. For Edge, it will be on by default.

While not nearly as good as the likes of Grammarly, Microsofts spellcheck in Windows is superior to that of the current Chrome one and having both browsers have access to it will hopefully make it even easier for many people who havent taken advantage of adding the Grammarly plug-in to their browsers.

Last Updated: June 1, 2020

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Microsoft and Google ar workng togethr to improve their brwzir spellcheck - Critical Hit

Windows 7 and Windows 10 aren't bad operating systems. In fact, they are both quite good. With that said, the newest version of Windows 10 has many bugs. Unfortunately, since Windows 7 is no longer supported, some of its users are stuck in a conundrum. They have to decide whether to use an unsupported Windows 7 or upgrade to Windows 10 that is full of telemetry and other "spying" that passes their information to Microsoft's servers.

Thankfully, there is another option -- switch to Linux. Yes, modern Linux-based operating systems will be supported (unlike the now-obsolete Windows 7) and most will run great on aging hardware (unlike Windows 10). Linux Lite is one of the best Linux distributions for Windows-switchers, as it is lightweight, modern, and familiar.

Today, Linux Lite 5.0 "Emerald" becomes available, and it is based on the bleeding-edge Ubuntu 20.04. It even comes with modern software, such as Linux kernel 5.4.0-33, LibreOffice 6.4.3.2, Gimp 2.10.18, Thunderbird 68.8.0, Firefox 76.0.1, and VLC 3.0.9.2.

ALSO READ: Linux-creator Linus Torvalds joins Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips in embracing AMD over Intel

"Linux Lite 5.0 Final Codename Emerald is now available for download and installation. This is the most feature rich, complete Linux Lite release to date. This is the release many people have been waiting for. UEFI is now supported out of the box. GUFW has been replaced by the highly configurable FireWallD (disabled by default)," says Jerry Bezencon, Linux Lite Creator.

Bezencon shares newly added software below.

If you are ready to try out Linux Lite 5.0 "Emerald," you can download it here now. Before you do, it is recommended you read the full release announcement here. Should you replace Windows with Linux Lite immediately? No, not immediately -- you should first try it and be sure it meets your needs. You may be pleasantly surprised by how great Linux can be.

Link:

Ubuntu-based Linux Lite 5.0 'Emerald' is here to replace Microsoft Windows on your PC - BetaNews

Google and Microsoft have worked together to improve the spellcheck experience in Chrome and Edge. The latest versions of Chrome and Edge are now powered by the built-in Windows Spellcheck feature rather than the previous Hunspell open source implementation. The switch means spellcheck within Chrome and Edge will now have better support for URLs, acronyms, email addresses, and an improved shared custom dictionary.

This feature was developed as a collaboration between Google and Microsoft engineers in the Chromium project, enabling all Chromium-based browsers to benefit from Windows Spellcheck integration, explains Microsofts Edge team.

If youre not seeing the new spellcheck support show up in Chrome, then you may need to enable a flag to get it straight away. Head to chrome://flags/ and search for Use the Windows OS spell checker and enable this setting and restart Chrome.

Microsoft has been contributing to Chromium and helping improve both Edge and Chrome ever since its surprise decision to switch to Chromium last year. While there have been hundreds of commits, user-facing changes arent always obvious like this.

We previously saw Microsoft helping Google improve Chromes tab management back in January, and Microsoft is also working to improve scrolling in Chromium with bounce effects and percentage-based scrolling.

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Google and Microsoft worked together to improve spellcheck in Chrome and Edge - The Verge

Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, has a vision for the companys Office 365 chat-based collaboration tool that competes with Slack, Facebooks Workplace, and Google Chat. In terms of reach, Teper wants Microsoft Teams to eclipse Windows. (Windows 10 runs on over 1 billion monthly active devices.)

Our interview took place a day after Microsoft concluded its online-only Build 2020 developer conference, where the company gave business developers new tools to build Teams apps. Microsoft launched a Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extension for Teams in preview, introduced new integrations between its Power Platform and Teams, and announced a custom app submission process to help IT admins. Teper was happy to cover a range of Teams topics, including metrics, growth, competitors, consumer positioning, machine learning, and of course dealing with the increased demand during the coronavirus pandemic.

Teams is Microsofts fastest-growing business app ever. That was true in 2018, long before lockdowns started juicing up numbers for remote work and learning. As of April 29, Microsoft Teams had 75 million daily active users, up 70% just six weeks prior. That month, Microsoft saw more than 200 million meeting participants in a single day, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes.

That 75 million number encompasses people who use the Teams app every day millions more likely use the app only during weekdays, weekly, or even less frequently. In Microsofts most recent quarterly earnings, CEO Satya Nadella said the company had 258 million paid seats of Office 365, which includes access to Teams. That means less than 30% of Office 365 business users are using Teams every day (how much less depends on the number of free Teams users).

Microsoft has attributed this years spikes in Teams usage to the pandemic, meaning a drop is inevitable. Still, given Office 365s size, Teams has plenty of room to grow, though Teper doesnt quite see it that way.

Im very bullish on us getting more Office 365 users to use Teams. But also, first line workers adopting Teams in health care, in retail, airlines, and so forth, Teper said. It actually gives us a much bigger addressable market than, say, the people who author Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents all day. So I think well see strong growth, hundreds of millions of people using Teams. At some point, the percentage of time people are spending in online meetings has got to go back down. So, the 4 billion daily minutes, that will continue to grow. But at some point, that number is going to level off because people dont want to spend eight hours a day in online meetings if they can meet in person. But as far as the users, Im very bullish on thats going to continue to grow.

When Microsoft shares an Office 365 seats number along with a DAUs figure for Teams, it gives ammo to competitors like Slack. Why not break out how many daily active users Office 365 has to make an apples-to-apples comparison possible?

In the matrix of all the things we could disclose weve decided to keep it relatively simple. The reason we decided to make the change for Teams is because its a communication app, Teper explained. People said, Hey, for communications apps, those things are daily habits. In order for us to understand how well youre doing for Teams, you should give the daily active number. Weve actually had a cohort of people who want us to disclose the monthly active number for Teams. Thats a bigger number than the daily active user. But theres financial regulations about material disclosure and so forth, so I wont throw out any new numbers because the SEC and Microsoft wont let me.

Microsoft currently has no plans to share DAUs for Office 365 or MAUs for Teams.

Teams has dwarfed the competition, based on numbers shared so far. Slack has 12 million DAUs as of October, Facebooks Workplace has 3 million paid users as of October, and Google has yet to share a number for Chat. We asked Teper which tool he views as Microsoft Teams number one competitor. At first, he dodged the question.

I was going to say pen and paper, Teper said. I think theres still people doing things that need to be automated and digitized. I think if we look at targeting 1 billion, 2 billion people, many of them are doing things in person, that is expensive. Youve got to travel. Theyre doing things manually with pencil and paper. We certainly see that in hospitals. So our biggest competitor is transforming how people work. Thats how we go big.

Google Meet has 100 million daily meeting participants and Zoom has 300 million daily meeting participants, which puts Microsoft Teams right in the middle with its 200 million meeting participants. (Unlike daily active users, meeting participants can count the same user more than once.)

But Google Meet and Zoom are only for video conferencing. How does Microsoft view the competitive space here?

First, we start from a customer standpoint, Teper said. There are a billion people using Windows and Office, so clearly there is a billion people who should be using our cloud services, mobile applications, and desktop applications. And then part of the reason were excited about Teams is that it can be used by people who are involved in business processes who may never have been traditional Office customers.

Microsoft offers virtual patient consults in Teams. Doctors and nurses sometimes use Office, of course, but most of their day is spent talking to patients. Microsoft hopes they can use Teams to collaborate with other health care practitioners in their organizations as well as carry virtual discussions with their patients. Teper also envisions airlines using Teams to collaborate with maintenance crews and retail stores trying to automate workflows.

We think about how many people in the world we can empower with our tools, Teper said. We are thinking about hundreds of millions and billions of people. Satya, when he came in as CEO, said every person and organization on the planet because he wanted us all to think about our mission and opportunity and impact. We start from there. And then we do that by building a suite of tools, integrated in Teams for chat, for calling, for meetings, for files, etc.

So thats the second part, Teper continued. And for sure, in those categories, there are big competitors who have good products, and were absolutely striving to be the best choice in each category. So yes, people are very much choosing Teams over Slack. Our success is in the zone of Zoom, but if you look at the commercial-business-and-education-only number which we produced they have a lot of consumer numbers I think were doing very well. So we start from a customer standpoint, we bring together a suite of tools that nobody else does. And each of those tools needs to be best of breed and be chosen and loved by customers in that category. And then the third thing, which is really what Build was about for us, which I think is unique, is making all this a platform.

Teper is referencing the tools the company released last week to help business developers build apps for Teams. Thats where he argues Microsofts integrated offering is in a clear leadership position. In other areas that Teams competes in, its a bit of a dogfight, he concedes, but in terms of a platform for developers, Microsoft is ahead.

Teams is a shell, a platform for building collaborative applications and integrating them in, Teper said. And creating enormous opportunity for partners to build solutions for customers and frankly make money investing in building their applications on Teams. Weve had a 750% growth of apps inside Teams [over the last year]. Seeing solutions for health care, education, manufacturing being built on Teams is that thing that I think maybe not everybody appreciates that were trying to focus on now. Everything from the Power Apps support to Visual Studio support, how people deploy applications. Thats the big thing that is the game changer versus the alternatives in the industry out there. So were going to help organizations solve their specific problems, not just give them general purpose tools.

From there, Jeff starts to dream big. That platform then becomes an ecosystem; much like Windows became an ecosystem, people build on it. You get the network effects and flywheel of that.

Is that how Teper sees Teams? The next Windows, if you will, for communication?

I wouldnt use those words exactly that way because Windows is going to be the next Windows, Teper said. But its a platform that transcends operating systems that will be even bigger than Windows. Yes. We want people to build Teams-based applications that run on iOS, Android, the web, the Mac, as well as Windows. So by that definition Teams will be ultimately, even more ubiquitous platform over time. It wont obviate the need for Windows but

The other piece of the puzzle in making Teams a massive platform is expanding beyond businesses. In March, Microsoft announced that Teams for consumers features were coming to the Android and iOS app in the next few months.

There is precedence for consumers using business tools. The latest high-profile example is Zoom an enterprise product that consumers have embraced. Everyone understands why people want to use video conferencing tools, especially during lockdowns. But what is the attraction of a chat and collaboration tool over, say, social networks, messaging apps, or just plain texting that consumers use today?

Almost every Microsoft product that weve done Office, Outlook, OneDrive, etc. because weve offered it to people across work, school, and their personal use, theyve been really successful, Teper said. Not everybody in their personal life is building giant Excel spreadsheets, but hundreds of millions of people are, to manage soccer teams, home improvement, keep track of their finances, athletic training, etc. So, weve been very successful in building products for work and life. We do think that there are teams in your personal life. There are sports teams. There are families. There are religious groups. There is running a charity auction, etc., etc. And we dont think those team-based activities in your personal life are well served by doing them on public social networks, or just in chat. We think, once things get a little more structured, you want a structured tool to help on it. And so we are introducing Teams for that.

Building a product for both enterprises and consumers at the same time brings its own set of challenges. There are also advantages though, as Teper pointed out.

We are also recognizing, as weve done with Windows and OneDrive, that while the core product should be the same, we really should streamline it for those consumer scenarios, Teper continued. And by doing that, well make it better for everybody. Part of the work were doing in the next few months as we get ready to start with Teams for consumers, first on mobile phones, is to streamline the experience. But I think if youre doing any kind of structured activity thats not an ad hoc conversation, Teams is going to be a better choice than an existing chat product or social network. Were not trying to displace all that. Were just saying theres an unmet consumer need in these more complicated activities in your personal life where getting organized is useful, just like it is with OneDrive or Excel.

Microsoft Teams for consumers will naturally intersect with Skype. We go over Tepers thoughts on that overlap here: Microsoft promises new Skype features despite Teams for consumers launch.

When business users started increasingly working from home, Teams usage spiked. There were even reliability issues. We asked Teper what it took to handle that demand beyond simply spinning up more cloud instances.

Teams already, before COVID-19, was our fastest growing business, Teper said. So we were used to nonlinear growth. But then post-COVID-19 it went off the trend line. The Teams architecture and the things behind it, like SharePoint and the Microsoft Graph, are elastic. So, as we saw a new demand, we needed to just spin up more Azure capacity around the world. And there was definitely a lot of excitement, back in the first couple weeks in March, because we were doing that. We found a few bottlenecks. When you have a large-scale system, we had a few things to tune, which we did. Through this its been pretty smooth sailing. The one stat I share is the number of daily meeting minutes is about 20 times what it was when we started. Im pretty proud of the team that built the software that could scale 20X. Yes, we had to spin up a lot of Azure capacity for it.

Some code, such as the provisioning system for adding new accounts to Teams, required reworking. The company had simply never anticipated adding as many users per day as it did during the lockdowns. Thankfully, Microsoft didnt have to turn any organizations or users away. But the company did adjust how it predicts usage.

At the start of this we had a meeting every three days, that went to twice a week, and then once a week (now its sort of every couple weeks) where we would look at all the signals, Teper said. We would look at the usage intensity of our existing customers. We had lots of people who had licensed the product who were using it more. We looked at the signup rate of new customers.

In one case, a school system told Microsoft that 800,000 students would be showing up on Teams the following week. The team had to look at its datacenters near those users to make sure there was capacity. At first, the Teams team was talking to the Azure team every day about where capacity would likely be fine and where it needed help.

That was then. Now, the company has enough data to make smarter decisions.

And then as we got probably a couple weeks into this, our data scientists got enough data to start to model a forecast, Teper said. The first week youre sort of going off anecdotes. Tell us about all the schools and big customers. Wed walk through them. And it was a little bit of conjecture about Will every student show up? Or just most of them? Or some of them? And so after a couple of weeks we had enough data where the new models became very reliable again. So we didnt have to over-provision. At the beginning when we were surprised by the demand, we swung the pendulum to add a lot of capacity for the extreme case scenarios. That was largely what played out. You dont want to operate that way forever because you can over-provision.

Thats not an easy balance to strike.

We spend billions of dollars a year building out our data centers and adding capacity, Teper continued. If we under-build for the peaks, our customers wouldnt have a great experience. If we over-build, our shareholders wouldnt have a great experience. Yes, we forecast this very carefully and have meetings. Theres sort of a meeting every month that I go to with my peers to make sure that were very safely in the zone of demand that we think wed forecast. But again you sort of design your systems for black swan events. We had not modeled 20X growth in meeting minutes in a quarter. We wrote the software that was ready for that. We got a lot of great help from our Azure friends. We talked about a black swan scenario, but it wasnt in our model.

Today, Teper is comfortable with the teams ability to predict demand, even though new users are still coming to the service at a faster rate every day. Were back to, for lack of a better term, normal mode where were not meeting every couple of days to look at the data. Its not changing as much as it was at the beginning.

Early on, the company would measure the number of PCs and people as countries were hit at different rates with COVID-19. Collecting all that data let Microsoft build ML models to predict how organizations might increase their intensity of Teams and when work-from-home rules would be set.

More users show up, theres more meetings, people do more tasks per day, and we build models on that, Teper said. We make a set of predictions and then we learn and theres a feedback loop. Then theres a second model of when do organizations come up under the service. Because there you have a sales pipeline that you talk to salespeople on, but you really want to validate that. So we built this separate set of models there.

Microsoft uses these algorithms to help it forecast both the growth of Teams and monitor for issues.

We used to write rules to monitor our software, Teper said. We now use ML to do that. Because for example, if we have a spike in support incidents, we will use machine learning to correlate that with telemetry we see in our servers around the world. And the machine learning will then write rules of patterns for us to detect. This is why our service reliability has gotten pretty great through all this. I feel very proud of our machine learning based monitoring.

AI use doesnt end there. The biggest focus on AI is actually in the product, Teper said. VentureBeat has covered Teams various AI-powered features most recently, we went deep on how Microsoft Teams will use AI to filter out noise from video calls. But Teams also uses AI to surface relevant conversation notifications and produce live captions of meetings. And theres more in the pipeline.

We also have an effort called moonshots, which are sort of big, crazy, bolder things wed like to do in Teams, Teper said. If even one out of five of those pay off, well have some pretty amazing things in the next couple of years.

Link:

Microsofts Jeff Teper: Teams will be even bigger than Windows - VentureBeat

Blood plasma from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 holds promiseas a potential treatment that could save lives. But, currently, there's a shortage of donors.

Now, a cross-industry coalition that includes the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins University, Anthem, LabCorp, plasma companies, blood centers and Microsoft is working tohelp mobilize thousands of people in the U.S. who have recovered from COVID-19 to donate their blood plasma.

This effort, called The Fight Is In Us,aims to support the rapid development of potential new therapies for patients with COVID-19.

"Roughly speaking, we want every single person who has recently recovered from COVID to donate plasma," said Peter Lee,corporate vice president of Microsoft Research andIncubation, speaking with CNBC's health tech reporter Christina Farr Thursdayduring a Facebook live interview.

"If there is a second wave, were going to need every last bit of convalescentplasma," Lee said.

Ongoing research suggeststhe use of antibody-rich blood plasma, also called convalescent plasma, to treat severely ill COVID-19 patients could help in the fight against the virus until there is a vaccine.

"As a stopgap, that could be really powerful," Lee said.

RELATED:Microsoft announces Cloud for Healthcare, first industry-specific cloud service

The coalition organizationsare working on two distinct approaches for treating COVID-19 that both urgently require the collection of convalescent plasma. One approach is the development of a hyperimmune globulin, which is being manufactured now and will be studied in clinical trials this summer. This approach is driven by the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance, an effort co-led by Takedaand CSL Behring along with other plasma companies.

The second approach is the direct transfusion of blood plasma through the Convalescent Plasma Expanded Access Program, which is currently being administered with authorization from the Food and Drug Administration by the Mayo Clinic.

The use of convalescent plasma harvested from recovered patients and transferred it to patients who are severely ill is not a new idea; it dates back to the 1918 Spanish flu, Lee said.

Through the effort led by Mayo Clinic, more than 17,000 patients have been treating using convalescent plasma.

Clinical research to validate the treatment's safety and efficacy is still emerging.The first large-scale safety studyon the treatmentbased on 5,000 patientssuggests experimental convalescent plasma is safe in treating severely ill patients.

Anotherstudy of hospitalized patientswith COVID-19 infectionsfrom Mount Sinai Hospital and Johns Hopkinsprovided a sign that blood-plasma transfusions from recovered patients improve survival rates.

RELATED:Amazon, Microsoft launch initiatives to accelerate COVID-19 research and testing

The shortage ofCOVID-19 tests means millions of people have not been tested and don't know whether they've had the virus. Another challenge to collecting more convalescent plasma is delayed appointments at blood centers in areas like New York City, where it can take four to five weeks to get an appointment, Lee said.

Microsoft is trying to help this effort in two ways: working with Mitre Corporation to develop arecruitment website, thefightisinus.org, and the launch of aplasma bot, a digital self-qualification tool for donor recruitment.

"We're working with blood centers and plasma centers to get enough telemetry to point you to those centers. And Uber hasstepped up to providefree rides to those who have to go long distances," Lee said.

"Right now, this week, were hitting the peak of the number of eligible donors. It's roughly speaking 21 days to 60 days from theonset of symptoms. After 60 days, the plasma doesnt have antibody levels good for this. We really are desperate to capture every last person we can," he said.

RELATED:Apple, Google and Amazon are sprinting to battle COVID-19. Here are lessons that can be learned

Lee also shared his perspective on other major healthcare topics during his chat with CNBC's Farr:

Telehealth:"It's absolutely here to stay," he said, noting the company has seen a huge surge in the use of its Teams app for telehealth visits.

"We see it on the back end with thecompanies we work with that handle claims. In the U.S. market, theres been a roughly 30% to 35% drop in the number of office visits with primary care providers and about5% or 6% off that has been taken up by telehealth. There is every reason to believe that theres much more growth there thats possible even withroutine office visits," he said.

Data interoperability: The rapid shift to virtual care will drive the need for providers and patients to have access to health data, he said.

"As consumers, were going to have a wider array of healthcare providers that we can call up on Teams or Zoom and that means doctors and healthcare providers will beseeinga wider diversity of patients," Lee said. "Now, the question is, 'How does a doctor get a hold of that patients health history?' Health data and interoperability, those issues get magnified in this new world," he said.

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Microsoft's Lee details effort to get 'every single person' who has recovered from COVID-19 to donate plasma - FierceHealthcare

Microsoft created a fun Easter egg for its Edge browser to reveal the new logo last year, and its now available for everyone to play. The Edge surf game is very similar to SkiFree, a classic game that was released as part of Microsofts Entertainment Pack 3 for Windows back in 1991. While it was used as part of an elaborate Easter egg hunt, where Microsoft employees posted cryptic clues to a series of puzzles and images, its now an official offline game inside Microsoft Edge.

You can access it from edge://surf/ in the address bar in Edge. There are three modes available: a classic surf mode, a time trial, and a slalom mode where you surf between gates. The standard classic surf mode is an endless surfer mode where you have to avoid obstacles and a kraken chasing after you. Time trial is self-explanatory, but Microsoft has added in coins to collect so you can shorten the time and find speedy routes. The zig-zag mode is perhaps the most challenging, as youll need to hit every single gate, otherwise, streaks are immediately reset.

Microsoft has even added keyboard, mouse, touch, and even gamepad support, and local high scores are also included. The game has been available for testers since February, but its now part of Microsoft Edge version 83.

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You can now play Microsofts new surf game inside the Edge browser - The Verge