Author: Microsoft Stories

In order to strengthen cybersecurity practices and awareness among government departments, the ministry of electronics and IT has launched the Cyber Surakshit Bharat initiative in association with the IT industry majors such as Microsoft. The mission targets to spread awareness about cyber-crime and building capacity for safety measures for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and frontline IT staff across all government departments. Speaking of the initiative, Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India, said, “Cyber Surakshit Bharat is a significant initiative. I congratulate the Government and our industry partners for coming together to launch it. Security and data privacy is the highest priority for Microsoft. And, as part of this initiative, we will bring the best experts to help train and create the capability to deal with the latest cyber-security challenges.”

Microsoft has rolled out a major update to Office for Mac, which features the real-time collaboration and automatic cloud saving features. Additionally, Office for Mac is now built from the same codebase as Windows, iOS, and Android systems. Notably, all three core Office apps—Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—have undergone some changes which the company has detailed in its release notes.

PerfectServe is integrating its clinical communication and care team collaboration platform with Microsoft Skype for Business Server and Skype for Business Online. This will enable clinicians to launch the Skype for Business mobile application for a video conversation within the PerfectServe application.

Microsoft has developed an AI to draw entirely original images based on nothing more than text. Researchers created a text-to-image bot that draws out pretty amazing images when fed a series of descriptive words. This was accomplished through the creation of a neural network called Attention Generative Adversarial Network (AttnGAN) that creates an image pixel-by-pixel.

After its debut in India, last year, Kaizala—a suite of productivity applications built in a chat interface—is being tested and previewed in countries with similar mobile penetration trends as India and could be formally launched there soon.

Microsoft has announced that it was integrating Azure Security Center with its Web Application Firewall (WAF) to offer better security to enterprise customers. The company also said that additional configuration settings, such as custom firewall rules, are also available in the WAF console, which is linked directly from the security center. Microsoft had also released a guideline for configuring the new setup.

Microsoft announced the acquisition of Avere Systems for an undisclosed amount in order to further boost its hybrid cloud mission. Avere provides NFS and SMB file storage for Windows and Linux clients running in the cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments

Microsoft has partnered with Adaptive Biotechnologies to map the genetics of the human immune system, to improve diagnoses of cancers and other diseases As per the agreement, Microsoft will bring research and large-scale machine learning and cloud computing capabilities to translate genetics of the human immune system, or immunome into simple blood test that can be broadly accessible to people around the world.

Various technologies at Microsoft that began transforming the lives of individuals and communities in India last year will gain further momentum in 2018, the company’s President Anant Maheshwari said in a mission statement. Microsoft is proud to play a role in the transformation of India’s core pillars of education, health care, agriculture and governance, among others.