Author: Microsoft Stories

Peter Gartenberg, General Manager, Enterprise Partner Group, Microsoft India, shared his insights at a recent event on how digital, technology and media have joined hands to build a business model, which has the ability to be agile, adaptable and is designed to thrive to be future ready. The session was moderated by Vikram Chandra, Consulting Editor, NDTV. Talking about technology trends, Gartenberg spoke about how Microsoft has been working on Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, SVG and all kinds of different formats.

Microsoft and the Telangana government sponsored the launch of India’s first UAV hackathon called “Hackadrone 2018”. The hackathon, which is open for registration, is welcoming developers, start-ups, and tech students that want to develop commercial and industrial solutions using drone technology to participate.

Power BI is Microsoft’s interactive data visualization and analytics tool for business intelligence. Microsoft’s Power BI service can visualize a lot more than chart data–from asking questions to analyzing the services you use. You can use it to pull data from a wide range of systems in the cloud and on premises and create dashboards that track the metrics you care about the most, or drill in and ask questions about your data. You can create rich reports or embed dashboards.

The Bluetooth-enabled Surface Precision Mouse by Microsoft is very comfortable while still looking elegant. It’s got six customizable buttons, a rechargeable battery, a thumb rest, and a scroll wheel that can be switched from smooth and fast vertical scrolling to granular line-by-line scrolling. It can be used with up to three PCs at the same time.

Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 is now running on more than 600 million active devices. The list of devices includes desktops, tablets, Xbox One consoles, HoloLens headsets, and Surface Hub devices. The team led by Nadella has developed features such as an AirDrop-like Near Share, native app tabbing with Sets, and visualizing history with Timeline. All these features are likely to persuade users to start using the latest Windows platform in the coming future.

Microsoft has elected four new members to its board of directors, bringing the total to 14. Nine of those 14 have been appointed since Satya Nadella became the company’s third CEO in February 2014. The new members had all been previously announced, but were officially elected by shareholders in the company’s annual meeting. Nadella and founder Bill Gates are also on the board.

Enterprises like Microsoft, which have operations spanning geographies, think that multiple global standards and regulations will create compliance issues and confusion. “There is a need for harmony between countries while drafting these new-age cyber policies and help make the cyber market less fragmented,” said Jan Neutze, Microsoft’s Director of Cyber security Policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “There is a lot of overlap in frameworks of different countries in preventing attacks. Industry should not be put in a position to have to choose, but rather we should be able to comply everywhere,” he said while speaking to ET.

Microsoft unveiled a free cloud tool called Azure Migrate, which the company said will make it easier to move VMware based applications to its infrastructure-as-a-service platform. Azure Migrate is able to discover on-premises, VMware based applications without making changes to an operational environment. It then virtualizes various components to reveal how they interact with each other. This allows administrators to visualize group level dependencies in multi-VMware applications, enabling them to group and prioritize the entire application for migration.

Yes Bank, India’s fifth largest private sector bank with 1,000 branches in over 670 locations and over 20,000 employees, digitizes its field sales processes by deploying Microsoft’s Kaizala. Happy with how the platform works so far, the bank is also planning to use it to enable a self-service channel to increase customer satisfaction.

Microsoft announced that its translator app now supports Tamil translation in Office 365. It currently supports Indian languages such as Bengali and Hindi. The app is available on Android, iOS and Windows platforms. With this addition, users can now translate through “Bing Translator” website, “Microsoft Translator” apps, “PowerPoint” add-ins and API on Azure in over 60 text translation languages and 10 speech translation languages.