Author: Microsoft Stories

Microsoft has updated its Outlook app, bringing contact editing to iOS, while its Android counterpart will receive it soon. In addition, contacts can be added and viewed in an entirely redesigned contact card to provide more details including latest conversations and shared files, apart from enabling easier calling and messaging.

Microsoft’s Major walks us through the ins and outs of the Xbox Scorpio devkit in a brand new video. In this video, he walks us through the features and hardware of the developer kit, to explain exactly how and why the hardware is as powerful as it is, and what that might mean for games.

At Computex, Microsoft announced that several major OEMs, including ASUS, HP, and Lenovo, will be delivering the first Always Connected PCs. In a statement, Microsoft said, “There is a new generation of users that need to be connected to the cloud at all times. They are students, creators, freelancers, small businesses, and enterprises. This means sharing experiences across screens and leveraging the latest network technology like gigabit LTE and eSIM. We are collaborating with our ecosystem on a shared vision.”

Microsoft’s Bing search engine has been around for years, but while we’ve found it to be perfectly good, not many people use it compared to the 3.5 billion searches made each day using Google. To change that, Microsoft has launched (another) Rewards program which gives users points each time they search using Bing. And points mean prizes.

Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass is now available for all as of today. The service launched early last month for Xbox Live Gold members on Xbox One with a free 14-day trial. Now all users can try the program for $9.99/£7.99/€9.99 per month or try it for 14 days with the same free trial.

Microsoft has announced the first open source developer tool for Azure. Called Draft, the new tool is designed to help developers create cloud-native applications on Kubernetes. Draft lets developers get started with container-based applications without any knowledge of Kubernetes or Docker.

Purdue and Microsoft entered into an agreement in April 2016 that extends their collaboration on quantum computing research, effectively establishing “Station Q Purdue,” one of the “Station Q” experimental research sites that work closely with two “Station Q” theory sites. The new, multi-year agreement extends that collaboration and includes Microsoft employees being embedded in Manfra’s research team at Purdue.

Neudesic, a nationally recognized business and technology consulting firm, announced it has won the 2017 Microsoft Cloud Apps Global Partner of the Year Award. ” We are pleased to recognize Neudesic for being selected as the Winner of the 2017 Microsoft Cloud Apps award. Our ecosystem of innovative partners is the cornerstone to delivering transformative solutions to our mutual customers” said Ron Huddleston Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft Corp.

At Computex 2017, Microsoft outlined key areas of focus to inspire customers, increase momentum in the PC market with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, and spark emerging categories including Windows Mixed Reality and Windows and Azure solutions for the Internet of Things. Nick Parker, corporate vice President, consumer and device sales, shared his vision, “Our partner model is unique in the industry as we collaborate, end-to-end, from design, through all phases of the product lifecycle and across consumer and device channels. At Microsoft, our success scales with our partners and, as an ecosystem, we reinvent existing markets even as we explore new ones.”

On June 1, 2017 Microsoft launched the second version of what is now called the Microsoft Cognitive toolkit, to accelerate the process of deep learning. The Open source kit which was earlier known as CNTK, is new range of competition against TensorFlow, Caffe and Torch by Microsoft. This time Microsoft has put efforts into usability, future extensibility, while still maintaining and improving its speed.