Author: Microsoft Stories

Microsoft is geared to boost the ecosystem for Indian data scientists by giving students the opportunity to learn and test their data analytical skills. As part of this scheme, the company in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru, concluded the first-ever Data Science Student Challenge (DSSC), on Saturday. The 24-hour global hackathon series, inaugurated as part of Pravega 2016, the annual tech festival of the Institute, witnessed participation by close to 200 students.

Ubisoft’s closed beta for “Tom Clancy’s The Division” is now live for Xbox One. Along with PvE quests, players will also have a chance to explore the Dark Zone and its various PvP aspects. The game is a highly anticipated MMO from Ubisoft, that implores the player to take charge of maintaining order, rebuilding the society and battling various opposing factions in a virus hit New York City.

Microsoft announced the lineup for its February Games with Gold line-up starting with “Styx: Master of Shadows” for Xbox One and “Gears of War 2” for the Xbox 360. Microsoft Games with Gold offers all its free games at one time, and then staggers them, with one game being offered for one portion of the month and another being offered over the other portion of the month.

Microsoft shares made a profit of USD 5 billion on USD 23.8 billion in revenue in the final three months of last year, propelling the company’s shares about seven percent when the earnings figures hit, before giving up some of the ground. Shares were up more than three percent to USD 53.64 in after-market trade, with analysts rejecting the notion that Microsoft was somehow past its sell-by date. Revenue from Microsoft Azure more than doubled while its overall “intelligent cloud” unit grew five percent to $6.3 billion.

MessageOps, a Microsoft Cloud business unit of Champion Solutions Group, announced the launch of ROOT. It’s a new SharePoint Intranet platform for Office 365 that is intelligently built, intuitively designed, and immediately useful. The feature-rich intranet portal is attractively priced to give all Office 365 customers an opportunity to create a more collaborative working environment. No longer will managing or installing a company Intranet be difficult.

Microsoft Azure Stack, a cloud platform running within customer’s own data centers, will be available for testing as a technical preview. It is a key focus for Microsoft in its hybrid cloud system plan. The Azure Stack has the same code that is used in Azure for running a stack locally as well as another in the cloud. Microsoft feels that customers will like its new approach as it helps them in familiarizing themselves with development and management in either scenario.

Enterprise interest in Windows 10, getting onto it and off Windows 7, is at an unprecedented level, research firm Gartner said. Although in virtually all cases the interest has not yet translated into actual deployments, it signals a faster move to the new OS than for past editions, including Windows 7. Gartner analyst Steve Kleynhans revealed that the level of interest expressed by customers and the type of enquiries made are snowballing the shift to Windows 10 than any previous operating system.

The all new Nokia 230 Dual SIM is now available in India for Rs. 3949. “The Nokia 230 Dual SIM has been designed to deliver on the latent need in the market. The device offers a premium feature phone experience to users, both in terms of the build and design of the device, as well as the usage.” said Ravi Kunwar, Director- North, Microsoft Mobile Devices. The device comes with a 2.8 inch screen, 1200 mAH battery, 32GB memory card support and more.

Microsoft has introduced real-time co-authoring with Office Online for documents stored in partner cloud services. The announcement expands the availability of the feature to an increased number of third-party cloud storage providers in the CSPP program. “This announcement is just the next step in our journey to make Office files more accessible no matter where they’re stored. We’re excited that Dropbox customers now have the capabilities to co-edit files in Office Online.” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office.