Author: Microsoft Stories

In a move to further boost a healthy and productive work environment, Microsoft India has doubled the maternity leave for its employees. The new policy, designed to enhance emotional upliftment of the workforce, allows employees to take paid maternity leave for six months. The policy, to be effective from February 1, 2016, will also offer employees flexible work arrangements up to two years.

TripAdvisor™, the world’s largest travel site*, today announced the launch of a new Windows 10 app across desktop, tablet and mobile. The TripAdvisor app for Windows 10 will be available in 47 markets and will be pre-loaded on millions of Windows 10 compatible devices in 2016. The new app features TripAdvisor’s comprehensive booking tools, including the TripAdvisor instant booking platform, which allows travelers to easily compare hotel options, check prices and availability and book their accommodation on TripAdvisor. Restaurants and attractions are also featured, many of which are bookable on the site.

Xbox One and Xbox 360 players can get their hands on Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch DLC for Crystal Dynamics’ Rise of the Tomb Raider. The DLC is available either with the $30 Season Pass or as a standalone purchase for $10. The Baba Yaga DLC sees Lara Croft exploring the wilderness of Siberia to discover a forbidden forest.

Box today unveiled three new integrations with Microsoft that enable seamless collaboration across devices and platforms. Box’s next-generation content management and collaboration platform now supports new integrations with Microsoft Office Online with real time co-authoring, Office for iOS and Outlook.com. “We designed the Cloud Storage Partner Program to make it easier for people, including Box customers, to work with Office documents no matter where they’re stored,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office.

ROBLOX expands the boundaries of user-generated gaming with its launch of ROBLOX for Xbox One on Microsoft’s Xbox Live. ROBLOX’s unique platform debut on Xbox One includes 15 user-created games, across 10 genres. ROBLOX will continuously unlock new titles on its Xbox app, ultimately providing unlimited access to the millions of ROBLOX experiences.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced a set of deals to more tightly integrate services built by other software makers into its Office suite. People who store Office files on Box or Dropbox, along with two other popular online file storage and sharing services, will now be able to edit those documents at the same time as other users. Previously, that function was only available for Office documents stored on a Microsoft service.

Called News Pro, the app takes your LinkedIn and Facebook account info and turns around results based on your profession and interests. You can also choose other topics of interest, just like you can with Apple’s News app or Flipboard. As the name suggests, this app seems to be focussed on professionals who need to know everything about an industry or area of focus quickly.

In order to speed up their AI and speech recognition projects, researchers at Microsoft have developed a toolkit that uses deep neural networks and multiple graphics processing chips for quicker results. The company has now open sourced the Computational Networks Toolkit (CNTK) and made it available for anyone to use in their own work on GitHub. It’s not the first tech giant to release deep learning software for free; last November, Google open-sourced its TensorFlow machine learning system that powered its Photos search functionality.