Author: Microsoft Stories

Microsoft recently announced its Office 365 Planner, the tool for teams to create plans, organise and assign work, share files, chat about what everyone was working on and get updates on progress. The Planner preview has started to roll out to Office 365 First Release customers.

Federation of Rajasthan Trade & Industry (FORTI), an apex chamber in Rajasthan, and Microsoft have come together to enable 30,000 small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the state to adopt technology. With support from BB Professionals, one of Microsoft’s leading partners, the adoption of modern technologies will make businesses more profitable and productive by connecting them better with suppliers, distributors, government agencies and increasing their reach to customers across India.

Microsoft India’s research and development arm posted a nearly 30 per cent jump in profit for the financial year, driven mainly by higher sales and a rise in software development projects, according to documents filed with the Registrar of Companies (ROC). Microsoft India R&D Pvt Ltd posted net profit of Rs 271.3 crore ( Rs 209.48 crore) for the year through March 2015. Revenue climbed nearly 15 per cent to Rs 2,635 crore.

One of the largest start-up accelerators in the world Microsoft Ventures is aggressively eyeing the Indian start-ups and partnering with corporate’s to connect mature start-ups with them. Scott Colman, General Manager, Microsoft Ventures, said, “We think our value proposition of startups is to help them grow to every stage of lifecycle. What we see in the Microsoft Ventures programme today is to help companies growth, find customers to expand geographically.”

As Google and Microsoft battle for enterprise cloud customers, each company’s natural strengths (and weaknesses) become more apparent. Microsoft, for example, is winning over large enterprises that already have massive workforces on Office 365. The pendulum started to slowly swing back in Microsoft’s favor after it released Office 365 in 2013 and finally embraced the cloud, according to TJ Keitt, a Senior Analyst with Forrester Research. Keitt also says Microsoft is on the winning end of the recent shift.

Microsoft has revealed features that have been added to the new Microsoft Band, including music controls, activity reminders and an improved Exercise Tile. With the new music controls, users can put away their phones and turn directly to the Band to pause, play, skip forward and back, and adjust volume. With the activity notifications, users can set the time intervals and the days they want to receive reminders or even set time when no reminders will be sent. The Exercise Tile lets users choose from popular options such as yoga or weightlifting when tracking their exercises, and summaries and observations from Microsoft Health or the Web Dashboard are now grouped by exercise type.

New Q3 data from Synergy Research Group shows that HPE, Cisco and Microsoft continue to lead in the three main data center infrastructure market segments — enterprise data center hardware, service provider data center hardware and data center software respectively. Cisco continues to lead in service provider hardware and Data center software is totally dominated by Microsoft.

Microsoft and Red hat have come a step closer on the emerging platform of cloud. Red Hat has added support for Microsoft’s Azure cloud to its latest release of CloudForms hybrid cloud management. With the support of Azure Microsoft shops will be able to manage Azure Workloads and resources from within cloudform.

Microsoft India plans to sign a 4G data-bundling pact with India’s No 1 carrier Bharti AirtelBSE -0.70 % to encourage the latter’s customers to buy the recently launched Lumia 4G smartphones. “Microsoft India is keen to partner with Bharti Airtel for a 4G data-bundling pact, wherein their customers may be able to double their data packs for free on purchasing our Windows 10 Lumia 4G devices such as the 950, 950 XL and the soon-to-launched Lumia 550,” said Ajey Mehta, Country Head, Mobile Devices, Microsoft India.