Author: Microsoft Stories

November 20, 2015 will be the 30th anniversary of the launch of the very first version of Windows. Upon its debut, this operating system aimed at the general public had a new graphic interface which was relatively easy to use. It was the first foundation stone in the immense Windows edifice to come.

In his first moves on cybersecurity in nearly two years as Chief Executive Officer, Satya Nadella is building a dedicated site and assembling a new group of experts to help Microsoft Corp. respond faster to threats across its various products. Satya Nadella, said, “We don’t think of security as being a separate piece of technology. It has to be core to the operational systems that you use, where your data resides, where your most critical applications usage is.”

Zoho Corporation, has announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft. The partnership will provide Microsoft’s customers with a suite of business productivity applications and IT management products on its O365 and Azure Marketplace. “Our partnership is a step towards making the best of technology available to SMBs and Enterprises across the world. Integration of Zoho Corporation applications with Office365 and Azure will empower them to collaborate better, engage faster with their customers and drive business growth,” said Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft India.

Microsoft is bringing PowerPoint slides and presentations to a new level of sophistication with the addition of features such as a cloud-powered recommendation engine and smart animation technology. The two new PowerPoint tools, called Morph and Designer, automate the creation of slides and are designed to help users create polished slides and motion effects with a few steps.

Microsoft Corp. has launched a new fund to cultivate companies with solutions that bring affordable Internet access to underserved markets. The fund is part of Microsoft’s Affordable Access Initiative, which invests in new last-mile access technologies, cloud-based services and applications, and business models that can reduce the cost of Internet access and help more people affordably get online.

After the terrorist Paris attacks recently, everyone is trying to their bit to help. To help communicate with friends and family, tech companies such as Microsoft and Google have made Skype and Hangout calls free for a few days, respectively. In a Skype blogpost, it stated, “In light of the devastating events that have taken place in Paris, we want to help people stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues. So, with immediate effect we are making all domestic and international calls to landlines and mobiles in France free of charge* for the next few days.”

Good news for IT professionals who were excited by the news back in April that Microsoft was launching a dedicated Windows Store front for Business – as of today, the Windows Store for Business is open in 21 markets around the world. Now, IT managers can sign up their business via the Store’s official website. Doing so will allow business decision makers to “acquire, manage and distribute Windows Store apps” easily across an entire organization.

Microsoft finally dropped its first big update to the Windows 10 operating system.Nestled away behind new features like colored titlebars and upgrades to Cortana are a handful of features that will finaly make Windows 10 way more usable to the business customers who generate most of Microsoft’s sales.”With this free update we have reached the point in the platform’s maturity where we can confidently recommend Windows 10 deployment to whole organizations,” said Microsoft Windows Boss Terry Myerson.

Esteemed scientist and Microsoft Research lead Chris Bishop has launched a set of free machine learning Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) – including one that can tell if a person is happy or sad. Bishop, who is head laboratist at Microsoft Research Cambridge, revealed that developers and businesses can get their hands on tools based on Microsoft products to bring AI like speech recognition, vision and language understanding into their apps.

Microsoft launched a new preview program for consumers who subscribe to Office 365 that will give them a sneak peak at new features slated to be added to the subscription service in the next one to three weeks. Office Insider was opened to subscribers of Office 365 Home, Personal and University — the third is a four-year deal available only to college students — who are running Office 2016 on a Windows device.