Author: Microsoft Stories

Lenovo expanded its Yoga range of devices with the launch of the 13.3-inch Yoga Tablet 2 with Windows 8.1, priced at $699 (Rs. 43,000 approximately) and available from November. The tablet will come bundled with a keyboard cover and a 1-month trial of Microsoft Office 365. It also comes with a kickstand that can rotate up to 180 degrees and offers four different modes – hold, stand, tilt, and hang.

Microsoft wants to move monitoring and analytics to the cloud, automate management and take over high- performance computing work with its latest Azure products. The company announced Azure Operational Insights, which extends the Azure hosted analytics, monitoring and management tools to on-premises equipment, simply by installing an agent on servers. “It’s really straightforward to get that data up [to Azure] and the amount of insight you can unlock is really powerful,” said Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure.

Aiming to further enhance consumer experience on its latest flagship smartphone, the Lumia 830, Microsoft Devices has announced a host of offers for its Indian users. Indian consumers purchasing the Lumia 830 smartphone will enjoy the best shopping and entertainment experiences on their device. All users will get a minimum of Rs. 6,000 off while shopping on the Snapdeal app and a 60-day free subscription to the Box TV app on Windows Phone, while Vodafone subscribers will get 2GB data free per month for 2 months.

Microsoft Corp unveiled an activity-tracking wristband and related Internet-based service that can track and analyse health, fitness and sleep data – jumping into the crowded wearable-computer market. The $199 Microsoft Band works with the company’s free Health application, which uses machine learning to interpret data and can run on its Windows system, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, said Yusuf Mehdi, vice president of devices and studios.

Microsoft is planning to embed mobile device management technology from its Intune product into Office 365, giving enterprises a way to secure and keep track of employees’ smart phones and tablets from within the friendly confines of its cloud productivity suite. Microsoft will integrate a subset of Intune MDM into Office 365 in the first calendar quarter of next year, Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Windows Server and System Center products, Microsoft, said in a blog post.

At TechEd Europe, Microsoft announced new cloud services, mobility solutions, APIs, tools and an expanded ecosystem of partner solutions, all designed to help IT professionals and developers compete and thrive in today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world. “We are using the power of our cloud platform — Azure, Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics — to deliver technology solutions that empower IT professionals, developers and end users to do more,” said Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft.

Microsoft has announced that it will be supporting the new Object Real-Time Communications API as part of the WebRTC standard and has started implementing it in the Internet Explorer browser. This will enable users to make Skype calls from within the IE browser, without downloading any third-party apps or plugins. Internet Explorer senior program manager Shijun Sun writes in a blog post that Skype is “working closely with the web community to improve other existing standards for richer video interoperability.”

With the increasing popularity of mobile text communication, emoji usage is getting more mainstream. And now Microsoft’s Bing is making them search friendly. Microsoft announced the support of emoji characters in Bing search in all English markets. “With this new feature, you can search using your favourite emoji, and Bing will return results based on the semantic meaning of the emoji,” Nick Roberts, senior program manager, Bing Relevance & Intent, said in an official blog post

Microsoft Devices launched the entry level dual-sim Nokia 130, with a built-in music player with up to 46 hours continuous playback, for Rs. 1,649 in India. “The Nokia 130 is a perfect device for consumers who are looking for their first mobile phone, or for those looking for a rock-solid backup phone to use alongside their smartphone,” Nokia India Sales Marketing Director Raghuvesh Sarup said. The phone has a 1.8 inch colour display and a standby time of up to 36 days.

On October 20 at TechEd, Microsoft quietly slipped in what looks like a potential game-changing announcement in the private/hybrid cloud world when they rolled out Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS), an integrated hardware/software system that combines an Azure-consistent on premise cloud with an optimized hardware stack from Dell.