In the News

According to a recent statement made by the Chief Experience Officer for Microsoft Office, Julie Larson-Green, the company wants users to spend more time accomplishing tasks than learning how the document creation tools work. She hinted at future versions of Office relying more on artificial intelligence and on ‘decomposable’ documents that make them easier to locate.

Microsoft has fixed more than 40 vulnerabilities in its products, including critical ones in Windows, Internet Explorer, Edge, and Office. The vulnerabilities are covered in 16 security bulletins, six of which are marked as critical and the rest as important. This puts the total number of Microsoft security bulletins for the past six months to more than 160, a six-month record during the past decade.

Microsoft’s latest Insider Preview for the lucky minority in the Fast Ring brings a whole slew of improvements and updates. The latest Insider Preview build, numbered 14367, has already started rolling out. The latest build brings support for handwriting recognition in 23 languages on PC and mobile. These languages include Malay, Swahili, Xhosa, Chinese and more.

The latest version of the alternative mobile operating system, Cyanogen OS, now integrates Microsoft’s main applications and services such as Office, Skype, OneDrive, Outlook and Cortana. Cyanogen’s project has gained the support of major groups such as Qualcomm, Telefonica and Microsoft. As a result, the latest version of the OS, Cyanogen OS (13.1), is currently optimized to let users access Microsoft Office software, communication tools and cloud storage service.

ROBLOX is announcing the launch of a new Windows 10 app, now available for free in the Windows Store for PCs and tablets. Warren Wilbee, Senior Director Partner Business Evangelism, US DX group, Microsoft, said, “We are very excited that ROBLOX is launching in our Windows Store, as we always strive to have the most intuitive products available to our community. We hold ROBLOX in high regards and are looking forward to the additional cross-platform capabilities our users will now enjoy through the ROBLOX Windows 10 app.”

Microsoft has reorganized its Office unit to combine products that tackle the same tasks rather than carving out individual products, said Julie Larson-Green, Chief Experience Officer, Applications and Services group, Microsoft. The company combined all tools for content creation like PowerPoint, Word and the Sway interactive-presentation app, while putting data and analytics tools like the Excel spreadsheet and Access database together.

Microsoft says other video-game makers are coming to play on its program to connect Xbox gaming with players on personal computers. At E3 this week, Microsoft announced Play Anywhere, a program that lets people who buy a single digital copy of a video game play on both Xbox and a Windows 10 personal computer. The first games announced to support the feature are six titles Microsoft is publishing itself, including “Gears of War 4” and “Forza Horizon 3”.

The sequel to the original Titanfall is multi-platform and takes advantage of multiple cloud systems. In fact, it uses “every cloud,” according to lead programmer John Shiring. Through a partnership with UK-based server company Multiplay, Titanfall 2 will use Azure, Google and Amazon cloud services, plus bare metal systems, physical servers that sit on racks in big data centers. It is heading to Xbox One and Windows 10

At the Build Developer conference, Microsoft gave the full rundown on a number of Office extensions for Mac. Part of it was a Starbucks add-in that allows users to send gift cards and book meetings inside Outlook. That extension is now ready meaning users can easily send a “thank you” cup of coffee or schedule a meeting at Starbucks location while looking at a related email.

AEC360 has won the 2016 Microsoft Industry Partner of the Year Award. The company was honored among a global field of top Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology. Gavriella Schuster, General Manager, Worldwide Partner Group, Microsoft, said, “We are honored to recognize AEC360 as this year’s Winner of the 2016 Microsoft Industry award. AEC360 is a prime example of the excellent talent we see in our Microsoft partner community to deliver innovative and transformative solutions to our mutual customers.”