In the News

Shutterstock Inc., a leading global provider of commercial imagery and music, announced that it will now be providing Microsoft PowerPoint users integrated access to its vast collection of professional photos and illustrations. Steven Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President Developer Experiences at Microsoft, said, “We know our customers are frequently using images to enhance their PowerPoint presentations. With this PowerPoint plug-in, Shutterstock is broadening its ability to enhance productivity, offering its extensive collection of high-quality imagery to professional users.”

Beginning with Microsoft’s Anniversary Update this summer, Microsoft Edge browser notifications will be turned on by default. The notifications will be sent to the Windows 10 Action Center, where they’ll live alongside updates from Mail and other Windows 10 apps, alerting users that they may need to respond.

The so-called Brexit (Britain exit) referendum will ask U.K. voters on June 23 whether the country should leave the 28-state EU. Proponents say membership in the union has hurt Britain’s economy and opens the country up to too much immigration. Microsoft said membership in the EU makes Britain a more attractive place to do business. The software company opened its first international office in the U.K. in 1982 and has 5,000 employees in the country.

Microsoft Flow was called the company’s answer to IFTTT immediately upon its soft launch. The app has now been launched for all users. The first impression users are going to have of the service is the arcane user experience, especially when creating a new “flow”. With Flow users can create multiple connections to the same service. The tool’s real power though lies in the rules it lets the users create.

SAP and Microsoft have announced joint plans to deliver broad support for the SAP HANA platform deployed on Microsoft Azure. The partnership aims to simplify work through new integration between Microsoft Office 365 and cloud solutions from SAP, and provide enhanced management and security for custom SAP Fiori apps. Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, said, “At Microsoft, we are focused on empowering organizations to advance their digital transformations. Together with SAP, we are bringing new levels of integration between our products that provide businesses with enhanced collaboration tools, new insights from data and a hyper-scale cloud to grow and seize new opportunities ahead.”

The Xbox One backward compatible team has done some work in order to make dual disc Xbox 360 games playable on the Xbox One. Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director’s Cut, was the first of these types of games to be offered up and the service is now 100 percent live. Dual Disc games are the newest addition to the game library. There are more games added to the collection almost every day.

Microsoft released the preview of its Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to all enterprise IT professionals after testing the service with an invite-only group of companies. ATP, like similar services from security-centric vendors, detects ongoing attacks on corporate networks, then follows up to investigate the attack or breach and provide response recommendations.

Microsoft launched their new OneDrive app based on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) for Windows 10 users. The company promised UWP-based versions for all its apps right after the launch of UWP framework. The app brings features such as drag and drop support to app for uploading files and restoring files from Recycle Bin in a touch-friendly environment.

iBot Control Systems, a Hyderabad-based startup company, is on a mission to drive IoT innovation for Indian businesses in alignment with the Make in India initiative. In a year, founder Ravi Subramanyam aims at making iBot world’s pioneering company in the IoT space. It was one of the 11 startups chosen by Microsoft Ventures for its Spring 2015 batch. Ravi Narayan, Microsoft Ventures, said, “We could associate with the synergy and didn’t look at it like a startup. During the program, we introduced them to Microsoft’s Head of Enterprise Sales of India. We found the technology a good way to bundle with our products. The India journey then started replicating outside the country.”

Microsoft, apparently, have been taking their E3 presence this year very seriously. As revealed by Digital Storytelling Lead Jeff Rubenstein, during the latest episode of Director of Xbox Programming Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb’s podcast, Microsoft have been working on their E3 show for 2016 since at least December last year. This should give a lot of hope to the Xbox fans as it implies that Microsoft might have quite a few announcements and surprises up their sleeves.