In the News

Microsoft announced a partnership with Steelcase, a 105-year-old office furniture and design company, to show off its vision of futuristic office spaces where productivity and creativity go hand and hand. Naturally, they’re all powered by Surface devices.

For people who love Windows 10, and some crisp downloads, Microsoft has a good news for you. This comes with Microsoft’s recently announced Unified Update Platform, which has been rolling out to Windows Insiders since November, and will be available to all retail users starting with the release of the Creators Update coming this year.

Microsoft announced that its hybrid-cloud solution “Azure Stack Technical Preview 3 (TP3)” is now available for Indian businesses which enables customers run Azure Cloud in on premise environments with pay-as-you-use pricing.

Soon, game developers can put Xbox Live in their games and publish to Xbox One and Windows 10 with no concept approval needed.

Microsoft has started providing extended support for its Windows Server software, letting corporate customers add up to six years to the lifespan of Windows Server 2008 and later, and SQL Server 2008 and later.

At Microsoft’s Future Decoded event in Mumbai, CEO Satya Nadella said the app has emerged as a de facto option for state governments like Andhra Pradesh, and even the Election Commission to boost productivity and keep in touch with their employees. Kaizala is a product of Microsoft Garage, which aims to fuse chat-based messaging and productivity, while including everyone, even those on 2G networks or using lower-end smartphones.

Microsoft launched its Skype Lite app for low-end Android smartphones last month and with its latest update, the Redmond-based company has now added the support for Kannada language to the video-chatting application as well. Separately, the Linux version of the app has also moved from alpha to beta and has received some new features and bug fixes.

At Game Developers Conference, Microsoft has announced that the company will start shipping development kits for Windows Mixed Reality this month itself. Interestingly, the Redmond-based company will be bundling its developer edition headsets (created in collaboration with Acer) along with the development kit. Further, the company has announced that mixed reality experiences will be making their way to other platforms including Xbox One and Project Scorpio in 2018.

Months after the release of its alpha version, Microsoft has finally upgraded Skype on Linux platform to beta. The new Skype release fulfills some of the top feature requests from the community to deliver an advanced experience.

Microsoft has released Azure Command Line (CLI) v2.0 with the ability to help administrators easily configure and manage cloud services. The new version is now generally available for Windows, Linux and Mac users. “The new version of Azure CLI should feel much more native to developers who are familiar with command line experiences in the bash environment for Linux and macOS,” Microsoft’s principal program manager Kamaljit Bath said in an official announcement.