Recent News

Windows 10’s marquee features are the return of the Start menu, a massively improved user interface and Microsoft’s personal assistant, Cortana — and the fact that it’s free. CRN Test Center has been using the pre-release version of Windows 10 for months and the final release since it was announced. Here is a hands-on look at Windows 10 from the perspective of solution providers.

Microsoft Outlook has added full Apple Watch support to its iPhone app, and it’s showing other email apps how it’s done.The new app takes brings up an overview over users’ inboxes, along with any upcoming calendar appointments. From here, users can respond to emails (either with a canned response or voice dictation), delete or archive them, flag them as important, mark them as unread, or schedule a reminder to see them later.

Microsoft earlier this year had announced that it will release tools to help Android and iOS developers port their apps to the Windows platform. Four months into it, the company has now released Windows Bridge for iOS (previously known as Project Islandwood) as an open source project. The tool is now available on GitHub under MIT licence.

Microsoft has doubled the bug bounty for Defense maximum from $50,000 to $100,000. It has expanded its bug bounty program to include Defense, Authentication Bonus, and RemoteApp to the list of domains covered in its Online Services Bug Bounty. Microsoft announced the bug bounty program to help the company address critical vulnerabilities and reward hackers who can break into Microsoft’s systems and services. This year, the company has added Azure services to the bounty portfolio.

Windows 10 brings along a long list of improvements and changes and most reviews have rated Windows 10 as a recommended update. A number of multi-finger touchpad gestures give navigating through Windows a Mac-like feel.

Microsoft’s Windows 10’s global usage share has quintupled since its July 29 launch, according to new data. Usage share, a measure of how active Windows 10 users have been on the Internet, stood at 3.2% at the end of August 5, data from analytics vendor StatCounter showed. That was a five-fold increase over the 0.6% logged by Windows 10 a week before, the first day Microsoft started serving the upgrade to members of its Insiders testing program.

Redmond is launching a new wireless keyboard and mouse set. The Wireless Desktop 900 consists of a keyboard with “quiet-touch keys” that Microsoft promises will offer a responsive typing experience, along with a full-size mouse that can be used by left-handers as well as right-handers.

Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Data Factory (ADF), a cloud service for data integration — the process of aggregating data from multiple sources so that people can analyze it all later. “With ADF, existing data processing services can be composed into data pipelines that are highly available and managed in the cloud,” Joseph Sirosh, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Information Management and Machine Learning.

Microsoft brought its Sway presentation tool out of beta, making it generally available for anyone who wants to create Web-based presentations that automatically reshape themselves to fit different devices. Sway makes it easy for people to build slick multimedia packages based on a topic or set of notes and work on them with other users from across the Web.

The Windows 10 upgrade promises to be simpler and easier to manage. It will also be the last OS upgrade you will do, if Microsoft is to be believed. The Windows 10 operating system will now strive to keep itself updated on a daily basis, thus negating the need for a large upgrade.