Recent News

With Windows 10 just around the corner, security top of mind and a new version of Office set to be released later this year, here are the top five most important and relevant Microsoft news announcements out of Ignite 2015, according to partners.

You can now catch a glimpse of Office 2016, as Microsoft opened up the newest version of Office to public preview confirming that its Office universal apps would go live on Windows phones, too. Office 2016 aims at enhanced network traffic management, enhanced distribution management, flexible update management and simplified activation management.

SQL Server’s next edition will provide a way to extend databases into the cloud, allowing customers to retain information they otherwise might need to erase due to a lack of local storage space. SQL Server 2016, a preview of which will be released around the middle of the year, will also encrypt all data by default, and has been integrated with the R statistical programming language, said TK Ranga Rengarajan, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, who leads engineering for the company’s database and big data businesses.

Microsoft this week launched a tool to manage its public and private clouds, but that the company says it will soon enable enterprises to control hybrid clouds based on Amazon Web Services and VMware clouds, too. “[The Operations Management Suite] helps simplify management of your datacenter assets wherever they live. That means any instance in any cloud, including your data center, Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMware, and OpenStack ,” stated Jeremy Winter, Product Manager, Microsoft.

Users of the upcoming version of Windows will be able to call on its Cortana voice-driven virtual personal assistant to help them parse their organization’s business intelligence data. Windows 10 will also let users run multiple desktops on a single computer, and even move applications across these different desktops. With Windows 10, Microsoft wants to find the “right balance between familiarity and productivity,” Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Operating Systems group.

Two new IT management products from Microsoft continue the company’s push to help customers move their operations to the cloud. The Microsoft Azure Stack software collection combines the Azure infrastructure and platform services so they can be used for an enterprise’s internal operations. “The Azure Stack will make it possible to have Azure in your data center, making it consistent with the public Azure,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the opening of the Ignite conference for IT professionals. The company also announced Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016, the next versions of the company’s server software and system management software.

Microsoft will soon offer three additional ways for enterprises to store data on Azure, making the cloud computing platform more supportive of big data analysis. Azure will have a data warehouse service, a “data lake” service storing large amounts of data, and an option for running “elastic” databases that can store sets of data that vary greatly in size, explained Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Executive Vice President, Cloud and enterprise group at the company’s Build 2015 developer conference.