Recent News

Microsoft and Dropbox forged an alliance this year with the promise of direct access between Office apps and the file sharing service to come soon and the first phase, which falls under Dropbox’s Project Harmony roadmap, is now here in a pilot phase. Members of the Dropbox for Business early access program, will get a first crack at the ability to access Dropbox directly from Office apps and edit Office files from the Dropbox app.

Microsoft India will offer a buy-back option to nudge Lumia smartphone buyers to upgrade to higher-end models at minimal incremental costs. The move is aimed at spurring Lumia smartphone sales, especially “devices in the Rs 6K-to-15K price band where we see massive growth opportunities, through a guaranteed exchange process at industry-best resale prices,” Microsoft India’s managing director (mobile devices) Ajey Mehta told ET.

Toshiba has launched a new tablet in India – the WT-8. The Windows 8.1 tablet is priced at Rs 15,490, available only on Amazon India. The WT-8 flaunts an 8-inch WXGA (1280×800 pixels) display and is powered by an Intel Atom quad-core processor paired with 1GB of RAM. Also included is 32GB internal storage expandable to 128GB. On the software front, the tablet comes preloaded with Xbox Music and Video, Skype and a one-year free subscription to Office 365.

Microsoft has partnered with edX, a non-profit online initiative, to enable course creators to integrate Office Mix into their edX courses. Created by founding partners Harvard and MIT, edX offers interactive online classes and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) from the world’s best universities, colleges and organizations to millions of students. Anoop Gupta, Microsoft Distinguished Scientist and Lead for the Office Mix, project, said “In partnering with edX, our goal is to democratize the creation of online lectures and courses.”

Softline Services, a subsidiary of Softline Group, a global Russian IT service and solution provider has announced its foray into the Indian market. With a decade of experience in cloud technologies, serving over 3000 clients globally, and as the 4th most competent partner worldwide for Microsoft, certified Softline specialists and experts will provide businesses with a full spectrum of IT services. Sudhir Nayar, Director, Partner Sales, Microsoft India, said, “Softline Services will bring on-board their proven ability to translate the benefits of cloud services to enterprises, especially SMBs, which is one of our key areas of focus.”

The Centre for Catalyzing Change, a NGO working for women and girl empowerment, organized a national learning conference, Youth Connect-Leveraging Technology, which witnessed the launch of Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) for the Scheme for Empowerment of Adolescent Girls (SABLA) services in Delhi and Jharkhand. Lori Forte Harnick, General Manager, Citizenship and Public Affairs, Microsoft, the keynote speaker on this occasion, reiterated Microsoft’s commitment to a digitally inclusive society.

One of the primary things most people use a computer for — and increasingly mobile devices as well — is productivity, like writing documents, creating presentations, plus managing email, contacts, and calendars. Microsoft Office is the de facto standard for productivity suites. However, if you want the full Microsoft Office experience, the better way to acquire the productivity suite: Office 365.

Microsoft is beginning to integrate its Bing search technology into Office, starting with Word Online, company officials announced on December 10. Microsoft is calling the new embedded search capability “Insights for Office”. Microsoft is rolling out the capability worldwide starting December 10. Ryan Gavin, Microsoft General Manager of search, cloud and content, said “Bing is evolving into an intelligent service layer or fabric that is part of other products and services – for example, Cortana, Xbox voice search and Windows 8’s smart search.”

To help organizations better organize their cloud assets, Microsoft and Accenture have released a package designed to make it easy to integrate in-house IT operations with Microsoft Azure cloud services. The package will “help enterprises to move more easily into cloud technologies”, said Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology Officer, Accenture. Susan Hauser, Corporate Vice President, Enterprise and Partner group, Microsoft, said, “What customers are asking for is the ability to move to a hybrid cloud where they don’t have to do the integration pieces.”

Businesses, especially small and medium-scale, are increasingly adopting cloud-based technologies, according to S Prashanth, Executive Director, Quadrasystems.net India Private Limited. He said the company, which is a Microsoft Gold Competency partner, saw 33 per cent growth in its cloud business because of increasing adoption by customers. Sudhir Nayar, Director, Microsoft India, said Microsoft has 10,000 partners in the country and all of them use its cloud-based products – Azure, Office 365 and CRM. He also said partners have the flexibility to customise these products.