Recent News

Microsoft is planning to embed mobile device management technology from its Intune product into Office 365, giving enterprises a way to secure and keep track of employees’ smart phones and tablets from within the friendly confines of its cloud productivity suite. Microsoft will integrate a subset of Intune MDM into Office 365 in the first calendar quarter of next year, Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Windows Server and System Center products, Microsoft, said in a blog post.

At TechEd Europe, Microsoft announced new cloud services, mobility solutions, APIs, tools and an expanded ecosystem of partner solutions, all designed to help IT professionals and developers compete and thrive in today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world. “We are using the power of our cloud platform — Azure, Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics — to deliver technology solutions that empower IT professionals, developers and end users to do more,” said Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft.

Microsoft has announced that it will be supporting the new Object Real-Time Communications API as part of the WebRTC standard and has started implementing it in the Internet Explorer browser. This will enable users to make Skype calls from within the IE browser, without downloading any third-party apps or plugins. Internet Explorer senior program manager Shijun Sun writes in a blog post that Skype is “working closely with the web community to improve other existing standards for richer video interoperability.”

With the increasing popularity of mobile text communication, emoji usage is getting more mainstream. And now Microsoft’s Bing is making them search friendly. Microsoft announced the support of emoji characters in Bing search in all English markets. “With this new feature, you can search using your favourite emoji, and Bing will return results based on the semantic meaning of the emoji,” Nick Roberts, senior program manager, Bing Relevance & Intent, said in an official blog post

Microsoft Devices launched the entry level dual-sim Nokia 130, with a built-in music player with up to 46 hours continuous playback, for Rs. 1,649 in India. “The Nokia 130 is a perfect device for consumers who are looking for their first mobile phone, or for those looking for a rock-solid backup phone to use alongside their smartphone,” Nokia India Sales Marketing Director Raghuvesh Sarup said. The phone has a 1.8 inch colour display and a standby time of up to 36 days.

On October 20 at TechEd, Microsoft quietly slipped in what looks like a potential game-changing announcement in the private/hybrid cloud world when they rolled out Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS), an integrated hardware/software system that combines an Azure-consistent on premise cloud with an optimized hardware stack from Dell.

Microsoft has raised the roof on its OneDrive storage again. The company announced Office 365 subscribers will get unlimited storage (up from the 1 TB limit) on OneDrive. “Unlimited storage is just one small part of our broader promise to deliver a single experience across work and life that helps people store, sync, share, and collaborate on all the files that are important to them, all while meeting the security and compliance needs of even the most stringent organizations,” Microsoft said in its blog.

Microsoft is going full throttle to undertake a rebranding exercise on a country-by-country basis by dropping the Nokia name from its smartphones. “This is a very exciting time for us and for Lumia products,” said Tuula Rytila, Senior Vice-President of Marketing, Microsoft Phones. “Our global and local websites are going through a transition as we speak, and in the coming days our social channels will get a new name too—they will be called Microsoft Lumia.”

Helped by stronger sales of its phones, Surface tablets and cloud-computing products for companies, Microsoft Corp has reported higher-than-expected quarterly revenue. While sales of its Lumia smartphones hit 9.3 million in the first full quarter since the close of the Nokia deal, revenue from the Surface tablet more than doubled to $908 million from $400 million in the year-ago quarter.

It’s time for Diwali discounts and freebies at consumer electronics stores around the country. Microsoft and Amazon are offering a discount of Rs 4,000 on the Xbox One video game console with FIFA 15, the popular football game, bundled with it for free. The Xbox One is currently available on Amazon.in for Rs 35,990.