Recent News

Microsoft India Chairman, Bhaskar Pramanik has outlined his expectations from the upcoming union budget. Policy guidance from the government on use of information technology for inclusive growth focused in areas of better citizen services delivery and governance are at the top of the list.

Microsoft India has invested around $100 million in educational projects over the last 10 years, most recently launching its IT Academy Program in partnership with Rotary International. The program reaches out to over 150,000 students and 7,500 educators in 150 Delhi NCR schools. “IT literacy is one of the biggest issues, and the work on this front has to go beyond just providing a computer” said Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, Microsoft India at the MOU signing.

Microsoft is expected to ship six security updates to customers next week, patching all versions of Internet Explorer (IE) and nearly all supported editions of Windows. The IE update, one of two classified as “critical” -Microsoft’s most serious threat ranking — will patch IE6 on Windows Server 2003, IE7, IE8, IE9, IE10 and the newest, IE11

Security announcements revealed that both outbound and inbound email on Outlook will have improved encryption using Transport Layer Security (TLS). Microsoft has also enabled Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) encryption support for sending and receiving mail between email providers and in its OneDrive service stepping up security measures for its customers.

Beginning Friday, Microsoft’s Outlook Web App integrates features that allow saving changes in documents attached to emails – all without the hassle of downloading the files, saving changes, and emailing them back. Instead, if you open a document that’s been attached to an email within Outlook’s Web app, the corresponding version of the Office Web app will open the document automatically. The idea is to cut down on all of the unnecessary steps involved in editing documents ‘offline’.

Microsoft put out a call for commercial and consumer beta testers to put upcoming versions of Office through the wringer. The announcement did not specify which editions of Office would be given early to testers, but most pundits assumed they would certainly include the suite on Android, possibly also the long-awaited touch-first productivity apps for Windows 8 and 8.1. “The family of products include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Visio, Access, Publisher and Outlook applications, as well as the Exchange, SharePoint and Project server products and cloud services,” Microsoft said in a short message on its Pre-Release Programs website.

Post the agreement, it is possible that Microsoft uses Canon’s imaging technology in its Windows Phone powered smartphone devices. “This collaborative approach with Canon allows us to deliver inventive technologies that benefit consumers around the world,” said Nick Psyhogeos, general manager, associate general counsel, IP Licensing of the Innovation and Intellectual Property Group at Microsoft. “Microsoft believes cooperative licensing is an effective way to accelerate innovation while reducing patent disputes.”

Microsoft and Japanese imaging company Canon have signed a broad patent cross-licensing agreement, Microsoft said on Wednesday. The agreement provides the companies with access to a wide variety to licenses for each other’s patents, including certain digital imaging and mobile consumer products.

Microsoft India has signed an MoU with Rotary International District 3010 to offer technology training across 150 schools in the Delhi-NCR region. The training, to be provided under the ‘Microsoft IT Academy Program’, is designed for teachers to help them train students on high quality technology training resources.

Microsoft said that it is scrambling Outlook email messages in transit to thwart spying by governments. “We are in the midst of a comprehensive engineering effort to strengthen encryption across our networks and services,” Microsoft vice president of trustworthy computing security Matt Thomlinson said.