Tag: Recent News

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Xbox Live Gold members: Play ‘NBA 2K18’ for free through June 10

Take a break from watching the NBA Finals this weekend and hit the court with NBA 2K18 during Xbox Live Gold Free Play Days. Xbox Live Gold members can enjoy NBA 2K18 for free and enjoy a limited time discount on this fantastic sports game and its virtual currency.

Starting Thursday, June 7 at 9:00 a.m. PT and running through to Sunday, June 10 at 11:59 p.m. PT, Xbox Live Gold members in Xbox One markets can play the most critically acclaimed basketball video game. During the weekend you can build up your career in NBA games, hit the courts in The Playground, join the Pro-Am circuit, or explore an all-new open neighborhood setting.

As mentioned earlier, you’ll also have the option to purchase NBA 2K18 Legend and NBA 2K18 Legend Gold Edition through the Microsoft Store at a 67% discount and up to a 30% discount on virtual currency to continue your gameplay experience. If you pass up on this opportunity, don’t worry – all your saved progress and earned achievements will be waiting for you should you decide to pick up the ball later to continue your career.

You can download NBA 2K18 by clicking on the Gold Member area on the home dashboard from your home console or by downloading directly from the Microsoft Store.

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Check out what’s next for Visual Studio

Since we launched Visual Studio 2017 in March of that year, it has become our most popular Visual Studio release ever. Your feedback has helped our team publish seven updates since our initial GA, which have improved solution load performance, build performance, and unit test discovery performance. We’ve also made Visual Studio 2017 our most accessible releases ever, helping developers with low-vision or no-vision be more productive.

Our team is focused on introducing features that make every developer more productive: better navigation features like “go to all” (Ctrl + ,), features to improve code quality like Live Unit Testing, and most recently, to enable real time collaboration with Live Share. And we have even started to show how we will use artificial intelligence to assist developers with IntelliCode.

Now, it’s time to start to look at what comes next.

The short answer is Visual Studio 2019

Because the Developer Tools teams (especially .NET and Roslyn) do so much work in GitHub, you’ll start to see check-ins that indicate that we’re laying the foundation for Visual Studio 2019, and we’re now in the early planning phase of Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio for Mac. We remain committed to making Visual Studio faster, more reliable, more productive for individuals and teams, easier to use, and easier to get started with. Expect more and better refactorings, better navigation, more capabilities in the debugger, faster solution load, and faster builds. But also expect us to continue to explore how connected capabilities like Live Share can enable developers to collaborate in real time from across the world and how we can make cloud scenarios like working with online source repositories more seamless. Expect us to push the boundaries of individual and team productivity with capabilities like IntelliCode, where Visual Studio can use Azure to train and deliver AI-powered assistance into the IDE.

Our goal with this next release is to make it a simple, easy upgrade for everyone – for example, Visual Studio 2019 previews will install side by side with Visual Studio 2017 and won’t require a major operating system upgrade.

As for timing of the next release, we’ll say more in the coming months, but be assured we want to deliver Visual Studio 2019 quickly and iteratively. We’ve learned a lot from the cadence we’ve used with Visual Studio 2017, and one of the biggest things we have learned is that we can do a lot of good work if we focus on continually delivering and listening to your feedback. There are no bits to preview yet, but the best way to ensure you are on the cutting edge will be to watch this blog and to subscribe to the Visual Studio 2017 Preview.

In the meantime, our team will continue to publish a roadmap of what we’re planning online, work in many open source repositories, and take your feedback through our Developer Community website. This blog post is just another example of sharing our plans with you early, so you can plan and work with us to continue to make Visual Studio a great coding environment.

John

John Montgomery, Director of Program Management for Visual Studio
@JohnMont

John is responsible for product design and customer success for all of Visual Studio, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, and .NET. John has been at Microsoft for 17 years, working in developer technologies the whole time.
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Profiles in Pride: ‘You shouldn’t have to go to work pretending to be something you’re not’

The Microsoft retail store employee faced a lack of acceptance until she found a community and the support to be herself 

By Natalie Singer-Velush

Q Johnson knows what it’s like to not be fully accepted for who you are. She felt the tension as a teenager, growing up in a family that didn’t tolerate the idea of same-sex love. After she graduated high school, her mother found out she was gay. “She told me, ‘That’s not allowed in my house. If you’re going do that, you need to leave,’” Johnson said. When Johnson returned from a trip out of town, she found that she’d been locked out of the house. She couldn’t get her belongings, and she had nowhere to go.

Then Johnson had to conceal her reality while she was homeless, living in her car and trying to get back on her feet after being rejected by her family. When few people were around, she would shower at night at her 24-hour gym, hiding her homelessness, and she ate meals at her job at a fast-food restaurant.

Not long after that, Johnson met the love of her life and joined the military. But in 2011, prior to the US Supreme Court’s 2013 reversal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, her marriage to her wife wasn’t recognized. So, she was required to live on base in the barracks with other unmarried soldiers. She kept an apartment off base with her new family—her wife and daughter—walking a tenuous line between desperately wanting to be fully herself and having to be the pretend version of herself that was required to do her job.

Eventually, her hidden life was discovered, and to be with her family Johnson left the military and her identity serving her country behind.

She decided she would try to reinvent herself in Oklahoma City, where she grew up, and maybe this time things would be different.

“Technology’s always been a passion of mine,” Johnson said. “I saw an inventory control position open at a Microsoft store, and I applied. I’ve been here two years. Coming into a new job, you’re nervous; you don’t know what to expect. Right when I interviewed I learned someone I would be working closely with is a lesbian. So I was like, it’s ok. I was relaxed—at ease, you know? I later learned other people working around me were gay, too. It was a relief.”

It was the first time in a very long time that she felt accepted for who she was, that she felt like she could just be Q.

“I felt like I could come in and be myself. I didn’t have to worry about judgment from my family anymore.

“You shouldn’t have to go to work pretending to be something you’re not. I shouldn’t have to be ashamed of being married to someone of the same sex. I should be able to come in and say, ‘This is my wife. This is my daughter.’ Here, I’m comfortable being myself.”

Now Johnson speaks to groups of LGBTQ+ military members and veterans, who often attend anonymously, telling them her story and helping them see that it’s possible to come out of hiding, to live a happy life and be fully accepted.

“There are people out there facing similar things. Talk to them; get that support. Don’t give up on your life because there are great things out there for you.”

“There are people who suffer from PTSD of all different types, who face the same things I face. I can go share my story and just, you know, just be human,” she said.

“It took me a long time to be able to share my story without crying. And it was my wife who told me, ‘You know, if you let it out you might feel better.’ And I thought, well if I’m going to let [my feelings] out, maybe there are other people who feel like me. Talking about these experiences with veterans is so important. It’s giving something back to them, after they serve their country.

“Being able to walk into a room and not be judged is so important. Because that’s who we are at the end of the day.”

Nowadays, Johnson says, she finds strength from her struggles and feels empowered to help others around her as much as she can. And she’s done hiding.

“I would say to anybody going through the same types of things I went through: Just one day at a time. It may be tough, whatever the situation is. But don’t get your hopes down, because it gets better. There are people out there facing similar things. Talk to them; get that support. Don’t give up on your life because there are great things out there for you.”

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Microsoft announces Windows 10 IoT Core Services at Computex 2018

Man standing working in a factory.

Similar to the embedded devices that came before them, modern IoT devices are often used in places where physical servicing is difficult and expensive. For example, it’s expensive for an oil company to put a technician on a helicopter to service equipment on a platform at sea. As a result, commercial IoT devices need to be supported and in service for far longer than their consumer counterparts.

Today at Computex 2018, we are excited to announce Windows 10 IoT Core Services. This offering will provide 10 years of support along with services to manage device updates and assess device health, enabling our IoT partners to create solutions to address their customers’ needs.

Windows 10 IoT Core is an edition of Windows 10 designed for building smart things and optimized to power intelligent edge devices. First released in 2015, it has been adopted by industry innovators such as Johnson Controls, Askey, and Misty Robotics.

Building on the Windows 10 IoT Core operating system, Windows 10 IoT Core Services will be a paid offering for IoT devices. The free edition of Windows 10 IoT Core will still be available via the Semi-Annual Channel (SAC).

  1. 10 years of Windows OS support via the Windows Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) which provides quality updates to keep device security up to date. Devices using the LTSC release won’t receive feature updates, enabling them to focus on stability by minimizing changes to the base operating system. Microsoft typically offers new LTSC releases every two to three years, with each release supported over a 10-year lifecycle.
  2. Update control with the newly announced Device Update Center (DUC) which provides the ability to create, customize, and control device updates. These updates are distributed by the same Content Distribution Network (CDN) as Windows Update which is used daily by millions of Windows customers around the world. Updates can be applied to the operating system, device drivers, as well as OEM-specific applications and files. Updates can be flighted to test devices prior to broader distribution.
  3. Device Health Attestation (DHA) enables enterprises and OEMs to raise the security bar of their organization with hardware-attested security. Evaluating the trustworthiness of a device at boot is essential for a trusted IoT system and a device cannot attest to its own trustworthiness. Instead, this must be done by an external entity such as DHA Azure cloud service. This service evaluates device health and can be combined with a device management system, such as Azure IoT Device Management. With this, you can take actions, for example, re-imaging the device, denying network access or creating a service ticket.

With these features, you can commercialize a device built on Windows 10 IoT Core and know that you have the enterprise-grade support and security that is synonymous with Windows. We are currently in limited preview with this service; to join, please email [email protected]. A broader preview will be ready in July 2018, with general availability later this year.

Earlier in the year, we announced that with the next release of Windows 10 IoT, we will provide 10 years of support for both Windows 10 IoT Core and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise. We also announced a partnership with NXP to support Windows 10 IoT Core on their i.MX 6 and i.MX 7 processors. The Windows 10 IoT Core Services offering builds on these announcements, as we continue to evolve the platform and make investments to support the IoT devices of today and tomorrow. We are excited about the possibilities and hope you will join us to create the future of IoT.

Windows 10 IoT – Tomorrow’s IoT today

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Updated June 5, 2018 11:03 pm

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Join Microsoft Education at ISTE 2018 June 24-27 – in Chicago or online

Please join us at the 2018 ISTE Conference & Expo taking place June 24th-27th in Chicago, Illinois.

Register for ISTE 2018 here. If you won’t be at ISTE this year, don’t worry! You can tune into What’s New in EDU: Live from ISTE each day the week of ISTE. You can also tune in on Facebook Live for HacktheClassroom.

10 Happenings from Microsoft Education at ISTE (and online for those #NOTAtISTE):

1. See ALL things Microsoft Education on our ISTE page.

2. Visit the Booth: Microsoft Education in the Expo Hall at #1102. We have dozens of sessions and training opportunities planned to help teachers save time by showing them ways to keep classrooms organized, create lessons, give students personalized feedback and track grades.

In the Booth: Classroom, devices, demos

Explore. Drop by booth #1102 to attend our sessions and your get hands on our latest education devices. Plus, you can enter to win a Surface!*

In the Booth: Visit our STEM Experience in partnership with BBC Learning

Visit booth #1102 to see how you can build future-ready skills in your classroom with hands-on learning through educator-built lesson plans that align to both ISTE and NGSS standards. Take your students on an underwater global odyssey in Oceans: Our Blue Planet, a BBC Earth and OCEANX film that reveals extraordinary discoveries and untold stories of the oceans’ most astonishing creatures.

3. Join Edtech Influencers and change-makers, Steven Andersen and Shaelynn Farnsworth, at 1:00 PM CT on Tuesday in the Microsoft Booth for, “Differentiation: Meeting the Diverse Needs of Learners with Technology,” a Microsoft-exclusive session. You can find info on all the Microsoft sessions here.

4. Register for the Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Academies:

Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Teacher Academy

Bring your own device to this one-day training designed for K-12 classroom educators who want to learn more about Microsoft’s tools and resources. Saturday, June 23rd at 8:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. Register now.

Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Trainer Academy

This two-day, in-depth training is exclusively for K-12 education teacher trainers responsible for delivering professional development training in their school districts. Saturday, June 23rd and Sunday, June 24th, 8:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. Register now.

5. Minecraft: Education Edition Training: Bring your Windows 10 device to this one-day training to learn how to use Minecraft in your classroom to promote creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving. Sunday, June 24th, 8:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. Register now.

6. Hands on Learning Lab | NEW! Play. Explore the latest technology through an immersive experience in Convention Center Room 185A. Enter a drawing sweepstakes for a chance to win a Surface Studio, attend a hands-on learning Make Code workshop, explore Collaboration Tools and much more!

7. Hack the Classroom | LIVE! Get Inspired. Hack the Classroom is an exciting, online, live event designed to show you what’s possible and ignite new ideas. This year, we will be live from ISTE bringing you the latest tools designed to empower your students to create the world of tomorrow! Learn more here.

8. Free Certifications | Grow. In our mission to support educators, we are offering FREE Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS), Microsoft Certified Educator (MCE) and Microsoft Technical Certified – Touch Develop (MTC) exam testing. Drop by the Marriott Room Shedd AB. To prepare and learn more please continue to visit aka.ms/ISTE18 for additional information and resources on Certification Testing.

9. IT Bootcamp | Get hands on. Looking to experience an IT Bootcamp through the eyes of a student? Join the IT Bootcamp Classroom in our Expo Floor Meeting Space area.

10. MIE Teacher Sessions | Listen & Learn. Join Microsoft Educators at the Hyatt Clark room to learn what’s new in Inclusive and Accessibility Tools; explore Collaboration tools between teachers, students and staff; and see how to inspire creativity with digital inking, mixed reality and 3D + STEM topics like Minecraft, Make code, Hacking Stem, Girls in Stem and Computer Science.

11. Get 1:1 support and connect with a Microsoft Training Partner at ISTE. You can even find your local Microsoft Learning Consultant at ISTE. Microsoft Learning Consultants attending ISTE include:

More happenings you won’t want to miss:

Spotlight on Solutions

Share & Learn. Join our panel sessions in room 183B. Panel members will be a mix of school leaders, school teachers along with both community and Microsoft team members to foster an open dialog with several points of view.

Microsoft Partners

Explore and learn. Visit the Microsoft Booth #1102 to learn more about inspiring Education Apps available in the Microsoft Store for Education. There will be a blend of demos from teachers sharing their practices throughout the booth experience.

ISTE + Microsoft Collaboration

Collaboration. Join Microsoft Educators in the official ISTE + Microsoft Collaboration Room. We will cover various educational technology topics to keep you at the forefront of how students are learning in today’s modern classrooms. Join us in the Convention Center #184D.

Computer Science Firehose

Dig Deep. Please join Microsoft Educators at the CS Firehose Track. They will share all the latest on Minecraft: Education Edition with code builder, Makecode.com, #HackingStem, Youthspark’s Make What’s Next Initiative and an overview of Microsoft Imagine Academy’s CS curriculum offerings.

You can view all the 2018 sessions here.

*Enter for your chance to win a Surface device at Booth #1102. Simply pick up an activity card at the Booth’s welcome desk, complete the activities listed, then return it to that same welcome desk. We’ll be drawing three winners each day!

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Driving opportunity for device partners in the era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge

Satya Nadella recently shared our vision for the future of computing – one in which the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud create experiences where trusted technology is part of the fabric of our lives.Today at Computex 2018, joined by executives from Microsoft’s engineering, marketing and research teams, I had the opportunity to share what that vision means for our device partners. The opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence (AI), ubiquitous computing and Microsoft 365 multi-device and multi-sense experiences has never been greater. Together we can create new, compelling devices and experiences in the era of the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud.

To accelerate innovation in this new era we invite all our partners to join our Intelligent Edge Partner Community. The community will help partners connect with one another to identify opportunities to collaborate on technology innovation and achieve shared business goals. In addition, community members will be able to participate in training and community events, and can participate in early-adopter programs that provide access to documentation, specs, OS builds and certification details. To sign up, simply head to http://Microsoft.com/intelligentedge.

Today, in Taipei, we announced a new category of teamwork devices: Windows Collaboration Displays. These large, interactive displays will let people experience Microsoft 365 collaboration tools: Office, Teams and Whiteboard at room scale, and include built-in sensors that can connect to Azure IoT spatial intelligence capabilities. This incredible technology will allow facility managers to utilize environmental data to make real-time decisions. A variety of collaboration displays, from Sharp and Avocor will be available later this year.

A Windows Collaboration Display from Sharp.A Windows Collaboration Display from Sharp.

We also announced Windows 10 IoT Core Services. This new service offering enables partners to commercialize a secure Internet of Things (IoT)-device backed by industry-leading support. It provides device makers the ability to manage updates for the OS, apps, settings and OEM-specific files, and is backed by 10 years of support.

Advances in ubiquitous computing and AI will drive the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge era 
Every part of our life, our homes, our cars and our workplaces are being transformed by digital technology. We are seeing this in every industry and sector of our economy.  The era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge will be driven by advances in ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligence and multi-sense, multi-device experiences.

First, with ubiquitous computing, Azure is being built as the world’s largest computer with cloud services from 50 regions around the planet, more than any other cloud provider. Azure also has the broadest set of compliance certifications in the industry, and brands across all industries are using Azure at scale. With offerings like Azure Stack, an extension of Azure that enables a truly consistent hybrid cloud platform; Azure IoT, a broad set of services that power IoT solutions; Azure IoT Edge, that allows devices on the edge to act on their own and connect only when needed; and Azure Sphere, a new solution to secure the 9 billion microcontroller unit (MCU)-powered devices that are built and deployed every year, Microsoft provides the most comprehensive ubiquitous computing fabric that partners can use to bring intelligence to edge devices from servers to gateways, to the smallest MCUbased sensors.

Computer scientists at Microsoft have been working on AI technologies for decades. Thanks to the immense computing power of the Azure cloud, access to comprehensive and secure data spanning services such as Bing, Office and LinkedIn, and the AI breakthroughs coming out of our worldwide network of research labs, we are uniquely able to infuse AI into our core products and services. Beyond that we’re delivering AI tools and frameworks including cognitive, vision, spatial and object APIs, and the recently announced Project Brainwave, an architecture for deep neural net processing on the edge – all of which partners can use to enable next-generation AI applications and solutions that run on devices.

Modern devices amplify the power of Microsoft 365 

Using Microsoft’s programs, platforms and suite of services, our partners are bringing to life a breadth of devices at the intelligent edge that delight customers and empower them to do more.

Microsoft 365 enables people and organizations to embrace the modern culture of work, to be more creative, work together more effectively and have a more productive experience – without sacrificing protection and security. This platform opens the door for new experiences brought to life by great hardware innovations from our partner ecosystem that helps users fluidly go from mouse to keyboard to touch to ink – and beyond, to multi-sense scenarios like voice and vision.

Modern devices from our partners light up Microsoft 365 features. Today at Computex, for the first time, we showed the brand-new HP ProBook x360 440 built for growing businesses and professionals on-the-go. Powered by Windows 10, the ultra-slim device delivers the power, security and durability businesses demand in a versatile 360-degree design. Built-in security from HP BIOSphere Gen4, a firmware ecosystem that automates protection of the BIOS, coupled with Microsoft 365 and an infrared sensor supporting Windows Hello face authentication, provides incredibly strong protection.

The new HP ProBook x360, built for businessThe new HP ProBook x360 440, built for business.

Another great device that takes advantage of Microsoft 365 is Asus ZenBook Pro 15 UX580, beautifully designed with an all-aluminum unibody in a luxurious Deep Dive Blue with Rose Gold detailing. This high-performance laptop isn’t just beautiful, it’s also powerful and able to handle the most demanding tasks with ease, powered by the latest eighth-generation Intel Core processors. The ZenBook Pro series also features Windows Hello capabilities and built-in support for Amazon Alexa voice services, giving users new, smart ways to interact with their laptop.

The Asus ZenBook Pro 15 UX580.The Asus ZenBook Pro 15 UX580.

Last year at Computex we announced a new category of always-connected PCs that partners including, Asus, HP and Lenovo are bringing to market. These devices come with incredible battery life and work like your phone with always-on connectivity. Earlier this week, Qualcomm announced that Samsung is joining us to expand this category of always-connected devices.

A new era needs a new level of trust

This new era represents tremendous opportunity for the ecosystem and comes with a responsibility to ensure that the technologies, devices and solutions we all create are trusted by the individuals and organizations that use them. We also need to ensure everyone can experience technology’s benefits and are inclusive. We all need to work together to ensure privacy, protect the legal rights of people around the world, drive cybersecurity efforts to keep the world safe and take steps to ensure that AI works in ethical and responsible ways.

Every part of our lives, every industry and every sector of our economy is being digitally transformed. There are limitless opportunities for Microsoft partners – from the largest Azure servers to the smallest devices using Azure Sphere and everything in between.

I’m so inspired by the opportunity for innovation that’s made possible by the intelligent cloud, the intelligent edge and AI, and I look forward to the future we’ll build together.

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Teachers, you asked for it: Page locking comes to OneNote Class Notebooks

Educators face an array challenges, not least of which is ongoing classroom management. As more and more teachers use Class Notebooks, stand alone or integrated with Microsoft Teams, the most common request we’ve heard from teachers is the ability to “lock” a page. This capability allows educators to have control and make the OneNote page read only for students while still allowing the teacher to add feedback or marks.  Today, we are excited to deliver on this request and begin rolling out page locking broadly to help teachers manage their classrooms and save time.

Page Locking—To further simplify classroom workflows, we are delivering on the number-one request from teachers for OneNote Class Notebooks—enabling lock pages. With our new page locking, the following capabilities are enabled:

  • Teachers can now lock all the pages of a distributed page as read-only after giving feedback to the student.
  • Teachers can unlock or lock individual pages by simply right clicking on the page on a student.
  • Teachers using Microsoft Teams to create OneNote assignments can have the page of the OneNote assignment automatically lock as read only when the due date/time passes

During our early testing process, we’ve had teachers trying out the page locking in their classrooms.  Robin Licato, an AP Chemistry and Forensic Science from St. Agnes Academy, Houston, TX had this to say: “This feature is an absolute game changer.  I am enjoying the ability to unlock a specific student who has an extension on an assignment due to illness or absence while keeping the page locked for students who did not complete the assignment on time!”

Scott Titmas, Technology Integration Specialist Old Bridge Township Public Schools, NJ was also an early beta tester of the new page locking feature. “The page locking feature is extremely intuitive, easy to use, and opens a whole new world of possibilities for teachers. It will be a welcomed feature addition for all teachers.  More encouraging than just this feature is the fact that Microsoft has consistently shown they listen to their users and user voice drives the direction of product development”

Platforms supported – Initially, we are rolling this out for OneNote for Windows 10, OneNote 2016 Desktop Addin, OneNote Online, and OneNote for iPad. Most platforms will provide page locking built in to the toolbar. For OneNote desktop, download the new free add in.

For additional details on which version of OneNote is required for both teacher and students, please visit this new OneNote Class Notebook page locking support article.  It is important to read this article to understand the details before rolling this out.

Important Note #1: for OneNote 2016 Desktop MSI customers, you must deploy this Public Update first before student and teacher pages will properly lock.  Please work with your IT Admin to ensure you properly deployment this patch first.  Page Locking is not supported for OneNote 2013 Desktop clients 

Important note #2: Page Locking works best when a page is distributed or made into an assignment. For example, if students copy the pages manually from the Content Library into their own notebooks and change the page title, the teacher will have to manually right click on the student page to lock it, instead of being able to use the single checkbox to lock all pages.

Page Locking.png

Page Locking in OneNote for Windows 10

Win32.jpgPage Locking in OneNote 2016 Desktop

 

Right click.jpg

Teacher right click to unlock a page

Class Notebook Addin version 2.5.0.0

  • Page Locking support to allow teachers to make a page of set of student pages read-only
  • Bug fixes and performance improvements

We hope you enjoy these new updates! Share any feedback at @OneNoteEDU, and if you need support or help, you can file a ticket here: http://aka.ms/edusupport.

This post was originally published on this site.

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Accenture CIO Stephen Cutchins: Fostering an inclusive workspace with Microsoft 365

Today’s post was written by Stephen Cutchins CIO and accessibility lead at Accenture.

Headshot of Stephen Cutchins, CIO and accessibility lead at Accenture.Diversity at Accenture is a source of strength; the wealth of different perspectives and skillsets that our employees bring to the table keeps us leading in our field. Achieving more as a company starts with addressing the needs of every single employee in our workforce. I am passionate about accessibility. I grew up with two cousins with disabilities and it shaped my outlook on the whole idea of inclusion in the workplace. Accessible technology is about one thing—fitting the tools to the humans who use them—and I’m fortunate to work with a company that shares my vision. I wanted to create an accessibility practice at Accenture, and to that end, I started as the first employee in the CIO’s Center for Excellence, where we look at finding the right tools for an inclusive workplace. And when it comes to business tools, we see Microsoft as a leader in inclusive technology and a great partner, a perfect match for our goals to put technology to work empowering every one of our employees. In fact, we now take it for granted that the experiences within Microsoft 365 are going to work well for our employees.

As a human-centric company, our workplace initiatives are designed to bring the conversation about accessibility to the forefront, encouraging an open dialogue about how we can support employees’ needs in the workplace. Accenture runs on Office 365 productivity services that include a wealth of built-in accessibility features. The Microsoft approach of “accessibility by design” matches our philosophy that accessibility is not an add-on or an afterthought, but an inherent part of the technology we use to communicate and collaborate as an organization.

The ability to collaborate effectively with your colleagues to get work done is the baseline of any productive organization. A lot of credit goes to accessibility features in Office 365 ProPlus applications—such as Skype for Business, Word, and Outlook—for helping us tap into the incredible resources in our company. Daily Skype voice and video calls become transformative when people who are blind or motor-disabled can participate by using JAWS screen reader for Windows or voice dictation software. Even minor changes can have an enormous impact. I was excited to see that when Microsoft moved the Accessibility Checker front and center in Word, near the spell check, it raised awareness of both the feature itself and the need to use it. We are all of different abilities, and learning to consider the full range of situations across the disability spectrum means employees will use the tools at hand for better communication and collaboration with everyone.

It gives me enormous satisfaction that our inclusive workplace, with Microsoft technologies, engages our employees to do their best work and to help them realize their true potential and grow as human beings. Everyone benefits.

—Stephen Cutchins

Read the case study to learn more about how Accenture is empowering its workforce with the intuitive accessibility tools built into Windows 10 and Office 365.

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New Azure offerings further commitment to offer largest scale, broadest choice for SAP HANA in the cloud

Microsoft at SAPPHIRE NOW 2018

Enterprises have been embarking on a journey of digital transformation for many years. For many enterprises this journey cannot start or gain momentum until core SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) landscapes are transformed. The last year has seen an acceleration of this transformation with SAP customers of all sizes like Penti, Malaysia Airlines, Guyana Goldfields , Rio Tinto, Co-op, and Coats migrating to the cloud on Microsoft Azure. This cloud migration, which is central to digital transformation, helps to increase business agility, lower costs, and enable new business processes to fuel growth. In addition, it has allowed them to take advantage of advancements in technology such as big data analytics, self-service business intelligence (BI), and Internet of Things (IOT).

As leaders in enterprise software, SAP and Microsoft provide the preferred foundation for enabling the safe and trusted path to digital transformation. Together we enable the inevitable move to SAP S/4HANA which will help accelerate digital transformation for customers of all sizes.

Microsoft has collaborated with SAP for 20+ years to enable enterprise SAP deployments with Windows Server and SQL Server. In 2016 we partnered to offer SAP certified, purpose-built, SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances supporting up to 4 TB of memory. Last year at SAPPHIRENOW, we announced the largest scale for SAP HANA in the public-cloud with support up to 20 TB on a single node and our M-series VM sizes up to 4 TB. With the success of M-series VMs and our SAP HANA on Azure Large instances, customers have asked us for even more choices to address a wider variety of SAP HANA workloads.

Microsoft is committed to offering the most scale and performance for SAP HANA in the public cloud, and yesterday announced additional SAP HANA offerings on Azure which include:

  • Largest SAP HANA optimized VM size in the cloud: We are happy to announce that the Azure M-series will support large memory virtual machines with sizes up to 12 TB. These new sizes will  be launching soon, pushing the limits of virtualization in the cloud for SAP HANA. These new sizes are based on Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake) processors and will offer the most memory available of any VM in the public cloud.
  • Wide range of SAP HANA certified VMs: For customers needing smaller instances we have expanded our offering with smaller M-series VM sizes, extending Azure’s SAP HANA certified M-series VM range from 192 GB – 4 TB with 10 different VM sizes. These sizes offer on-demand and SAP certified instances with flexibility to spin-up or scale-up in minutes and to spin-down to save costs all in a pay-as-you-go model available worldwide. This flexibility and agility is something that is not possible with a private cloud or on-premises SAP HANA deployment.
  • 24 TB bare metal instance and optimized price per TB: For customers that need a higher performance dedicated offering for SAP HANA, we are increasing our investments in our purpose-built bare metal SAP HANA infrastructure. We now offer additional SAP HANA TDIv5 options of 6 TB, 12 TB, 18 TB, and 24 TB configurations in addition to our current configurations from 0.7TB to 20 TB. This enables customers who need more memory but the same number of cores to get a better price per TB deployed.
  • Most choice for SAP HANA in the cloud: With 26 distinct SAP HANA offerings from 192 GB to 24 TB, scale-up certification up to 20 TB and scale-out certification up to 60 TB, global availability in 12 regions with plans to increase to 22 regions in the next 6 months, Azure now offers the most choice for SAP HANA workloads of any public cloud.

Microsoft Azure also enables customers to derive insights and analytics from SAP data with services such as Azure Data Factory SAP HANA connector to automate data pipelines, Azure Data Lake Store for hyper scale data storage and Power BI, an industry leading self-service visualization tool, to create rich dashboards and reports from SAP ERP data.

Our unique partnership with SAP to enable customer success

Last November, Microsoft and SAP announced an expanded partnership to help customers accelerate their business transformation with S/4HANA on Azure. Microsoft has been a long time SAP customer for many of our core business processes such as financials and supply chain. As part of this renewed partnership, Microsoft announced it will use S/4HANA for Central Finance, and SAP announced it will use Azure to host 17 internal business critical systems.

I am very pleased to share an update on SAP’s migration to Azure from Thomas Saueressig, CIO of SAP:

“In 2017 we started to leverage Azure as IaaS Platform. By the end of 2018 we will have moved 17 systems including an S/4HANA system for our Concur Business Unit. We are expecting significant operational efficiencies and increased agility which will be a foundational element for our digital transformation.”

Correspondingly here’s an update on Microsoft’s migration to S/4HANA on Azure from Mike Taylor, GM Partner; Enterprise Applications Services at Microsoft.

“In 2017 we started the internal migration of our SAP system that we have been running for over 25 years, to S/4HANA. As part of that journey we felt it was necessary to first move our SAP environment completely onto Azure, which we completed in February 2018. With the agility that Azure offers we have already stood up multiple sandbox environments to help our business realize the powerful new capabilities of S/4HANA.”

As large enterprises, we are going through our business transformation with SAP S/4HANA on Azure and we will jointly share lessons from our journey and reference architectures at several SAPPHIRE NOW sessions.

Last November, we announced availability of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) with Azure, to offer customers an accelerated path to SAP HANA. We see several customers, such as Avianca and Aker embark on their business transformation by leveraging the best of both worlds, SAP’s managed services, and the most robust cloud infrastructure for SAP HANA on Azure.

“In Avianca, we are committed on providing the best customer experience through the use of digital technologies. We have the customer as the center of our strategy, and to do that, we are in a digital transformation of our customer experience and of our enterprise to provide our employees with the best tools to increase their productivity. Our new implementation of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud on Microsoft Azure is a significant step forward in our enterprise digital transformation,” said Mr. Santiago Aldana Sanin, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Digital Officer at Avianca. “The SAP and Microsoft partnership continues to create powerful solutions that combine application management and product expertise from SAP with a global, trusted and intelligent cloud from Microsoft Azure. At Avianca, we are leveraging the strengths of both companies to further our journey to the cloud.”

Learn more about HEC with Azure.

Announcing SAP Cloud Platform general availability on Azure

The SAP Cloud Platform offers developers a choice to build their SAP applications and extensions using a PaaS development platform with integrated services. Today, I’m excited to announce that SAP Cloud Platform is now generally available on Azure. Developers can now deploy Cloud Foundry based SAP Cloud Platform on Azure in the West Europe region. We’re working with SAP to enable more regions in the months ahead.

“We are excited to announce general availability for SAP Cloud Platform on Azure. With our expanded partnership last November, we have been working on a number of co-engineering initiatives for the benefit of our mutual customers. SAP Cloud Platform offers the best of PaaS services for developers building apps around SAP and Azure offers world-class infrastructure for SAP solutions with cloud services for application development. With this choice, developers can spin up infrastructure on-demand in a global cloud co-located with other business apps, scale up as necessary in minutes boosting developer productivity and accelerating time to market for innovative applications with SAP solutions,” said Björn Goerke, CTO of SAP and President of SAP Cloud Platform.

Microsoft has a long history of working with developers with our .NET, Visual Studio, and Windows community. With our focus on open source support on Azure for Java, Node.js, Red Hat, SUSE, Docker, Kubernetes, Redis, and PostgreSQL to name a few, Azure offers the most developer friendly cloud according to the latest development-only public cloud platforms report from Forrester. We recently published an ABAP SDK for Azure on GitHub, to enable SAP developers to seamlessly connect into Azure services from SAP applications.

SAP application developers can now use a single cloud platform to co-locate application development next to SAP ERP data and boost development productivity with Azure’s Platform services such as Azure Event Hubs for event data processing and Azure Storage for unlimited inexpensive storage, while accessing SAP ERP data at low latencies for faster application performance. To get started with SAP Cloud Platform on Azure, sign up for a free trial account.

Today, we are also excited to announce another milestone in our partnership. SAP’s Hybris Commerce Cloud now runs on Azure as a “Software as a service” offering.

Customers embarking on digital transformation with SAP on Azure

With our broadest scale global offerings for SAP on Azure, we are seeing increased momentum with customers moving to the cloud. Here are some digital transformation stories from recent customer deployments.

  • Daimler AG: One of the world’s most successful automotive companies, Daimler AG is modernizing its purchasing system with a new SAP S/4HANA on Azure solution. The Azure-based approach is a foundational step in an overall digital transformation initiative to ensure agility and flexibility for the contracting and sourcing of its passenger cars, commercial vehicles, and International Procurement Services on a global basis.
  • Devon Energy: Fully committed to its digital transformation, Devon Energy is pioneering efforts to deploy SAP applications on Azure across all its systems. The Oklahoma City-based independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company is strategically partnering with Microsoft on multiple fronts such as AI, IT modernization, and SAP on Azure. Learn more about Devon’s digital transformation at their SAPPHIRE NOW session.
  • MMG: MMG, a global mining company, recognized that existing SAP infrastructure was approaching end-of-life, and that moving to the cloud would deliver the lowest long-term cost whilst providing flexibility to grow and enable new capabilities. Immediate benefits have been realized in relation to the overall performance of SAP, in particular, data loads into Business Warehouse.

For more on how you can accelerate your digital transformation with SAP on Azure, please check out our website.

In closing, at Microsoft, we are committed to ensuring Azure offers the best enterprise-grade option for all your SAP workload needs, whether you are ready to move to HANA now or later. I will be at SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 and encourage you to check our SAPPHIRE NOW event website for details on 40+ sessions and several demos that we’ll be showcasing at the event. Stop by and see us at the Microsoft booth #358 to learn more.

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Bloomberg: ‘Microsoft buys GitHub for $7.5 billion, going back to its roots’

Microsoft Corp. is buying GitHub Inc. for $7.5 billion in stock, bringing in house a community of 28 million programmers who publish code openly and extending a shift away from a strategy of shrouding its software in secrecy.

The move is both a return to Microsoft’s earliest software-development roots and a sharp turnaround from its stance on open-source software a decade ago. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said the deal, expected to close by the end of this year, will speed moves into the cloud and artificial intelligence.

“Computing is becoming embedded in the world, with every part of our daily life and work and every aspect of our society and economy being transformed by digital technology,” Nadella wrote in a blog post Monday. “Developers are the builders of this new era, writing the world’s code. And GitHub is their home.”

GitHub, a 10-year old San Francisco-based startup, was founded as a way for software developers to share and collaborate on coding tools and is an essential platform for many open-source programmers.

Microsoft wasn’t always so welcoming to such coders, who were seen as a threat to the company’s business as a commercial software company. Co-founder Bill Gates and former Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer championed developers building proprietary software for Microsoft, not the kind of open-source projects found on GitHub.

In fact, in the early 2000s, Ballmer and his team were highly critical of that kind of a project, calling it a “cancer” and saying that it went against “the American Way.”

A lot has changed since then. Under Nadella, who took over four years ago, Microsoft has been increasingly relying on open-source software to add programming tools, and the purchase of GitHub lets it tie up with a company that has become a key part of the way Microsoft writes its own software. Microsoft is now supporting many flavors of Linux, an open-source operating system, and has used open models on some significant cloud and developer products itself. This deal will mark another dramatic step in that direction.

The acquisition reflects Microsoft’s “ongoing pivot to open-source software, seeking to further broaden its large and growing development community,” said Richard Lane, an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft is now one of the biggest contributors to GitHub, and as Nadella moves the company away from complete dependence on the Windows operating system to more in-house development on Linux, the company needs new ways to connect with the broader developer community.

Not all the developers are happy about being controlled by the world’s biggest software company. “Anybody active in the open source community should be upset that Microsoft is going to be the steward of this large body of code,” said coder Jacques Mattheij. He said he deleted his GitHub account.

Nadella acknowledged that he’ll have to earn the trust of GitHub’s users, but also said that Microsoft is “all in on open source.”

Satya Nadella

Photographer: David Ryder/Bloomberg

“Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation,” Nadella said in the statement.

The deal will add to Microsoft’s operating income in its fiscal year 2020, the company said in a statement Monday. The shares were up 0.6 percent to $101.38 at 9:55 a.m. in New York.

For GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new chief executive officer and has yet to make a profit, the acquisition provides a new way forward.

GitHub, which will operate independently, will be led by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Xamarin and a current Microsoft developer-tools executive. It will continue to support the programming languages, tools and operating systems of the user’s choice.

GitHub preferred selling the company to going public and chose Microsoft partially because it was impressed by Nadella, a person familiar with the deal said on Sunday.

While GitHub is used by Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft to store corporate code and collaborate, the company’s losses have been significant — it lost $66 million over three quarters in 2016. It had revenue of $98 million in nine months of 2016.

Microsoft has talked to GitHub on and off for a few years. Recently they began talks about a partnership but progressed to discussing an acquisition, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The deal is the third of Nadella’s four-year tenure that’s valued at above $2 billion, following LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion and the maker of the Minecraft video game, Mojang AB, in 2014 for $2.5 billion.