New Employee Announcement: Alecia Aktabowski, Project Manager (San Diego)

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Alecia Aktabowski began working at Managed Solution on Monday, April 25, 2016. Alecia lived 13 years in Indiana and 13 years in Georgia before moving to San Diego. Alecia is married with a super independent daughter, Ella and 2 incredibly dependent dogs, Cami and Monty.
Alecia joins us from SIGMAnet, where she managed professional services projects and tier 3 engineer scheduling and escalations.
When Alecia isn't in the office she enjoys hiking, shopping, going to Ella's school functions, doing hair, and eating dessert. Alecia can't swim despite her husband being a rescue swimmer. We are excited to welcome Alecia to the Managed Solution Team!

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National Teacher Appreciation Day: Technology in Education

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Celebrate the teacher you love with some cool educational tech! education.microsoft.com

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Israeli Government Turns to Microsoft Azure

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Israeli government turns to Microsoft Azure

By Maor David-Pur, Government Industry Solution Manager, Microsoft Israel, as written on enterprise.microsoft.com
As governments from around the world consider moving to the cloud, many are turning to Microsoft to help them with this move. Why? Because Microsoft Azure offers the greatest flexibility and security of any major cloud computing platform. Moreover, we’re committed to working with governments to meet their unique needs.
A great example is the Israeli government, which has been hosting an increasing number of workloads on Azure. By choosing Azure, government officials are saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware and maintenance costs. They’re obtaining a flexible solution that allows them to keep sensitive data on-premises. And they’re improving services for citizens by offering them solutions that automatically scale up to meet user demand. Consider the following examples:

The Israeli parliament is broadcasting its meetings with Azure Media Services

During the past few years, an increasing number of citizens have been tuning in to watch the meetings of the Knesset, Israeli’s parliament. To meet the growing demand, the parliament has begun streaming these meetings both live and on-demand using Azure Media Services, a highly scalable, cloud-based video streaming service. By moving to Azure, the Knesset has saved money in hardware and maintenance costs, while offering citizens a service that automatically scales up and down as demand dictates. Azure has also enabled the parliament to make its meetings accessible to citizens from almost any device including the Android, iPhone, and Windows platforms.

Israeli Railways runs its journey planning service on Azure

The Israeli Railways Company offered a journey planning service hosted on its own servers, but the service had been slow and sometimes crashed, which discouraged citizens from using it. To improve the service without an expensive hardware investment, the state-owned railway moved its database to Azure. Israeli Railways was initially concerned about privacy and security, but it was reassured by our industry-leading commitment to protect our customer’s data. By running its database on Azure, Israeli Railways has saved money in hardware and maintenance costs. Moreover, the railway now has a highly available and scalable service that citizens can depend on for their transportation needs
Based on its positive experience with Azure, the Israeli government is continuing to extend its use. Israeli Railways is planning to move other parts of its website to Azure. And the Knesset plans to add 18 more channels that broadcast committee meetings in addition to meetings of the entire parliament. In addition, the Knesset’s research arm is experimenting with Azure Machine Learning as it researches the impact of proposed legislation.
These scenarios demonstrate some of the many ways that Azure can help governments meet their unique needs. The Israeli government is turning to Azure for a growing number of services because it’s scalable, cost-effective, and highly secure—and because it offers a hybrid approach, giving the government the control and flexibility it needs. To learn more, please see our Microsoft Azure web page.

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Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint mobile apps get useful new features

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Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint mobile apps get useful new features

By Ida Torres as written on androidcommunity.com
One of the best things about the Microsoft Office programs is the auto save feature which has saved us countless times when our laptop loses battery or the program suddenly closes or something else happens. But that feature was only available for desktop software. Until now. Finally the autosave feature is available for the Word, Excel, and Powerpoint mobile apps, both for smartphones and tablets. There are also app-specific new features in the latest round of updates from Microsoft.
It does make sense that auto-save will eventually come to mobile devices since you are more likely to lose connection, get a battery drain or malfunction and any other errors that might happen while working on a document on your smartphone or tablet. All three apps will also now get version history, so just in case you wanted to go back in time, you’ll be able to choose from several save points. So even if there is auto-save now, you can still go back to certain points of history in the document.
Another new thing, at least for Word and Powerpoint, is that you’ll finally be able to experience real-time collaborative editing support. There may still be a few bugs here and there, but eventually, it will hopefully become as smooth as with the web apps and Google Docs themselves. Meanwhile, Powerpoint also gets another new feature called “Designer”, but only for the tablet version. There is now a tab called “design ideas” where it suggests to you what theme or layout would work best with a certain picture.
The rollout has already started so you can check the Play Store if your apps are ready for these new features. You can also get the APK if you don’t want to wait.

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