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Pokémon Go spotted in Power BI publish to web
If you’ve missed hearing about it by now – although we’re not sure how you would – the new mobile game Pokémon Go was released this week by Niantic and The Pokémon Company, and it became an instant success. The game combines GPS location data, augmented reality, and the “gotta catch ‘em all” collectible fever of the original Pokémon games. Players wander around outside with their phones, hoping to find and capture rare monster spawns and battle other players for the right to claim virtual “gyms”.
Within days of its release, Pokémon Go became the top free app in both the Google Play store and the Apple App Store, surpassing favorites such as dating app Tinder and social media app Twitter. And now the latest craze has even been spotted in Power BI publish to web!
Earlier this week, a Power BI community member published their interactive report on the monsters featured in Pokémon Go. You can get an overview of all the monsters available, sort them by damage type, and see the relative power of each type. see it in full screen mode.
If you are one of the many people planning on playing some Pokémon Go this weekend, we wish you good weather and lots of rare monsters! (And for more unique examples of Power BI dashboards, check out the Data Stories Gallery.)
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CONGRATULATIONS TO CHRIS SULLIVAN
JULY 2016 PLAYER OF THE MONTH
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This award is given on a monthly basis to a Managed Solution employee who has done an amazing job of exemplifying and living up to the Managed Solution Core Values.
The Managed Solution leadership team selected Chris Sullivan as Player of the Month for handling his clients with ease! Chris also takes excellent CW notes to help out his team and improve office efficiency.
Chris is new to the Managed Solution team, and he has already made a huge impact on our company. Chris provides incredible customer service, giving each client the service they deserve. His soothing personality makes a great fit for keeping up with any situation. Chris keeps up with the commotion here by excelling in the office. We are so excited to have him on our team, and we appreciate everything he does for us! Congratulations Chris!
This award is given on a monthly basis to a Managed Solution employee who has done an amazing job of exemplifying and living up to the Managed Solution Core Values.
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At Managed Solution, we strive to be the best technology based company by investing in our top assets; our people!
Here at Managed Solution we thrive in an energetic, performance-driven environment where results, teamwork, and quality of customer satisfaction are recognized and rewarded. Our corporate culture is diverse, open and creative. We look for team members with proven experience, a strong sense of passion and dedication to the highest levels of excellence, technology and business ethics.
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Microsoft wins battle for Boeing in war with AWS
By Clint Boulton as written on cio.com
Boeing chose the Azure cloud platform because Microsoft agreed to collaborate on analytics software intended to help improve operational efficiency in the narrow margin aviation sector.
Boeing's decision to run its aviation analytics applications on the Azure cloud computing software is a big win for Microsoft, which is chasing Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the high-stakes race to sell computing, storage and other infrastructure software over the internet. The aerospace giant based its choice largely on Microsoft’s willingness to help it develop applications to serve its 300 airline customers, which are starved for ways to optimize fuel efficiency and better manage fleets.
"The combination of technical acumen and depth, as well as where they're investing and how they're addressing the business customer, really matched up with our objectives," says Andrew Gendreau, director of advanced information solutions at Boeing's digital aviation unit. He tells CIO.com that Microsoft also impressed with its commitment to advancing its Cortana analytics and internet of things suites as well as augmented reality, which could play a big factor modeling aviation modeling.
That even a division within a large enterprise would standardize on Azure shows just how far the platform has come in a few years. AWS grabbed an early lead in corporate cloud infrastructure a decade ago as developers began consuming its elastic storage and compute services. With AWS proving reliable and cost-effective, developers sung AWS' praises, boasting that the capability to spin up and shut down servers at will made application development more nimble. AWS soon began attracting larger corporate customers, notably Netflix, Capital One, Pfizer and the CIA.
Boeing deal shows Microsoft no longer 'bumbling around'
Azure has come on strong under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella, whose mobile first, cloud first strategy is resonating with CIOs. Pattonair CIO Brian Long recently told CIO.com that CIOs have noticed how Microsoft has "gotten its act together," entering the mobile and cloud frays after a few years of "bumbling around."
Boeing's digital aviation unit chose Azure after using AWS, CenturyLink and other vendors. Gendreau acknowledges that while there are "players that accelerate your business" most cloud providers offer point solutions, which can introduce complexity in Boeing customer's aircraft systems. Conversely, Microsoft is willing to work closely with organizations to understand their business objectives and provide more comprehensive software suites.
Gendreau says Microsoft will help Boeing generate analytics that enable predictive aircraft maintenance, optimize fuel efficiency and fleet management in an industry where margins are razor thin. While airlines globally generate about $700 billion in revenue, they spend about $700 billion in operating costs, Gendreau says. Ensuring access to real-time machine information will assist pilots, mechanics, dispatchers and flight attendants in making flying more efficient. Ideally, this will help airlines sustain profitable growth.
"The aircraft are becoming smarter and smarter and the operators are all looking to gain more operational insights into what's happening on the aircraft," says Greg Jones, Microsoft’s global industry director for travel. "This is a true opportunity to look at what transformation can occur within the aviation space."
Several smaller organizations, from native cloud companies such as Box to the nearly 200-year-old publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are using Azure. Yet if Microsoft is going to challenge AWS it needs more marquee enterprise customers like Boeing and General Electric, which earlier this month said that its Predix IoT platform would run on Azure.
Yet Microsoft faces a big challenge in a cloud market where exclusive deals remain hard to come by. AWS enjoys commercial relationships with Box, GE and Boeing.
In AWS, Microsoft faces stiff test
Ed Anderson, a Gartner analyst who tracks the cloud computing market, says Microsoft’s recent enterprise wins underscores how traditional businesses such as GE and Boeing are adopting progressive computing approaches, including cloud, IoT and machine intelligence. “The fact that Boeing announced this with Microsoft rather than with AWS shows some traction that Microsoft is gaining,” says Anderson. “It’s very important for Microsoft to win deals like this.”
AWS played a major role in driving Amazon.com's profitable second quarter Thursday, reporting revenue of $2.87 billion, up 58 percent from the same period in 2015 and the most it ever delivered in one quarter. If AWS keeps up the pace, it will easily exceed the $10 billion run rate CEO Jeff Bezos foreshadowed for 2016. And there's no signs of slippage: Salesforce.com selected AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider and Kellogg’s, Brooks Brothers, Ferrara Candy Company are all running critical SAP business applications on AWS.
Microsoft’s cloud business is on a bit of a tear itself. The company said earlier this month that its fourth-quarter revenue from Azure grew 102 percent, while Azure compute usage doubled year-over-year. Its Intelligent Cloud, which includes server Windows Server and Azure, grew 7 percent to $6.7 billion. More broadly, Microsoft’s commercial cloud business, which includes Azure, as well as Office 365 and Dynamics CRM, achieved a $12 billion run rate, up from $10 billion in its previous quarter.
However, Microsoft’s accounting practices – it declines to disclose revenues for Azure alone -- make apples-to-apples comparisons between Azure and AWS impossible. Anderson says that while Microsoft’s enterprise reach goes deep, particularly with businesses that use .NET applications and that have inked enterprise agreements, AWS enjoys the pole position in the public cloud market. As such,Anderson says, Microsoft “must go the extra mile to attract some of these big deals.”
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Democratizing data—
Atkins goes digital by default with Office 365 E5
We’ve determined that we want Atkins to be “digital by default.” For me, that’s not just about using technology to bring people and information together, it’s about flexible experimentation at a rapid pace.
As an important part of our strategy, we’ve invested in the latest and most comprehensive version of Microsoft Office 365, the E5 suite, to give employees new ways to serve themselves and make faster, better decisions. Multiple benefits captured our attention, but I’m most eager to adopt Microsoft Power BI. We see it as the heart of our efforts to break down silos, unlock our core corporate data and enhance personal effectiveness.
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Atkins has a history of delivering innovative answers to complex engineering problems, from designing the world’s longest driverless subway in Dubai to transforming the offshore wind energy industry to international airport modernization. We’re infusing every part of our company with that same spirit of innovation, which is no small feat for a global organization. We’ve got to think about global collaboration and choose technology systems that work everywhere in the world, tools that make it easy for people to share information and connect with each other. We can’t take months to provide employees with new capabilities—we need to be able to get them up and running.
My colleagues want a 360-degree, single, integrated view of the business and the ability to consume that data proactively without waiting for another report to be created. Using Power BI, individual employees have self-service access to intelligence that they can slice and dice in whatever ways are most helpful to them. They also have an easy way to view and share their insights through interactive visualizations. I’m a great believer in democratized capabilities across the organization, and enabling employees to access and experiment with data ties directly to our emphasis on innovation.
Increasing our ability to be data driven also helps us act faster by taking advantage of existing resources and expertise. Giving our entire workforce access to Power BI unlocks the full potential of the whole company and helps enable the agile new world we’re creating.
There are many other aspects of Office 365 that help us move faster and give us the business agility we’re looking for. For example, we use our Yammer enterprise social network to crowdsource solutions to client issues, come up with ideas for hackathons and engage diverse groups in conversations about using innovative technology to create value for our employees and clients alike.
Also, through E5, we’re extending our use of Skype for Business, making it our single solution for voice, video, conferencing and instant messaging. Moving to complete cloud-based communications gives us obvious benefits in terms of cost savings and less equipment on people’s desks. Plus, we’ll continue to gain benefits as Microsoft adds new features to the platform over time. There’s also real value in using the full capabilities of Skype for Business because it supports true mobility. Atkins has many consultants who spend a lot of time on the road. They love using Skype for Business to stay productive and effective wherever they might be in the world.
In fact, Office 365 will have a transformational impact on the way all sorts of employees work at Atkins—they no longer need to be at a desk or even in an office. They go to Office 365 to connect with colleagues and clients and bring new insights to the work we do. They tap into our innovation hubs, client communities, winning work communities and business change leaders network. And they use Microsoft SharePoint Online to set up team sites quickly for collaboration across borders, and they share information with Microsoft OneDrive for Business.
Our vision is to move the company completely to the cloud by 2020, allowing us to decommission on-premises infrastructure and concentrate our creative energy in the spaces where we can truly differentiate Atkins from the rest of the market. Using Office 365 helps us harness our collective knowledge and experience, combine it with some of our clients’ knowledge and experience, and develop innovative, successful solutions in a fraction of the time it would have taken before. I’m excited about the future at Atkins and our relationship with Microsoft and Office 365. We look forward to the ongoing benefits of using a product that’s continually evolving and adding value to what we do, just like we do for our clients.
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.
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5 ways to boost your professionalism over email
Every day, inboxes are packed with more than one billion emails. For small businesses, the challenge to set yourself apart and establish what your business represents in a single email can feel daunting, but it’s easier than you think.
Follow these five simple—yet highly effective—strategies to convert the customer, close the sale, build your brand and continue to build your small business through effective use of business email.
1.Create a custom email address for your business— Show you mean business, and get taken seriously with a properly formatted email address. If you use your personal email, you’re not communicating all the potential your business has to offer. Instead, format your email as yourname@yourcompany.com.
2.Use the To, CC, and BCC lines strategically— Eliminate the risk of unnecessary replies or over-filling inboxes. Ask yourself a few questions to determine if a BCC or CC line is the right choice. Do the contacts know each other (or need to)? Does every recipient need to read every response? Respect recipients’ privacy by placing contacts in the BCC line and add people in the BCC field to eliminate the opportunity for “reply all” blunders. While you’re at it, consider waiting to fill all To, CC, and BCC lines once you’ve drafted and proofread your email. This eliminates the risk of an email “misfire” and gives you a chance to think about what you’ve written before pressing send.
3.Write smart subject lines— A catchy or motivating subject line enhances the chance your email will be read. Create a subject line that’s focused, personal and shows the value or urgency of reading. To create click-worthy subject lines, combine a few action-based and topical subject line elements with an added value to readers.
4.Include a clear next step— Include clear calls to action with precise next steps. Whether you want readers to follow a link, call a number, reply to your email or something else, state it clearly and make it easy for them to follow through. Need a question answered? Don’t dance around it. Ask the question in the beginning of your email, and prompt your recipients to answer toward the end.
5.Proofread— Spellcheck will only get you so far. Don’t just proofread for spelling and grammar; check that your tone is appropriate to the subject matter. Be careful of jokes and sarcasm, as humor can easily be mistaken and misunderstood. And check for one of the most common email errors: referring to an attachment but forgetting to include one.
It’s amazing how impactful simple email strategies are, and you will see the results as you implement them into your small business email communication plan. Once you’ve implemented these strategies (and proofread one more time, for good measure), you’re ready to send.
