Nowadays, it’s common to use your smartphone to share articles, photos, directions and much more. While some apps make it easy to do that, others don’t. But with a new app released through the Microsoft Garage called Clip Layer, you can easily snip and share almost anything that appears on an Android screen.
Clip Layer applies a universal overlay over any screen that makes it quick and easy to select a snippet of information, copy it and act on it by sharing or including it in an email.
“Like a lot of people, my phone is the center of my life,” says Steve Won, a senior designer with Microsoft’s Office team and creator of Clip Layer. “I like to share what I’ve seen and I noticed a couple of problems unique to consuming on a smartphone.”
For instance, he found it hard on some apps to select anything, and even if there was a way to do that, it was oftentimes cumbersome to press and hold on content and then to drag two grabbers, which was required in order to select. He noticed it was a common problem across apps, and it became the starting point for this project.
This is Won’s second app released through The Garage following Hub Keyboard, which uses an Android keyboard to show a clipboard, pull contact info, get document links from the cloud, translate, show web results and allow rephrasing of sentences through a thesaurus.
“If I take another step back, the root of the issue is similar to Hub Keyboard,” Won says. “Apps being silo’d is a common problem for both, as there is no standard way to share or pull information across apps. There’s been a lot of growth with smartphones and ecosystems, as there are more apps that come into stores, but the same problem keeps persisting: less apps able to talk with each other, as they’re designed to work independent of each other. But while the keyboard is focused on input and only shows up when the app allows input, Clip Layer has more coverage and works on any screen. Hub Keyboard was focused composing, and this one is focused on sharing and re-using what already exists.”
After his team’s success with Hub Keyboard, which confirmed the problem of silos and validated the approach of giving users more to do with keyboards, he turned to consuming and sharing without a keyboard through Clip Layer in April.
Hub Keyboard gave him hands-on coding experience, so he decided to develop Clip Layer by himself, as a design idea, and to provide insights to other teams at Microsoft interested in on-screen captures like this.
“I feel like The Garage gives us a lighter weight process to experiment and share a lot of learnings with other teams too,” Won says. “It’s a win-win for project teams and Microsoft.”
From Clip Layer, he wants to find out if the overlay approach solves the problem of sharing when there isn’t an obvious way of doing so in an app. And, he wants to find out what people do with the information – do they email it or share it on social media? How do they make use of it?
Going through The Garage process with Hub Keyboard helped prepare him better for submitting Clip Layer.
“It’s always smoother the second time around,” Won says. “Your first startup gets you ready for the second one. The first time around, besides product development, all this stuff was new to me – like the release checklist. I was a lot more anxious. This time around, at least I had a better idea of the entire picture. I had peace of mind, knowing what to expect and how to plan for everything.”
A deeper look at Skype for Business integration with iOS CallKit
We recently announced deeper integration of Skype for Business with iOS devices using Apple’s CallKit framework, which enables a better experience for Skype for Business calls on the iPhone. The CallKit API with iOS 10 enables Skype for Business calls to work the same way as the native calling experience on iOS, allowing you to seamlessly extend your personal device as a business phone.
Answer Skype for Business calls from lock screen
Now, iPhone users can accept an incoming Skype for Business call right from the lock screen. There is no need to unlock the phone or launch the Skype for Business app to receive the call. Skype for Business calls will appear and behave just as regular cellular calls do—including being able to see the caller’s name on the lock screen. When you need to, you can also get to the app from the calling interface with just one touch.
Handle Skype for Business calls like any other call
This integration also allows you to switch between calls across Skype for Business, your personal cellular line and other VoIP applications supporting CallKit. If you are in an important Skype for Business conversation and receive an incoming cellular call, you can send the second call to voicemail or put the Skype for Business call on hold to accept the incoming cellular call. You’ll also see Skype for Business calls in your phone’s call history.
Built-in IT and user controls
These new features are enabled by default for all iOS app users. In scenarios where you may not want the Skype for Business calls to appear in the native iOS call log, the built-in IT and end-user controls allow you to disable the CallKit integration altogether. IT admins can disable this integration for their users through a policy, and app users can also control it in the settings.
Try the new calling experience
To try the new calling experience, update your iOS app today. If you haven’t yet checked out the Skype for Business mobile app for iOS, you can download it at Skype for Business Apps & Downloads.
Every company is a technology company, but most don’t behave like one
In 2011, Marc Andreesen famously wrote a Wall Street Journal essay declaring that “software is eating the world.” Five years later, the five largest companies in the world by market capitalization are all software companies.
However, in today’s information economy, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook are not the only important large technology companies.
As technology becomes more and more pervasive across industries and functions, companies like Exxon, GE, Citi, and Walmart are all racing to become technology companies as well.
Today, we are less interested in the distinction between technology and non-technology companies (because there are very few successful companies that are not technology companies). Instead, it’s more interesting to ask questions like – Tesla is a technology company rapidly learning to become an automobile company, and Ford is an automobile company rapidly learning to become a technology company – which one is going to get there first?
In short, software is eating the world, but software companies aren’t the only ones taking a bite.
How do companies in real estate, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, or other industries that have traditionally not been recognized as technology industries become technology companies? What are some of the key learnings that we see from startups and companies that are successfully making this transition?
It starts at the highest level of leadership
Leading a transformation to become a successful technology company is not a job that can simply be tasked to the CTO or CIO. The level of engagement and investment to lead a successful transformation requires the CEO and board of directors to not only be fully bought in but to be the main drivers of the change.
Goldman Sachs has known for many years that technology is a key competitive advantage in financial services. In one recent WSJ article, a top Goldman executive valued a license for their risk measurement system at well over $1 billion, and possibly even up to $5 billion. They have since open-sourced the system in a move to attempt to drum up new business.
More importantly, however, Goldman Sachs’ Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein has repeatedly stated that “Goldman Sachs is a technology firm” and highlights the fact that Goldman Sachs actually employs more engineers than companies like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn and often competes for talent and wins against top internet companies.
Talent is the most important asset of a technology company
One of the key drivers for the rapid growth of new technology companies is the low capital requirement to build a company today. New companies no longer need to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of servers and equipment; instead, they can pay for servers on demand from cloud providers when needed.
This dynamic makes it more important than ever for companies to hire great people. In fact, a recent survey Madrona conducted in conjunction with its annual CIO Summit found that 89% of Fortune 500 CIOs say hiring top talent is their number one concern today.
GE has likely made the largest investment in this space to change the story that young engineers and college graduates hear about the company with a series of Youtube videos and television ads. Though it remains to be seen whether these videos work, GE has recognized that filling its talent pipeline with young engineers and technologists is critical and is investing accordingly.
Technology needs to be at the core of company culture, not an afterthought
At a company like Microsoft or Facebook, engineering positions are the most prestigious, highest status roles at the company. The founders and CEOs of technology companies are often engineers and may have even built early version of the products themselves.
For companies to successfully make the transition and become a technology company, cultures need to change to take into account the unique way that software development works and to highlight the importance of technology and the people who manage and build it.
One example of a move towards a developer friendly culture is happening at Walmart. WalmartLabs recently open sourced Electrode, the application platform that powers Walmart.com. Electrode is a modular platform that helps improve application performance, and Walmart is open sourcing the software to give back to the open source world and benefit from additional contributions from the community.
It is important to keep in mind that building a technology-driven culture is not just about free lunches and massages. As Joel Spolsky CEO of Stack Overflow said in a recent interview, “If you want to attract and keep developers, don’t emphasize ping-pong tables, lounges, fire pits and chocolate fountains. Give them private offices or let them work from home because this uninterrupted time to concentrate is the most important and scarcest commodity.
Companies need to move fast and adopt agile practices
The pace of technology adoption is getting faster and faster every year. For example, it took decades for electricity and telephones to reach 50% of US households, but today it takes only years for new technologies like smartphones and tablets to reach a majority of the population. This underscores the importance for companies to continuously adopt new technologies that can enhance productivity and also to continuously experiment with new technologies that have the potential to be disruptive to the business.
An interesting anecdote from The Lean Startup, one of the manifestos for startup founders, is that Intuit holds themselves accountable to being innovative and agile by using two key metrics: (1) the number of customers using products that didn’t exist three years ago and (2) the percentage of revenue coming from offerings that did not exist three years ago. Historically for Intuit, it took a new product an average of 5.5 years to reach $50 million in revenue; at the time the book was written, they had multiple products generating $50 million in revenue that were less than a year old.
Particularly, as the world is moving towards cloud computing, continuous development, and continuous updates are the name of the game. Agile development practices enable you to continuously deliver better experiences for your customers and waterfall development methodology is a relic of the past.
Companies need to look forward and avoid getting caught in the innovator’s dilemma
The classic case for why legacy competitors can do everything “right” and fail is the force of disruptive innovation described in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. Businesses can reject innovations based on customers’ current needs while innovative upstarts develop products in a way that meets customers’ future needs.
Recently, we have seen automakers take very innovative approaches to automotive technology as autonomous vehicles move to the front and center of the startup world with the acquisitions of companies like Otto and Cruise and public pilots of new technologies like Uber’s self-driving cars in Pittsburgh or Tesla’s Autopilot feature.
Ford, in particular, has been very vocal about the autonomous future and the importance of working differently in the context of today’s technology-driven world. Ford’s CEO, Mark Fields, has written that “As little as four years ago, our approach was aligned with the thinking of most automakers today, which is taking incremental steps to achieve full autonomy by advancing driver assist technology. This is not how we look at it today. We learned that to achieve full autonomy, we’d have to take a completely different pathway.”
Conclusion
The race to become the market leader across a variety of sectors and geographies is speeding up amongst older incumbents and promising, young startups. Startups have a lot to learn from the established management and financial practices of incumbents, but incumbents have a lot to learn from startups as well. The companies, young or old, that use technology to best create competitive advantages for themselves will win.
Technology needs to be a fundamental fabric of the company’s DNA and culture as companies truly internalize that “Every company is a technology company”.
Want to learn more about how to bolster your company's technology? Contact us here!
5 keys to simplified mobile protection
Businesses today are reaping the benefits of mobile, like increased productivity, lower overhead, and happier employees. However, mobility can bring added risk, requiring greater focus on protecting data, enabling secure employee access, and managing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) as personal devices are used for work. With the right tools, managing this risk doesn’t have to be complicated.
Here are five components of your business that Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), in conjunction with Office 365 addresses.
People - Give employees the access they need, when and where they need it
Mobile devices - Manage your company resources, regardless of device
Apps - A single platform to manage every app
Data - Protect data wherever it goes
Infrastructure - The foundation that enables mobility
Productivity is the goal of mobility. Security is the requirement. Enabling secure mobile productivity doesn’t need to be overly complicated or expensive. With Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) and Office 365 working together, you ensure employee productivity while keeping your company protected in a mobile world.
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Achieve IT infrastructure cost savings of at least 50%
Call Southern California’s most trusted name in cloud at 800-208-3617 for real time pricing and a cost benefit analysis for Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS.
With Office 365, we’re eager to help your small business achieve more. That’s why we are expanding the value of Office 365 to include not only essential productivity and collaboration tools, but also new services to help you run your business. The launch of Bookings earlier this year introduced a new way to schedule appointments with your customers. Today, we are adding a new tool to help you manage your customer relationships more effectively.
As a business owner, you know that getting repeat business starts with knowing your customers well, remembering the conversations you’ve had, and following through on their requests. That can be a challenge when you have many customers to keep track of and not enough time in the day. To make it easier for you to track and grow your customer relationships, we are introducing a new Office 365 service called Outlook Customer Manager.
Outlook Customer Manager gives you a complete view of your interactions with each customer, helps you track tasks and deals in progress, and surfaces timely reminders. You can stay on top of customer relationships right from Outlook, with no need to install or learn separate tools.
Now included at no extra cost in the Office 365 Business Premium plan, Outlook Customer Manager is a cloud-powered solution designed especially for small businesses. And as your business needs grow, you can move to Dynamics 365 to take advantage of enhanced customer information, process efficiency and consistency, and deeper financial and customer insights.
Customer information in one place—without busy work
Trying to keep up with all the information and tasks from emails, meeting invites, call logs, Excel sheets, handwritten notes and other team members can get in the way of more important work. That’s why Outlook Customer Manager automatically organizes customer information—such as emails, meetings, calls, notes, files, tasks, deals and deadlines—in a timeline next to your inbox.
See customer information next to your inbox so you can act on it right away.
The information in the timeline is automatically gathered from the email, calendar and call log data from your Office 365 environment, minimizing the need to manually enter data about your customer interactions. With all your customer information gathered in one place, you can spend less time entering data, or searching for it in various places, and more time with customers.
Never miss what’s important
Within the busy day of a business owner, it’s easy to forget about items that need follow-up—or worse, fail to fulfill important commitments to a customer. Outlook Customer Manager helps you stay on top of opportunities and commitments by surfacing timely reminders, letting you associate tasks with a contact, company or deal, and listing deals by stage, close dates, priority and amount. To help you prioritize your time, the system automatically presents a Focused list of your most important customers and deals.
Dive in for a detailed view of your customers and deals, and see timely reminders.
Get everyone on the same page
At a small business, everyone pitches in for customers. But when several team members talk to a customer, it can quickly get complicated to keep track of all the communication. With Outlook Customer Manager, you can choose to share customer information with your team so everyone is on the same page.
This means the next time an employee is out sick, other team members can answer a call from their customers with all the needed information at their fingertips—from notes from recent customer calls to upcoming meeting dates, and from deal stage information to the name of that customer’s dog.
Access it all on the go
Get on-the-go access.
Work doesn’t always happen in front of a desk, which is why Outlook Customer Manager has a mobile app that gives you quick access to the same customer information you’ll see at your desktop. You can check recent communication right before meeting with a customer, jot down a quick note after a meeting or scan a business card to quickly create a new business contact—all in a few swipes on your phone.
The mobile app is initially available for iOS, and over time we will bring it to other mobile platforms.
Simple to use
Outlook Customer Manager is accessible in one click from the home tab in your Outlook inbox—so you don’t need to install any new software or spend days training your team to get them started. Because your data stays in Office 365, you don’t waste valuable time setting up connectors to other software or services, or managing separate products.
Get started in one click.
Getting started with Outlook Customer Manager
Outlook Customer Manager is now rolling out to Office 365 Business Premium customers, starting with those opted into First Release and continuing worldwide in the coming months. Once it has rolled out to your Office 365 account, you will see an icon for it in the home tab in Outlook 2016 for Windows. Just click the icon to get started. If you want early access, please see this page for more information on how to join the First Release program for Office 365.
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How to Survive Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday brings a lot of great things, like crazy discounts, free shipping codes, and the best deals for online shopping. The holiday also brings a lot of bad things, like data breaches and server crashes. As your employees (and customers) may be online shopping all day, don't let your company data go unprotected. A Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution can keep your business safe while the sales commence.
Securing productivity, collaboration and enterprise data is critically important as organizations digitally transform.
3 Obvious Reasons You Need A Backup & Disaster Recovery Plan
You need to protect your company data from security threats and hackers. Did you see all the recent news of political breaches by hackers who exposed “secure” data?
Natural disasters do occur and 90% of companies that experience one week of data downtime go out of business within 12 months.
Systems do crash, data gets erased or corrupted, viruses attack.
With vast quantities of vital data moving through your business, even with limited resources and budget, it is critical for an organization to have a true business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place. This is the only solution to deliver an advanced insurance policy against loss of data and downtime.
Managed Solution provides a Business Continuity/Backup & Disaster Recovery Service to protect data from loss and prevent costly downtime in the event of a catastrophic server failure.
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At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
We care deeply about how we achieve that mission and our lasting impact on the world. Across the company, we are working to apply the power of technology to ensure corporate responsibility, safeguard human rights and protect our planet. This commitment is central to why many of our employees come to work every day, and it impacts the type of products and services we develop.
In our 2016 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report, which we published today, you will find information about our policies and business practices which reflect our commitment to making the planet a better place.
During fiscal year 2016, Microsoft made progress on a number of fronts:
· Expanding our commitment to sustainability by establishing new energy goals, including having our data centers rely on a larger percentage of wind, solar and hydro power electricity over time.
· Prioritizing inclusive design and accessibility in the development of our products and services to empower everyone, while deepening our inclusive culture at Microsoft.
· Enhancing our companywide privacy principles and the Microsoft Privacy Statement to protect our customers’ personal data and their right to privacy.
· Holding our suppliers accountable to human rights, labor, health and safety, environmental, and business ethics practices prescribed in our Supplier Code of Conduct.
· Expanding economic opportunity to every corner of the planet through Microsoft Philanthropies’ three-year commitment to donate $1 billion in public cloud computing for nonprofits around the world.
· Contributing to public policy discussions with a new book, “A Cloud for Global Good,” which lays out a roadmap of 78 specific policy recommendations to help ensure cloud computing is trusted, responsible and inclusive.
As part of our commitment to transparency, this report builds on Microsoft’s prior annual citizenship reporting, but is now designed to be a living reporting website where we can offer both the year-over-year data we traditionally provide as well as ongoing updates throughout the year on important developments on our efforts.
We take seriously our responsibilities to help the world achieve more and are committed to meeting our responsibility to address economic, social and environmental issues. We also recognize the importance of partnerships and value the opportunity to work with nonprofits, advocates, governments, academics, customers and employees to advance progress. Together, we can strengthen communities and ensure greater outcomes for all.
We will continue to dedicate ourselves to the challenges humankind faces, the role technology can play and the unique contributions Microsoft can make in cooperation with others around the world.
Contact us Today!
Chat with an expert about your business’s technology needs.
