Whether you’re planning your next dinner date or an upcoming meeting with teammates, the Outlook team’s mission is to provide you with the best calendar app out there. Today, we’re happy to share that it’s about to get even better on iOS and Android—with new features and a better overall experience to help you manage and make the most of your day.
Here’s a look at what’s new:
Stay connected with Interesting Calendars
A few months ago, we introduced Calendar Apps to let you connect your favorite apps—Wunderlist, Facebook and Evernote—to your calendar. Our goal? To give you a complete and clear view of your day with your events, tasks and notes in one place.
Today, we’re taking this idea one step further by adding Interesting Calendars, which allows you to subscribe to your hometown sports team’s calendar and see the events automatically pop up in your calendar. TV shows and more will be following soon
Interesting Calendars is available today to Outlook for iOS users with an Office 365 email address (coming soon to Android). Users with an Outlook.com email address will be able to subscribe later this year, with Gmail and other accounts to follow.
Add some personality to your agenda with event icons
Try typing “coffee” or “lunch” next time you create an event and see what happens in your agenda view—the keywords automatically trigger an icon that matches your event title. Icons come in handy when you want to scan your day quickly and see what’s coming up. Also, they’re fun.
For Sunrise users, we even added new icons on top of our regular list. Let us know once you’ve found them all.
Know where you need to go with maps in event details
Don’t want to get lost on your way to your next appointment? Just start typing a location next time you create an event, choose one of the handy suggestions (powered by Bing) and Outlook will include a map with your event details.
Now, before your next event, you can simply tap on the map in the event details and get directions from your favorite maps app.
Schedule in a snap with improved date and time pickers
As we continue to bring more of the Sunrise design expertise to Outlook, we updated our date and time pickers so that scheduling is easier than ever. Our new design provides a simpler, more intuitive way to choose the date and time when creating a meeting—matching how Outlook works on the web or desktop. You can try this out today in Outlook for iOS, and it is coming soon on Android.
Update meetings on the fly with recurrence editing
Recurring meetings can be edited from your mobile device. Now you can adjust the time, location, attendees or even delete the event if necessary while on the go. Outlook confirms if you’d like your changes to apply to the individual instance or all the meetings in the series. We will be adding the ability to create recurring events in an upcoming update.
Make meetings on the go easier with Skype for Business
Following our Skype integration, you can now create Skype for Business meetings directly from your phone. When creating a new event on your Office 365 calendar, the option to add a Skype meeting is now included. Simply tap the Skype Meeting toggle and Outlook includes your company’s Skype information in the description of the event. When the meeting arrives, you’ll also be able to join the call with just a tap.
And there’s even more to come!
Let us know what you think of our new calendar features! We’re not stopping here in our quest to provide you with the best calendar experience on iOS and Android. If you have other ideas for what would make the calendar experience even better for you, let us know right from Outlook by going to Settings > Suggest a Feature.
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New Azure services help more people realize the possibilities of big data
This week in San Jose thousands of people are at Strata + Hadoop World to explore the technology and business of big data. As part of our participation in the conference, we are pleased to announce new and enhanced Microsoft data services: a preview of Azure HDInsight running on Linux, the general availability of Storm on HDInsight, the general availability of Azure Machine Learning, and the availability of Informatica technology on Azure.
These new services are part of our continued investment in a broad portfolio of solutions to unlock insights from data. They can help businesses dramatically improve their performance, enable governments to better serve their citizenry, or accelerate new advancements in science. Our goal is to make big data technology simpler and more accessible to the greatest number of people possible: big data pros, data scientists and app developers, but also everyday businesspeople and IT managers. Azure is at the center of our strategy, offering customers scale, simplicity and great economics. And we’re embracing open technologies, so people can use the tools, languages and platforms of their choice to pull the maximum value from their data.
Simply put, we want to bring big data to the mainstream.
Azure HDInsight, our Apache Hadoop-based service in the cloud, is a prime example. It makes it easy for customers to crunch petabytes of all types of data with fast, cost-effective scale on demand, as well as programming extensions so developers can use their favorite languages. Customers like Virginia Tech, Chr. Hanson, Mediatonic and many others are using it to find important data insights. And, today, we are announcing that customers can run HDInsight on Ubuntu clusters (the leading scale-out Linux), in addition to Windows, with simple deployment, a managed service level agreement and full technical support. This is particularly compelling for people that already use Hadoop on Linux on-premises like on Hortonworks Data Platform, because they can use common Linux tools, documentation, and templates and extend their deployment to Azure with hybrid cloud connections.
Storm for Azure HDInsight, generally available today, is another example of making big data simpler and more accessible. Storm is an open source stream analytics platform that can process millions of data “events” in real time as they are generated by sensors and devices. Using Storm with HDInsight, customers can deploy and manage applications for real-time analytics and Internet-of-Things scenarios in a few minutes with just a few clicks. Linkury is using HDInsight with Storm for its online monetization services, for example. We are also making Storm available for both .NET and Java and the ability to develop, deploy, and debug real-time Storm applications directly in Visual Studio. That helps developers to be productive in the environments they know best.
You can read this blog to learn about these and other updates we’re making to HDInsight to make Hadoop simpler and easier to use on Azure.
Azure Machine Learning, also generally available today, further demonstrates our commitment to help more people and organizations use the cloud to unlock the possibilities of data. It is a first-of-its-kind, managed cloud service for advanced analytics that makes it dramatically simpler for businesses to predict future trends with data. In mere hours, developers and data scientists can build and deploy apps to improve customer experiences, predict and prevent system failures, enhance operational efficiencies, uncover new technical insights, or a universe of other benefits. Such advanced analytics normally take weeks or months and require extensive investment in people, hardware and software to manage big data. Also, now developers – even those without data science training – can use the Machine Learning Marketplace to find APIs and finished services, such as recommendations, anomaly detection and forecasting, in order to deploy solutions quickly. Already customers like Pier 1, Carnegie Mellon, eSmart Systems, Mendeley and ThyssenKrupp are finding value in their data with Azure Machine Learning.
Azure Machine Learning reflects our support for open source. The Python programming language is a first class citizen in Azure Machine Learning Studio, along with R, the popular language of statisticians. New breakthrough algorithms, such as “Learning with Counts,” now allow customers to learn from terabytes of data. A new community gallery allows data scientists to share experiments via Twitter and LinkedIn, too. You can read more about these innovations and how customers are using Azure Machine Learning in this blog post.
Another key part of our strategy is to offer customers a wide range of partner solutions that build on and extend the benefits of Azure data services. Today, data integration leader Informatica is joining the growing ecosystem of partners in the Azure Marketplace. The Informatica Cloud agent is now available in Linux and Windows virtual machines on Azure. That will enable enterprise customers to create data pipelines from both on-premises systems and the cloud to Azure data services such as Azure HDInsight, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Data Factory and others, for management and analysis.
The value provided by our data services multiplies when customers use them together. A case in point is Ziosk, maker of the world’s first ordering, entertainment and pay-at-the table tablet. They are using Azure HDInsight, Azure Machine Learning, our Power BI analytics service and other Microsoft technologies to help restaurant chains like Chili’s drive guest satisfaction, frequency and advocacy with data from tabletop devices in 1,400 locations.
This week the big data world is focused on Strata + Hadoop World, a great event for the industry and community. It’s exciting to consider the new ideas and innovations happening around the world every day with data. Here at Microsoft, we’re thrilled to be part of it and to fuel that innovation with data solutions that give customers simple but powerful capabilities, using their choice of tools and platforms in the cloud.
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