New Windows 10 upgrade benefits for Windows Cloud Subscriptions in CSP

New Windows 10 upgrade benefits for Windows Cloud Subscriptions in CSP

By Nic Fillingham as written on blogs.windows.com

We’re excited to announce that customers with Windows subscriptions via the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program can now upgrade their Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PCs and devices to Windows 10 at no additional cost.
This means customers subscribed to Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and E5 as well as Secure Productive Enterprise E3 and E5, can now upgrade their Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PCs and devices to Windows 10 without the need to purchase separate upgrade licenses.
This is an important benefit addition to Windows cloud subscriptions in CSP as it enables customers who have yet to purchase a new Windows 10 device, or who missed out on the free upgrade to Windows 10 campaign, to take advantage of enterprise-grade security, managed by a trusted partner, for the price of coffee and a donut.
In order to take advantage of this new upgrade benefit, tenant admins for customers with Windows cloud subscriptions can log in to the Office 365 Admin center http://portal.office.com with their Azure Active Directory admin credentials and see options to begin the upgrade on the device they are currently using, share the download link with others in their organization, create installation media or troubleshoot installation.
The Windows 10 upgrade licenses issued as part of this process are perpetual and associated with the device. This means the license will not expire or be revoked if the customer chooses to end their Windows cloud subscription in the CSP program.

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The new upgrade benefits are rolling out now and tenant admins with Windows subscriptions in CSP should start to see Windows 10 upgrade options and links in their Office 365 Admin center over the next 48 hours.
We hope these new Windows 10 upgrade benefits will better enable businesses of any size – including those with PCs and devices still on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 – to work with a trusted partner to upgrade to enterprise-grade security and management with flexible, small business pricing from just $7 per user, per month.

NGA Human Resources builds a more engaging employee experience with move to Office 365

employee-engagement-managed-solution

NGA Human Resources builds a more engaging employee experience with move to Office 365

By Russell Sheldon, chief information officer, senior vice president for HR consulting, application services and global technology, as written on blogs.office.com.
At NGA Human Resources (NGA HR), the way we engage with our employees—and what we believe it takes to be a great employer—centers around building a positive employee experience. This is what we do on a daily basis for our customers, and it’s equally true for our internal operations.
When new employees join the business, regardless of location or job function, it is vital that they feel part of our global organization. (We operate in more than 35 countries, serving customers in more than 145 countries in 25 languages.) All employees need to be connected, engaging in the company culture that drives our success as a business.
In the digital economy, technology, location and time zones should not be a barrier to productivity. Given our global presence, using technology that promotes worldwide collaboration is critical. In turn, collaboration and the sharing of ideas are paramount to fostering talent. We enact our belief that employees everywhere should feel connected to their organization and that they should be able to work as easily together as they do individually.
Our corporate objective is to make HR work better for businesses. To do this, we have to make the workplace a great place for people to work. For example, we rely on the same HR and payroll platform internally that we use to empower millions of our customers’ employees around the world.
As a business and a services provider, NGA HR has a policy of investing in innovative technologies that drive business efficiencies and improve the employee experience, while continuing to adhere to the strictest compliance requirements.
That is why, when our G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Work) contract came up for renewal, we took the time to evaluate what we require as a global organization. We reviewed the market for cloud-based business tools that would help us achieve the scope of global collaboration and individual productivity that we want for our employees, yet still maintain the highest level of data security.
We selected Microsoft Office 365 and migrated our back-office applications and internal collaboration platform from Google to Office 365. We believe that Office 365 presents more aligned business services that will make it easier for us to grow, develop, and most importantly, retain our talent. Employees want to work for an organization that uses technology to improve their work experience so they can collaborate and innovate more effectively to contribute to its growth. This is the inherent value of effective business productivity tools.
A perfect example comes from our chief executive officer, Adel Al-Saleh. Today, he uses Skype for Business Online to host video calls with our 300 global leaders, something that was not possible before. Now the leadership team meets more frequently, using interactive virtual discussions to speed decision making on a global scale. I run a team of approximately 2,000 people around the world. I use Skype for Business Online to connect in real time with 30 of my senior managers, dramatically reducing the time and cost of business travel and freeing up my time and budget for allocation to more strategic requirements. Also, now that we can rely on the de facto industry standard for office collaboration, our commercial teams are responding to RFPs and collaborating on documents more efficiently than ever.
Because Microsoft includes intuitive collaborative capabilities throughout Office 365, it’s easy to be productive. You can kick off a Skype for Business Online call from your inbox and access all Office documents from any device. Now mobile employees stay in touch with work using minimal effort.
The fact that we had more than 8,000 employees regularly active on our Yammer enterprise social network just four weeks after we went live demonstrates that Google was not addressing the need we had for companywide collaboration. Today, we have listened to our employees, and we are providing them with the same ease of communication and access to data that they are used to at home.
Also, with Office 365, we can maintain a hybrid environment. This is hugely advantageous to us when working with customers whose data cannot leave their geographic borders. NGA HR manages the payroll data of millions of employees around the world every year, so we take data security very seriously. We can assure all customers that Office 365 meets our internal compliance mandate and European data privacy standards. It adheres to the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party (A29WP) opinion on cloud computing around basic principles of transparency, purpose limitation, data retention, access and disclosure restriction. We also took into consideration the positive opinion of A29WP on the Microsoft Cloud business solution, in line with European data transfer and protection clauses.
Our relationship with Microsoft got off to an incredible start with the highly successful implementation of Office 365. Thanks to the close collaboration among NGA HR, the Microsoft FastTrack team and Microsoft partner Content and Code, we migrated 8,000 employees across the globe, with all their data, in just 12 weeks.
The deployment and change management expertise of the FastTrack team helped us meet our strict deadline, imposed by the expiration of the Google contract, with comfortable breathing space. With a minimal learning curve, everyone in the organization is more mobile, connected and agile. The feedback from employees is positive, and we are already seeing great results. Today, NGA HR is looking forward to even greater collaboration and localization of our global business.

Manage BYOD and corporate-owned devices with MDM Solutions

byod-managed-solution-jpgManage BYOD and corporate-owned devices with MDM solutions

As written on microsoft.com
With the increasing volume and diversity of both ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) and corporate-owned devices being used in organizations today, a growing challenge for IT departments is keeping corporate information secure. Microsoft mobile application management (MAM) and mobile device management (MDM) solutions help minimize this complexity by offering management capabilities both on-premises and in the cloud, all from a single console.
For more information, watch Enterprise Mobility: Mitchells & Butlers boosts service with managed mobile platform:
MANAGE DEVICES AND APPS FROM THE CLOUD
With the proliferation of mobile devices in the workplace, employees can, and do, work from just about anywhere. To stay productive, this mobile workforce demands consistent access to corporate resources and data from any location on any device. This BYOD trend has introduced significant challenges for IT administrators who want to enable enterprise mobility while ensuring that corporate resources are protected from unauthorized access.
Leveraging Microsoft Intune, you can deliver application and device management completely from the cloud, or on-premises through integration with System Center Configuration Manager, all via a single management console.
Microsoft has also incorporated manageability and data protection directly into the Intune-managed Office mobile apps to help maximize productivity while providing the flexibility to extend these same management capabilities to your existing line-of-business apps through the Intune App Wrapping Tool. You can choose to manage the Office mobile apps with or without enrolling the device for management to protect corporate information without the risk of intruding on a user’s personal life.
Intune is included in Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security—a cost-effective way to use enterprise mobility cloud services for all of your employees.
BENEFITS

 

For more information, watch the mobile device and application management overview video below:
Microsoft Intune: Mobile Device and Application Management Overview

 

Improving service quality in Skype for Business

improving-skype-4-b-managed-solutionImproving service quality in Skype for Business

As written on microsoft.com/itshowcase

 

When Microsoft IT deployed Skype for Business 2015 to support our highly mobile global user base, our goal was to provide the best user experience in the industry. We learned valuable lessons about hardware requirements, managing our complex network, accommodating diverse and remote clients, and running a unified communications platform in a hybrid cloud environment. We also helped develop a Call Quality Dashboard to help other organizations optimize the user experience.

Microsoft is a leader in unified communications—where voice, instant messaging, and conferencing converge to help employees communicate and collaborate effectively from anywhere. In 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype and integrated it into our Lync unified communications solution to create Skype for Business. Skype for Business has a design inspired by Skype and the security, compliance, and control of Lync.

In 2013, Microsoft IT planned to deploy a pre-release version of Skype for Business to the Microsoft global user base. Feedback from these users would help the product team improve the product before public release. To get Skype for Business to work well for our internal users, though, we would need to manage a complex environment. Unified communications is a real-time service that’s sensitive to change, client-to-client or server health anomalies, network latency, packet loss, and jitter.

Also, we knew that our hardware would be insufficient to support peak usage. We knew this because when we upgraded from Lync 2010 to Lync 2013, users experienced poor call quality, dropped calls, and bad connections. In 2014, we had 10 major incidents when as many as 1,000 Lync users were unable to make calls, join meetings, or were disconnected during a call. We determined that the problem was outdated hardware. The Lync 2013 architecture requires more robust hardware than Lync 2010, but we were still running the old servers. Skype for Business has the same architecture as Lync 2013, so without a hardware upgrade, the user experience would be poor, no matter what else we did.

Together with the product team, we launched the Get to Green program in March 2014, with “green” being the desired state of the service as shown in our metrics. Our goal was to make the end-to-end Skype for Business user experience the best in the industry. In addition to upgrading hardware, we needed to address issues arising from incompatible client drivers and hardware and a variety of networking environments. Also, more and more of our users were connecting to Skype for Business using personal devices and personal wireless networks that we don’t manage. We would need to find ways to improve the way our service performs on these unmanaged devices and external networks.

Creating a plan for great service quality

We got together with the product team to plan the Get to Green program. Our goal was to improve the user experience so there would be fewer dropped calls and better voice and video quality. To succeed, we would need to assess the environment and identify areas of opportunity to improve the service.

We would measure our success by using the Global Employee Satisfaction Survey and the Poor Call Rate (PCR). The employee satisfaction survey is administered bi-annually to a cross-section of employees that represent all roles and regions. It gathers their opinions about Microsoft IT services and resources, including their unified communications user experiences. PCR is an objective measure of call quality, based on a mean opinion score (MOS) for packet loss, jitter, concealment ratio, and round-trip times.

Defining problem areas

To plan improvements that would have the most impact, we assessed the service environment and identified the following areas that affect the user experience the most.

Identifying areas of opportunity

To improve the user experience, we focused our efforts on improving these areas:

Focusing on the remote user experience

We decided to focus on improving service quality for our most challenging group of users, field sales people. Out of all our users, they’re the most dependent on the Skype for Business service. They don’t have the benefit of our stable corporate network, so their calls are often affected by network anomalies. Field sales users are often not in corporate offices and they rely heavily on unified communications to do their work. They often connect over external wireless networks of variable quality, and are the most affected by quality and reliability issues. We knew that once we got the service working well for them, all of our users would benefit.

The following two tables show the roles that are most affected by service quality, and the percentage of field sales people that are affected by poor PCR, respectively.

Optimizing Skype for Business

Over a period of several months, we made improvements to the server and network infrastructure, client devices, and user support. We’ve also continued migrating more of our user base to the cloud. While we still have a way to go, early results show that our approach is working, and the user experience is improving.

Increasing server capacity and redundancy

For the on-premises deployment of Skype for Business, a key area that we needed to address was server reliability and availability. To improve reliability and availability, we needed to increase server capacity and introduce redundancy to support the Skype for Business architecture. The old hardware we were using had been designed for Lync 2010, which had a distributed architecture where a capability or service runs on a separate server. To increase scalability, the Lync 2013 architecture allows multiple services to run on a single server or across server farms. Capacity can then be increased by adding servers. This architecture boosts the need for server performance, though. More CPU and memory is required to serve peak loads. For redundancy, we would need to add servers.

Skype for Business uses the same architecture as Lync 2013. To increase reliability and performance, we deployed more robust hardware to meet the new requirements. Also, to take advantage of its threading improvements over Microsoft Windows Server 2008, we decided to run the infrastructure on Windows Server 2012 R2 instead. Upgrading to Windows Server 2012 R2 yielded the added benefits of Windows Fabric, which Skype for Business makes extensive use of.

While still running Lync 2013, we upgraded all of our hardware to support the new consolidated architecture, where multiple services run on the same server. We first set up the new hardware infrastructure and then migrated our Lync 2013 servers over to it. This increased server capacity and network bandwidth to support optimal performance at peak load. It eliminated single points of failure and created redundancy to make the service highly available. Once Lync 2013 was up and running on the new hardware, we were able to do an in-place upgrade to Skype for Business.

To do this migration, we started with the backend servers and user pools, and then migrated the front-end servers. We migrated groups of users in a phased manner so that we could monitor and correct issues as we went along. When all users were migrated, we decommissioned the old hardware. After the servers were upgraded, we upgraded the Lync clients to Skype for Business clients.

Improving networking

We needed to ensure that the network could support peak load, which meant upgrading our data center circuits. We also made appropriate firewall settings, provided better DNS infrastructure, and enabled end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) on the network to prioritize voice and video traffic.

We also needed to account for changes in the way users access unified communications. With Lync 2010, most of our users had hard-wired connections. By the time we were ready to deploy Skype for Business, most of them used wireless connections. The wireless infrastructure in our buildings was creating a huge bottleneck that we had to fix.

We’ve improved our networks and upgraded our unified communications devices to gain better performance and call quality, as follows:

For details on network planning approaches for Lync Server and Skype for Business Server 2015, seeNetwork Planning, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting with Lync Server.

Improving device management

We developed a Skype for Business tool called the Call Quality Dashboard to help us track down call quality issues. Some of these issues are caused by devices that have incompatible drivers and hardware. The dashboard lets us drill down and identify exactly which devices are causing problems, even personal, unmanaged, devices. We can then work with the users to correct the issues. We’re now able to manage all of our devices better. The Call Quality Dashboard is discussed in more detail later, in Monitoring service health.

Moving to the cloud

We’re gradually moving our users to the cloud-based Office 365 Enterprise E5 service, which includes Skype for Business. By 2017, we plan to move 90 percent of our users to this service (keeping some users on-premises so we can continue to support our on-premises server product). This will resolve many of our current reliability and availability issues. It will also reduce the cost of supporting unified communications.

 

We’re migrating our users in steps. Within the United States, we’ve moved almost all of our users to the Office 365 Enterprise E5 service. To support our customers outside the United States, we still use the Skype for Business 2015 on premises solution. This is because, until recently, Office 365 Enterprise E5 was available only in North America. Now the service is expanding globally, and we plan to move all of our international users to it by 2017. We’ll do this in stages as the service becomes available in different parts of the world. As we gradually migrate our international users, we’ll be able to eliminate the on-premises infrastructure in other countries/regions and data centers.

In the meantime, some of our users are hosted on a cloud server, but still have on-premises voice service provided by a telecommunications company. Ultimately, when we move everyone to Office 365 Enterprise E5, we will no longer need the external telecommunications provider, but will receive all of our communications services through Office 365 Enterprise E5.

Creating a feedback loop with users

Telemetry doesn’t tell the entire story. We also collect and prioritize user feedback to reveal blind spots and drive improvements to the product and service. The Global Employee Satisfaction Survey—our main mechanism for listening to users—tells us where we need to improve. In addition, we’ve created an internal SharePoint site called Skype@Microsoft (shown in Figure 3) that gives users ways to send us feedback and requests. It’s the starting point for everything to do with using Skype for Business: community engagement, information, self-service tools, and alerts.

We also gather data from a questionnaire that pops up when a user finishes a Skype call. It lets us know about call quality issues. We view the data in our Call Quality Dashboard, described later.

Helping users help themselves

We depend on our users to make good technology choices. Using the right kinds of devices, peripherals, and Wi-Fi networks with Skype for Business improves their experience. Our Skype@Microsoft SharePoint site gives users help on using Skype for Business, including guidance on technology selection and self-service tools to help them assess how well their client is working. We recommend that they select from a list of peripheral devices that we certified for Skype for Business. The certification process ensures that the devices work well. For the list, see Phones and devices for Skype for Business. We also provideinstructional videos.

For our field sales sellers, our most challenging user group, we’ve also developed an outreach program that includes training on tools, tips, and best practices to get the best Skype for Business user experience. These are summarized in the following figure.

Monitoring service health

We use a number of tools to continuously monitor service health, so that we can correct issues that might interfere with a good user experience.

Call Quality Dashboard

To help us diagnose network infrastructure issues affecting call quality, we developed the Call Quality Dashboard, which is included with Skype for Business Server 2015. For each phone call, it shows the type of call (wired or wireless, internal or external) and provides a measure of call quality. It uses PCR as a key performance indicator and rates calls from 1 to 4 based on packet loss and jitter. We also developed the Call Quality Methodology to use with the dashboard data. It provides a step-by-step approach to improving call quality. This has helped us to speed up our investigations and quickly resolve issues.

Using the dashboard, Microsoft IT managers drill down into the metrics—even to the individual call—to ensure that we’re delivering the best user experience at each location or building. We look at the following information:

 

We use this data along with the Call Quality Methodology to drive improvements across Microsoft, and so far have reduced PCR from 8 percent to less than 2 percent. We’re training IT managers to use the tools to drive improvements in their buildings by correcting issues with underperforming devices, incompatible drivers and client versions, and insufficient network bandwidth.

Performing site investigations

Our IT site managers perform site investigations by drilling down into Call Quality Dashboard data to uncover the source of issues. Once they know the source, they can remediate it. The following screen capture shows a top-level view of the data for one of our buildings. The yellow trend lines in the graphs represent the PCR rates on wired and Wi-Fi networks and by day of week. In this case, they’re all trending down, which means the service is getting healthier. The red sections in the graphs represent calls with a PCR that’s higher than the target desirable state. We drill down for more detail, such as the type of calls involved, the network device drivers being used, the wireless hotspot in use, the wireless channel, and so forth. The user ratings that we capture on call quality are also included in the dashboard.

System Center Operations Manager

We use the management packfor Skype for Business Server 2015 to monitor our servers and get alerts on issues, such as when Skype for Business processes exceed a defined performance threshold.

Key Health Indicators

We use the following Key Health Indicator (KHI) performance counters to get metrics about server health: CPU and memory utilization, and TCP transmit time. Along with other resources, you can download the KHI Guide that outlines the methodology that we use to measure KHIs on servers and our environment.

Network tools

We use tools such as the policy assurance manager tool in HP Network Automation to ensure that routers and switches in the data centers are running a compliant configuration and to ensure QoS is enabled end to end. We can also determine where we need to provide additional capacity to achieve availability and reliability for the network and server infrastructure. We use another internal tool to ensure all the network devices are running the gold code and that they’re meeting our capacity and compliance standards.

We also use tools such as Unify Square PowerMon to measure quality during synthetic transactions. We set up probes and test accounts in data centers.

Measuring success

While we’re continually improving, we’re already seeing improvements in the user experience and also enjoying cost benefits:

Best practices for a great user experience

Use these best practices to improve the user experience with Skype for Business in your organization.

Provide sufficient capacity and bandwidth

Make sure that server capacity and network bandwidth support optimal performance at peak load. Use redundant systems to make sure that the service is highly available. Enable networking QoS, and open the recommended ports for optimal performance. To ensure your infrastructure supports the best possible service, be sure to follow the capacity planning guidelines for Skype for Business.

Put the right tools in your toolbox

Acquire and set up the tools discussed in this paper so you can monitor and manage Skype for Business service quality.

Move to the cloud

To gain performance and feature benefits, plan to move your Skype for Business users to the cloud—Office 365 Enterprise E5. Not only will it cost less, but it will increase your unified communications capabilities. Also, users like the Skype for Business client. Our Microsoft users are much happier with it.

If you haven’t already deployed a unified communications service, you can start offering a 100-percent, cloud-based service through Office 365 Enterprise E5. Not only will you avoid needing to support the infrastructure, but you’ll no longer have to pay telecommunications providers for telephone services. Rather, your users can connect to the Internet using Skype for Business, and Microsoft Azure will route telephone calls for them. This can represent a large savings for your organizations.

Listen to your users

Take these steps to ensure a great user experience:

Help your users get good results

Make sure that users are empowered with tools and training to get the best possible Skype for Business experience. There are many situations that users can manage better than IT can. Help your users help themselves by giving them guidance and the right tools. Provide real-time notification of incidents and self-service workarounds. Make information on best practices easy to find.

Ensure client health before a meeting starts

Provide tools to ensure that the client is as healthy as possible before a user joins a meeting.

Use the recommended home router and best practices guide

For remote users, provide guidance for selecting and configuring a home router. Have a list of recommended Wi Fi routers. Use diagnostic tools to make sure the home Wi-Fi network is performing well.

Use approved headsets and peripherals

Recommend Skype-certified headsets and peripherals to ensure the best possible experience for your meetings. The certification process ensures that peripherals work well.

Get ready for the first truly Digital Decade

first-digital-decade-managed-solution

Get ready for the first truly Digital Decade

By John Biggs as written on techcrunch.com
No matter how this election ends one thing is clear: what happens online in the next decade will have an increasingly important effect on our daily lives. Until recently politics, warfare, commerce, and education has mostly been offline. That will change drastically in the next ten years.
But isn’t the world already digital? Most of it is but the places that it isn’t – parts of rural America, the third world, huge swathes of Asia and India – are getting more bandwidth than ever. Our devices are constantly online and listening and our homes are full of things that glow, beep, and buzz.
Look at the news. The FBI is using Malware “like a grenade.” Legal pot sellers are using Bitcoin to skirt banking regulations. The coffee shop has been replaced by the Facebook thread. The two biggest crises of this US election are based on the infallibility of network memory. In one corner Clinton was constantly attacked for an email server and on the other side Trump was attacked for things he said in passing that spread like kudzu through the Internet. Ultimately both sides used the Internet to magnify their message.
Social media is just the beginning. We are already offloading most of our petty tasks to computers and as they get smarter we’ll offload even more.
A plugged-in fried of mine expects commercial quantum computing to come online in five years. This means we’ll have more computing power available to us (and our cloud services) than ever. Our devices are constantly listening and at the ready and self-driving cars are coming faster than we expected. While many technologies, including blockchain, will take decades to mature we can expect parts of these technologies to embed themselves in our lives in the next few years.
We must react to these changes quickly or be quickly left behind. The digital-first government services cropping up in Estonia and the pro-startup movement in Poland are perfect examples of countries doing it mostly right. The bad news is that legislators are bailing water out of a sinking boat and not plugging existing holes. Banking regulation is woefully behind the times as is the slow crawl of drug legalization. There are no clear ways forward to catching and trying international cybercriminals and in an era when the next military attack could come from the Internet that’s pretty scary. 3D printing is a great hobby but it quickly get derailed by talk of 3D printed guns and drone bombs. We are at once ignorant of the extent and danger of our digital world and deathly afraid of it.
The next ten years will require us all to understand the vagaries of email servers, how to react when the credit card system is shut down by Anonymous, and how to avoid getting hit by ransomware. We’ll be plugging in more and more often and the world may look like an episode of Black Mirror if we don’t start actively separating the online and offline by putting our toys away and looking each other in the eye. And, in the end, the pace of change will keep rising, leaving the angry, the afraid, and the uneducated behind. I’d wager it’s our collective mission to make sure that doesn’t happen and, if it does, that the damage is limited and the lessons learned are the good ones.

Healthcare Compliance, Security, and Trusted Health Technology

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Healthcare compliance, security, and trusted health technology

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Integrate and simplify your healthcare compliance

Security and healthcare compliance offerings from Microsoft help protect your ICT infrastructure. Protection, access , and management features help you manage risk and achieve your strategic goals. The cloud is a far more powerful, far less expensive way to innovate than health solutions built the traditional way. But health organizations need to trust that sensitive information will stay secure and comply with regulations when they adopt cloud platforms. We are committed to ensuring that your data stays secure, private, and under your control, and that with the Microsoft Cloud, you will stay compliant, even as regulations and standards evolve.

Deliver security-enhanced access from virtually anywhere

For more information call 858-429-3000

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Healthcare Mobility Solutions from Managed Solution

The Microsoft family of devices, services, and solutions can help transform the way care teams communicate and access and use information throughout the course of their day. Windows-based, clinical-grade devices help to enable virtually anywhere access to actionable intelligence, resources, and personalized experiences that improve user productivity. With these enterprise-grade solutions that help keep patient information secure and compliant, users can leverage any single clinical-grade device to tap into comprehensive information systems while enjoying the ease of use associated with advanced technology. By providing efficient access to patient health information to both care teams and patients, all involved parties have the information they need to make informed decisions and to follow through on the prescribed care regimen.
The Microsoft Connected Health Platform (CHP) provides a collection of best practices and guidelines to help build e-health solutions that are efficient, security-enhanced, flexible, and scalable. All of these features build a platform that helps improve patient engagement.
Based on the extensible and agile principles of the Connected Health Framework (CHF), Microsoft CHP provides offerings for optimizing health information and communication technology, including prescriptive architecture, design, and deployment guidance; tools; and solution accelerators. Microsoft CHP is built primarily on a foundation of application platform technologies and services, as well as generic Microsoft infrastructure optimization models and tools, tailored for the health environment, enabling the delivery and management of on-premises, cloud, or hybrid solutions.

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Designing secure health solutions with Azure

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Designing secure health solutions with Azure

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Receive guidance and considerations you need to make regarding the secure use and implementation of Azure cloud technology
Since its launch in 2010, Microsoft Azure has gained rapid adoption from organizations of all sizes around the world, spanning many industries. The users of Azure benefit from agility, reduced costs and complexity, limitless scale, and innovation made possible by cloud computing.
For organizations in regulated industries, such as healthcare, where laws regulate protected health information (PHI), the need to understand how cloud adoption affects their privacy, security, and regulatory compliance posture is paramount. These organizations should seek deeper understanding and guidance in solution design and cloud deployment operations.

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The future of mobile app development

The future of mobile app development

By Nat Friedman as written on blogs.microsoft.com

It is incredible how much has happened since Xamarin joined Microsoft just over a month ago, starting with Scott Guthrie’s Build 2016 announcements that Xamarin is now part of all editions of Visual Studio at no additional charge — from Community to Enterprise — and our plans to open source the Xamarin SDK. It is a dream come true for us to be able to put the power of Xamarin into the hands of all developers.
In just the first two weeks since Build alone, we helped nearly 3.5 times more developers get started building great apps with Xamarin than ever in our history as a company.
Now we are at Xamarin Evolve 2016, the world’s largest cross-platform mobile development conference, in Orlando. This morning we open sourced the Xamarin SDK and launched new ways to make Visual Studio the most complete mobile development environment. We also launched new ways to build native, cross-platform apps faster than ever using our popular cross-platform UI framework, Xamarin.Forms.
This is our third Evolve conference, but the first time we are showing the comprehensive developer experience that only Microsoft and Xamarin together can deliver.
Open source Xamarin: Ready for you!
We have officially open sourced and contributed to the .NET Foundation the Xamarin SDK for Android, iOS and Mac under the same MIT license used for the Mono project. This includes native API bindings for iOS, Android and Mac, the command-line tools necessary to build for these platforms, and Xamarin.Forms, our popular cross-platform UI framework.

Watching Xamarin co-founder and open source pioneer Miguel de Icaza announce this onstage was a proud moment for all of us. The future of native cross-platform mobile development is now in the hands of every developer. We look forward to seeing your contributions; go to open.xamarin.com to get involved.

Visual Studio: Your complete mobile development environment
Today we launched new ways to connect Visual Studio to your Mac to make it even easier for C# developers to create native iOS apps, and new ways to auto-generate mobile app test scripts in Visual Studio.
Our iOS Simulator remoting lets you simulate and interact with your iOS apps in Visual Studio — even supporting multi-touch interactions on Windows machines with capable touch screens. We also unveiled our iOS USB remoting, which makes it possible to deploy and debug apps from Visual Studio to an iPad or iPhone plugged into your Windows PC.
In addition, our Test Recorder Visual Studio Plugin now brings Test Recorder’s ability to generate test scripts to Visual Studio users. Simply interact with your app on device or in the simulator and Test Recorder automatically generates scripts that can be run on thousands of devices with Xamarin Test Cloud’s automated app testing.

 

Xamarin.Forms: Faster and easier mobile app development
We launched Xamarin.Forms a few years ago to help developers build mobile apps faster, maximizing UI code-sharing while still delivering fully native experiences.
Today, we showed three key new features that will be coming to Xamarin.Forms. Data Pages and Themes make it easy to connect apps to common entities and data sources, and create beautiful, native user interfaces with just a few lines of code. The Forms Previewer makes it easy to iterate on your Xamarin.Forms UI designs by providing real-time previewing of Xamarin.Forms user interfaces composed in XAML.

 

The new, mobile-optimized development lifecycle
We were able to show today the most streamlined mobile lifecycle available anywhere through our combined product lineup, including integrations between Visual Studio Team Services, HockeyApp and Xamarin Test Cloud. Through our combined mobile lifecycle solution, you now have a complete solution to build great mobile apps at scale, tackling the unique challenges of mobile DevOps.

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We’ve heard great enthusiasm from our customers. Bryan Hooper, senior director enterprise architecture at Bloomin’ Brands, talked about how they have “paired Xamarin with Microsoft’s Azure technology, and we’re really excited about the new partnership between the two organizations.” Darrell Thompson, vice president of information system services at Coca-Cola Consolidated, says that “Xamarin and Microsoft have been excellent partners and brought our mobile development to a whole new level.”
If we’re able to deliver all of this for you in just six weeks, imagine what you’ll be able to do in six months with Xamarin and Microsoft!