Managed Solution Becomes a Microsoft Authorized Education Partner
Managed Solution earns distinction through commitment to academic customers.
Managed Solution, today announced it has become a Microsoft Authorized Education Partner (AEP), demonstrating its ability to meet Microsoft academic customers’ evolving needs in today’s dynamic business environment. To earn a Microsoft AEP authorization, partners must complete a test to prove their level of academic licensing and market expertise.
The AEP program is designed to train participating resellers on Microsoft’s Academic licensing, authorize them to purchase and resell Microsoft Academic licenses, and demonstrate to potential customers that they are approved and knowledgeable academic partners.
Managed Solution is a long standing and fast growing full-service IT solutions firm that solves business technology challenges that are holding back the profitability potential of companies and deliver, maintain and forecast the technologies they'll need to stay competitive in their market place.
“By becoming AEPs, partners show themselves to be committed and trained in providing discounted Microsoft academic products to the education market,” said Anthony Salcito, vice president of Education for Microsoft Corp.’s Worldwide Public Sector. “This authorization, along with our other education partner initiatives, gives our partners recognition of their areas of expertise and our academic customers the confidence that they are buying from academic IT specialists.”
The Microsoft AEP Program is designed to authorize and equip organizations that deliver academic products and services through the Microsoft platform with the training, resources and support they need to provide their customers with superior experiences and outcomes.
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers businesses by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place.
Managed Solution was founded in 2002 and was quickly recognized as one of San Diego’s 40 fastest growing companies and the 27th fastest growing IT company in Southern California. With corporate headquarters in San Diego, Managed Solution provides IT services nationwide and was recently recognized as one of the top 10 National Cloud Service Providers.
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Students demonstrate their HoloLens apps after a quarter of VR and AR design
It’s just about impossible to get your hands on Microsoft’s impressive mixed-reality HoloLens platform these days — unless you’re a computer science student at the University of Washington. Then you get to play with them whenever you want.
At least that’s the case for the students in CSE 481V, in which, according to the course description, you will “learn a ton about Virtual and Augmented Reality, get familiar with the latest technology and software, and build an app in 10 weeks.”
This is the first time the course has been offered in this fashion, with generous underwriting by local VR/AR players Microsoft, Oculus and Valve/HTC. The 36 students in the course had access to the HoloLens dev team and all the major headsets — there were 25 HoloLenses involved, which is probably more than have ever been in one place. Students also got to hear from guest speakers like Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash and author Neal Stephenson — whose “Snow Crash” was required reading for the course.
All in all, it’s enough to make a guy want to matriculate.
“We pitched the idea of a VR/AR class last year to HoloLens leadership and they immediately got excited and were eager to make it happen,” wrote Steve Seitz, one of the class’s instructors. “I was initially quite worried about the idea of relying on a brand new device and development platform for a 36 person class. But I’m extremely impressed with the development environment… it was good enough that students with no prior experience could get up and running quickly and make some really compelling applications in just a few weeks.”
You can see what those applications were at the course webpage, complete with weekly blog posts showing progress from concept to execution. There’s augmented reality cooking, a painting app and the clever idea of gamifying the process of scanning a room so it can be used in other apps.
The class culminated in a sort of open demo day at the UW campus, where students could show off their work to the general public and serious players like Microsoft Research’s CVP Peter Lee.
It’s a great opportunity for students, no doubt, but also a fertile testing ground for the companies in the space. How did these fresh young minds interact with the technologies? What did they run up against? What tools did they wish they had? This kind of extensive focus testing is always valuable, not to say this was an ulterior motive, just that it was no doubt a fruitful collaboration.
“For the HoloLens team, this was an opportunity to evaluate the platform in a focused educational settings, and get early feedback,” wrote Seitz. The team also provided technical support and training.
Seitz and the class’s other instructor, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, aim to offer the class again next year. UW is, of course, a convenient location for Microsoft to work with, but the institution is also a hub for research in this area, having pioneered many VR and AR ideas early on in its famous HITLab.
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Back-to-school updates for the OneNote Class Notebook app, and the add-in is now generally available
As many teachers and schools prepare for the 2016/2017 school year, it is a great time reflect on the excitement that many teachers and schools have shared with us over the past year as they began using OneNote Class Notebooks the first time.
We heard from teachers all around the world about the enthusiasm that has been bubbling around this new way of working. We heard from a teacher in Florida who told us how class notebooks have changed her life, a teacher from Wales who describes his school’s journey finding OneNote Class Notebooks and a Lithuanian teacher who uses class notebooks as an ePortfolio. In the UK, we heard from a school that declared OneNote has revolutionized the way they work. We had the chance to meet many of you in June at ISTE, including a teacher who told us the story of how class notebooks and her excitement for them inspired her to reconsider retirement and keep teaching this year. We have also continued listening and working with teachers, who have been the inspiration for the next set of improvements that we are rolling out today.
Improvements to the Class Notebook app based on teacher feedback
Today, we are rolling out new features and improvements across 44 languages and 63 markets. These 2016 back-to-school improvements will help save teachers valuable time in the classroom as well as allow OneNote Class Notebooks to be even more organized.
On the homepage of the Office 365 Class Notebook app, we updated the old Get Notebook Links button to include the new Manage notebooks button, and all of the improvements can be found under this button.
By clicking the Manage notebooks button, a teacher can see all of his/her class notebooks on one page with an expanded set of capabilities, including:
•Rename student sections—If you want to rename any student sections, click the pencil icon and type the new name of the section. Be sure to press Save after adding the student sections.
•Add section—To distribute a new section to all students, simply click the Add section button. Be sure to press Save after adding the student sections.
•Enable Teacher-Only section group—The Teacher-Only section group is a private space where only the teacher can see what is inside—students cannot see anything. To add a Teacher-Only section group to your class notebook, click the Enable Teacher-Only section group link. Co-teachers also have access into the Teacher-Only section group.
•Lock Collaboration Space—Enabling this feature makes the Collaboration Space read-only (or locked down) to disallow any students from editing. You can move the switch between a locked and unlocked state.
•Open—Clicking this link opens the class notebook.
•Link to the class notebook—Provides easy way to copy the class notebook link to share with others.
Class Notebook add-in is moving from preview to general availability
The Class Notebook Add-in Preview is the result of feedback and collaboration from teachers and school staff, whose input helped build these new tools. We’ve seen an amazing response to the add-in for our OneNote 2013 and 2016 teachers. In June, we also added many of the capabilities to our OneNote Mac app. Today, we are moving the OneNote Class Notebook add-in from preview to generally availability (GA). This means that IT admins and school staff should feel confident deploying the Class Notebook add-in broadly across a district, and it is officially now “Version 1.” In addition to announcing general availability, we all have some new updates detailed below:
•GA in 44 languages and 63 markets.
•Edmodo assignment and grade support.
•Firefly Learning assignment and grade support.
•Improved help and feedback options.
•For IT admins—Group Policy support for prepopulating LMS and SIS information. •New group policy deployment page: Class Notebook add-in group policy.
•General Download Center information.
To manually update your add-on just click the Update button that should appear if you have an older version of the add-in. This will download the latest version and also install the GA version.
We hope you are excited to try out the 2016 back-to-school improvements! The OneNote Class Notebook team will continue listening to teacher and school staff feedback. As usual, please reach out to us on Twitter @OneNoteEDU or drop us a line at OneNoteEDU@microsoft.com.
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Learning Tools for OneNote supports more languages and themes and is now generally available
Today, we are moving Learning Tools for OneNote out of preview (announced in January) and into general availability (English only). Learning Tools for OneNote was initially released as a customer preview back in January of 2016. The concept came from an internal Microsoft “Hackathon,” where a group of people who were passionate about inclusively got together to design tools to help people with learning differences. The result was a set of tools that ultimately help all people. The Hackathon project won the grand prize, and the prototype was built into a product and released earlier this year.
Since the initial release, we’ve been amazed and humbled by the positive reaction from students, teachers and many others from around the world. We’ve seen press reviews such as Jordan Shapiro’s in Forbes, “Learning Tools For Microsoft OneNote May Be One Of The Most Disruptive Education Technologies Yet,” and the Dyslexic Advantage Community named Learning Tools a “Top Dyslexia App of 2016.”
More importantly, we’ve seen the results and impact from people who have been using Learning Tools. We’ve seen reading speeds dramatically increase, as seen in this video with Special Education teacher Lauren Pittman. We’ve heard stories of dyslexic students who insist that they only want to read materials using Learning Tools and a teenager with learning differences express a passion and desire to read for the first time in his life. We’ve seen Learning Tools being used by emerging first-grade readers in Florida, as seen in this video. A teacher in Macedonia uses Learning Tools to teach English to her young students. English Languages Learners (ELLs) have also been using Learning Tools widely. We believe Learning Tools speaks directly to Microsoft’s mission of empowering every person on the planet to achieve more.
New improvements for Learning Tools
In addition to the general availability of Learning Tools for OneNote, we’ve added a new set of capabilities, including:
•Localized user interface—Localization of the Learning Tools toolbar in over 35 languages.
•Dictation—Four new dictation languages (Spanish, French, German and Italian).
•Color themes—Now includes new yellow, green, blue and pink, which have been specifically designed and tuned based on research.
•Switching reader languages—Improved the ease of switching between text-to-speech languages in the immersive reader.
•Multiple language support—Ability to read back multiple languages on one page, such as English, Spanish and French on the same page.
•Speech controls—Simplification of speech controls and a new menu for all of them.
•Easy download—Easy instructions to download more text-to-speech languages. This will depend on your Windows version.
Localization of the Learning Tools toolbar in over 35 languages.
Dictation—Four new dictation languages (Spanish, French, German and Italian).
Simplified audio and speech controls, improved ease of switching between text-to-speech voices and easy instructions to download more text-to-speech voices.
Color themes—Now includes new yellow, green, blue and pink
We hope that you enjoy these new improvements for the new school year! You can download the Learning Tools General Availability at www.onenote.com/learningtools, or if you already have it, you will see an update button appear within the add-in (see below).
And don’t forget: Office 365 Education, including OneNote and Learning Tools, is free for students and teachers! Get yours at Office.com/education.
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Take your OneNote Class Notebooks wherever you go with the new “Save a copy” feature
As OneNote Class Notebooks become more popular, we’re often asked how a student or teacher can take their digital books with them when leaving school. Students graduate or change schools and would like to be able to bring the portfolio of work with them. Teachers change schools or take on a new role and also want to keep their Class Notebooks. Based on talking to lots of teachers and students, we launched the new “Save a copy” feature for Class Notebooks.
To see how this works, just follow these simple steps:
1.Sign in to OneNote Online, our web version of OneNote.
2.From the Notebook list, click Class Notebooks to display all your Class Notebooks.
3.Right-click to select a Class Notebook and then select Save a copy.
4.Click Next. You are prompted to sign in to a consumer Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, go here http://www.live.com to sign up.
That’s it! Your OneNote Class Notebook is copied to the consumer OneDrive and is available for you to use elsewhere.
This is just the initial rollout of the Save a copy feature. In the near future, we will add the ability to choose any notebook type, not just Class Notebooks. We will also roll out the Save a copy feature to your own OneDrive for Business, which will allow students to save a copy of their Class Notebook from a teacher’s OneDrive for Business to their own OneDrive for Business.
As usual, reach out on Twitter at @OneNoteEDU with questions or send us an email at ClassNotebook@onenote.uservoice.com.
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Pass Through Wormhole To Online Learning
Education is a social interaction, whether online or in person, says Sally Buberman, CEO and co-founder of Wormhole. That basic concept led to the creation of the first ‘Live Learning’ platform, a new concept in online education that disrupts the foundations of traditional e-learning and builds a new experience by leveraging mobility, gamification and people interaction to create the most engaging online training programs. It’s been a journey of epic proportions, from a small startup in Argentina to a customer base of more than 2000 companies, government organizations and educational institutions in 10 countries that continues to expand.
To scientists, a wormhole is a theoretical passage through space and time that could create shortcuts for long journeys across the universe. To Sally Buberman, Max Menasches and Ignacio (Nacho) Lopez, the word translates into providing enterprises and institutions a simple way to produce content, offer online training and still retain the best of live education.
The live piece, says Buberman, engages students more effectively by giving them the ability to talk openly with instructors as if they were together in the same room instead of waiting for occasional office hours. An online but live environment tends to be less intimidating than a person-to-person environment; it allows a student to take a live class while still allowing each to have a voice by share ideas and questions in real-time.
“I was giving online lectures over the Internet,” Buberman says. “I thought, ‘Why not create a reliable online university that offers real-time interaction between teachers and students?’”
Teachers, they theorized, needed a platform where they could create and retain their own content. And students from all walks of life needed a way to interact in real-time with their teams and instructors without having to travel to a specific location. This is also true in corporate and government training programs, where the company is focused now.
Pulling Max and Nacho into her plan, the Wormhole team ultimately decided to enter the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition (in 2007) as a way to obtain feedback and validation. The nature of Microsoft’s developer competition forced them to create milestones, build their first prototype and present the idea to others. Making it to the finals inspired the trio to quit their jobs and officially form their startup.
“At the time, we had almost no money to invest,” says Buberman. “We bootstrapped from scratch, worked on the side to generate revenue and reinvested all our earnings back into our little company. That was how we managed to hire the first employees who helped us develop the first version of our product – Wormhole Campus.”
From the beginning they chose to build their foundation on a mix of .NET and other open source software (OSS) packages. Linux, for instance, is Wormhole’s core operating system; C# and Java are the core languages used by the company. To scale-out easily, the startup uses a combination of Windows Server and Ubuntu Server. Wormhole also utilizes Joomla, a PHP CMS, for marketing websites and other internal developments, as well has having native mobile apps for Android and iOS.
Other OSS packages in use at Wormhole include Redis, MySQL, Nginx, Tomcat, Jenkins, a build automation tool, Apache Ant, a Java-based build tool and NAnt, a scripting tool for .NET that helps improve build functions.
Because Wormhole’s virtual classrooms offerings are 100 percent web-based, they don't require the installation of any software. They must, however, be able to work well under very low bandwidth and poor Internet connectivity in order to reach the most people. As the startup continued to grow at a very fast pace (their platform now has over 3 million users a month), it began to rethink its infrastructure architecture.
Before moving to Azure, says Lopez, Wormhole was managing every bit of its infrastructure by itself while hosting on private virtual servers and AWS. As it began researching Microsoft Azure, it discovered that Azure’s PaaS offering and managed services like Redis Cache and SQL Azure offered a simpler infrastructure and a new generation of computing that AWS didn’t have. The development team was quite surprised at Microsoft’s support for OSS technologies – it was expecting Azure to be 100 percent Microsoft-centered.
Joining the Microsoft BizSpark program, Lopez says, was a critical turning point for the startup because of the free licensing and tools it offered. It removed cost and technology barriers Wormhole was experiencing as it expanded.
“Being supported by Microsoft makes you feel comfortable,” Lopez explains. “When you are a startup with no funding, being able to have all the Microsoft software for free together with Azure Credits is an invaluable support.”
“We read a lot before making the move to Azure and also consulted with other startups that were using OSS on Azure to get their opinion,” says Lopez. “We learned that Azure OSS support was not something Microsoft created because it had to – it really wanted to help developers. And Azure overall has better integration (than AWS) with our development tools, so we realized it would help us streamline our development and deployment processes.”
As they continued to research Azure, they saw Microsoft starting to increase the speed of Azure feature releases, a lowering of costs to meet or beat AWS and a mix of PaaS and IaaS offerings with support for Linux, PHP and Java.
“We decided we need to try it out,” he says, “especially when we saw how easy it was to use the management portal and discovered it had automation capabilities, VMs with support for Windows and Linux and worldwide data centers that could help us as we grew.”
“We are making even more use of Linux and other OSS on Azure, because it's so simple to manage and maintain!” he says.
After entering – and winning – more competitions and receiving numerous awards after the Imagine Cup journey, Wormhole developed a board of advisors comprised of well-known industry leaders. It now feels ready to pitch investors in a bid to raise capital for further international expansion.
“As an entrepreneur,” reflects Buberman, “you face many challenges every day and you fail a lot as well. The only way to survive the entrepreneurial life is if you can transform every failure into knowledge and positive experience. Use all the materials you can get hold of – you never know which one will be the turning point for your company.”
Microsoft is helping these startups succeed through its BizSpark program.
About BizSpark: Microsoft BizSpark is a global program that helps startups succeed by giving free access to Microsoft Azure cloud services, software and support. BizSpark members receive up to $750 per month of free Microsoft Azure cloud services for 3 years: that’s $150 per month each for up to 5 developers. Azure works with Linux and open-source technologies such as Ruby, Python, Java and PHP. BizSpark is available to startups that are privately held, less than 5-years-old and earn less than $1M in annual revenue.
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The SwimTrain exergame makes swim workouts fun again
To many who swim for exercise, workouts come down to the monotony of doing laps—swimming back and forth in a pool. Over and over. Unlike other exercisers, who can make their routines less of a chore by adding a social component—working out with friends, family, or in groups—swimmers really haven’t had many options, because coordinating a group of swimmers is difficult. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) are happy to report that with SwimTrain, their new cooperative “exergame” research project, you’ll never have to swim alone again.
SwimTrain is the result of a research collaboration between KAIST and MSRA. The project targets something we can all relate to: exercise boredom. Swimming, while one of the best ways to get fit, can be tedious. The SwimTrain team thinks they have a way to make swimming a lot more exciting.
How does SwimTrain work? First, you slip your phone into a waterproof case and plug in some waterproof headphones. Then, you jump in. Players get matched up as a team to form a virtual “train,” with each player controlling the speed of a single train compartment. Go too fast or too slow, and the game warns you of bumping into other compartments. Featuring narration, vibration feedback, spatialized sound effects, and background music, the immersive experience takes players through different modes of gameplay based on an interval training workout plan.
Each SwimTrain round consists of three phases:
Phase 1: Compartment ordering
Compartments race against other compartments. A compartment is ranked based on a swimmer’s average stroke speed during the race.
Phase 2: Train running
Compartments are placed along the same track and run in a circle (like a merry-go-round). To earn points, each swimmer must maintain their current stroke rate with the target stroke rate established in the previous phase. A compartment shifts with the movement of the current stroke rate relative to the target stroke rate, and it should travel without crashing into adjacent compartments.
Phase 3: Train stop
The virtual train stops. Every swimmer takes a short rest. The game narrates the final ranking of the current round and information for the next round, such as the duration of each phase and recommended stroke types.
SwimTrain accomplishes immersive gameplay by relying on advanced tech packed into a mobile phone. The barometer, accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer track swimming activities, determining swimming periods, stroke, style, speed, and other events. This information is fed to a Network Manager based on the Microsoft Azure cloud, and is then delivered back to the game as rank and round data, determining the status of the player in relation to the train. It’s also passed to a Feedback Manager, which provides the auditory and sensory feedback that make SwimTrain unique.
Preliminary feedback from users is positive—SwimTrain makes you feel like you’re not alone in the pool. According to one test user, “Although [SwimTrain] didn’t provide any visual feedback, I felt like I was swimming with others.” Feedback is also indicating that SwimTrain is providing an immersive and enjoyable experience that’s intense workout, too.
The project team’s research is getting noticed in the world of human-computer interaction (HCI). CHI 2016, the world’s top conference for HCI, has accepted the team’s research for inclusion in the CHI 2016 Notes and Papers Program.
This collaboration with KAIST is a great example of how Microsoft values symbiotic relationships with partners in academia. “Not only do we have the ability to shape the future of Microsoft products, we have the chance to support and learn from some of the top professors in computer science,” said Darren Edge, lead researcher at MSRA. Many of these collaborations lead to internships. “When a student makes a particularly promising contribution to a joint project, we can also invite them to spend time at Microsoft as a research intern. Everybody wins from such internships: we get some of the brightest PhD students to work on our projects, and the students develop new expertise and skills that they can apply to their university work with their professor.”
Darren explains that this recently happened as a result of his ongoing collaboration with Professor Uichin Lee at KAIST. Following the completion of work on SwimTrain, Professor Lee’s PhD student Jeungmin Oh joined Darren at MSRA for a six-month internship, working in another area. “We are all now collaborating on multiple projects in parallel. If any of them are as successful as SwimTrain, which won the third place award at the recent Microsoft Korea and Japan Day and has two accepted papers pending publication, I will be very happy indeed,” he states.
The MSRA HCI group has in fact had a longstanding collaboration with academia: In recent years, MSRA has supported principal investigators for projects published at CHI 2014, CSCW 2015, and CHI 2016.
In the future, SwimTrain will focus on measuring more data, such as heart rate and maximal oxygen uptake, to determine the exertion level of a player’s swimming. Also, the method might be applied to other group exercises, such as group jogging and group cycling. We look forward with anticipation to what SwimTrain might inspire.
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