Thanks for tuning in for another edition of Weekend Reading. Recent excitement surrounds using Bing to predict your March Madness bracket, Azure as the backend cloud solution of choice for game developers, a Microsoft Research platform that uses “Minecraft” to test AIs applications Microsoft partnering on a solar power project in Virginia and more.
March Madness fans are turning to Bing Predicts to devise their bracket based on machine learning that analyzes social and search signals and more than a decade of extensive NCAA statistical data. Last year, Bing’s smarter bracket picked 73 percent of the games correctly and finished in the top 30 percent of all brackets nationwide. Find out more about the smarter bracket and Bing’s March Madness predictions on Bing Blogs and also learn about the March Madness app.
Popular adventure and puzzle game “Draw a Stickman: EPIC 2” lets users collaborate to draw and share inventive characters, tools and weapons. Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform is a key component of the game’s functionality, mobility, scalability and performance. For game developers around the world, Azure is the backend cloud solution of choice, helping them launch and grow their games with a reliable, open platform and easy-to-use services for scaling and managing user spikes. Read the full story on Microsoft News Center.
AIX, a platform developed by Katja Hofmann and her colleagues in Microsoft’s Cambridge, U.K., lab and unveiled publicly on Monday, allows computer scientists to use the world of “Minecraft” as a testing ground for improving artificial intelligence. Microsoft researchers are using AIX for their own research, and they have made it available to a small group of academic researchers under a private beta. This summer, AIX will be available via an open-source license. Read more about AIX on Next at Microsoft.
As part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to carbon neutrality, the company has joined a public-private partnership that will bring 20 megawatts of new solar energy onto the grid in Virginia. Microsoft is excited about this innovative partnership model and looks forward to expanding on the new approach. Learn more about this deal and Microsoft’s commitment to enhancing access to renewable power sources on the Microsoft Green Blog.
Twitter for Windows 10 is now available for your phone, with new features that make connecting with people and expressing yourself more seamless than ever.
From your phone, you can explore Moments, a feature that shows the best of what’s happening on Twitter. You can also send group Direct Messages; shoot, edit and tweet video from your camera; share a tweet and easily add a comment; and see top tweets without logging in. The updated app joins the Twitter Windows 10 app released last year for PCs and tablets.
This week on the Microsoft Facebook page, we traveled to Buffalo, New York, where we welcomed BAK USA to the Windows family. In Buffalo, they’ve started a tech revolution by foregoing the assembly line and building each tablet by hand.
The Hidden Microsoft Edge Features You Didn’t Know About
It’s hard to switch browsers when we’re comfortable with what we’re used to. But knowledge is power and it’s healthy to know your browser options.
Microsoft Edge is the new browser available in Windows 10. Here is a video that provides an overview of features you may not know about!
And in case you’re interested in other Edge details, here’s research that shows how Edge is faster than Chrome, how it’s incredibly secure, and how Cortana can help you with your web browsing experience.
Three months ago, Microsoft launched Skype for Business Cloud PBX, Meeting Broadcast and PSTN services to provide a complete meetings and voice experience in Office 365. Already, thousands of Office 365 customers are using these services, and many more are trialing them. Today, we’re announcing our first major geographic expansion of these services; new support for hybrid deployments; new, modern meeting room solutions; and improvements to our unified reporting, management and analytics.
PSTN Conferencing available for purchase in 32 countries
As of March 1, 2016, customers in 17 additional countries—Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia and South Korea—can buy dial-in conferencing as part of their Office 365 subscription. Now customers in 32 countries total can simplify their infrastructure using Skype for Business Online for all of their meeting needs, and take advantage of flat-rate, per-user, per-month pricing to simplify budgeting and accounting for conferencing services. Our PSTN conferencing service will include local dial-in numbers in more than 60 countries by the end of this month and nearly 100 countries by the end of June.
New Cloud PBX features and general availability of the Cloud Connector Edition
We’re also pleased to announce that the new Cloud Connector Edition of Skype for Business Server will be generally available starting in April. All versions of Skype for Business Server allow customers worldwide to use Office 365 Cloud PBX with the carrier calling services of their choice, and the new Cloud Connector Edition allows customers to quickly connect existing phone lines and phone numbers to Office 365 by delivering these proven hybrid capabilities as optimized, pre-configured virtual machine images. This summer, we will deliver a preview of our new virtual Organizational Auto Attendant in Cloud PBX, enabling customers to use Office 365 for automated handling of business calls and using speech recognition.
PSTN Calling Preview outside the U.S.
Starting in May, we will offer a preview of Skype for Business PSTN Calling services in the UK. With the preview, customers in the UK will be able to trial number acquisition and assignment, inbound and outbound calling, voicemail and other features—all provided by Microsoft and seamlessly integrated as part of Office 365. Office 365 customers in the UK can register for the preview today at the Skype Preview sign-up page.
Project Rigel—bringing the Skype Meeting experience to every meeting room
Over 97 percent of meeting rooms are currently equipped with traditional projectors or displays and only a telephone for including remote participants. But for meetings to be as effective and engaging as possible requires web and video conferencing with features like screen sharing, IM and whiteboard. Without these capabilities, people lose the benefits of rich interaction, remote participants have a sub-optimal experience and the whole team is less productive due to longer meeting startup times.
Today, we are announcing an initiative, codenamed “Project Rigel,” to address this problem. Project Rigel will bring a Skype Meeting experience pioneered on Microsoft Surface Hub to nearly any meeting room with a display or projector. It will use Windows 10 devices for center-of-room touch control and Skype for Business online meeting technology to easily connect remote users. Hardware partners including Polycom and Logitech will certify elements of their portfolios for use with Project Rigel systems, including the Polycom RealPresence Trio and CX5100, and Logitech ConferenceCam Connect, ConferenceCam GROUP and PTZ Pro Camera. Logitech also plans to deliver a purpose-built smart dock for Project Rigel to seamlessly connect the system elements in a meeting room, while Polycom plans to deliver a portfolio of complete Project Rigel systems. We expect the first systems based on Project Rigel to be available in the second half of 2016.
Connecting traditional video teleconferencing systems to the Office 365 Meeting experience
Roughly 3 percent of meeting spaces today include traditional video teleconferencing systems, or VTCs, from Cisco, Polycom and others. We’re pleased to be working with Polycom on two new efforts to extend the Skype Meeting experience to these dedicated video endpoints. First, Polycom will provide an update to its RealPresence Group Series products, which will add both Office 365 integration and a user interface consistent with the Skype Meeting experience. Second, Polycom will provide a Cloud Video Interoperability service, hosted in the Microsoft cloud, which will enable a wide range of existing VTCs, including Cisco and Polycom systems, to connect to Skype for Business meetings in Office 365 and will include audio, video and content interoperability. We will work closely with Polycom to ensure that Office 365 customers can easily take advantage of this service. Both offerings are expected to be available in the second half of 2016.
Through these innovations, we will deliver with our partners a complete range of video conferencing solutions based on Skype for Business in Office 365, establishing a new standard for cloud, hybrid voice and video capabilities for any business meeting room.
Unified management, reporting and analytics for enterprise communications
Finally, in keeping with our goal to make the Skype for Business management tools powerful and easy to use for IT professionals, we will add powerful management, reporting and analytics tools to our communications cloud in the second half of this year. IT admins will be able to understand usage patterns, analyze call quality and quickly troubleshoot issues in both cloud and hybrid Skype for Business deployments via a single pane of glass within the Office 365 admin portal.
For More Information on Microsoft and other Cloud Solutions, Contact Us at 800-208-4037
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Microsoft's March Updates
By Kirk Koenigsbauer as written on blogs.office.com
This month, our updates include a tool for migrating Evernote notes to OneNote, enhancements to PowerPoint Designer and new languages supported in Office for Mac and Skype Translator. We also have updates for our commercial customers using Skype for Business, Project Online and Office 365 video. Read on for more.
OneNote now helps you make the move from Evernote
Earlier this month, we released a tool that will help you import your Evernote notes into OneNote, and the response has been overwhelming. To date, more than 10.5 million Evernote pages have been moved over to OneNote. If these were stacked pages of standard print paper, it would reach a height of approximately 3,500 feet—which exceeds the Burj Khalifa (the tallest skyscraper in the world) by almost 800 feet. We believe this success has a lot to do with OneNote’s unique capabilities, including a free-form canvas where you can mix text, images, documents, handwriting, audio, video and more; free offline access; and unlimited monthly uploads. Download the OneNote Importer tool for Windows and get started today. We’ll deliver the Importer tool for Mac in the coming months.
Search in OneNote for handwriting in photos
OneNote already lets you search on handwritten notes made with a pen or finger and digital ink. Now OneNote can search on handwritten notes and whiteboards contained within images you’ve added to OneNote using Office Lens, as well other tools such as the OneNote Clipper, me@onenote.com and Livescribe. Soon we’ll also support handwriting recognition for images you add directly into OneNote on any device. These improved handwriting search capabilities help you get the most out of capturing information to collect and organize in OneNote.
Enhancing the power of PowerPoint Designer
Four months ago, we launched PowerPoint Designer, an intelligent new design assistant to help you create beautiful slides in seconds. As detailed in this PowerPoint blog, we’re excited to announce three new ways we’ve made Designer more powerful to enhance your PowerPoint experience and give you greater visual impact in less time.
Multiple images—Until now, Designer could provide design recommendations when you inserted a single image into a PowerPoint slide. Now Designer can suggest designs for when you insert multiple images. You’ll see design suggestions for up to two images for all PowerPoint themes, and up to four images when using the specific Office and Gallery themes.
Color extractor—Designer now extrapolates the most prevalent color option from inserted images and applies that in a thoughtful way to your overall theme. This works with the new Gallery theme and will roll out to the other native PowerPoint themes in coming months.
Facial recognition—Now Designer can recognize which images include faces and make intelligent cropping decisions to prioritize them when making design suggestions.
We’ll keep improving PowerPoint Designer based on what we learn from your feedback. Stay tuned for even more enhancements to Designer in the future, including design suggestions for additional elements such as bulleted text, data points, lists and more. Learn more about using Designer here.
New language support in Office for Mac and Skype Translator
There has been strong customer demand for right-to-left language support in Office 2016 for Mac. We are pleased to announce that Office 2016 for Mac now supports Arabic and Hebrew and provides right-to-left language support in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Outlook will follow within a month. Learn more about how to get started here.
Skype Translator also now supports Arabic. This means that even more people around the world can speak another language without learning it, helping to break down language and communications barriers in everyday life. Skype Translator now supports a total of eight spoken languages (Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian) and Spanish). More than 50 written languages (including Arabic) are also supported, so you can still text others around the world, even if you don’t speak the same language. Make sure you’ve downloaded the latest version of the Skype for Windows desktop app to get started!
Expanding Skype for Business meetings experiences and voice services
Earlier this month, we announced a number of ways we are expanding the reach of Skype for Business meetings and voice services in Office 365. We’ve almost doubled the number of countries—now at 32 and counting—where customers can buy dial-in conferencing as part of their Office 365 subscription. This allows them to use Skype for Business Online for all of their meeting needs. Also, our PSTN conferencing service will expand to include local dial-in numbers in more than 60 countries by the end of March and nearly 100 countries by the end of June.
The new Cloud Connector Edition of Skype for Business Server will be generally available starting in April. All versions of Skype for Business Server allow customers to use Office 365 Cloud PBX with the carrier calling services of their choice. Now the new Cloud Connector Edition makes it even easier for customers to quickly connect existing phone lines and phone numbers to Office 365. Check out the blogfor more details on these and other Skype for Business announcements!
Introducing Office 365 Project Portfolio Dashboard and Office 365 Video viewer statistics
We’re excited to announce that Office 365 Project Portfolio Dashboard will soon be available for commercial customers to add to Project Online through the Office Store! Customers will also be able to view these dashboards using a new iPad app. These apps come pre-configured with powerful dashboards that allow business leaders, portfolio managers and project managers to gain insights into areas such as resource utilization, project portfolio performance, costs, active risks/issues and key milestones.
In addition, video viewer statistics have rolled out to Office 365 Video for our commercial customers. Gain insights on what’s working, how and when in your videos, by tracking how they are viewed and understanding trending patterns as they are shared by email, Yammer, or discovered within Office Delve. You can see aggregate data on how many people have watched your videos, how long they watch them and what the drop-off rates are over time. Learn more about viewing statistics for a video in Office 365 Video.
As always, learn more about what’s new this month here: Office 2016 and Office for Mac. If you’re an Office 365 Home or Personal customer, be sure to sign up for Office Insider builds to be the first to use the latest and greatest in Office productivity. Commercial customers on both Current Channel and Deferred Channel can also get early access to a fully supported build through First Release.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
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Break free from Oracle with SQL Server Competitive Migration Offer
Break free from expensive data solutions with mysterious, frustrating pricing plans and surprise add-ons. With SQL Server, you get breakthrough in-memory performance across all workloads, mission critical high availability, and business intelligence and advanced analytics tools—all in one package.
This offer includes support services to kick-start your migration, and access to our SQL Server Essentials for the Oracle Database Administrator training. Dive into key features of SQL Server through hands-on labs and instructor-led demos, and learn how to deploy your applications—on-premises or in the cloud.
Act now, training and services are only available through June 30, 2016.
Claim your offer:
Engage your account executive to begin the process
Identify application workloads to migrate and specify the SQL Server cores required
Enroll in a new/renewed Server Cloud Enrollment (SCE) (SCE has a minimum requirement of 50 cores and requires entire SQL Server installation to carry SA coverage)
Receive free licenses and services package to kick-start your migration (Software Assurance subscription is required and services only available through June 30, 2016)
Prove migration via deployment report, letter from CIO, or partner proof of execution (POE)
Managed Solution’s Team has the experience and expertise to architect SQL database and reporting systems tailored for your environment. Contact us for more information 800-307-0296
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Five Reasons You'll Love Everything Built in to SQL Server 2016
Check out the new SQL Server 2016—the first database that is born in the cloud, setting a new standard for the pace of innovation.
Five reasons to love the new SQL Server 2016:
Industry leader in mission-critical - SQL Server 2016 delivers breakthrough mission-critical capabilities in scalability, performance, and availability for your most important OLTP and data warehousing workloads.
Scale up to 12 TB of memory and 640 logical processors with Windows Server 2016
Reach up to 30x faster transactions and 100x faster queries with enhanced in-memory performance
Run real-time Operational Analytics over transactional data
Balance loads across readable secondaries in Always On availability groups
Most secure database - Our multi-layered approach to security has a proven track record of producing the least vulnerable database, even while being the most widely-used database on the planet.
Rely on a database with the least vulnerabilities of any major platform—six years in a row
Protect data at rest and in motion with TDE and new Always Encrypted
Mask sensitive data with minimal application impact using Dynamic Data Masking
Grant access based on user characteristics with Row Level Security
Comprehensive business intelligence - SQL Server 2016 delivers a comprehensive, on-premises, enterprise-ready BI platform that helps you to transform complex data into actionable insights.
Create modern reports and visualize dense data with additional chart types
Access KPIs and mobile and paginated reports using the SQL Server Reporting Services web portal
Get faster SQL Server Analysis Services performance with parallel processing
Use enhanced multidimensional models in SQL Server Analysis Services
Easily set up SQL Server Data Tools Preview in Visual Studio 2015
In-database advanced analytics - Built-in advanced analytics provide scalability and performance for building and running your advanced analytics algorithms directly in the core SQL Server transactional database.
Transform complex data from multiple sources into trusted data models using the most popular statistical modelling language
Process analytics in-place, reducing latencies and operational costs
Write models once and deploy anywhere: in-database, to the cloud, or to Linux, Hadoop, and Teradata
Access thousands of R Scripts and Models in CRAN (Common R Archival Network)
Consistent experience from on-premises to cloud - SQL Server 2016 delivers a consistent experience both on-premises and cloud. You get an exceptional experience whether data is in your datacenter, in a private cloud, or on Azure.
Dynamically stretch warm and cold data to Azure with Stretch Database
Tackle your mission-critical workloads with larger Azure virtual machine sizes
Rely on our cloud-first features, tested by millions of Azure databases
Use the skills you already have with common development and management tools and common T-SQL everywhere
Managed Solution’s Team has the experience and expertise to architect SQL database and reporting systems tailored for your environment. Contact us for more information 800-307-0296
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full managed services to businesses of every size, industry, and need.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
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Managed Solution’s Team has the experience and expertise to architect SQL database and reporting systems tailored for your environment. Contact us for more information 800-307-0296
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SQL Server 2016: The database for mission-critical intelligence
Joseph Sirosh - Corporate Vice President, Data Group, Microsoft as written on blogs.microsoft.com
The world around us, every business and nearly every industry, is being transformed by technology. This disruption is driven, in part, by the intersection of three trends: a massive explosion of data, intelligence from machine learning and advanced analytics, and the economics and agility of cloud computing.
While databases power nearly every aspect of business today, they were not originally designed with this disruption in mind. Traditional databases were about recording and retrieving transactions such as orders and payments very reliably, very securely and efficiently. They were designed to enable reliable, secure, mission-critical transactional applications at small to medium scale, in on-premises datacenters.
Databases built to get ahead of today’s disruptions do very fast analyses of live data in-memory as transactions are being recorded or queried. They support very low latency advanced analytics and machine learning, such as forecasting and predictive models, on the same data, so that applications can easily embed data-driven intelligence. They allow databases to be offered as a fully managed service in the cloud, in turn making it easy to build and deploy intelligent Software as a Service (SaaS) apps.
They also provide innovative security features built for a world where a majority of data is accessible over the Internet. They support 24×7 high-availability, efficient management and database administration across platforms. They therefore enable mission critical intelligent applications to be built and managed both in the cloud and on-premises. They are exciting harbingers of a new world of ambient intelligence.
We built SQL Server 2016 for this new world, and to help businesses get ahead of today’s disruptions. It supports hybrid transactional/analytical processing, advanced analytics and machine learning, mobile BI, data integration, always encrypted query processing capabilities and in-memory transactions with persistence. It is also perhaps the world’s only relational database to be “born cloud-first,” with the majority of features first deployed and tested in Azure, across 22 global datacenters and billions of requests per day. It is customer tested and battle ready.
Let me share with you what industry analysts and our customers think.
Industry analysts recognize the breadth and depth of our capabilities in data, intelligence and the cloud. Microsoft is the only company recognized as a leader across data platforms and cloud by Gartner in both vision and execution, in database, business intelligence, advanced analytics, data warehouse, cloud infrastructure and cloud application platforms.
The customers we’ve been working with in preview share our excitement and are already benefiting from new innovations, such as built-in analytics.
PROS Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: PRO) is a revenue and profit realization company that helps B2B and B2C customers achieve their business goals through data science. Royce Kallesen, senior director of Science and Research at PROS says: “Microsoft R’s parallelization and enhanced memory management on the server integrated with SQL Server provides much faster results on a common platform with built-in security.” They have realized over 100x faster advanced analytics using SQL Server and built-in Microsoft R Server.
In addition to faster analytics, the real-time in-memory processing capabilities of SQL Server are industry leading. This technology allows up to 100x faster analytics with updatable in-memory columnstores. In addition, as the only commercial database that leads simultaneously in both transaction processing (per the TPC-E benchmark) and data warehousing (per the TPC-H benchmark), SQL Server allows customers to realize incredible performance against massive data sets and gain real-time insights – across all workloads, new and existing applications.
“KPMG observed approximately 60 percent reduction in execution time and 10x table-compression gains for one of the main analytical procedures by leveraging Columnstore Indexes and Parallel Insert functions in SQL Server 2016,” says Michael S. Sellman, executive director, Global IT Services, KPMG LLP.
According to Chris Stolte, co-founder and chief development offficer of Tableau, Inc., “an average 190%+ interactive query performance improvement enables our customers to visually explore large datasets in real-time, even against transactional databases.”
With unique hybrid capabilities, any SQL Server deployment or app can span private clouds, hosted clouds and our public cloud, Microsoft Azure. New Stretch Database technology allows customers to dynamically, transparently and securely stretch their transactional data to Azure, creating a massive database with great price performance. Customers can also use new AlwaysOn Availability Groups to enable disaster recovery at low cost.
Security has never been more important, and we’re humbled to be the industry’s least vulnerable database, six years running, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) public security board. Several capabilities in SQL Server 2016 help protect data at rest and in memory (Always Encrypted), encrypt all user data with low performance overhead (Transparent Data Encryption), mitigate attacks with support for Transport Layer Security version 1.2, and allow developers to build applications that restrict access and protect data from specific users with Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) and Row Level Security (RLS).
DocuSign helps organizations build entire approval workflows without a single sheet of paper or filing cabinet in sight, so security and reliability are critical, as they are with every business today. Docusign partnered with Microsoft to help secure their customers’ data, realize insights with SQL Server analytics and BI capabilities and receive world-class support. Hear directly from their Chief Architect and Vice President of Platforms, Eric Fleischman:
With all of these capabilities built-in, SQL Server 2016 delivers not just a relational database, but an entire data platform for your business with incredible TCO. Today customers can save up to $10 million over three years versus Oracle, running transactional, data warehouse, data integration, business intelligence and advanced analytics workloads.* Judson Althoff, president of Microsoft North America, announced a new program to help more customers adopt SQL Server 2016 and save. Specifically, customers currently running applications or workloads on non-Microsoft paid commercial RDBMS platform will be able to migrate their existing applications with free SQL Server licenses.**
Microsoft is delivering on a vision that no other company can match across data, intelligence and cloud. To learn more, watch the webcast as well as various on-demand videos that showcase the new capabilities of this database built for mission-critical intelligence.
Managed Solution’s Team has the experience and expertise to architect SQL database and reporting systems tailored for your environment. Contact us for more information 800-307-0296
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
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SQL Server 2016: The database for mission-critical intelligence
