AWS OpsWorks for Windows now supports custom AutoScaling based on Amazon CloudWatch Alarms and custom AMIs.
Amazon CloudWatch alarms can be used as thresholds for AWS OpsWorks Automatic Load-based Scaling. For example, you can use ‘Disk Reads’ or ‘Network In’ as metrics to scale up or down your load-based instances.
Custom AMI support gives you the ability to use your own AMIs based on a Windows Server 2012 R2 base that have software such as Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with SQL Server Express, SQL Server Standard or SQL Server Web preinstalled.
These additions to AWS OpsWorks Windows support benefit customers that want to start with custom built AMIs and customers that have the need to scale their infrastructure based on any metric available in Amazon CloudWatch alarms.
Read our Product Page to learn more and our Documentation to get started with AWS OpsWorks.
Education is a must-have ingredient for success. And to succeed in education, reading and writing is essential. The challenges that come with language barriers and learning disabilities such as dyslexia are vast and varied, but luckily technology is able to help many students overcome literacy obstacles.
One solution is coming from a team at Microsoft that spans collaboration between Windows, OneNote, Bing and Microsoft Research: the OneNote for Learning extension. The team and their project emerged victorious over more than 3,300 other projects and 13,000 other hackers around the world competing in the company’s second annual //oneweek Hackathon during the last week of July.
Sebastian Greaves, a Vancouver-based OneNote developer, thinks of the extension as a toolbox with many small tools that can solve big problems. It has special text formatting tools that can make reading, writing and note-taking easier. Features include enhanced dictation powered by Bing speech recognition services, immersive reading that uses Windows services of simultaneous audio text playback with highlighting, and natural language processing that relies on Microsoft Research.
“One of the key things we wanted to achieve is to make sure no student ever got behind in their education because of difficulties with reading,” says Greaves, who drove down to Redmond, Washington, with others from his office to work side-by-side with the entire team during Hackathon. “We wanted to make sure that was as little a barrier as possible, so they can focus on what they’re learning.”
More than a dozen of Greaves’ teammates worked together for more than eight weeks to create the free OneNote extension, which will debut this fall in several schools in the U.S. and France.
“One of the great things about this project was that we utilized loads of different services,” Greaves says. “It meant that we could do so much more than we could’ve done if we had to write it all from scratch.”
By connecting with so many existing technologies across Microsoft, the team was able to do a lot in a short period of time. Every team member made key contributions to push the project forward, says Jeff Petty, the accessibility lead for Windows for Education and the program manager who led the grand prize-winning team.
“It takes a tremendous amount of work to envision it, pull it together and then deliver it in such a way where it just makes sense for people,” says Petty. “I don’t think we could have done something as powerful without having real breadth and depth on the team.”
OneNote Hackathon finalists OneNote team in Redmond, Wash. (left to right) Jeff Petty, Rob McKaughan, Chris Quirk, Mira Shah, Mike Tholfsen, Greg Hitchcock, Kevin Larson and Daniel Hubbell on August 11, 2015. (Photography by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures)
Petty was interested in finding opportunities to deliver better learning outcomes for students and teachers. He focused on dyslexia, which affects as much as 20 percent of the population. He connected with a team in OneNote that was working on solving problems for dyslexic readers, such as visual crowding. That team found ways to put more space between letters, which makes words more readable.
That team had won an internal OneNote hackathon in the spring for that idea, led by Valentin Dobre, a software engineer, and Greaves.
Petty recognized this was a great start, but soon he and the expanding team also realized they could do more to pull together a more wide-reaching solution for students.
“When you address challenges with reading and writing, the benefits extend far beyond the original audience you had in mind,” says Petty. “By solving a problem for one audience, we’re actually going to make life easier for many more people.”
In his work with Windows, they were able to take advantage of the immersive reading function, with the ability to highlight text and have it read aloud, which increases reading comprehension. The next big connection was finding font and reading experts in Windows research.
“They helped us gel,” Petty says. “They backed up our solutions with science. Nothing that we built came from what we just thought was a good idea. It’s all based on prior research. These are proven interventions for students with dyslexia and also techniques that create a better reader for everybody.”
The researchers provided additional ideas for improving the team’s tool chest, like breaking words down into syllables to improve word recognition, and reading comprehension mode, which highlights different parts of speech like verbs and subordinate clauses.
Mira Shah was the team’s user research expert and formerly a speech pathologist. She gave them a real-world perspective with her experience in schools and seeing firsthand what worked and what didn’t.
Petty served as the glue to the team, bringing a broad perspective to reading and writing, and kept them on track with guiding principles, such as developing something backed by science, and keeping everyone focused on delivering something that would make a difference in people’s lives – something they could all be proud of, regardless of the outcome.
“I think we can make reading and writing better for everybody,” Petty says. “And if we really focus on people with disabilities, and we understand what works for them, we can bring those designs and solutions to our products that benefit everyone.”
Once the team came together, they shared a common drive to finish what they started.
“At no point did we think we were not going to ship,” Petty says. “OneNote was not interested in doing this as an experiment. Hackathon forced us to create a prototype they could polish to take it to schools in the fall.”
During the three very intense days of the //oneweek Hackathon, everyone on the team met each other for the first time, working practically nonstop under the Redmond tents that housed 3,000 people during the working sessions. Having the Vancouver-based OneNote development members – Greaves, Dominik Messinger and Pelle Nielsen – join the rest of the team was critical to their success.
“We could not have done it without them being there,” Petty says. “It was a completely different way of working, to get rapid feedback and iterate and iterate and iterate. We’d give them protected blocks of time where they got no additional feedback. Then we’d come back together for joint review. We were doing iterations while they were coding, then we had to decide to either refine functionality or bring new features. There is no way we could have made the same progress had we not all been there.”
At the Hackathon, the team also met the mother of a daughter who has severe dyslexia, working with another team. She believed what the OneNote for Learning team was doing was going to make a difference, and her reaction gave them even more confidence they were on the right track.
OneNote Hackathon finalists OneNote team in Vancuouver, Canada (left to right) Mark Flores, Alex Pereira, Sebastian Greaves, Pelle Nielsen, Scott Leong, Dominik Messinger, Reza Jooyandeh, Ken Wong on August 11, 2015. (Photography by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures)
And for developer and team member Dominik Messinger, whose native language isn’t English, the project provided him with better tools to improve his own language skills, such as dividing words into semantic units for better comprehension – and pronunciation.
“I caught myself reading out some notes for OneNote documentation, and just listening to it, discovered some words I’ve totally pronounced wrong. Text to speech is pretty useful,” Messinger jokes. “Also, having short term goals and having all this energy, coding really fast and collaborating really, really fast – that was quite an experience. We can be proud of what we achieved in so few days.”
For the whole team, the Hackathon exemplified the best things about being able to tap into the entire company for resources.
“I think there’s a lot of strength in working across orgs and teams, and getting to work with people we might otherwise not get to work with, such as the accessibility team,” Nielsen says. “Learning how important it is to choose the right color scheme or font was eye opening.”
While everyone brought their own strengths to the project, its ultimate purpose served as a north star that maintained the team’s focus.
“We wanted to make sure this was a non-stigmatizing feature. This is something anybody could use. Someone using the extension wouldn’t raise a big red flag that they’ve got a disability,” Nielsen says. “For me, the most important thing was recognizing the value of our goal. It doesn’t matter how cool the tech is if it doesn’t help anyone. That’s what is so compelling about this project. We’re making learning easier for every single student.”
Alongside a new security update for Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer, Microsoft released a new cumulative update for Windows 10. The company has released KB3081436, KB890830, KB3087916 and KB2267602. All of the latest updates focus on bug fixes, but mainly security patches.
For those wondering, KB890830 introduces a new update for the Windows Malicious Software Removable Tool, while KB3087916 introduces a security update for Internet Explorer Flash Player. To get the latest update, you’ll need to head over to Settings>Update & Security. However, if you’ve automatic updates enabled, Windows should automatically download these soon.
Here's another Windows Holographic demo showing universal apps running on the HoloLens from Microsoft!
Posted on July 14, 2015 by David Mario Smith
At its Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft gave new details on it’s Project GigJam collaboration app, which represents a fresh approach by the technology titan. GigJam will enable users to find or pull information from any or multiple business applications, share that information or parts of it with team members in a workspace metaphor. Users can keep track of processes and the tasks involved to get work done quicker.
I find GigJam to be one of the more important announcements from Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference. For one, the name is probably the coolest name Microsoft has come up with. Well, being the son of a Jazz musician, it just evokes emotions in me. But I digress. More importantly, this represents a new Microsoft. This is Satya Nadella’s Microsoft, which is trying to be more open and platform agnostic.
GigJam is not tied to Windows. It was built using web standards such as REST, OAuth, JavaScript, and HTML5. It also works across Android, iOS, Mac and Windows devices and PCs. It also works on large screens such as Surface. GigJam allows you to share tasks with a purpose, in which you can assign responsibilities with the right information to the right people, ensuring the proper context to get things done. Cortana capabilities will be built in to allow audio for audio comments. Every task in an application seemingly becomes an application in itself that enables multi-user collaboration. Now it’s exact release date has not be revealed, but we anticipate this will be one of the most significant Microsoft product launches.
GigJam is Nadella’s vision to move Microsoft into an innovative position of openness and breaking down proprietary barriers between the applications and devices people use to get work done. What makes GigJam important is that it could potentially cause a paradigm shift in the way collaboration and productivity applications work. We’ve seen Microsoft release Sway and Delve and is trying to address the “help people get work done” mantra of newer mobile collaboration services such as Slack. The traditional barriers to that have been proprietary islands of collaboration platforms in which Microsoft was a main culprit. Building GigJam with open standards is a huge step for Microsoft and sends an industry alert that they’re about innovating in this space.
I’ve been writing about the emerging mobile collaboration space, which is impacting collaboration and causing traditional vendors to react with new lightweight mobile offerings to support how people work. I believe GigJam is an innovative step and point in this trend that will demand a response from emerging and traditional collaboration providers. GigJam calls tasks, people, content and context to the forefront in a way that will potentially help people get work done faster and more efficiently. GigJam is at the project stage, so from now till it is officially released, I’m sure deeper details will be revealed. As an analyst, I’m usually tempered on product announcements claiming to be the next big thing and that can cure all ails, but I believe Microsoft has something here. Time will tell how well they execute though. Stay tuned!
Microsoft Windows 8.1 is designed to work seamlessly between touchscreen and keyboard. This reimagined operating system was designed to make everyday tasks easier and more enjoyable. Windows 8.1 features a fully customizable tile interface, instant search capabilities through the charms, access to apps through the user-friendly Windows Store, and much more.
Master Windows 8.1 before Windows 10 is launched on July 29, 2015.
Want to learn more?
View Managed Solution’s In The TechKnow – a Web Tech Series featuring how-to video tutorials on technology. This series is presented by Jennell Mott, Business Operations Manager, and provides a resource for quick technical tips and fixes. You don’t need to be a technical guru to brush up on tech tips!
Microsoft is planning to release Windows 10 on July 29th. So they have to hand over the RTM build of Windows 10 as soon as possible to their partners for testing before the release. According to several reports that emerged online, Microsoft is planning to sign-off Windows 10 RTM later this week. Wzor also posted a screenshot of Calendar app showing RTM Sign-off date as July 9th. Also, Microsoft is testing Windows 10 Build 10176 from the th1 branch as the first Release Candidate build.
For Windows Insiders, Windows 10 RTM will not make that much difference from their current build apart from improved stability of the overall performance and bug fixes. Microsoft is planning to release new builds with many new features even after Windows 10’s release on July 29th.
It’s an exciting time for Skype for Business as they deliver communication-powered productivity in Office. In the last few months, they've delivered the Skype for Business client for Windows, the new Skype for Business Server, and Skype for Business Online in Office 365. And just last week, they announced previews of new meetings and voice capabilities in Office 365 through the Skype for Business Preview Program.
Today they announced the availability of the Skype for Business app for Windows Phone.
What’s new - intuitive interface, more emoticons, improved server communications
If you are familiar with the Lync app for Windows Phone, you’ll notice a number of enhancements in the new app. The most noticeable differences right off the bat are the Skype for Business brand and UI, which is intuitive and familiar if you happen to use Skype in your personal communications. They've also revamped emoticons, which now offers over 100 emoticons to land your message visually.
They have improved how the app and the server handle conversation notifications. Once you’re notified of a new conversation on your phone, the other clients you have logged in won’t be able to grab the conversation and prevent you from responding on your phone.
They have also enhanced security with at-rest data encryption, so your conversation history and voicemail is encrypted by default.
And your most recent conversations are now synchronized across devices whether they took place on your PC, tablet or phone, as long as you’re running the latest server software. We’re working hard to enable that for Office 365 users as well, so stay tuned for more news to come.
How you can upgrade today
Most people who have the Lync 2013 app on their Windows Phone will be automatically updated to the new Skype for Business app, but here are the particulars depending on which version of Windows Phone you use:
If you have a Windows Phone 8.1 and higher but do not have the Lync 2013 app, you can download the new Skype for Business app in the Windows Store.
If you have Windows Phone 8.1 and higher and currently have the Lync 2013 mobile app, the new Skype for Business app will replace your existing app and tile automatically.
If you have Windows Phone 8.0, you will continue to use Lync 2013 or Lync 2010, which remains compatible even if your organization is running the new Skype for Business Server.
Posted by Skype for Business Team, on July 6, 2015
