ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 25, 2017 /CNW/ -- Microsoft Corp. on
Monday welcomed over 25,000 business customers to its annual IT
event, Microsoft Ignite in Orlando,
Fla., where the company showcased how it is infusing cloud,
AI and mixed reality across it products to help customers visualize
and create the future of business. Microsoft also shared how
quantum computers could help solve some of our planet's biggest
challenges. News spanned Microsoft's commercial businesses — Office
365, Windows 10, Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AI —
with a focus on how the company is empowering people and
organizations to succeed in a rapidly evolving workplace, and
enabling customers to harness data, AI, hybrid and cloud
technologies to evolve business process and innovate for the
future.
"Digital technology is impacting all aspects of our society and
economies, creating unprecedented opportunity for organizations of
all sizes," said Satya Nadella, CEO,
Microsoft. "I'm optimistic and inspired by the ingenuity of
customers, partners and developers everywhere that are pushing the
frontiers of what's possible with mixed reality and artificial
intelligence infused across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure,
to transform and have impact in the world."
The next frontier of computing
Following 12 years of investment in its vision to create a
scalable computer based on quantum physics, today Microsoft
announced the creation of a new programming language optimized
for exploiting scalable quantum computers and deep
integration of the programming language into Visual Studio,
providing developers with debugging and other support and
state-of-the-art simulators that can run locally or on Microsoft
Azure. The tools will be available for free by year's end.
Developers can join Microsoft's quantum community today by signing
up at www.microsoft.com/quantum.
Empowering employees and fostering a new culture of
work
Microsoft also announced the expansion of Microsoft 365 with two
new solutions to empower firstline workers and education customers.
The company also introduced new intelligent search capabilities, a
vision for intelligent communications centering on Microsoft Teams,
and security and IT management enhancements to help customers stay
secure and compliant, including meeting the General Data Protection
Regulation.
- Microsoft 365 F1 brings together Office 365, Windows 10
and Enterprise Mobility + Security to empower the more than 2
billion firstline workers worldwide who serve as the first point of
contact between a company and its customers or who are directly
involved in making products.
- Microsoft 365 Education includes Office 365 for
Education, Windows 10, Enterprise Mobility + Security and
Minecraft: Education Edition. It gives students, faculty and staff
everything they need to create and collaborate, securely.
- Microsoft 365-powered devices, including new commercial
Windows 10 S devices from HP Inc., Lenovo, Acer and Fujitsu
starting at $275, offer
self-service deployment and simplified management, staying always
up-to-date, resulting in a low total cost of ownership for
businesses. Designed for cloud-based identity and management,
these devices are ideal for firstline workers, students and
educators.
- Microsoft introduced a new vision for intelligent
communications, including plans to bring Skype for Business
Online capabilities into Microsoft Teams, along with cognitive and
data services, making Teams the true hub for teamwork in Office
365, including persistent chat, voice and video.
- Intelligent search experiences use AI and machine
learning to deliver more relevant search results everywhere you
search across Microsoft 365. New experiences include Bing for
business private preview, which provides a unified view of
personalized, contextual search results from inside and outside
your organization.
- New LinkedIn in Microsoft profile cards now provide the
ability to see information from LinkedIn profiles in Microsoft apps
and services. This new experience, rolling out now for first
release customers in Outlook Web Access, SharePoint and OneDrive
for Business, enhances the way you collaborate and build
relationships by providing insights about the people you're working
with, inside and outside your organization, right from within
Office 365.
- HP Inc. and Lenovo will join Surface in supporting
Windows AutoPilot by providing device IDs to companies on select
orders beginning January 2018. This
enables users to easily set up a new device complete with the
company configuration and apps ready to go and removes the need for
IT to touch the device or manage updates in person.
- Microsoft 365 is delivering improved Advanced Threat
Protection (ATP) features like enhanced anti-phishing
capabilities; expanded protection to SharePoint Online, OneDrive
for Business and Microsoft Teams; and integration between cloud and
on-premises identity threat detection capabilities.
More information on Microsoft's Modern Workplace solutions is
available here.
Modernizing business processes with cloud and AI
Microsoft expanded Dynamics 365 with new AI solutions that
transform critical enterprise scenarios and apps and services to
help business users reinvent the processes they use every day.
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI solutions are designed to
tackle high-value, complex enterprise scenarios and tailored to
existing processes, systems and data. The first solution includes
an intelligent virtual agent for customer care, an intelligent
assistant for customer service staff and conversation management
tools, all powered by Microsoft AI. Australian Government
Department of Human Services, HP Inc., Macy's and Microsoft are
already using this technology to improve overall customer
satisfaction and handle more requests, in a shorter amount of
time.
- Modular apps for Dynamics 365 to help customers quickly
transform high-impact processes by integrating with existing
systems and augmenting them with workflow and insights from
Dynamics 365, LinkedIn and Office 365. The first two modular apps,
Attract and Onboard, will help companies recruit the most qualified
candidates and ensure their success with personalized onboarding.
Both will be available as part of Dynamics 365 for Talent later
this year.
- Deeper integration between PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and
Office 365 and Dynamics 365. Now, any business user familiar with
InfoPath forms, Access databases or SharePoint can build apps that
extend and automate their business processes with PowerApps and
Microsoft Flow.
More information on how companies can use these new technologies
to improve business applications and processes is available
here.
Advancing the enterprise cloud
Microsoft Azure is driving new levels of organizational
productivity, intelligent data-driven experiences and deepened
business trust — all via a consistent, unique hybrid cloud approach
across data, apps and infrastructure, whether on-premises or in the
cloud.
- Azure Stack shipping through OEM partners including Dell
EMC, HPE and Lenovo. An extension of Azure, Azure Stack is truly
unique in the marketplace, enabling consistency that allows
organizations to build and deploy apps using the exact same APIs,
tools and experiences they would have in the Azure cloud.
- SQL Server on Linux, Windows and Docker availability with
SQL Server 2017 GA. SQL Server is the first born-in-the-cloud
database that is also available on-premises. SQL Server 2017 brings
the power of SQL Server to Windows, Linux and Docker containers for
the first time, enabling developers to build intelligent
applications using their preferred language and environments to
drive even more productivity, along with high levels of performance
and data security.
- The fully automated Database Migration Service and SQL DB
Managed Instance is now available for customers to easily lift
and shift their on-premises SQL Server databases to an Azure SQL
database.
- SQL Data Warehouse delivers a new optimized-for-compute
performance tier, significantly improving performance of
analytics in the cloud. This new compute-optimized performance tier
also scales further than before, up to 30,000 compute Data
Warehouse Units. The preview will be available in the fall.
- Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server will let customers
maximize existing license investments with discounted rates,
further extending the promise of hybrid across our customers' data
investments.
- Azure Cost Management services by Cloudyn
will help manage and optimize cloud spend via a single, unified
view across multicloud environments. Customers and partners will be
able to use the service to manage their Azure spend for free.
- Azure Security Center will include new
integrated security capabilities focused on reducing
vulnerability and increasing threat protection, as well as
extending to secure hybrid workloads.
- The preview of new updates to Azure Machine Learning
will provide AI developers and data scientists with a new set of
tools to develop and manage machine learning and AI models anywhere
— in the cloud, on-premises or on the edge. These new updates will
also make AI developers and data scientists more productive by
leveraging the most popular open source frameworks, tools and
runtimes.
- Azure CosmosDB and Azure Functions integration. By
bringing the power of Azure CosmosDB, our globally distributed,
first-of-its-kind modern database service, to our serverless
offering, Azure Functions, developers can achieve new levels of
productivity, writing apps with just a few lines of code so they
can innovate faster to react to "events" like IoT sensors, database
changes and more.
- Updates to Microsoft Cognitive Services, a
collection of intelligent APIs that allows developers to easily add
AI capabilities to their applications. Today's updates include the
general availability of text analytics, a cloud-based
service for language processing, such as sentiment analysis, key
phrase extraction and language detection of text. Next month, we
will also make generally available Bing Custom
Search, a customized search experience for a section of
the Web, and Bing Search v7, which will provide more
relevant results using Bing Web, news, video, image search, as well
as a new version of autosuggest and spellcheck.
More information on Microsoft's enterprise cloud solutions is
available here.
About Microsoft Ignite
More information and news from Microsoft Ignite can be found at
the Microsoft News Center. Readers can also follow and engage with
the Microsoft Twitter community at @MSFTnews and @MS_Ignite using
#MSIgnite.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) is the leading platform and
productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and
its mission is to empower every person and every organization on
the planet to achieve more.
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SOURCE Microsoft Corp.