To continue to meet legal, business and regulatory compliance challenges, businesses must be able to keep and protect important information and quickly find what’s relevant. Spending days, if not weeks, manually sifting through millions of files to find the small number that are relevant isn’t just expensive—it isn’t an option.

At Microsoft, we know how demanding and complex compliance can be. As you might imagine, being a large enterprise operating at a global scale, we’re subject to many discovery requests every year. Our legal department uses the eDiscovery features of Office 365 to improve the accuracy and usefulness of our discovery results and save time and money.

Our white paper titled “Office 365 meets evolving eDiscovery challenges in a cloud-first world” walks you through the rich eDiscovery capabilities in Office 365 and gives examples of how we use them at Microsoft to help satisfy compliance and legal requests in a timely and cost-effective manner.

When organizations migrate to the cloud, they are better served by solutions that are designed for the cloud from the beginning. That’s why at Microsoft, we’ve adopted a cloud-first strategy. Our solutions give our customers increased efficiencies, cost savings and security in the cloud—right from the start. Our Office 365 eDiscovery solution brings eDiscovery to the cloud in a scalable, efficient, always up-to-date and secure environment.

Before Office 365 eDiscovery was available, we had to manually collect content from various sources. Gathering a large volume of content and loading it into an offline processing tool took time. Then we had to reprocess it. With collection, processing and remediation, it could take between two and three weeks to give outside counsel the documents they requested. Today, we do most of this work in hours, not days or weeks. We start to export content on the fly and can have it ready for counsel to load into their review tool by the end of the day.

With eDiscovery search, we typically reduce the amount of content in a case by about 95 percent. However, this still leaves large volumes of data that need to be submitted to the very costly process of legal review. Advanced eDiscovery helps us reduce these costs significantly: we typically see a further reduction of 30 percent by eliminating duplicate files and grouping near-duplicates, and another 25 percent by consolidating email threads.

By reducing the amount of manual work required to respond to eDiscovery requests, Office 365 eDiscovery saves our legal department about $4.5 million annually.

Download the full white paper today to learn more.

The post Microsoft saves $4.5 million annually using Office 365 eDiscovery appeared first on Office Blogs.

This post is authored by Hang Zhang, Senior Data Scientist Manager, Gopi Kumar, Principal Program Manager, and Xibin Gao, Data Scientist, at Microsoft.

Back in September 2016, we released an early public preview of Team Data Science Process (TDSP), with the goal of supporting secure collaboration within enterprise data science organizations, with capabilities such as versioning, knowledge management and more. TDSP helps you structure your data science projects by providing a standardized set of Git repositories, document templates and utilities that are relevant at different stages of your development lifecycle. One of the key elements of TDSP is a repository of utilities that we’ve specifically created to boost data science productivity. Along with our September 2016 release (version 0.1), we published two R-based data science utilities to a public GitHub repository, namely:

• Interactive Data Exploration, Analysis and Reporting (IDEAR), which helps data scientists to explore and visualize a data set interactively, and
  
• Automated Modeling and Reporting (AMAR), which facilitates baseline model training, model sweeping, and parameter sweeping.
  

Motivated by your feedback and suggestions, and based on our understanding of the needs of the data science community, we are now pleased to announce TDSP Data Science Utilities version 0.11. This new version, which officially released during the recent holiday season (on December 22nd, 2016), includes several new features and enhancements, which we describe in this blog post.

New Features

IDEAR Now Runs in Python

According to the KDnuggets 2016 poll, R and Python are the top two languages for analytics and data science. To better support the data science community, we are now releasing IDEAR in Jupyter Notebooks (Python 2.7). Data scientists who prefer Python can now explore and visualize data using similar functionality as what IDEAR had earlier provided in R. Users can upload the IDEAR Jupyter Notebook to a Jupyter Notebook server, configure the working directory in the Jupyter Notebook, and start investigating data sets. More detailed instructions can be found in GitHub repository. The interactivity is enabled using the ipywidgets library in Python.

IDEAR in R Now Extracts Date Time Components Automatically from Datetime Fields

Datetime is a common data type encountered in business applications such as customer churn, fraud detection and demand forecasting. Data scientists usually write code to extract datetime components such as year, month, weekday, week of year or hour, and can then use them as extra variables for further analysis and modeling. This new feature of IDEAR in R extracts these datetime components automatically and adds them directly to the original dataset, with column names ending with _autogen_year, _autogen_month, etc. IDEAR in R works with this enhanced dataset, allowing data scientists to visualize and obtain insights on how these date and time components impact the target variable. Users only need to specify which columns are datetime columns and provide their format in the YAML configuration file. To try this feature, use the UCI_Bike_Rental data by passing para-bike-rental-hour.yaml file to IDEAR. This data has a datetime column dteday in the format “YYYY-mm-dd“, which has been specified as DateTimeColumns in the YAML file.

IDEAR in R Now Runs in Visual Studio with R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS)

With our September 2016 release, IDEAR in R
needed to be run on RStudio. For data scientists who prefer Visual Studio with RTVS as their data science IDE, we now have the option to run IDEAR in R in Visual Studio. You can do so simply by changing the option “Shiny pages browser” to External in Visual Studio. More detailed instructions can be found here: Instructions for using IDEAR in R.

Enhanced Features

We are also pleased to offer the following enhancements to our earlier features:

• Slices in pie charts of individual categorical variable visualizations are sorted by the frequencies of the categorical variable levels. Sorting slices in this manner makes pie charts more readable, especially when individual variables have a large number of levels (e.g. week number, day of month, etc.). The bar chart of the categorical variable still takes the ordinal order of the levels, to provide a view complementary to pie charts sorted by frequencies.
  
• Enhanced readiness to run IDEAR in both R and Python on the Azure Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM). DSVM, by default, carries Jupyter Notebook server with Anaconda Python and Microsoft R Open. The most recent release of DSVM carries all the libraries necessary to run IDEAR in both R and Python. After you clone the Data Science Utilities repository to your DSVM, you can use IDEAR in R on Visual Studio with RTVS or use IDEAR in Jupyter Notebooks (Python 2.7) after simply launching your Jupyter Notebook server. For instructions on launching Jupyter Notebook server on the Azure DSVM, see this article: Ten Things You Can Do On the Data Science Virtual Machine.
  
• IDEAR in R now has a more consistent coding style, following the guidance provided in Hands-On Data Science Sharing R Code — With Style. This makes source code more readable.
  

Next Steps

Go ahead and try these new utilities by cloning the GitHub repository. Two sample datasets are included as well, so you can use these to try out the new utilities or try them on your own datasets.

We hope you get a chance to use these tools and the Team Data Science Process in your next data science project. Send us your feedback as always – you can either use the comments feature below or go to the issues tab of our GitHub repository above, or tweet to @zenlytix. We’re always looking for ways to improve our tools and make them even more useful across an even broader range of analytics scenarios.

Hang, Gopi & Xibin

On February 8, we’ll be livestreaming a Windows Developer Day, which will outline what’s new for developers in the Windows 10 Creators Update. Whether you’re building for the web or UWP, the latest consumer app or line of business tool, there’s something in it for you. RSVP on the Windows Developer Day site to be the first to know as we share more details in the coming weeks.

Join Kevin Gallo and the Windows engineering team, as they talk through how the latest advances in Windows 10 APIs and tooling enable you to build great things:

• What’s new with Windows developer tooling: UWP tooling, BASH, Developer mode, and more
• Learn about the latest XAML advancements, and how UWP helps you build Windows apps that are more personal and productive
• Hear the developer story behind the recent announcements of Cortana skills and the new Windows mixed reality headsets
• We’ll also close out the event with a live Q&A panel, where anyone can ask their questions

For this Windows Developer Day, we’re partnering with Channel 9 to share it with the world. We’re also in the process of working with our Windows Developer MVP community to setup local viewing parties around the world, where Windows devs can get together, share tips and network with one another.

Be sure to stay in the loop. Bookmark and RSVP on the Windows Developer Day site to be the first to know as we share more details in the coming weeks.

The post Join us on Feb 8th for Windows Developer Day – Creators Update livestream appeared first on Building Apps for Windows.

This is the first of a series of posts on PowerShell Core and the tools we use to test it. If you’ve looked at the main project for PowerShell (https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell, you may have noticed a new badge down in the Build status of nightly builds:

We are supplying code coverage numbers for our test pass via the OpenCover project (https://github.com/OpenCover/opencover) and we visualize our code coverage percentage via coveralls.io (https://coveralls.io/github/PowerShell/PowerShell?branch=master). This means you can see some details about our testing and how much of PowerShell is covered by our test code.

You can get your own coverage numbers easily via our OpenCover module which may be found in the test/tools/OpenCover directory. To generate a code coverage report, you need to create a build which supports code coverage. Currently, that’s only available on Windows, but we do have an easy way to get it:

(All of these commands assume that you are at the root of the PowerShell repo)

# create a code coverage build.
PS> Start-PSBuild -Configuration CodeCoverage -Publish

# Now that you have a build, save away the build location
PS> $psdir = split-path -parent (get-psoutput)

# Import the OpenCover Module
PS> Import-module $pwd/test/tools/OpenCover

# install the opencover package
PS> Install-OpenCover $env:TEMP

# now invoke a coverage test run
PS> Invoke-OpenCover -OutputLog Coverage.xml -test $PWD/test/powershell -OpenCoverPath $env:Temp/OpenCover -PowerShellExeDirectory $psdir

If you want to get code coverage for only the tests that we run in our Continuous Integration (CI) environment, add the parameter -CIOnly. Then you’ll need to wait for a bit (on my system and using -CIOnly, it takes about 2.5 hours to run).

Looking at the Data

The OpenCover module can also help you visualize the results from a very high level.

# first collect the coverage data with the Get-CodeCoverage cmdlet
PS> $coverData = Get-CodeCoverage .\Coverage.xml
# here’s the coverage summary
PS> $coverData.CoverageSummary
NumSequencePoints       : 309755
VisitedSequencePoints   : 123779
NumBranchPoints         : 105816
VisitedBranchPoints     : 39842
SequenceCoverage        : 39.96
BranchCoverage          : 37.65
MaxCyclomaticComplexity : 398
MinCyclomaticComplexity : 1
VisitedClasses          : 2005
NumClasses              : 3309
VisitedMethods          : 14912
NumMethods              : 33910

# you can look at coverage data based on the assembly
PS> $coverData.Assembly | ft AssemblyName, Branch, Sequence

AssemblyName                                     Branch Sequence
------------                                     ------ --------
powershell                                       100    100
Microsoft.PowerShell.CoreCLR.AssemblyLoadContext 45.12  94.75
Microsoft.PowerShell.ConsoleHost                 22.78  23.21
System.Management.Automation                     41.18  42.96
Microsoft.PowerShell.CoreCLR.Eventing            23.33  28.57
Microsoft.PowerShell.Security                    12.62  14.43
Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Management         14.69  16.76
Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Utility            52.72  54.40
Microsoft.WSMan.Management                       0.36   0.65
Microsoft.WSMan.Runtime                          100    100
Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Diagnostics        42.99  46.62
Microsoft.PowerShell.LocalAccounts               0      0
Microsoft.PowerShell.PSReadLine                  6.98   9.86

I’m not going to go through all the different properties that are reported, we’ll take a closer look at those in future posts.  The Get-CoverageData cmdlet is still fairly rudimentary, but it will provide some details. This is part of our public repo, so I encourage you to enhance it and log issues if you find them!

Better Coverage Visualization

Another way to view coverage data is via the ReportGenerator package, which creates HTML reports and provides much more details about the coverage. The ReportGenerator package is available via the find-package cmdlet in the PackageManagement module. The following will install the package, and show how to run it:

# find and install the report generator package
PS> find-package ReportGenerator -ProviderName nuget -Source https://nuget.org/api/v2 | install-package -Scope CurrentUser
PS> $ReportGenExe = “$HOME\AppData\Local\PackageManagement\NuGet\Packages\ReportGenerator.2.5.2\tools\ReportGenerator.exe”
# invoke the report generator and create the report in c:\temp\Coverage
PS>& $ReportGenExe -reports:Coverage.xml -targetdir:c:\temp\Coverage

Now that you’ve created the reports, you can visualize them with your browser.

PS> invoke-item C:\temp\Coverage\index.htm

Click on the “Enable filtering button”, and then “Collapse all” and you should see something similar to:

You can then drill in on what interests you (Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Utility, for example)

Of course, there’s a lot more detail to discover, and I encourage you to poke around. In my next post, I’ll go through an entire workflow:

• Select an area for improvement
• Create new tests
• Gather new coverage data
• Compare results from previous runs

I’ll target something specific (a cmdlet) and show how to determine the gaps and how to fill them.

Call To Action!

Now that you see how easily you can generate code coverage data, this is a great opportunity to provide some additional coverage and increase the quality of our releases. If you see some area which you’re passionate about or notice an area which you would like to measure better, it’s a great way to provide improved coverage. As you create new PRs, you can aim for high coverage in your new functionality (85-90%), and now you can measure it!

Last June, we invited our fan community to jump in and get hands-on with a slice of Halo Wars 2 with our first multiplayer beta. We received a tremendous amount of valuable feedback on both the technical and gameplay side that has helped the team continue to refine and improve the overall Halo Wars 2 experience as we march towards launch on Feb. 21, 2017.

I’m happy to announce one more opportunity to get hands-on with Halo Wars 2 and ask for your participation in one final large-scale multiplayer beta. This time around the focus will be exclusively on our brand-new, card-based game mode, Blitz, and it’ll be available on both Windows 10 PC and Xbox One beginning Jan. 20, 2017.

Blitz is our new twist on RTS gameplay that combines the deck building and split-second decision making of card-based strategy play with explosive tactical combat in the Halo universe. Your card deck, along with your faction leader, are your greatest resources as you assemble a collection of air, ground and infantry units and seek to out-think and out-maneuver your opponents on the battlefield. We’re really excited about this new mode and look forward to unleashing Blitz upon the community to play and run through its paces prior to launch. The Halo Wars 2 Blitz Beta will officially begin on Friday, Jan. 20 and is slated to run through Jan. 30, 2017.

On behalf of the entire team, thanks for your support and excitement around Halo Wars 2 thus far. We can’t wait to share Blitz mode with you starting Jan. 20!

See you online,
Dan

To learn more about Halo Wars 2 Blitz Beta, head over to Xbox Wire!

The post Halo Wars 2 Blitz Beta available Jan. 20 appeared first on Windows Experience Blog.

vcpkg, a tool to acquire and build C++ open source libraries on Windows, was published 3 months ago. We started with 20 libraries and now the C++ community has added 121 new C++ libraries. We really appreciate your feedback and we created a survey to collect it. Please take 5 minutes to complete it.

The survey measure your overall satisfaction with the tool and the catalog of libraries. It also captures your needs and feedback to prepare the next version. Your input is essential for us to build a tool you need and use, thanks in advance for your time and inputs.

As always don’t hesitate to contact us for any issues or suggestions, you can open an issue on github or reach us at vcpkg@microsoft.com

SQL product team has made significant improvements in columnstore index functionality, supportability and performance during SQL Server 2016 based on the feedback from customers. This blog series focuses on the performance improvements done as part of SQL Server 2016. Customers will get these benefits automatically with no changes to the application when they upgrade the application to SQL Server 2016. Please refer to the following blog for details

Thanks

Sunil Agarwal

Todays episode is part 2 of my chat with Brad Strock, the CIO of PayPal.

Brad and I talk about why de-stigmatizing failure is such a valuable approach to IT innovation, as well as our first jobs (both of us started out as mechanical engineers), and writing code on punchcards.

.

To learn more about how top CIOs stay secure + productive,check out this new report.

In the next episode, we begin to wrap up Season 3 with the first of two outtakes episodes its all the best stuff that couldnt quite fit into the previous episodes.

You can subscribe to these videoshere, or watch past episodes here:www aka.ms/LunchBreak.

There are an estimated 500-million frontline staff workers around the world in retail stores, hotels, restaurants, manufacturing and other service-related industries. These employees typically don’t have their own office, desk or computer—making it hard to access and share information important for the workday. Far too often, these workers rely on manual processes and outdated tools—cumbersome creation and printing of paper schedules, bulletin boards crammed with notes and a flurry of phone calls and text messages to cover shifts. Microsoft StaffHub is here to help.

We’re pleased to announce the worldwide general availability of Microsoft StaffHub—a new application for Office 365 designed to help staff workers manage their workday—with schedule management, information sharing and the ability to connect to other work-related apps and resources.

Manage schedules

Microsoft StaffHub makes it easy for managers to create, update and manage shift schedules for their team, streamlining what has been a labor-intensive process.

Employees have access to all their shift information, including the ability to easily swap shifts with others right from the Microsoft StaffHub mobile app. No more having to go into the breakroom at work to look at the bulletin board.

Managers create, update and manage shift schedules for the team.

Employees view their upcoming shifts at a glance on their mobile device and can request to swap a shift with someone else.

The app home screen provides a summary of upcoming shifts as well as any important notes. Employees can also see who else is scheduled for the day, which is useful if they want to know who they’ll be working with or if they want to swap shifts.

When schedule conflicts come up, Microsoft StaffHub makes it easy to swap a shift or offer a shift to someone else. Requests are always routed to the manager for approval, and updates and notifications are automatically sent to the team.

Share information

With Microsoft StaffHub, managers can quickly distribute important information to their team, such as policy documents, news bulletins or videos. Managers also have a fast and reliable way to send quick messages to team members. For example, to let an employee know “there is a spill on the floor” or “the regional GM is arriving in 20 minutes,” simply tap the employee’s name and type a message. Employees can also send messages directly to each other or to the entire workgroup.

Managers select the content they want to distribute to their team.

Employees can view the files on the mobile app.

Connect to other apps and resources

Companies often use multiple systems and tools to help manage their workforce, and we want to make it easy for Microsoft StaffHub to connect to these existing systems. We’re pleased to announce that StaffHub will support connections to Kronos, a leading provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions. Initially, this integration will enable managers to import individual and team schedule information from Kronos’s Workforce Central platform directly into Microsoft StaffHub. This functionality will initially be in private preview to a small group of Office 365 and Kronos customers. Stay tuned for more!

Microsoft StaffHub also supports the ability for admins to define custom links for workers to view in the mobile app, which can point to important resources or sites, such as HR systems for reporting time off, or to custom applications, built with tools such as Microsoft PowerApps. Managers can also export team schedule information to a .csv file for use in other systems.

Next steps

Microsoft StaffHub is enabled today for Office 365 customers with a K1, E1, E3 or E5 plan. Team managers can sign in at staffhub.ms, and employees can download the app on iOS or Android.

For a deeper look at Microsoft StaffHub, check out this video:

Frequently asked questions

Q. Which Office 365 plans include Microsoft StaffHub?

A. StaffHub is available as part of the Office 365 K1, E1, E3 and E5 plans (including the Education version of these plans).

Q. How can I access MicrosoftStaffHub?

A. Microsoft StaffHub is initially available on the web as well as for iOS and Android apps. It is currently available in the following 15 languages: Chinese-Simplified, English (U.S.), Spanish, Russian, Japanese, French, Brazilian-Portuguese, German, Korean, Italian, Chinese-Traditional, Dutch, Turkish, Swedish and Danish.

Q. Does each team member need to have an Office 365 account to use Microsoft StaffHub?

A. Yes, each team member and manager using Microsoft StaffHub must have an Office 365 account.

Q. Can I turn off Microsoft StaffHub for my company?

A. Microsoft StaffHub is on by default, and IT admins can turn it off for their organization at any time by going to staffhub.ms/admin and setting Enable Microsoft StaffHub to Off.

The post Microsoft StaffHub is here! appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today, businesses are collecting more data than ever before. But data without insight is meaningless, and insight without action is pointless. The biggest question organizations face is how to make sense of it all—how to sift through everything to find meaningful information that helps to tell a story about customers, product insights or industry trends that can help drive a business forward.

On the latest episode of Modern Workplace, Susan Etlinger, industry analyst at the Altimeter Group, and Gabi Steele, data visualization scientist at The Washington Post, discuss the challenges businesses face in turning data into actionable insights and the best course of action for getting started. They talk about key issues, including:

• Building the right teams and asking the right questions.
• Defining a vision and hypothesis but being ready to pivot based on emerging data patterns.
• Choosing the right vehicle for the right communication (interactive visualizations versus static infographics).
• Making data accessible to more audiences through powerful storytelling.
• Using tools that most organizations already own to do more with existing data.

You’ll also see a demonstration of Power BI, Excel and Word features that help improve data visualization to gain insights. The new Office Tap feature shows how those visualizations can be easily inserted into reports.

Register and watch the latest Modern Workplace episode, “Visualize: The power of data storytelling,” to learn more.

The post Find and tell a compelling story in your data appeared first on Office Blogs.

This past year was an exciting one: we saw even more great Windows 10 devices introduced to our customers that take advantage of the password-free security benefits of Windows Hello. Built in to Windows 10, Windows Hello takes away the hassle of remembering passwords and minimizes security risks for millions of Windows customers. With Windows Hello, you can simply and uniquely use your face, fingerprints, or a PIN to quickly and more securely sign-in to your Windows 10 device.

Over the last year, one of our top priorities was to make this technology available on the widest variety of devices. Today, Windows Hello can be used on nearly every Windows 10 device in the world natively with a PIN or integrated biometric sensor or with an accessory. In fact, during the 2016 holiday season we counted nearly 100 unique biometric-enabled Windows devices and accessories available across all form factors, including laptops, all-in-ones, 2-in-1s, tablets, phones and peripherals.

While using Windows Hello with devices that include embedded biometric sensors is a great way for consumers and enterprises to get password-free security, companion experiences can also provide greater security and convenience enabled with Windows Hello. Since first announcing the companion device framework at Build 2016, we have had more than 20 partners join our efforts to make passwords a thing of the past. By opening the Windows Hello companion device framework to the hardware industry, our partners are delivering differentiated and innovative Windows Hello devices that meet the needs of both consumers and businesses, including those in heavily regulated industries.

Some of the Windows Hello companion device partners.

Here’s a glimpse into a handful of companion devices for both consumer and business scenarios.

Nymi Band

The Nymi Band is a wearable Windows Hello companion device that allows you to sign into your Windows 10 device without a password. Just walk up to your PC wearing the Nymi Band, tap the band to express your intent, and then you’ll be quickly signed into your device. The band does this after Nymi’s HeartID™ technology confirms it’s actually you using your heartbeat and their unique electrocardiogram (ECG) based authentication technology. You can read more about the Nymi Band solution here.

The Nymi Band is a wearable Windows Hello companion device.

YubiKey

The YubiKey from Yubico is a USB connected Windows Hello companion hardware device. By plugging the device into a USB port, the device allows you to quickly and more securely unlock your Windows device. The YubiKey is an inexpensive, practically indestructible device and can support additional two-factor authentication, including NFC, making the YubiKey a great solution for today and the future. You can read more about the Yubikey solution here.

Yubikey works with Windows Hello to unlock your device with USB hardware.

RSA SecureID Access Authenticator

The RSA SecureID Access Authenticator turns existing devices that almost everyone owns into a Windows Hello companion device. The RSA SecurID Access Authenticator app runs on your mobile device and it can remotely sign you into your Windows 10 PC based on your proximity to the device or through the entry of a PIN or biometric verification from the app, depending on certain risk factors. You can read more about the RSA solution here.

The RSA SecureID Access Authenticator lets you verify your identity by shaking or tapping the device.

HID Global Seos card

You might be familiar with HID Global whose cards are used by organizations around the world for IT authentication, building access, time and attendance, and cashless payments. HID Global’s Seos card is an NFC-based companion device that enables you to tap to unlock Windows Hello. By using your employee badge as your Windows companion device, you get the added convenience of using something that you already have with you.  A high assurance version of the HID Global card also supports digital signing and encryption based on NIST standards. You can read more about the HID Seos solution here.

Windows Hello is changing the way we interact and authenticate our devices, apps, and web services. Together with our partners, companion devices using Windows Hello will further empower our customers to have more secure, password-free experiences. Our growing partner community building innovative companion devices understands that Windows Hello conforms to industry and government standards like FIDO, now endorsed by governments, making Windows Hello and companion devices a safer bet for customers and the partner community alike.

Partners who are interested in discussing the opportunities for Windows Hello companion devices can get in touch with our team at: cdfonboard@microsoft.com.

*Windows Hello requires specialized hardware, including fingerprint reader, illuminated IR sensor or other biometric sensors and capable devices.

The post Windows Hello supports a growing variety of secured companion devices appeared first on Windows Experience Blog.

In episode 113 of the Office 365 Developer Podcast, Richard diZerega and MVP Mark Rackley about JavaScript development in SharePoint and the SharePoint Framework.

Download the podcast.

Weekly updates

• SharePoint Framework Release Candidate 0 is on its way by SharePoint Team
• Build custom controls for the SharePoint Framework web part property pane by Waldek Mastykarz
• Yo Simple Style by Stefan Bauer

Show notes

• www.markrackley.net
• www.twitter.com/mrackley
• www.paitgroup.com
• www.stratusforms.com
• www.sharepointalooza.org

Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS is available on iTunes or search for it at “Office 365 Developer Podcast” or add directly with the RSS feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast.

About Mark Rackley

Mark is partner and chief strategy officer at PAIT Group and an Office 365 MVP with more than 20 years of experience designing and developing software solutions. Mark’s daily responsibilities include forging the direction of solution architecture and development projects for clients while providing the best solutions for clients’ unique problems. As a globally recognized SharePoint geek, Mark is an active blogger, presenter, author (and bacon aficionado) who is eager to lend his real-world knowledge of SharePoint to all who need it. In addition to speaking at various SharePoint conferences, Mark is the organizer of SharePointalooza in Branson, Missouri and can be found speaking at as many Saturday events as his professional and family life will allow. Mark engages his audiences with humor, real-world stories from the trenches, and practical solutions.

About the hosts

Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and a frequent speaker at worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at aka.ms/richdizz and can be found on Twitter at @richdizz. Richard is born, raised and based in Dallas, TX, but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician and lightning-fast runner.

A Civil Engineer by training and a software developer by profession, Andrew Coates has been a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft since early 2004, teaching, learning and sharing coding techniques. During that time, he’s focused on .NET development on the desktop, in the cloud, on the web, on mobile devices and most recently for Office. Andrew has a number of apps in various stores and generally has far too much fun doing his job to honestly be able to call it work. Andrew lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife and two almost-grown-up children.

Useful links

• Office 365 Developer Center
• Office 365 main blog
• dev.office.com blog
• Twitter
• Facebook
• FlipBoard
• Slack channel

StackOverflow

• http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev
• http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev
• http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev

Yammer Office 365 Technical Network

• O365 Dev Podcast
• O365 Dev Apps Model
• O365 Dev Tools
• O365 Dev APIs
• O365 Dev Migration to App Model
• O365 Dev Links
• UserVoice

The post Episode 113 on JavaScript development in SharePoint with Mark Rackley—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Peter Loforte, general manager for the Office Modern User Assistance team.

We are continuing to bring training courses from LinkedIn Learning to our Office Training Center with more than 20 new courses on working with Word and PowerPoint. There are more than 60 new videos to help you quickly get up to speed on Office—whether you need to learn about tracking changes in Word or designing PowerPoint presentations.

With the previous releases from LinkedIn Learning for Outlook and Excel—you now have free access to over 170 LinkedIn Learning videos. They can be found alongside the hundreds of courses in our Office Training Center.

Take a sneak peek at our introduction to PowerPoint:

The post More LinkedIn Learning Office training courses now available appeared first on Office Blogs.

Many developers use the Bing Maps REST services to perform spatial queries such as geocoding an address or calculating routes and distances. The Bing Maps REST services are nice and fast, however, using them from a .NET application used to require a decent amount of work. The Bing Maps .NET REST Toolkit aims to make it easy to use these services from your .NET application by providing a portable class library, which wraps the Bing Maps REST services and implements best practices to ensure the good performance and the most accurate results are returned. In the past, it could easily take an hour or more to add the Bing Maps REST services to their application. Now, with the aid of a NuGet package, you can implement the Bing Maps REST services in minutes. You can find this project on GitHub here.

How to use the .NET REST Toolkit

Add the REST Toolkit to your project

In Visual Studio, open the NuGet Package Manager, select the Browse tab and search for "Bing Maps REST". This will reduce the list of results enough to find the "BingMapsRESTToolkit" package. If you want to verify that you have the correct package, the listed owner of the package is bingmaps and the author is Microsoft. Install the package into your project.

Alternatively, if you are using the NuGet command line:

       PM> Install-Package BingMapsRESTToolkit

Call the Bing Maps REST services using the Toolkit

The Bing Maps REST Toolkit has two key components, a service manager and a set of request classes. The ServiceManager is a static class that makes it easy to asynchronously process any Bing Maps REST request. Here is a list of the different requests classes available:

• ElevationRequest
• GeocodeRequest
• ImageryMetadataRequest
• ImageryRequest
• ReverseGeocodeRequest
• RouteMajorRoadsRequest
• RouteRequest
• TrafficRequest

The ServiceManager class has two static methods: GetResponseAsync and GetImageAsync. The GetResponseAsync method will return a Response object from the Bing Maps REST services which aligns with the documented Response object for the REST services. The GetImageAsync method will return a stream containing the image data.

The following is an example of how to make a geocode request and get the response from the Bing Maps REST services.

The following is an example of how to request a map image from the Bing Maps REST services to retrieve the image stream.

Bing and Open Source

The Bing team has been working towards being more involved in the Open Source community. Here are a few other open source projects recently released by the Bing team that you may be interested in.

• Bing Location Control helps devs add location to the conversation
• New Bing and Cognitive Services APIs samples added to the Bot Builder samples repo
• TypeScript Definitions for Bing Maps V8 Released on GitHub

Hello Windows Insiders!

Today we are excited to be releasing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15007 for PC and Mobile to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring.

What’s new in Build 15007 for PC & Mobile

More Microsoft Edge Improvements:

• Sharing your tabs (PC): We’ve added the ability to share a set of tabs you’ve set aside. Just click the “Tabs you’ve set aside” button, and under the “…” menu select the option to “Share tabs” with many apps installed on your PC.
• Import data (PC): We’re making it even easier to bring your data over from another browser when you switch to Microsoft Edge. The new “Import from another browser” button in Settings allows you to bring your favorites, browsing history, saved passwords, and other data from another browser you have installed, in one simple step.

• Running faster (PC): You can now choose to “Run” a download link without first saving it, and we’ve added a “Save As” option to the existing “Save” link.

• Web Notes improvements (PC): We’ve updated Web Notes to now leverage the familiar Windows Ink experience you’ve come to know in Photos and Maps, amongst other places. Tap the pen or highlighter in Web Notes, and you will now see the full set of Windows Ink colors, as well as the new slider released for Windows Ink with Build 14986.

• Text scaling and zoom (Mobile): Based on your feedback, in Microsoft Edge you can now zoom into a webpage regardless of zoom settings defined by the website, matching other mobile browsers. Pages are now zoomable to at least 500%. Because of this, we no longer automatically scale text in Microsoft Edge when you’ve enabled the Ease of Access option to increase the text size, since you can zoom in on the text to reach a size that matches your own comfort level. This addresses feedback that Ease of Access zoom settings made web pages render incorrectly.
• Apps for Websites: Clicking links to websites that support web-to-app linking will now open that page in the respective app.

[Coming Soon] Download themes for your PC from the Windows Store (PC): In Build 15002, we introduced the new themes settings page in the Settings app. Soon, you’ll be able to go directly from the themes setting page directly to the Windows Store to download new themes for your PC! This isn’t working yet in today’s build and you’ll see a Store icon that does nothing at the bottom of the themes setting page. However, you can go to the Store page for themes here to try out downloading themes from the Store.

Cortana can help you pick up where you left off (PC & Mobile): If you have multiple PCs, you probably know how cumbersome it can be to find everything you need to resume work after switching between PCs. Cortana can now help with that! When you switch computers, Cortana will display quick links in the Action Center to help you easily get back into the Microsoft Edge websites and SharePoint (or other cloud-based) documents you used most recently. For example, if you were working on a PowerPoint deck on your laptop, when you later return to your desktop, a link to that deck appears in Action Center. Or perhaps you’re browsing recipes in Microsoft Edge on your PC downstairs, and grab your laptop to go bake up a storm in the kitchen—Cortana will be there for you and have a link to that recipe ready to go. In adding this feature, we’ve also updated Cortana to take advantage of notification grouping, described earlier, so you can more easily differentiate between the types of messages.

Inline progress bar for notifications (PC): Based on your feedback, app developers can now send toast notifications with a progress indicator to show progress to the user, such as download progress, exercise progress, etc. As a highly related but separate feature, we now also support developers to update an existing notification through “data-binding”. Please go to Tiles and Toast MSDN Blog to find out more.

In a future build, you will see this capability with Windows Store downloads.

Scrollbar improvements for UWP (PC & Mobile): We have made improvements to the XAML scrollbar for mouse to ensure it is available when you need it, while taking up less space and causing less undesirable flashing when you don’t. With these changes, the panning indicator now appears when you move a mouse over a scrolling region and the full scrollbar appears when you want to directly interact with it. This improvement will be visible in any app that uses the Windows 10 Creators Update SDK.

Windows Hello Enrollment Improvements (PC): With Build 15007 we are bringing in some exciting improvements around how you discover and enroll into Windows Hello’s facial recognition. For devices and peripherals that support Windows Hello. you’ll now see a visual guidance that tracks your face in real-time, shows you an improved progress indicator and gives you real-time feedback to quickly and smoothly set your face up for signing in. The best way to know what’s changed? Try it out! You can setup or improve your Windows Hello facial recognition under Settings > Accounts > Sign-in options > Windows Hello > Face recognition.

Rainbow Flag: Microsoft’s continued dedication to diversity brings the rainbow flag to the emoji font and keyboard!

New Bluetooth APIs (PC & Mobile): This is the first build you can try out the new APIs that enable GATT Server, Bluetooth LE Peripheral role and unpaired Bluetooth LE device connectivity. To try them out install the latest preview SDK. For more information, check out this blog post.

Keyboard navigation improvements for the Snipping Tool (PC): You can now take a screen capture using only your keyboard. Press Alt + N, select the desired snip type and press enter – this will start the capture. Now use the arrow keys to move the cursor to one of the intended corners of your snip, and press either space or enter to start selecting your snip area. Once you have the area you want, press enter or space again to finish the capture. This keyboard navigation also works with the new Win + Shift + S keyboard shortcut.

What’s new in Build 15007 for just Mobile

Sync your settings using Azure Active Directory (AAD) Identity (Mobile): You can now sync your settings on AA-Joined phones using Enterprise State Roaming. With Enterprise State Roaming enabled for your phone, you can sync settings such as passwords, Wi-Fi profiles, Edge Favorites, Edge Reading List, and app data across desktop and mobile devices. To get the most out of this feature, make sure sync is turned on for the same account on both your mobile and desktop device under Settings > Accounts > Sync Your Settings.

App reset (Mobile): One of the features added to PC with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update was the ability to reset an app back to its original state. We’re happy to announce starting with Build 15007, the same will now be possible on Mobile – thanks everyone who logged feedback requesting this! If you have a UWP app in a bad state, open Settings > System > Storage, and navigate to the app. In the advanced settings for that app, you’ll now see a “Reset” option. Tapping it will clear the app’s cache, and reset the app as if it had just been installed (without actually having to reinstall it).

Cortana loves music (Mobile): You can now use Cortana to control music playback on more of your favorite music apps (EN-US only). Starting with this build, we’ve enabled natural language compatibility for iHeartRadio and TuneIn Radio. While you are listening to music in one of these apps, you can also use your voice to control playback and volume. With radio stations, we often want to know what that catchy tune is that has played a million times, so we added support for “What’s Playing”. Try saying “Hey Cortana, What’s Playing” and it will work for all apps playing music. This appeared for Insiders on PCs with Build 14986.

Adding music recognition support to Chinese (Simplified) (Mobile): Cortana can now recognize music for customers in China. Simply tap the music notes icon in the top corner of Cortana’s home page, and Cortana will listen to whatever music is playing and use Netease to tell you what song it is. This works exactly like the feature does in English (United States). This appeared for Insiders on PCs with Build 14986.

Cortana sign-in using Azure Active Directory (AAD) identity (Mobile): This capability will allow you to sign into Cortana with your work or school account instead your MSA, enabling you to use Cortana even if your organization does not support MSA. To sign in to Cortana using your work or school account, just go to Cortana’s Notebook and “About Me” and sign in. You’ll get the full Cortana experience with most of the same features. This appeared for Insiders on PCs with Build 14986.

More recurrence options for Cortana Reminders (Mobile): We’ve heard your feedback, and we’ve added a new option to set recurring time-based Cortana Reminders for “Every Month” or “Every Year” — great for bill payment or anniversary reminders! This appeared for Insiders on PCs with Build 15002.

Web payments: Microsoft Edge now has preview support for the new Payment Request API, which allows sites to make checkout easier using the payment and shipping preferences stored in your Microsoft Wallet. This is currently in a preview state for developers and will not process payment information until a future flight. You can learn more about Payment Request on the Microsoft Edge Dev Blog. This appeared for Insiders on PCs with Build 15002.

Improved legibility for UWP apps in high contrast (Mobile): In order to address some of the most common high contrast issues experienced in UWP apps, we’ve updated the XAML framework to now display an opaque layer behind the text and coerce semi-transparent UI to be fully opaque. This appeared for Insiders on PCs with Build 15002. These adjustments are applied by default in high contrast and apply to *all* XAML Store applications, however apps will have the opportunity to opt out using the Windows 10 Creators Update SDK. More details will be available once the latest SDK has been published. If you find any issues with this work, please log them here, and as always, you can reach out to @MSFTEnable on Twitter at any time about accessibility problems and requests you have for accessibility in Windows.

Helping you find the setting you need in Settings (Mobile): One of our ongoing goals has been to make Settings easier and faster to navigate – based on feedback we’ve made a few design tweaks that appeared for Insiders on PCs with Build 15002, and are now also available on Mobile:

• Settings pages now contain additional information on the right or bottom (depending on the window size) providing links to support, feedback, and any other related settings if available.
• Since our System Settings list was getting quite long, we’ve moved app related settings out of System into a new category called Apps.

Updated device settings (Mobile): The new device settings experience combines the Bluetooth and Connected devices pages to offer a single place to manage your devices/peripherals. We’ve also listened to your feedback and added the ability to disconnect and reconnect your Bluetooth audio devices directly from this Settings page, as well as updated the flow for adding a new device connection. Try out the new page and let us know what you think through the Feedback Hub! This appeared for Insiders on PCs with Build 15002.

New option to pause updates: We’ve added an option that will enable you to pause updates on your phone for up to 35 days. To pause your phone, go to the Settings > Update & security > Phone Update and tap Advanced. This capability will be available on enterprise managed devices on Windows 10 Mobile. This appeared for Insiders on PCs with Build 15002.

Other changes, improvements, and fixes for PC

• We fixed an issue where tearing off a tab in Microsoft Edge (using your mouse to drag a tab into its own window) might cause your PC to bugcheck (GSOD).
• We fixed an issue where going to Battery settings page via Settings > System > Battery crashes the Settings app.
• We fixed an issue where the Virtual Touchpad was no longer missing from the taskbar context menu.
• We fixed an issue where the touch keyboard button might be missing from the taskbar on touch machines.
• We fixed an issue where Windows Hello was giving a “Couldn’t turn on the camera” error on the Lock screen.
• We fixed an issue where Remote Desktop connections might unexpectedly fail due to an error saying invalid credentials (when in fact the credentials had been valid).
• We fixed an issue that could result in the quick action section being missing from Action Center.
• We fixed an issue where Surface pen clicks might not work after cycling Bluetooth off/on.
• We fixed an issue where the Data Usage page in Settings might not load.
• We’ve updated the Virtual Touchpad to be a little bigger.
• We’ve fixed an issue resulting in the Netflix app potentially displaying a black screen rather than the expected video content.

Other changes, improvements, and fixes for Mobile

• In response to your feedback, alarm sounds will start at a slightly higher volume level. (They will then ramp up to full volume, as before).
• We fixed an issue Insiders with certain devices, such as the Lumia 950, may have experienced where their phone sometimes took an unexpectedly long time to show up after connecting to their PC.
• We fixed an issue where System related notification toasts (e.g. Bluetooth, USB/Autoplay, etc.) didn’t work.
• We’ve updated the experience when using Cortana to receive incoming SMS messages over Bluetooth to make it more reliable. To enable this feature if it is not already, open Cortana settings and make sure one of the following Bluetooth options is on: “Bluetooth and wired headsets” or “Bluetooth only”.
• We fixed an issue where video recorded in portrait mode might not playback with the correct aspect ratio.
• We fixed an issue on recent Insider builds resulting in the Skype Preview tile not updating with an alert badge when a new message had been received.
• We fixed an issue where certain websites pinned to Start from Microsoft Edge when tapped would perform a web search rather than opening to that page.
• We fixed an issue where the SIM Pin dialog would display truncated text in certain languages.
• We fixed an issue that could result in the phone getting stuck at the Goodbye screen when rebooting if Bluetooth was enabled.
• We fixed an issue resulting in the Outlook Calendar sometimes displaying the wrong date on its live tile after a new day has begun.
• We fixed a bug that was preventing Notification Listener apps (like wearable apps) from accessing notifications on recent builds.

Known issues for PC

• After updating to this build, nonstop exceptions in the Spectrum.exe service may occur causing PCs to lose audio, disk I/O usage to become very high, and apps like Microsoft Edge to become unresponsive when doing certain actions. As a workaround to get out of this state, you can delete C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Spectrum\PersistedSpatialAnchors and reboot. For more details, see this forum post.
• We are investigating certain situations in which PCs might bugcheck (GSOD) during the installation of new builds (15002+) causing the PC to rollback to the previous build.
• When clicking on certain elements in desktop (Win32) games, the game minimizes and cannot be restored.
• Desktop shortcuts containing the “%” character (usually URI shortcuts with escaped characters) will result in a cyclical explorer.exe crash. To resolve this, use Task Manager to open PowerShell, and edit the shortcut to not include a % in the path.
• When projecting to a secondary monitor, if you set the connection to “Extended”, Explorer.exe may start crashing in a loop. If this happens, turn off your PC, disconnect the secondary monitor, then restart your PC.
• Windows Insiders will unexpected see a “Holographic” entry on the main page of Settings.
• Brightness changes made via Settings > System > Display will unexpectedly revert after closing the Settings app. For now, please use either Action Center, power flyout or brightness keys to change the brightness.
• The list of apps in the Surface Dial “Add an app” page via Settings > Devices > Wheel may unexpectedly be empty. If that happens, tap the “Browse for an app” button at the bottom of the screen to pick the desired app instead.
• Taskbar preview icons are unexpectedly small on high-DPI devices.
• Quicken will fail to run with an error stating .NET 4.6.1 is not installed. For Insiders familiar with Registry Editor, there is an optional workaround. Take ownership of the following registry keys and edit the “version” value to be 4.6.XXXXX instead of 4.7.XXXXX:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v4\Client
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v4\Full

Note: Please take caution when editing the registry. Changing the wrong value can have unexpected and undesirable results.

• Using CTRL + C to copy in Command Prompt won’t work.
• Some websites in Microsoft Edge may unexpectedly show “We can’t reach this page”. If you encounter this, please try accessing the site from an InPrivate tab.
• Dragging apps from the all apps list to pin on Start’s tile grid won’t work. For now, please right-click on the desired app in order to pin it.
• Miracast sessions will fail to connect.
• On certain hardware types (e.g.: Acer Aspire), the Netflix app crashes when starting a movie.
• 3rd party UWP apps would crash on devices if the DPI settings on the machine are >=150% (Generally people do this on high resolution devices – Surface book etc.).
• If you upgrade from Windows 8.1 directly to Build 15002, all your store apps are lost during upgrade process but you can go and re-download all the lost apps from the Store.
• When using Microsoft Edge with Narrator, you may hear “no item in view” or silence while tabbing or using other navigation commands. You can use Alt + Tab when this happens to move focus away from and back to the Edge browser. Narrator will then read as expected.
• Saying “Hey Cortana, play on ” doesn’t work immediately after installing the app. Wait 5 minutes for indexing to begin and try again.

Known issues for Mobile

• The Windows Hello greeting is missing from the lock screen. Showing the animation and user name is important for letting you know we have securely identified you. Of course, we also recognize the essential purpose of the Windows Hello feature is getting you to your Start screen without delay.  We’re working hard to make sign-in as quick as possible across all Windows Hello scenarios.
• AAD Identity Settings Sync: You may not see your Favorites or Reading List roam down in Microsoft Edge if you try to immediately open these tabs after opening Microsoft Edge. You can open Microsoft Edge, wait 30 seconds, and then open favorites and Reading List to see content.
• AAD Identity Settings Sync: Microsoft Edge does not sync Reading List from PC to phone unless there is a restart.
• AAD Identity Settings Sync: Microsoft Edge is syncing passwords on phone but not showing them in “saved passwords” in Microsoft Edge settings.
• When you receive a new email notification and tap on it to open the message, it doesn’t open the Mail app or message.
• New option to pause updates contains text referencing PC-only Windows Defender.
• Insiders with certain devices, such as the Lumia 635 and 636, may not be able to manually change the brightness. The brightness will still automatically adjust if it is set to do so, so please use that for the time being while we investigate.
• The ninja cat emoji display in two characters on the keyboard instead of the expected one.
• Adding a new card / paying with an existing card will not work in Microsoft Wallet.

Upcoming Bug Bash

You all gave us feedback that you LOVED the last Bug Bash and wanted to do one during the holidays. We didn’t have the feature set we wanted in Insider Preview builds nor did we have the team available to help triage Feedback Hub items at that time so we decided to wait. The wait is almost over! Our second Bug Bash for the Windows 10 Creators Update is planned for Friday February 3rd through Sunday February 12th. By the participation levels from previous Bug Bashes, we know how much our Windows Insiders love to Bug Bash alongside our Engineering Teams and for this one, we’ve extended it to cover two weekends to give our Insiders more opportunity to provide us feedback. We’ll publish some new quests as usual for this bug bash as well. We are also planning at least one webcast so we can all Bug Bash together (more details coming soon). Thank you to all the Insiders that have participated in the past and to those who will participate in this upcoming Bug Bash. Your feedback is *very* valuable to us and helps shape Windows 10!

Team Updates

We have gotten an outpouring of supportive mail and comments from you all on the stories of the people in the Insider Program. The most recent one by Callum Moffat one of our youngest and most passionate Insiders really struck a chord with us. We love hearing the stories behind the people sending us feedback, so if you would like to share yours, please let us know.

Thank you everyone and keep hustling,
Dona <3

The post Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15007 for PC and Mobile appeared first on Windows Experience Blog.

Furthering our commitment to be the most trusted cloud for Government, today Microsoft is proud to announce two milestone achievements in support of the US Department of Defense.

Information Impact Level 5 DoD Provisional Authorization by the Defense Information Systems Agency

Azure Government is the first commercial cloud service to be awarded an Information Impact Level 5 DoD Provisional Authorization by the Defense Information Systems Agency. This provisional authorization allows all US Department of Defense (DoD) customers to leverage Azure Government for the most sensitive controlled unclassified information (CUI), including CUI of National Security Systems. 

DoD Authorizing Officials can use this Provisional Authorization as a baseline for input into their authorization decisions on behalf of mission owner systems using the Azure Government cloud DOD Region. 

This achievement is the result of the collective efforts of Microsoft, DISA and its mission partners to work through requirements pertaining to the adoption of cloud computing for infrastructure, platform and productivity across the DoD enterprise.

General Availability of DoD Regions

Information Impact Level 5 requires processing in dedicated infrastructure that ensures physical separation of DoD customers from non-DoD customers. Over the past few months, we ran a preview program with more than 50 customers across the Department of Defense, including all branches of the military, unified combatant commands and defense agencies.

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of the DOD Region to all validated DoD customers. Key services covering compute, storage, networking and database are available today with full service level agreements and dedicated Azure Government support.

Dave Milton, Chief Technology Officer for Permuta Technologies, a leading provider of business solutions tailored for the military affirmed the significance of the general availability of the Azure DoD regions, saying:

“Azure Government DOD Regions has given us the ability to deploy our SaaS offering, DefenseReady Cloud, to the US Department of Defense in a scalable, secure, and cost-effective environment. The mission-critical nature of DefenseReady Cloud requires high availability, compliance with DoD’s SRG Impact Level 5 requirements, and scalability to support our customers changing demand, with a flexible pricing structure that allow us to offer capability to large enterprises as well as local commands. With Azure Government DOD Region, we are now able to onboard a customer in weeks, not months, allowing for a time-to-value that is unparalleled when compared with on-premises or other government-sponsored options. Through our partnership, Microsoft provided direct access to product group engineers, compliance support, training, and other resources needed to bring our SaaS solution to DoD.”

These accomplishments and the commentary of our customers and partners further reinforce our commitment to, and the strength of, our long-standing partnership with the US Department of Defense. For more information on Microsoft Cloud for Government services with Information Impact Level 5 provision authorization visit the Microsoft in Government blog, and for more detail on the Information Impact Level 5 Provision authorization (including in-scope services), please visit our Microsoft Trust Center.

To get started today, customers and mission partners may request access to our Azure Government Trial program.

This Week on Windows, we’re sharing a recap of CES 2017 and bringing you new apps and a midseason TV guide! Do you share your PC with friends or family? Check out how to set up multiple profiles with Windows Hello.

Here’s what’s new in the Windows Store this week:

Slack for Windows 10

Slack gives you a place to connect with the people and apps you work with every day, no matter where you are or what you do – and now it’s available to download for free in the Windows Store. No need to spend time digging through your inbox, searching for files, or toggling endlessly between different apps to find what you need. And with Live Tiles, you can see your latest notifications and hop right back in if anything needs your attention. To activate Live Tiles, simply pin Slack to your Start menu. Get Slack for Windows 10 today!

Audible Free Book Offer

Thanks to Audible (Free download, with IAP options), Windows users get a post-holiday gift, a free audiobook: “Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood,” (usually $24.95) written and narrated by Trevor Noah. The comedian and host of “The Daily Show” takes listeners on a harrowing, hilarious and inspiring adventure set in the waning days of apartheid.

Midseason TV Guide

The holidays may be over, but don’t despair – it’s time for midseason TV with the Midseason TV Guide! Watch brand-new episodes of all your favorite returning shows – including Sherlock and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia– and discover new ones, like Taboo, Six, and Westworld. Check out the best of midseason TV in the Movies & TV section of the Windows Store!

Taboo, Season 1

The year is 1814, and rogue adventurer James Keziah Delaney (Tom Hardy) has returned to London with a stash of stolen diamonds and a thirst for vengeance. Watch Ridley Scott’s original series Taboo ($19.99 HD, $14.99 SD), available in the Movies & TV section of the Windows Store.

Have a great weekend!

The post This Week on Windows: CES recap, a midseason TV guide and more appeared first on Windows Experience Blog.