The post Things Go Better With Microsoft appeared first on Smart Office.
]]>SEATTLE: Microsoft has won a five-year deal with soft drink giant Coca-Cola to supply business software, including its Teams chat app and tools for customer service agents.
The companies did not disclose the size of the deal but said it will include Dynamics 365, a suite of Microsoft tools that competes directly with Salesforce.
Coca-Cola said it will use Microsoft technology to pull together information from several internal systems, using artificial intelligence to fetch data from them, and answer questions.
The company said Microsoft’s software would replace previously disparate and fragmented systems.
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]]>The post Service NSW Dumps Microsoft For Chrome appeared first on Smart Office.
]]>It has already purchased some 1200 Chrome OS devices to replace Windows computers in Service NSW self-service kiosks.
Service NSW has calculated that the Chrome desktops require only five percent of the support hours previously required by its Windows devices.
The agency also saved costs by ditching private WAN networks, relying instead on broadband and Wi-Fi. According to a recent report by Service NSW’s CTO Colin Jones and former CIO Ben McMullen: “When you add in the savings on devices and IT management, we’re targeting reducing our operational costs by 46 percent per year.”
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]]>The post Telstra Inks World-First Deal To Make Calls Inside Office 365 appeared first on Smart Office.
]]>The new ‘Telstra Calling for Office 365’ is set to launch in mid-2018, and will be bundled into several MS Office programs, with the addition of Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams.
Just last week, Microsoft revealed 200,000 organisations are using ‘Teams’, up from 125,000 six months ago.
The product will enable Telstra to further expand into corporate and business segments, with many retiring PABX telephone systems.
The partnership is heralded the first of its kind between Microsoft and any global telco.
Telstra Executive Director of Global Products, Michelle Bendschneider, affirms the new service follows several years of relationship building between the telco and Microsoft.
The new calling service will be sold as a standalone offering, and Bendschneider claims it’s one of Telstra’s most significant product launches this year:
“Launching a product like this caters for, not just the large enterprises, but more importantly the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Australian organisations that will need to re-plumb and rewire their communications and collaborations environment ahead of a number of things changing in the market like the NBN”.
Microsoft Australia COO, Rachel Bondi, claims Telstra’s new product reflects the close relationship between both companies:
“This is a unique offering in the Australian marketplace. We have Microsoft Office calling and hybrid solutions in other markets, but this is co-created for Microsoft and Telstra only in Australia”.
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]]>The post Microsoft Office 2019 Will Only Be Accessible On Windows 10 appeared first on Smart Office.
]]>The change was spotted on a Microsoft support post describing the new changes to Window and Office servicing and support.
In the post Microsoft defends its decision by saying, “Modern software not only provides new features to help people do their best work, but also new, more efficient manageability solutions and more comprehensive approaches to security. Software that is more than a decade old, and hasn’t benefited from this innovation, is difficult to secure and inherently less productive.”
The Verge points out this move is designed to push businesses who do not have Office 365 into subscriptions. This update will not affect Office for Mac.
Microsoft Office 2019 will be releasing during the second half of 2018, includes perpetual versions of the Office apps (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and Skype for Business) and servers (including Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business).
Microsoft says previews of the new products will start shipping mid-year 2018.
In a post Microsoft says, ‘Office 2019 will add new user and IT capabilities for customers who aren’t yet ready for the cloud. For example, new and improved inking features—
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]]>The post Microsoft Actions Exposed, After Trove Of Documents Reveal Employee Rape Claims appeared first on Smart Office.
]]>Microsoft’s lack of action in the case was revealed as, part of a trove of internal files unsealed on Nov. 29 in a two-year-old class action lawsuit alleging gender discrimination at Microsoft.
The documents shed new light on the company’s struggle to deal with reports of harassment and on internal debates over whether women were treated fairly.
It’s not known if any cases of harassment or sexual confrontations have taken place at Microsoft Australia or whether Microsoft Australia has settled any cases as their PR Company Ogilvy PR refuses to talk to ChannelNews because we have questioned their actions in the past.
While personal information such as names, dates and departments are largely redacted, the confidential files detail harassment complaints made by company veterans, incidents investigated by human resources, and internal scepticism over the equal pay data Microsoft publicises.
Questions are also being raised about the way that Microsoft who employ spin doctors such as Ogilvy PR tried to hide information relating to claims that females have made against the Company.
Apparently, Microsoft put in place numerous legal hurdles to keep employee complaints under wraps.
According to Bloomberg who exposed the case the woman who was raped was an intern when her Microsoft colleagues took her out for drinks in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighbourhood.
According to her lawyer it now appears that during the night, the male intern sexually assaulted her—or “forcibly penetrated her while she was sleeping,” according to her lawyer’s letter revealed last month.
When she woke, naked and with just flashes of memory, she rushed to the hospital for a rape exam and later filed a police report.
She then reported the incident to her supervisor at Microsoft as well as the company’s human resources department, which promised a prompt investigation and that’s when her problems started.
In the meantime, she was required to keep working alongside the man.
When she discussed getting a restraining order with Microsoft, HR told her if she wanted one, she’d need to change teams, her lawyer wrote.
The girl liked the work and her boss, so she stayed put for the rest of the summer. Microsoft later offered her a full-time job.
And despite the allegations against him, Microsoft also hired her accused rapist.
The company assured her she wouldn’t be located near the man, nor would they have to work together, her lawyer wrote. She took the job and signed a one-year lease for housing, even though she was still waiting to hear about the investigation.
The intern told her story in a February 2014 settlement letter agreed by the Courts.
A Microsoft representative said in a statement that the company works “hard to create a safe work environment for every employee.” The company said that while the intern’s alleged incident didn’t occur at work, it took her claims “very seriously,” and its security and investigations team met with her. “We encouraged her to take her complaint to law enforcement, and offered to connect her with additional resources such as victim advocacy groups,” the spokesperson said, adding that Microsoft also took “practical steps to address concerns she had about her safety.”
Bloomberg also revealed several harrowing stories along with expert reports, regarding three female employees in 2015 alleging systemic disparities in the pay and promotion of women in technical and engineering roles at Microsoft.
As part of the court process to share evidence in the case, Microsoft had to give the women’s lawyers at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP and Outten & Golden LLP more than 150,000 internal documents, including several allegations of harassment and assault, like the intern’s letter.
“I don’t think companies are motivated to truly change their internal culture … until they are publicly held accountable” a lawyer involved in the case said.
The Microsoft intern’s allegations are public—whether she wanted them to be—because of a rare confluence of events. While about two-thirds of workers at large employers have signed mandatory arbitration agreements, they are not standard at Microsoft.
The plaintiffs requested Microsoft turn over individual complaints, and an NDA doesn’t necessarily prevent an employer from disclosing those documents in court, even if it would have prohibited a woman from telling her own story publicly.
The letter on behalf of the former intern, for example, included a proposed settlement for severance, and in exchange offered “a full and complete mutual release.” Details about how things worked out for the intern weren’t included in the disclosures.
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]]>The post Quantum leaps and bounds appeared first on Smart Office.
]]>It follows the announcement of a US$50 million partnership with Dutch research organisation QuTech two years ago.
The design is said to improve reliability and thermal performance, as well as reducing radio frequency interference.
Intel is in a race with Google, IBM, Microsoft and others to plant a firm footing in quantum computing. It believes quantum computing won’t replace today’s computers – but augment them.
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]]>The post MS Oz Lifts Office 365 Pricing appeared first on Smart Office.
]]>No more, it seems. The bottom, perhaps, has been reached.
Microsoft Australia says it will raise the price of its Office 365 Home and Personal subscriptions from October 12. But at this stage the price rises will affect only home versions of Office 365.
The whisper is that business subscriptions may also be quietly raised in coming months.
Meanwhile, for Office 365 Personal edition users, the subscription price will climb from $89 to $99 a year. So far not revealed is the new pricing for the Home edition, currently $119 a year.
A Microsoft Australia spokesperson said the company “periodically assesses its pricing to ensure reasonable alignment with the needs of customers, partners and the marketplace”. Uh, huh …
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]]>The post Microsoft Left Behind by AWS, What’s New? appeared first on Smart Office.
]]>In fourth place with just 2.3pc was Google.
“The market for cloud services is growing faster than virtually every other IT market today, with much of this growth coming at the expense of the traditional, non-cloud offerings,” said Sid Nag, a Gartner research director.
“The demand for cloud-based IaaS continues on its path of aggressive growth, and the high growth of IaaS is also driving growth in related cloud markets.”
While AWS heavily dominated the market in 2016, Microsoft Azure gained “more momentum,”and Google made “some gains”, Gartner says, kindly.
Despite its huge lead, Gartner predicts that Amazon will witness future “growth erosion” in market share, as non-hyperscale providers struggle to provide value through their services, while other IaaS market leaders will see an increase in growth.
Nag notes that Amazon has achieved its top spot by serving the most customers across the broadest range of use cases – from cloud-native start-ups to mid-market businesses wanting to lift and shift traditional applications, and to enterprises executing “transformational migrations” to the cloud.
His advice: “Technology strategic planners must build both relevant offerings and partner-based ecosystems to seize the opportunity.”
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]]>The post Bloody Monday: New Tech Stocks Sell-Off Stokes Industry Fear appeared first on Smart Office.
]]>Facebook fell 4.6 percent, on track for its worst day in nearly a year and eliminating over US$20 billion of its market value, while Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet each lost more than one percent.
For Apple, this followed a major fall of US$50 million on Friday (CDN, Monday).
It closed Monday’s trading at $150.58, down $1.31 on the day, and well below the $158.67 price the shares were going for a week previously, let along the year’s top of $164.94.
The sight of poor crowds at Apple stores worldwide on Friday, launch day for the new iPhone 8 range, may well have affected the market.
Underscoring growing concerns about a shift in investor focus, a quarter of the 68 stocks in the technology index have seen recent drops of 10 percent or more, which many on Wall Street define as a major correction.
“I think we’re seeing more of a rotation out of some hot-flying tech names into small-caps, some of the names that may well benefit from tax cuts,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities in New York.
Investors dumped many other recent tech favorites including Nvidia, down 4.04 percent, and Applied Materials which lost 3.4pc. Videogame makers were also down, including Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts, which both lost more than three percent.
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