Articles about Microsoft

Microsoft is continuing to add new features and functionality to Outlook.com.

In addition to the integrated OneDrive support, the software giant added Box and Dropbox sharing to its webmail service earlier in the year, and today it makes sharing even more useful with the addition of support for Google Drive and Facebook.

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GitHub has published The state of the Octoverse 2016, a very interesting report that offers an insight into how its 14 million users leveraged the hugely popular repository this year. Among them is a list of organizations with the most open source contributors, most popular coding languages, most used emoji reactions, new user interactions and much more.

The list of organizations with the most open source contributions is particularly interesting, because it shows Microsoft leading the pack with over 16,000 users. The software giant is followed by Facebook and Docker, with Google only coming in fifth place. For folks who associate Microsoft with closed-source this must come as a pretty big surprise.

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Sunrise is dead, long live Sunrise! Once considered the best mobile calendar app to ever grace us with its presence, it got acquired by Microsoft and is now officially retired.

But Microsoft has taken its best features and reincarnated them into its Outlook app's calendar, and the general feeling is overall quite positive. The updated Outlook, which is available now, comes with a couple of changes. Interesting Calendars is one of the new features, which allows Outlook to connect with businesses, TV shows and similar.

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Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing Azure Service Fabric, which allows developers to run and manage microservices, to Linux.

Azure's CTO Mark Russinovich is very enthusiastic about microservices, which the company has been using internally for seven years. Russinovich believes that the vast majority of apps even including enterprise apps will soon be built using this technology.

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You don’t need a valid license to run a Windows 10 Insider Preview Build on your PC. Each build is time-limited, but a new version will be released before the previous one expires.

Provided you keep updating your system to the latest build, you’ll have no problems. However, if you’ve installed a preview build and not updated it -- hey, free Windows! -- Microsoft is about to flip a kill switch that will stop it working entirely.

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It’s been two weeks since Microsoft rolled out a new Windows 10 build to Insiders on the Fast ring. In that time the company has been busy upgrading its build monitoring services.

Today, it's business as usual once more, as the company releases Build 14926 for PC and Mobile. The latest build is well worth the wait as this not only fixes the issue that was killing Wi-Fi for some users, and the problem causing bluescreen crashes for Kindle owners, but introduces several notable new features.

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When people think of Twitter, their minds might conjure images of short-form messages filled with emoji. While it is much more than that, it is how some people view the social network. Lately, however, the company is looking to expand into other markets, such as streaming media. As a publicly-traded company, Twitter could be looking to rejuvenate a relatively stagnant stock.

Today, Twitter announces that its streaming video is no longer limited to your phones and tablets. Yes, folks, it is finally time for Twitter's video in your living room, as the company releases a free app for three popular TV-connected media devices -- Microsoft Xbox One, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV. While the experience on all three will be similar, it looks like Apple's device will be slightly better thanks to an exclusive side-by-side split-screen feature.

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Many large enterprises use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) as their identity platform for managing users and providing secure access to thousands of cloud SaaS and on-premises applications.

Secure access company Ping Identity is announcing a collaboration with Microsoft to deliver integrations that will expand secure remote access and single sign-on (SSO) from any device to more on-premises web applications for Microsoft Azure AD customers.

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HP is turning away from Salesforce and Oracle software to run its sales processes and now plans to use Microsoft Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) software exclusively in its sales and support departments.

The two companies have entered into a six-year contract and plan to roll out Dynamics CRM to 6,500 of HP's sales staff and 20,000 of its support personnel. Though the dollar amount of this deal is still unknown, around 50 percent of the company's workforce will now use Microsoft's software and services to manage their relationships with customers.

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The latest big update to Windows 10 began rolling out to users a month ago, but while the Anniversary Update officially became available on the 2 August, it was a staggered launch.

Microsoft targeted "newer" devices first, with those on older systems set to receive the update shortly afterwards. If you were keen to upgrade, you could of course hurry things along or take matters into your own hands.

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Microsoft keeps adding new features to its Office 365 suite, and now it has made easier for people outside a group to collaborate on files. A new feature, for Office 365 groups, allows people who aren't staff members, or members of a particular group, to join in and collaborate.

Group owners can now use the web version of Outlook to invite non-staff members in.

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For a little while now Microsoft's ad campaigns have been less about highlighting its own products, but a vehicle for knocking others'. It's something we've seen numerous times with the company's Surface ads, and now there's another one.

This time around we see the Surface Pro 4 compared to a MacBook Air. Microsoft says the former is better than the latter because it has a pen. Oh, and a detachable keyboard. But the tone of the ad is just so ridiculous, it serves only to make Microsoft look pathetic.

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News of software vulnerabilities often centers on products from well-known companies that potentially put large numbers of end users at risk.

But a new report from software solutions company Flexera Software reveals that the niche products used by specialist industries can be just as much of a problem.

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A security researcher has revealed a way to determine the password needed to access a protected Windows or OS X account. Using Rob Fuller's technique, it doesn't matter if the computer in question is locked, and it uses a USB SoC-based device to crack user credentials.

By modifying the firmware of a USB dongle, Fuller was able to make the device appear as an Ethernet adaptor. By spoofing a network connection, it is then possible to trick a target computer into giving up an account password.

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Microsoft has announced that local datacenters are now available in the UK to Office 365 and Azure customers. This enables companies dealing with UK-only customers to ensure that data remains within the country and fully complies with data protection and privacy laws.

Describing itself as the "first global cloud productivity provider" to offer UK residency for data, Microsoft says Azure and Office 365 are now generally available from multiple data center locations in the UK. It has already attracted the custom of the Ministry of Defence.

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