Pedro Hernandez

Microsoft is making its Bookings self-service, online scheduling platform available to all Office 365 Business Premium customers worldwide. The web-based solution for small businesses offers customer-facing appointment setting functionality that syncs with the internal calendars of an organization’s workers. Bookings made its debut in the United States and Canada last summer, and now Microsoft is […]

Going forward, Visual Studio previews will peacefully coexist with the production releases, Microsoft announced this week. Although the software giant just released Visual Studio 2017 last week, the company is already working on updates, wrote Daniel Jacobson, program manager for Visual Studio at Microsoft, in a March 16 blog post. Among the new additions is […]

Microsoft added a new option to its ever-growing catalog of Azure virtual machines (VMs), this time aimed at cloud workloads with demanding storage requirements. “The L Series for Storage optimizes workloads that require low latency, such as NoSQL databases (e.g. Cassandra, MongoDB, Cloudera and Redis),” said Jon Beck, principal program manager at Microsoft Azure, in […]

Microsoft Translator’s collection of neural network languages grew by one this week. The company has added Korean, bringing the total of number of languages supported by the system to 11. Other languages include English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. In addition to infusing its cloud services and business software ecosystem […]

Microsoft’s March update for Power BI Gateway, an on-premises gateway that allows customers to connect the company’s business intelligence and analytics service to local data sources, now includes a more user-friendly way of alerting users to connection issues. “We’ve made improvements to the way we do the network health checks,” blogged Microsoft Power BI program […]

Microsoft is serious about becoming the go-to provider of big data cloud services for its enterprise Azure cloud-computing customers. The company introduced a new Apache Spark connector for Azure DocumentDB, among several new additions to the company’s big data solutions portfolio, during the Strata + Hadoop World big data conference in San Jose, Calif. today. […]

Brother on March 15 took the wraps off seven new color laser and multifunction printers that offer businesses of practically all sizes the tools to combat data leakage due to the improper handling of printed materials. One of those tools is near-field communications (NFC) card reader support, Steve Feldstein, director of B2B marketing at Brother’s […]

There’s more to the Windows 10 Creators Update virtual reality (VR) experiences and features aimed at creative professionals. For businesses, the system software upgrade will also enhance Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection’s (ATP) ability to uncover stealthy attacks. Borrowing the name of the antimalware software that comes bundled in the company’s flagship operating system, Windows Defender ATP […]

Teams, a business group chat and collaboration service for Office 365, is generally available, Microsoft announced today. Teams is included in the Business Essentials, Business Premium and Enterprise E1, E3 and E5 Office 365 plans. Customers who purchased an Enterprise E4 plan before it was retired can also access the service. Microsoft Teams is the […]

Practically every business is sitting on a wealth of knowledge that employees bring into the workplace, but capitalizing on it can be a challenge. To help businesses unlock the collective skills and expertise of their workforces, Microsoft is rolling out a new Office 365 user profiles. They blend elements of the Office 365 graph, which […]

Microsoft HoloLens is getting ready to go to work in Europe. The software giant announced today that six new companies had been accepted into the HoloLens Agency Readiness Partner program, joining 10 current agency partners located in the U.S. and Canada. Partners receive hands-on training with the HoloLens team at Microsoft and build the expertise […]

Running the cloud on processors inspired by smartphone chips? Recent moves by Microsoft and Qualcomm may soon make it a reality. Microsoft and mobile chipmaker Qualcomm announced a collaboration at Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit 2017 that may improve the prospects of ARM-based servers in the data center. ARM is an energy-efficient RISC (reduced instruction […]