Daily Video: Microsoft Moves to Declutter Outlook Inboxes

Today’s topics include a new email management tool from Microsoft, as well as moves to incorporate the company’s Outlook mobile apps for iOS and Android into Enterprise Mobility, a report on the increase of distributed denial-of-service attacks and a survey that shows IT workers are feeling less stress these days.

Clutter, an Office 365 technology that organizes Outlook email inboxes to prioritize important and task-related messages, will be switched on by default in June, Microsoft announced. Office 365 tenants enrolled in the First Release program will be switched over to Clutter on June 1; all others will get access to it on June 15. Clutter monitors a user’s email interactions and applies-machine learning techniques to prioritize important emails. The feature moves less important emails to the Clutter folder, where users can later review them.

Microsoft is moving fast to incorporate its new Outlook mobile apps for iOS and Android into the company’s cloud-enabled mobile-device management platform, dubbed the Enterprise Mobility Suite. Microsoft released the mobile version of the Outlook email client earlier this year. New controls will allow administrators to restrict the sharing of data with policies that limit the use of features like copy, cut and paste to prevent leaks of sensitive information.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks have more than doubled in the past year, with a shift to a new type of attack that uses non-secure home routers and office devices to inundate a target with data. This is according to a report from Internet-infrastructure firm Akamai. The first quarter 2015 State of the Internet Security Report found that while eight “mega-attacks” exceeded more than 100G bps in bandwidth, the average attack sent less than 10M bps toward targets, but did so for at least a day.

A TEKsystems survey of more than 1,000 IT workers indicates a major change in the stability of IT staffing environments as compared to a year ago. The survey found that 11 percent of entry- to mid-level IT professionals and 13 percent of senior IT professionals consider the work they are currently doing to be the most stressful of their career, a significant decrease from the 30 percent and 32 percent that said the same thing in 2014. Nearly half of entry- to mid-level and senior-level IT professionals consider their current work to be the most satisfying of their career, an increase over 2014 levels.