Microsoft Tuesday - Top News - #05

Here comes “Microsoft Tuesday – Top News - #05” with top links/announcements floating around the world of Microsoft technologies. Above the fold, you will find news on Office 2016, Skype for business, Kinect, Azure and Windows 10.

Follow the links mentioned below to know more about those news topics. Don’t forget to share your feedback on “Microsoft Tuesday” that I share weekly.

I’m pleased to announce the IT Pro and Developer Preview of Office 2016 for the Windows desktop. We’ve been in private preview with Office 2016 for several months. Now we’re ready to expand the program to our commercial Office 365 customers, an important milestone that gives IT pros and developers an opportunity to start testing the upcoming release. To be clear, this early build doesn’t yet contain all the features we’re planning to ship in the final product. However, through the course of the preview, customers should expect to see new features delivered through monthly updates.

Enabling people to connect with one another is central to Microsoft’s mission to reinvent productivity and help people make the most of every moment. For us, connecting people means delivering experiences capable of conveying all forms of human expression—verbal, written, visual and emotional. In today’s modern workplace, productivity will increasingly be centered on conversations, whether in writing, in person, via phone or video conference call. People need communications tools that allow them to express themselves in the most natural and approachable way possible, and that work the way they do—fluidly across locations and devices.

Today, we are very excited to announce that Azure Media Services is fully integrated with Azure CDN. Azure CDN can be easily enabled for any Media Services streaming endpoint by using the Azure Management Portal or via the Media Services REST API 2.9 or .NET SDK 3.1.0.2. This allows you to leverage the capabilities of our worldwide CDN POPs to easily scale from thousands to hundreds of thousands of viewers and to improve performance. The CDN is designed to cache and deliver content to end users from a CDN POP that is as close as possible to them. By moving content close to the user, delivery time is reduced and the overall user experience can be significantly improved.

So I got locked out of an Ubuntu VM that's running in Azure  Long story, but an employee left and some now the "admin" user I had access to no longer had "sudo" powers anymore. I needed to run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade but literally had no user available with admin on the box. If the machine was local, I could perhaps boot into recovery mode but this is a VM in the cloud. I do however, have access to the Azure portal because I do own the VM. While the operating system  doesn't think I'm powerful inside, I am powerful outside. Scott Hanselman shows you, how.

Softronic, an IT management and consulting company headquartered in Stockholm, joined forces with the renowned Karolinska University Hospital to create an easy-to-use, affordable way to follow up remotely with Parkinson’s patients. Taking advantage of Kinect’s depth sensing, high-definition video, and skeletal tracking, the application can assess five movements based on the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (URSDRS), a widely used tool for assessing the status of Parkinson patients.

We launched Azure ExpressRoute last year to enable you to easily extend your IT infrastructure to Azure using private, dedicated, high bandwidth connections that bypass the Internet. We have since made ExpressRoute available across 16 locations globally and have been joined by close to 20 partners so you get enterprise-grade reliability and predictable network performance no matter where you are.

Today at the renewed Windows Hardware Engineering Community (WinHEC) summit in Shenzhen, China, I had the honor of speaking about Windows 10 and the innovation and opportunity it offers our valued partners. China is a global epicenter for innovation and we’re excited to be working with the area’s leading hardware and software companies to develop ground-breaking devices and consumer experiences that will help shape the future of Windows 10.

We continue to make great development progress and shared today that Windows 10 will be available this summer in 190 countries and 111 languages. Windows has always been global with more than 1.5 billion users around the world and here in China hundreds of millions of PCs operate Windows today. That’s why it was particularly fun to show our latest global innovation, Windows Hello, on stage for the first time, and to feature a number of Windows 10 customizations for the China market, such as Cortana in Mandarin.

When you publish a Java web application, you want a clear view of what users are doing with it and how it’s performing. Your most effective plan for future work comes from a deep understanding of how people use what you’ve already provided: which features they like, what patterns they follow, and what they find difficult. You also want to know that your application is performing well – how quickly it responds, how performance varies under load. If performance drops or exceptions are thrown, you’d like to be notified quickly, and to diagnose the issue you’ll want powerful filter and search facilities to investigate the event traces.

Do you like the composed version of Microsoft Tuesday? Do share your feedback below in the comment section. Subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed and email newsletter to get immediate notification of new posts. I am available on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Connect with me to get the updates share over those social networking channels.

In case you missed the last week’s post, here it is for you: Microsoft Tuesday - Top News - #04