Microsoft News & Articles

Skype and Microsoft Lync are now connected, and it means those who use the Microsoft communications network can now reach out to a wider audience of Skype users.

Is the Bring-Your-Own-Device movement now including bring-your-own-social tools? According to a new survey by Microsoft, enterprise social tools are now considered so helpful in the workplace that nearly a third of respondents said they would be willing to spend their own money on buying the right ones. 

With only a couple of weeks until Apple's big developer event, the company has to match Google's feature-heavy Android and app updates from I/O, Microsoft's new media-friendly Xbox One and keep generating hardware magic in what is becoming a highly predictable market. 

This week there were quite a number of releases for mobile including new printing possibilities for mobile users from Accellion and Ricoh. SkyDrive Pro is now available for Windows, while Adobe is offering Photoshop Express for Windows 8, and Cognidox releases XtraNet for document portals.

What is Xbox One? Is it a games machines, a media center, or an app player? Microsoft wants it to be all three, with near instant-on, voice activation, Skype and many other features, but to do this, it runs a version of Windows 8, a gaming hyper-OS and a media system, highlighting the company's struggles with Windows.

Yahoo is bidding for Tumblr in an attempt to boost its social media credentials, but Facebook and other parties may be interested in spoiling the party. 

Windows and Windows Phone 8 customers are hearing some details about Microsoft's plan for updating each system in the coming months, and it starts with a public preview of Windows Blue by the end of June.

Keeping track of important Facebook updates can be a tedious process, especially if a person has a lot of contacts, but Bing aims to make this easier by integrating Facebook into its social sidebar tool.

Launch a Gchat session right from an Outlook.com email message with the Google contacts integration.

Google's instant messaging service has been integrated into the Microsoft universe, at least when it comes to the Web based Outlook.com and the cloud based SkyDrive storage app.

With every new edition of SharePoint there’s a lot of new apps around that are key to getting the best of out it. This week AvePoint has a new meetings app to bring order to the content around meetings, Metalogix is offering a new way of assessing SharePoint storage, SharePoint Solutions automates site creation, and PartnerPulse monitors Microsoft partners.

Sales teams for Microsoft's Yammer social network will join up with the Office 365 team, the company has announced, all the more easy to integrate the two technologies.

Have you been building up your Klout score through social activity, informative posts and connections? If so, you could be a Klout Expert, someone wise enough to get your content to the top of search engines thanks to a new initiative by the measuring company. 

After the announcement that SharePoint Online is coming out of Preview, Microsoft has also announced a number of upgrades to Microsoft Office Web Apps, which, when all the upgrades become available, will come with support for Chrome on Android tablets and co-editing in real-time.

Another milestone in the gradual upgrade of Office 365 -- SharePoint Online is finally out of preview. Although Microsoft doesn’t say when users will be able to get the new version, it does say that it will be soon and that users will be given notice of four weeks before they have to upgrade.

This week in the realm of Document Management, Microsoft finally cleared up one of the big questions surrounding Office -- the subscription model and where it is going in the future. In other news, EMC is holding its annual show and hosted a lot of interesting developments with Documentum, while NetDocuments opens an app store and dtSearch upgraded.