May, 2010

Universities are under a lot of pressure these days. They need to cut costs, deliver great services to a demanding audience of faculty, students and staff, and provide the reliability and security of a major enterprise. So we were happy to learn this week that the University of Arizona has selected our Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite to provide key productivity and collaboration tools for its campus in Tucson. They’ll be using the cloud-based service to synchronize e-mail and...

Eighteen months ago we launched Microsoft Tag , our mobile barcode technology. Since then more than 1 billion Tags have been printed by people and businesses all over the world. In the month of April alone, more than 20 million magazines with Tags were in the hands of U.S. consumers. Today we’re announcing that Tag is coming out of beta and that basic use of Tags will be free of charge. This means you will be able to generate and use Tags that link to our standard scenarios, such as linking...

By now, most people have seen the org news we announced on Tuesday morning, and some of the resulting coverage and opinion. As I talked to people about the news today, there were a couple of questions that kept coming up: Isn’t Robbie a bit young to retire? (he’s 48, and has been at the company for 22 years, ever since he got out of grad school… at internet speed, that makes him more than eligible) Why leave now? (hear what Robbie has to say ) What is J Allard really going...

Nearly three years ago, I moved to Boston from Redmond to pursue my work with Microsoft as a user-experience (UX) designer in a place closer to family. When I first got to One Memorial Drive, I was stuck in a little first-floor cubicle. I could get my work done, but it wasn’t the most inspiring workplace. But that changed quickly. Within a year, our small Unified Communications team moved to the 11th floor in the then brand-new Microsoft New England Research & Development Center (which...

Last Thursday we wrapped up this year’s Connected Health Conference , held in downtown Bellevue, Wash. It’s where we get together with a few hundred customers, partners, thought leaders from the industry, policy makers -- and talk about the health care industry and the kind of positive change and innovation that’s happening. I like to think of it as a “community of Innovators.” We’re seeing real progress. At last year’s conference , much of what we talked...

We had some important visitors this week – Timothy Geithner, the U.S. Treasury Secretary; Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com; and Warren Buffet, an investor and philanthropist you may have heard of…. They were all her for Microsoft’s 14th annual CEO Summit, which brought together about 125 leaders from around the world to talk about business, technology and the economy. We’re used to seeing important leaders from business, industry and government on campus. But a little...

On Thursday we hosted our first citizenship “Accelerator Summit,” a day of open discussion on our corporate citizenship efforts. The conversation was based on how technology and partnerships can accelerate change on social and economic issues. The event included a variety of different sessions related to workforce development, education, environment, online safety, and the role of technology in the non-profit community. It was attended by government and nongovernmental partners, academics...

Editor's note: The following is a guest post from Kelly Walsh, author of EmergingEdTech.com . I write about Education Technology, and oversee a department that implements and supports it in a small private college in New York. Education technology is something that I’m passionate about, especially when I think about the many ways that it can engage and inspire today’s students. There is enormous potential for emerging technologies to positively affect education. Computerized tools...

Today, we are announcing a new alliance with Capgemini that will bring the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), our cloud service for communication and collaboration, to Capgemini’s worldwide clients as part of their new Infostructure Transformation Services . This news already is gaining traction with our customers. One example is C10 , a French consumer-products distributor that has adopted BPOS for its entire organization. It did so because BPOS could deliver the security...

It’s amazing to think about how much we all rely on email in our personal and professional lives. And email today is about much more than sending written notes to your family, friends and coworkers. These days messages contain photos, videos, web links, shared documents, shared maps – there’s no end to the variety of email’s uses. And because email is changing, so is Hotmail. We’ve made some big changes to Hotmail to benefit our users, who among them send and receive...

What a week! Just days ago in New York, we launched Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 to business customers worldwide . The response to this epic release has been nothing short of amazing. With more than 8.6 million people already using the 2010 set of products in our beta program, it is clear there’s tremendous appetite for a platform that lets people work anywhere across the PC, phone and browser; brings social networking behind the firewall; and makes it easier to bring ideas to life with...

Technology is transforming our ability to measure, monitor and model how the world behaves. This has profound implications for scientific research and can transform the way we tackle global challenges such as health care and climate change. This transformation also will have a huge impact on engineering and business, delivering breakthroughs and discoveries that could lead to new products, new businesses – even new industries. Today, we’re proud to introduce Microsoft’s Technical...

Movie studios release star-studded films… Carmakers the newest model… For us, of course, the big news often is around the release of new software. So that made this past week important. On Wednesday we released Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to our business customers. These releases represent big advances in these products, with features that aid collaboration and boost productivity. It was great to see big customers already talking about ways Office 2010 is helping their...

The old relationship between internal line of business applications and business productivity software such as Microsoft Office might once have been described as “second cousins once removed.” The two software applications often sat side by side on the same PC, but they seldom spoke to one another and didn’t have much in common. In 2003, the relationship improved to first cousins with the release of Microsoft Office 2003 and a young version of SharePoint, which made it easier to get information...

Today’s a big day for us. We’re officially launching the 2010 series of Office and SharePoint products in New York City this morning. Over at the Office 2010 Engineering blog , I share some behind-the-scenes insights from a recent conversation I had with Office engineering leader, Antoine Leblond. We invite you to the learn more, join the conversation and watch Stephen Elop’s 11 AM EDT keynote here . Posted by Takeshi Numoto Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office

Innovation and analytics often are seen as opposing concepts. Many argue that innovation –which is often glorified as a moment of genius – cannot be reduced to a set of processes. Or even worse, to a set of metrics. I will be talking about this concept during several upcoming events. I’ll be speaking at the 2010 Palladium EMEA Summit in Madrid . I am presenting with Lego CIO Henrik Amsinck at the Business Performance Conference in Florida , and guest lecturing at Kellogg's Executive MBA program...

It looks like summer might finally have arrived here in Seattle . It seems like everyone has left to start the weekend a little early and who can blame them. Rain or shine, here’s your helpful roundup of the things you might have missed this week. Something we call Weekend Reading: DigiGirlz: Many of us here know first-hand how fulfilling careers in the tech industry can be, and how important the tech industry is to future economic success. We also know that women are under-represented in professions...

Today, we’re hosting the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley TechFair. It’s a showcase for research projects from our Silicon Valley lab , as well as selected projects from Microsoft Research facilities in Redmond, Wash ., and Beijing . Silicon Valley is perhaps the most widely recognized center of technical innovation in the world, and we’re delighted to show the local community some of the projects we find most exciting. One area of substantial investment at Microsoft Research Silicon...

It is clear that collaboration drives the modern enterprise. Sharing documents and applications within the company, from the remote office, with trusted partners and customers, into the cloud, etc. – is crucial for most organizations today. Collaboration is a key engine for success, regardless of which industry or part of the world you’re in. And, whether its deployed on-premises or as hosted cloud service, the new SharePoint 2010 is the ideal business collaboration platform to connect people...

Last fall, with Ray Ozzie’s support and sponsorship, we started FUSE Labs , with the mission to work with Microsoft product and research teams to ideate, develop and deliver new social, real-time and media-rich experiences for home and work. It’s been about eight months now, and we’ve just begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible. It’s been especially exciting to see the response to some of our early projects. For example: • Our team worked extensively on the Outlook Social Connector...