Posted by Pamela Passman Corporate Vice President, Global Corporate Affairs
With the addition of Louisiana and Ohio today, 32 states and the District of Columbia have now joined Elevate America, an initiative we launched 15 months ago to provide people across the United States with access to no-cost technology training and certification that helps them find employment. So far, we’ve offered more than 800,000 free training and certification vouchers through our partnerships with Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
We’ve learned a lot from working with these states. They’re each facing complex economic challenges, but it’s very encouraging to see how hard they’re working to reduce unemployment. Elevate America is designed to help by strengthening workforce skills, specifically the computer skills that half of today’s jobs require, and that will be required by an estimated 77 percent of new jobs created in the next decade. Of course, computer skills are just one set of skills that people need to find employment, yet we’re already seeing firsthand how important access to these skills can be.
Posted by Tim Cranton Associate General Counsel, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit Today the FBI announced federal indictments returned against three culprits charged with disseminating a major malware scheme believed to have caused $100 million in losses to victims worldwide. The scheme revolved around a form of malware called “scareware,” which falsely persuades consumers that they need to purchase useless and expensive software to protect their computers. Microsoft is proud to have supported the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice in these cases, which send a clear and important message to cyber-criminals that they will be caught and brought to justice. The scheme in these indictments was global, complex and sophisticated. The scareware went by various names, including WinFixer – meant to mislead consumers into associating the bogus software with trusted Microsoft products. At one time, WinFixer and its variants are thought to have been responsible for 75 percent of scareware worldwide.
Posted by Anthony Salcito Vice President, Worldwide Education
Six years ago in the Western Heights School District near Oklahoma City, nearly half of all students were dropping out before they could graduate. This was unacceptable, Superintendent Joe Kitchens decided, and began looking for a solution. He thought that by collecting data -- such as grades, attendance, socio-economic factors and other variables -- his teachers and counselors could better understand what was happening with students, why they would suddenly disengage and lose interest in class, and then proactively intervene with specialized programs to keep more students in school. The district deployed a new data system for tracking student progress, and today, Western Heights has reduced its dropout rate from 45 percent to 21 percent -- an amazing accomplishment.
I’m lucky enough to have traveled to hundreds of schools around the United States over the years. Nearly everywhere I’ve been, reducing high-school drop-out rates has been one of the leading educational challenges. About 26 percent of incoming high school freshman will not graduate high school on time, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And the overall graduation rate has changed little over the last three decades, despite advances in curriculum and teaching methods.
Posted by Brad Smith Senior Vice President and General Counsel
Over the past few months, starting with my January speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., I’ve talked a lot about the great potential for cloud computing to increase the efficiency and productivity of governments, businesses and individual consumers. To realize those benefits, we need to establish regulatory and industry protections that give computer users confidence in the privacy and security of cloud data.
Today, I returned to Washington to continue the discussion as one of the plenary speakers at the Gov 2.0 Expo 2010.
As I shared during my presentation, we are constantly seeing powerful new evidence of the value of cloud computing.
Today, for example, we announced that the University of Arizona chose Microsoft’s cloud platform to facilitate communications and collaboration among the school’s 18,000 faculty and staff. After initially looking at various supposedly “free” online services, the institution selected Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite to update its aging e-mail system and to provide new calendaring and collaboration tools. U. of A. officials concluded that, as a research university that conducts $530 million in research annually, it needed the enterprise-level security and privacy protections that BPOS could provide, but which the alternative services could not match.
Posted by Teresa Carlson Vice President, Microsoft Federal
(Cross-posted from the Microsoft FutureFed blog)
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) held an event last week that brought stakeholders in the federal IT community together to discuss cloud standards for data portability, interoperability, and security. It was called the Cloud Computing Forum & Workshop, and members of the Microsoft Federal team attended to brainstorm ideas on how we can best facilitate cloud adoption in the federal government.
Below is a great recap from Susie Adams, Microsoft’s Federal Civilian and IGO Chief Technology Officer.
Last week I attended the National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST) Cloud Computing Forum and Workshop, and it was clearly a serious effort to kick off collaboration between government and industry to accelerate the use of cloud technology. Dr. Pat Gallagher, Director of NIST, believes that cloud computing can make the U.S. government “more effective, more efficient, and we believe more secure.” However, Dr. Gallagher indicated that the government is falling behind the private sector in adopting cloud services, and that he shares the concern of Vivek Kundra, Federal Chief Information Officer, that government does not offer citizens and employees online services as robust as the commercial services of Facebook, for example.