At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced what it calls its “Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform.” That’s not so much a new platform but an effort to bring the company’s existing database, analytics and governance services closer together.

As Rohan Kumar, Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Azure Data told me, the shift towards this platform approach started a few years ago. “Four years ago, I saw that in analytics,” he said. “We saw where we had data integration as a separate service, data warehousing, big data analytics, Power BI. The big thing we saw customers struggle with was putting them together. ‘Oh, I have to integrate data, land it inside the lake, then do some warehousing queries, dashboard it in Power BI, maybe do a machine learning workflow.'”

With Azure Synapse, the company made the first step in this direction by helping its customers work with different kinds of data across different services, mostly with a focus on data lakes and warehouses. Now, Kumar noted, the company is extending this across operational databases and governance. Specifically, this means Microsoft is now launching Azure Synapse Link for SQL, for example, that, in combination with Azure Synapse Analytics, allows for real-time analytics for SQL Server 2022 and Azure SQL Database.

As for SQL Server 2022, which is now in preview, Kumar described it as the “most cloud-connected release yet,” with support for Synapse Link so that all new commits will be sent to Synapse and Azure for analysis, all without impacting the performance of the transactional workloads. SQL Server 2022 connected to Azure also enabled disaster recovery to Azure AQL Managed Instance in the cloud and Microsoft Purview, the company’s data governance platform, now also integrates with SQL Server 2022.

And talking about Purview, which can already manage a number of third-party assets on-premises, Kumar noted that there is not just the integration with SQL Server but also new capabilities like the ability to get deeper insights into a company’s entire data estate (and Microsoft is working with third-party service providers to expand these capabilities, too). “One of the big questions we hear from our customers is, ‘look, our data estate is spread across multiple regions of the world but we don’t want our European data to ever leave the boundaries of Europe, so we need to have those insights, we need to have alerts if that rule is ever broken.'” With the new Data Insights feature, enterprises will now be able to do just that.

Of course, there are also a number of new product features that aren’t directly related to the overall platform. There’s a new ‘Business Critical’ tier for Azure Database for MySQL, for example, that promises 1.5x performance improvements, as well as the new Microsoft Graph Data Connect that will empower “customers to securely export their Microsoft 365 data estate” (though I’m not sure anybody really knows what the Microsoft Graph is all about these days).

Maybe more importantly, there’s also a preview of a self-service feature for Power BI datamart that will allow analysts to create these data marts inside of Power BI. “Today, if you’re a business user and you want a data mart, your normal course of action is to go talk to IT,” explained Kumar. “Now, with Power BI datamarts, we’ve made that into a self-service capability within Power BI so you can select the data and there’s an entire workflow that makes it very easy, while ensuring that all the governance pieces around data governance and security are respected.”

At its virtual Build developer conference today, Microsoft announced the private preview launch of the Microsoft Dev Box, a new virtual developer workstation in the cloud.

It’s no secret that it can often be quite a bit of a process for developers to set up a new physical machine according to their needs. Microsoft argues that with the new Dev Box, IT teams can give newly onboarded developers easy access to a standard development environment without having to configure their own machine. Meanwhile, more senior developers who may be working on different projects — all with their own configurations and conflicting dependencies — can use multiple Dev Boxes to get their work done. And at the same time, IT regains control since the Dev Boxes are integrated with Windows 365 and management tools like Intune and the Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

Image Credits: Microsoft

This is not the first time Microsoft has made virtual development environments available to developers. Earlier this year, the company also launched its Azure Game Development Virtual Machine into preview. The use case here is obviously a bit different, but the idea is pretty much the same.

Developers can set up their boxes as needed, with any IDE, SDK or internal tools they need (as long as it runs on Windows) and target any platform their tools support.

Image Credits: Microsoft

It’s worth noting that the developers themselves stay in control of their Dev Boxes and can create new ones and delete old ones as necessary. “Developers can create Dev Boxes to experiment on a proof-of-concept, keep their projects separate, or even parallelize tasks across multiple Dev Boxes to avoid bogging down their primary environment,” Microsoft explains in today’s announcement. “For devs working on legacy apps, they can maintain Dev Boxes for older versions of an application to quickly create an environment that can reproduce and diagnose critical customer issues as they emerge.”

To keep costs down, developers can obviously spin their machines down at night and start them up in the morning. And to manage those costs across teams, Microsoft will also offer a single view to see all of a team’s boxes.

Virtual development environments themselves are obviously nothing new. We’ve seen AWS take a step in this direction with the virtualized Cloud9 IDE, for example, though Microsoft’s solution seems to be quite a bit more flexible.

Seattle-based Zeitworks, which is launching its private beta today after raising a $4.5 million seed round in 2020, wants to give enterprises data-driven tools for improving the productivity of their teams and streamline their business operations. That’s a market that’s seeing quite a bit of growth right now, especially given how the pandemic has made remote work a standard business practice and how the overall talent crunch is forcing many businesses to do more with fewer employees. The overall idea here is to give businesses better insights into how teams work and where there are opportunities for improving business processes beyond simply using automation.

“The problem that we’re really addressing is that there’s teams and companies in just about every industry who execute all kinds of repetitive business processes every day– and to be clear, it’s business processes executed by humans,” Zeitworks CEO and co-founder Jay Bartot told me. “Think about processing bank loans or insurance claims or HR onboarding of new employees, moving information from system to system. Oftentimes, those systems aren’t interconnected or don’t have APIs. The problem that we’re solving is that the majority of these processes can’t be optimized because they’re undocumented and unmeasured. They’re just not understood.”

Image Credits: Zeitworks

Unsurprisingly, understanding these processes is at the core of Zeitworks’ product. But since these processes aren’t documented, you can’t exactly build a rule-based engine around discovering what people are doing. Instead, the company uses an AI-driven task mining system that uses signals from a wide variety of sources, mostly with a focus on the desktop applications these users interact with during their daily work. Bartot actually noted that he prefers the term ‘process intelligence’ over ‘task mining,’ given that task mining tends to be associated with creating RPA bots more than empowering teams and helping them work better.

Image Credits: Zeitworks

Now, in order to do all of this, Zeitgeist has to run its agent on an employee’s desktop and those users’ daily work is then tracked with quite a bit of granularity. Microsoft, with its Productivity Score, does something similar, but the company also faced quite a bit of backlash over it, given that managers could drill down to the individual employee and see how many emails they sent, chats they participated in, etc. The company later made some changes that put the focus more on the organizational level and away from individual users.

“In our world, the kinds of productivity scores that we are recording are around this repetitive work — the fact that people are processing bank loans or you know insurance claims repeatedly is a fundamental part of what we’re measuring and what we’re doing with pattern recognition,” Bartot explained when I asked him about the potential for backlash. “So the productivity scores are really geared towards that specific kind of repetitive work. I think in the case of Microsoft and other tools that we see out there also in the productivity space, when you’re measuring across many different types of workers up and down the worker stack from the highest level knowledge workers all the way down to kind of digital laborers, I think it’s more challenging to come with something that is useful and something that would make sense to people.” He believes that because his company has a very different kind of focus, its scores will be more useful and acceptable to users. 

Looking ahead, Zeitworks is starting to build out its go-to-market capabilities now that it has proven its system with a number of pilot customers. The company is also working on getting its SOC 2 certification.

Image Credits: Zeitworks

Microsoft 365’s Bookings feature is an incredibly useful tool for organizing tasks and events. If you often struggle to keep track of your schedule, then this feature is definitely for you! Read on to learn the basics of how Bookings works and some tips on how to get the most out of it.

Visibility

Bid goodbye to the days of scribbling on Post-its and frantically going through your schedule to find out where you’re heading for lunch. Bookings provides you with a unique scheduling app that is compatible on both desktops and mobile devices. Here, customers can select times and dates based on current availability — simply enter the contact information and then book it. The system then fully automates the process of managing your appointments.

No more rain checks

Cancellations and missed appointments mean wasted time slots unless you’re able to fill them up with new bookings. Avoid lost income by controlling how much advance notice is required to make a cancellation. With Bookings, appointments appear immediately in staff calendars and can be added or revised by customers in their own personal calendars.

Additionally, a confirmation email is automatically sent to the customer, followed by another automatic email reminder before the appointment time. The web page also offers a rescheduling service: customers can simply click on the link on the confirmation email and pick a time that’s better for them.

Synchronization

Once completed, the booking is then synced to a centralized calendar where businesses are given the option to reschedule, cancel, or reassign the appointment to other staff members as they see fit.

Should you decide to reassign a booking to staff members, Bookings offers a nifty feature known as “split view.” This shows which staff members are booked at which times, and lets you compare everyone’s schedules side by side. The appointments are synced not only to your calendar but to the staff members’ calendars as well. Moreover, this versatile system accommodates Office 365, Outlook, and even Google Calendar, so clients and staff can keep whatever calendaring service they prefer.

Double duty

Appointment setting might be the primary function of Bookings, but the system can also be utilized to build your company’s customer list. Once customers input their information into the system, it automatically creates contact entries for those customers. The contact card contains personal information such as your customer’s name, address, phone number, and email address.

And as your company grows, you can add more staff members as well as create additional booking pages for free. Furthermore, staff members aren’t required to have Office 365 subscriptions to be a part of the service.

Efficient tech resources aren’t enough to maintain a successful business anymore. To really stand out from competitors, you need comprehensive appointment management. Give us a call if you need any questions answered or issues addressed. We’re more than happy to help.

Microsoft 365’s Bookings feature is a great way to keep track of your tasks and events. It allows you to create appointments, schedule meetings, and track deadlines. In this blog post, we will show you how to use the Bookings feature in Microsoft 365, and provide some tips on how to make the most of this powerful tool.

Visibility

Bid goodbye to the days of scribbling on Post-its and frantically going through your schedule to find out where you’re heading for lunch. Bookings provides you with a unique scheduling app that is compatible on both desktops and mobile devices. Here, customers can select times and dates based on current availability — simply enter the contact information and then book it. The system then fully automates the process of managing your appointments.

No more rain checks

Cancellations and missed appointments mean wasted time slots unless you’re able to fill them up with new bookings. Avoid lost income by controlling how much advance notice is required to make a cancellation. With Bookings, appointments appear immediately in staff calendars and can be added or revised by customers in their own personal calendars.

Additionally, a confirmation email is automatically sent to the customer, followed by another automatic email reminder before the appointment time. The web page also offers a rescheduling service: customers can simply click on the link on the confirmation email and pick a time that’s better for them.

Synchronization

Once completed, the booking is then synced to a centralized calendar where businesses are given the option to reschedule, cancel, or reassign the appointment to other staff members as they see fit.

Should you decide to reassign a booking to staff members, Bookings offers a nifty feature known as “split view.” This shows which staff members are booked at which times, and lets you compare everyone’s schedules side by side. The appointments are synced not only to your calendar but to the staff members’ calendars as well. Moreover, this versatile system accommodates Office 365, Outlook, and even Google Calendar, so clients and staff can keep whatever calendaring service they prefer.

Double duty

Appointment setting might be the primary function of Bookings, but the system can also be utilized to build your company’s customer list. Once customers input their information into the system, it automatically creates contact entries for those customers. The contact card contains personal information such as your customer’s name, address, phone number, and email address.

And as your company grows, you can add more staff members as well as create additional booking pages for free. Furthermore, staff members aren’t required to have Office 365 subscriptions to be a part of the service.

Efficient tech resources aren’t enough to maintain a successful business anymore. To really stand out from competitors, you need comprehensive appointment management. Give us a call if you need any questions answered or issues addressed. We’re more than happy to help.

Are you struggling to keep track of your tasks and events? Microsoft 365’s new Bookings feature may be just what you need. With this feature, you can easily create and manage appointments for yourself or your team. Here is some key information on how to use the Bookings feature and some of its benefits.

Visibility

Bid goodbye to the days of scribbling on Post-its and frantically going through your schedule to find out where you’re heading for lunch. Bookings provides you with a unique scheduling app that is compatible on both desktops and mobile devices. Here, customers can select times and dates based on current availability — simply enter the contact information and then book it. The system then fully automates the process of managing your appointments.

No more rain checks

Cancellations and missed appointments mean wasted time slots unless you’re able to fill them up with new bookings. Avoid lost income by controlling how much advance notice is required to make a cancellation. With Bookings, appointments appear immediately in staff calendars and can be added or revised by customers in their own personal calendars.

Additionally, a confirmation email is automatically sent to the customer, followed by another automatic email reminder before the appointment time. The web page also offers a rescheduling service: customers can simply click on the link on the confirmation email and pick a time that’s better for them.

Synchronization

Once completed, the booking is then synced to a centralized calendar where businesses are given the option to reschedule, cancel, or reassign the appointment to other staff members as they see fit.

Should you decide to reassign a booking to staff members, Bookings offers a nifty feature known as “split view.” This shows which staff members are booked at which times, and lets you compare everyone’s schedules side by side. The appointments are synced not only to your calendar but to the staff members’ calendars as well. Moreover, this versatile system accommodates Office 365, Outlook, and even Google Calendar, so clients and staff can keep whatever calendaring service they prefer.

Double duty

Appointment setting might be the primary function of Bookings, but the system can also be utilized to build your company’s customer list. Once customers input their information into the system, it automatically creates contact entries for those customers. The contact card contains personal information such as your customer’s name, address, phone number, and email address.

And as your company grows, you can add more staff members as well as create additional booking pages for free. Furthermore, staff members aren’t required to have Office 365 subscriptions to be a part of the service.

Efficient tech resources aren’t enough to maintain a successful business anymore. To really stand out from competitors, you need comprehensive appointment management. Give us a call if you need any questions answered or issues addressed. We’re more than happy to help.

New Relic, which has long been known for its observability platform, is entering the security market today with the launch of a new vulnerability management service. Aptly named New Relic Vulnerability Management, the service aggregates data from botth its own native vulnerability detection system and third-party tools, giving security, DevOps, SecOps and SRE teams a single service for monitoring their sotware stack for vulnerabilities.

“Minimizing security risk across the entire software development life cycle is imperative — and we are seeing more pressure on DevOps to manage risk while making sure it doesn’t become a blocker to the pace of innovation,” said New Relic CEO Bill Staples. “New Relic Vulnerability Management delivers more value to engineers harnessing the power of observability with our platform approach, and accelerates our mission to help every engineer do their best work with data, not opinions.”

The company argues that one if its major differentiators is that this new tool can integrate with third-party security tools. This in turn should help teams prioritize which security risks to focus on (because there are always more than any team can handle), with the new service also helping them to identify which actions to take to remediate those risks).

The new service is part of a series of announcement New Relic made at the CNCF’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference and its own FutureStack event today. Other announcements include enhancements to the company’s application performance monitoring service (which now collects logs in context), new partners in its Instant Observability ecosystem (which now features more than 470 integrations), and a major new partnership with Microsoft, allowing Azure users to use New Relic as their default observability platform natively inside the Azure Portal.

New Relic, which has long been known for its observability platform, is entering the security market today with the launch of a new vulnerability management service. Aptly named New Relic Vulnerability Management, the service aggregates data from botth its own native vulnerability detection system and third-party tools, giving security, DevOps, SecOps and SRE teams a single service for monitoring their sotware stack for vulnerabilities.

“Minimizing security risk across the entire software development life cycle is imperative — and we are seeing more pressure on DevOps to manage risk while making sure it doesn’t become a blocker to the pace of innovation,” said New Relic CEO Bill Staples. “New Relic Vulnerability Management delivers more value to engineers harnessing the power of observability with our platform approach, and accelerates our mission to help every engineer do their best work with data, not opinions.”

The company argues that one if its major differentiators is that this new tool can integrate with third-party security tools. This in turn should help teams prioritize which security risks to focus on (because there are always more than any team can handle), with the new service also helping them to identify which actions to take to remediate those risks).

The new service is part of a series of announcement New Relic made at the CNCF’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference and its own FutureStack event today. Other announcements include enhancements to the company’s application performance monitoring service (which now collects logs in context), new partners in its Instant Observability ecosystem (which now features more than 470 integrations), and a major new partnership with Microsoft, allowing Azure users to use New Relic as their default observability platform natively inside the Azure Portal.

Lounge, a team communication startup that was looking to reimagine the future of work with features designed for remote and distributed workforces, has now found an exit after Slack entered its same market last year with competitive voice and video tools. Launched by former Life360 employees last year, Lounge confirmed it’s been acquired for an undisclosed sum by Pulse — another company building technology aimed at improving remote worker productivity, but specifically through features that automate updates to users’ Slack status via a combination of A.I. and custom rules.

Pulse was founded by Raj Singh, who has already had multiple exits, including to companies like Salesforce. In particular, Pulse was attracted to Lounge’s ideas around team-building activities for remote workers.

That was only a subset of what Lounge had offered, however. Its service was a more expansive platform with features like message boards, audio chat, group audio, and visual representations of typical corporate office spaces — like employee desks, conference rooms, and even break rooms. On top of this, it had built features designed to help remote workers connect and get to know one another, like photo-sharing tools and support for company-wide events — like steps or meditation challenges, for example.

According to Lounge CEO Alex Kwon, despite his startup’s unique features, it struggled against the lock-in and network effect of mainstream remote work platforms, like Slack and Microsoft Teams. But the final bullet was Slack’s introduction of Huddle, its own lightweight audio networking feature that effectively took aim at one of Lounge’s biggest selling points — drop-in voice chats.

Initially, Lounge decided to pivot to focus more on asynchronous team-building activities with deeper Slack integration.

Kwon says Singh later reached out to him, and explained how Pulse aimed to become a platform for displaying the status of each team member right inside Slack, where they’re already working — as opposed to having employees use a whole new platform like Lounge. Pulse was also looking to expand its solution to other workplace apps, like Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and even Discord. Both parties agreed that establishing team-building activities as a social layer for this existing offering could make sense. It also served Lounge’s original vision to make remote teams feel closer.

“Raj is an experienced entrepreneur in the B2B space with a previous exit to Salesforce, so the acquisition conversation became a natural next step for us,” notes Kwon.

Pulse aims to use Lounge’s asynchronous teambuilding activities like its Steps challenge and Team photos feature as the social roadmap for Pulse’s ambient status updater right inside Slack, Kwon says. You could imagine, then, how company-wide team-building challenges could be turned into Slack status updates the same way Pulse today updates your status based on the apps you use — like Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, Slack Huddles, etc. — and your calendar, working hours and more.

As a result of the acquisition, Kwon is the only Lounge member joining Pulse, and only as a part-time product advisor — a signal the acquisition was more about the tech than talent.

Deal terms weren’t revealed but we understand it to be more stock than cash, implying a smaller exit.

Lounge had raised $1.2 million in funding from investors including Unusual Ventures, Hustle Fund, Translink, Unpopular Ventures, and other angels.

Google Cloud is holding its annual Security Summit this week and unsurprisingly, the company used the event to launch a few new security features. This year, the announcements focus on software supply chain security, Zero Trust and tools for making it easier for enterprises to adopt Google Cloud’s security capabilities.

It’s no surprise that software supply chain security makes an appearance at this year’s event. Thanks to recent high-profile attacks, it’s been the focus of White House summits and, just last week, an industry group that includes Google, Amazon, Ericsson, Intel, Microsoft and VMware pledged $30 million to work with the Linux Foundation and Open Source Security Foundation to improve the security of open-source software.

At today’s Summit, Google Cloud announced the launch of its Assured Open Source Software service, which gives enterprises and government users access to the same vetted open-source packages that Google itself uses in its projects. According to the company, these packages are regularly scanned, analyzed and fuzz-tested for vulnerabilities and built with Google Cloud’s Cloud Build service with evidence of SLSA-compliance (that’s ‘Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts,’ a framework for safeguarding artifact integrity across software supply chains). These packages are also signed by Google and distributed from Google’s secured registry. “Assured OSS helps organizations reduce the need to develop, maintain, and operate a complex process for securely managing their open source dependencies,” Google explains in its announcement today.

Also new today is BeyondCorp Enterprise Essentials, a new edition of Google Cloud’s BeyondCorp Enterpirse Zero Trust solution that promises to “help organizations quickly and easily take the first steps toward Zero Trust implementation.” The company says it includes features like context-aware access controls for SaaS applications and other SAML-connected services, as well as threat and data protection capabilities, in addition to data loss prevention, malware and phishing protection in Chrome.

Finally, Google is also launched a new Security Foundation solution for enterprises that aims to make it easier for them to adopt Google Cloud’s security capabilities. It joins Google’s other ready-made solutions, which so far have focused on specific industries (retail, media and entertainment, financial services, etc.) as opposed to this more general security-centric package. “This solution is aligned to the prescriptive guidance from our Google Cloud Cybersecurity Action Team, and codified in our Security Foundations Blueprint, so that you get the controls you need for data protection, network security, security monitoring, and more to help make your deployments secure from day one–and to do it more cost-effectively,” Google explains.

As environmental issues take center stage with increasingly severe weather incidents, wildfires, droughts and floods across the globe, companies who generate pollution up and down the supply chain are looking for ways to measure their impact on the environment with an ultimate goal of finding ways to minimize their overall contribution to the problem.

But in order to improve your carbon footprint, you need to be able to get a baseline measurement and then follow the data over time and that takes a set of software tools.

Microsoft wants to help, and it announced new offering today called Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. In a blog post authored by Alysa Taylor, Corporate vice president, industry, apps, and data marketing; and Elisabeth Brinton, Corporate vice president for sustainability; the company outlined its plans for a new offering to help.

The solution aims to use of a set of measuring devices to collect the data, and then take advantage of Microsoft’s cloud-based data collection services to process and understand that data.

“To effectively drive sustainability reporting, sustainability efforts, and business transformation, organizations need better visibility into activities across their enterprise and value chain. Collecting and connecting IoT data from devices using sensors — combined with rich services at the edge or in the cloud — provides the basis to monitor and measure activities at scale.”

The data collection piece takes place in a tool called Microsoft Sustainability Manager, which they write”will empower organizations to more easily record, report and reduce their environmental impact through increasingly automated data connections that deliver actionable insights.”

Microsoft is not alone in this type of effort as other major players have made similar announcements over the last year including Salesforce, Google and IBM. In fact, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said at a press event last week, sustainability is going to be a big business moving forward, as more companies try to reduce their carbon output. Salesforce and Google have built similar products, while IBM acquired Envizi, a startup that helps companies measure their carbon usage.

All of these solutions are data driven, and look to help companies collect key data to understand their environmental impact, while finding ways to reduce it over time and meet sustainability goals.

Microsoft will also be working with a variety of partners to help extend the solution beyond its core offering. The tool will be available for testing or purchasing on June 1st.

Every company needs to track goals, often referred to as objectives and key results, or OKRs for short. Traditionally, those have been tracked manually in a spreadsheet, but over recent years many startups have been building software to track this key company information.

Early last year, Microsoft launched Viva, a modern employee portal/intranet product. The company referred to it as an employee experience platform, but whatever you call it, it’s about being a central place to track work-related information for employees.

Last fall, the company bought one of those OKR tracking software startups, Ally.io, with the goal of incorporating that functionality into Viva. Today, the company announced a private preview of the new module, which provides a way for individuals, teams and companies to track their progress on their internal goals.

Vetri Vellore, corporate vice president for Microsoft Viva Goals explained the new module. He came to Microsoft when Ally was acquired.

“We are announcing the new goal setting application within Viva to make it easy to now bring this purpose and alignment to every level of organization. It’s called Viva Goals, and Viva Goals is a new module in Microsoft Viva for business goal setting and management,”

Image Credits: Microsoft

Vellore says that his team has been working hard over the past seven months, since the acquisition, to transform what was the Ally product into a module inside Viva. And he says a big reason behind the acquisition was to accelerate the product development roadmap.

“We decided to get acquired because we saw this as the best way to accelerate Ally’s mission — How do we bring purpose to work?”

He believes that getting everyone aligned on goals has always been a huge challenge for organizations of all sizes, but the pandemic really accelerated this need. That’s because with people spread out more, managers needed to communicate goals more clearly than ever before.

“One of the specific things we keep hearing about, this was even before the pandemic, but suddenly now, employees want more clarity on how their work aligns to the company’s purpose and mission,” he said.

And with Viva Goals, this involves building a place where employees can see how their individual work relates to the team and organization’s overall goals. Once managers input these goals, they can link to other work systems and the goal progress can update automatically from the information in these linked programs, or they can go in and update the progress manually, depending on the need.

Viva Goals is going into private preview starting today. Vellore says it should be generally available some time in Q3.