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Quick Poll is available on Microsoft Forms as an add-in. As the name suggests, the tool allows users to create real-time polls quickly. When typing an email in Outlook, the Quick Poll add-in button can be used to generate poll questions with answer options. Recipients who receive the email can vote directly within the mail or click the link to see the question open in a separate window. Poll results are also showed on the voting car in the email....

1 Two’s Company, Three’s a Crowd2 Blame Game Gates describes missing out on buying Android when Google acquired the company was one of his “greatest mistakes ever”. While he admits the result has not particularly harmed Microsoft as the company’s other divisions thrive, he says missing out on mobile meant Microsoft is competing instead of dominating: “It’s amazing to me that having made one of the greatest mistakes of all time, and there was this antitrust lawsuit and various things, that our other assets like Windows and Office are still very strong, so we are a leading company,” says Gates....

That represents a 22% increase year-on-year. Microsoft also confirmed its operating income for FY22 Q1 was $20.2 billion, up 27% from the same period a year ago. Elsewhere, the numbers continue to make good reading for Microsoft investors. For example, net income reached $20.5 billion, up 48%. As has often been the case in recent years, Microsoft’s cloud business is the primary reason for the significant gains. Office Commercial and Cloud revenue increased 18%, Office 365 Commercial jumped 23%, and Office Consumer grabbed a 10% growth....

In its announcement, Microsoft says finding specific content in an email inbox is not easy. This is especially the case for enterprise users who may receive multiple emails per day. While searching an inbox will bring up relevant results, sometimes there are hundreds of emails to hunt through. Email Insights intuitively finds the specific content, which takes the load off the user. The app searches connected inboxes and displays the top three most relevant results....

Though Excel has had localized functions for some time, that doesn’t fix the problem completely. The majority of tutorials are still in English, and many have been taught US functions, despite the language barrier. Translating them manually can be time-consuming and a huge headache. Danish employee Martin Ørsted noticed this very quickly, and vowed to solve the problem during Microsoft’s Hackathon. The result is a new Garage project accurately named Functions Translator....

Windows animated features for Start Menu tiles is a nice OS touch that lets updates arrive on the Windows Live Tiles. As the name suggests, the subdomain was a compartment of buildmypinnedsite.com, which Microsoft launched alongside Windows 8. The service allows website to create and show live updates inside Windows Start menu tiles. For example, Microsoft Edge users could pin a web page directly into the Start menu on Windows 10 (Start Page on Win8)....

This announcement brings several important changes to Ignite. Firstly, Microsoft is moving Ignite 2020 back to the usual September schedule for the conference. Last year the event was moved to November. Clearly that change was not meant to last. Many speculated November would become the default time for Ignite because it moved the conference out of hurricane season. The event is the company’s largest conference and would cause major problems if it was cancelled....

“With hundreds of millions of Augmented Reality capable mobile devices in the hands of business users, every maker will be able to leverage the power of mixed reality to extend their Power Apps with the ease of drag-and-drop development,” said Microsoft of the addition. “With these new capabilities, makers can start to digitize workflows in physical space in new and innovative ways using tools they are already familiar with.” PowerApps have already proven popular with many businesses, allowing them to provide modern functionality with less overhead....

Usually, Microsoft handles security patches with its month Patch Tuesday rollouts. However, if a flaw is problematic enough, the company will break out of this cycle to issue out of band emergency updates. With August Patch Tuesday been and gone, this latest patch is one of those out of band releases: “An out of band security update has been released for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2,” Microsoft notes....

Other changes coming to Azure App Service on Azure Stack include improvements to Admin and Functions portals, .NET Core 2.0 support and general fixes. Regarding support for highly available deployments, Microsoft explains workloads can now be deployed across fault domains. “Therefore App Service infrastructure is able to be fault tolerant as it will be deployed across fault domains. By default all new deployments of Azure App Service will have this capability however for deployments completed prior to Azure Stack 1802 update being applied refer to the App Service Fault Domain documentation....

Joining Microsoft in the Open Source Security Foundation (OSSF) are Red Hat, Google, JPMC, IBM, NCC Group, and OWASP Foundation. Microsoft’s own GitHub is also a part of the group. Announced Monday, the collective of tech companies are also joined by the JPMorgan Chase banking firm. All of the foundation is hosted at the Linux Foundation. In the announcement, the group said the intention is connect and secure software by leveraging the Linux Foundation....

Because Microsoft Launcher 6.0 was a ground-up build, it lacked some features of the full app in Microsoft Launcher Preview. Now the new version is coming to users of the Beta app. It seems Microsoft will maintain three Launcher apps on Android signaling three levels of development (Preview, bets, and full release). According to Dr. Windows, the beta version is a couple of builds behind the preview version. That makes sense for the three-tiered approach....

Either way, Microsoft has rolled out a massive new update for Microsoft 365 customers. The focus of this upgrade is on meetings, but it seems Microsoft has thrown the kitchen sink at it. This is a beefy update laden with new tools. With that in mind, I’ll get right down to the business to describing the new features. First up, Microsoft wants us to spend less time preparing for meetings....

However, Microsoft has not described what the fully featured app will include. It is clear the company wants to expand the reach of the service in a useable manner across platforms. There are already applications available on Android and iOS platforms. In the post, the company points out that it has used customers feedback from the Desktop Notifier to create the new full-app experience. “We’ve gotten tons of great feedback on the current desktop notifier, and we’re excited to deliver a more full-featured desktop app....

However, it seems the software package first adopters of the Duo receive will not be the final one. Instead, Microsoft looks to be working on constantly improving the app bundle that is available on the smartphone. According to a new Redmond job post, the company is looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer. Under this role, the employee will work on Android apps that highlight the dual-screen of the Surface Duo....

Microsoft took the criticism on board and announced last November it would audit AnyVision. It seems the company agreed with protestors of the investments and M12 has now divested its stake in the controversial company. Furthermore, Microsoft says it won’t make any future investments in AnyVision. Even when making the initial investment last year, Microsoft said it was subject to AnyVision complying“with its six ethical principles to guide its facial recognition work: fairness, transparency, accountability, nondiscrimination, notice and consent, and lawful surveillance....

In terms of the latter, MSN.com will remain as the branding, but will be shown as being “powered by Microsoft News”. As for the company’s MSN News on iOS and Android, these will both now be known only as Microsoft News. In terms of end users, this is essentially a rebranding and nothing more. However, Microsoft says the new service highlights its consolidation of tools and services into a single aggregating platform for news curation: “Microsoft News represents the ways we keep people informed across the web, phone and PC, using our long-tested approach of curating news via publishing partnerships, human editors, and AI....

If you’re wondering why having a 64-bit version of OneDrive is important, Microsoft explains it makes it easier to manage large files. Of course, this will depend on whether your version of Windows 10 supports 64-bit. “The 64-bit version is the right choice if you plan to use large files, if you have a lot of files, and if you have a computer that’s running a 64-bit version of Windows,” Microsoft’s Ankita Kirti says in a blog post....

In its report, FireEye says OneDrive has observed this significant rise, the largest amongst its three rivals, Dropbox, Google Drive, and WeTransfer. In fact, the service went from being comfortably the safest cloud storage provider in terms of malicious files last year to be the second worst. Dropbox continues to be the worst of the bunch, with 80% of malicious file usage growth. This continues from last year, where Dropbox was also the worst....

As the name suggests, Auto Fix in Microsoft PowerPoint automatically helps you to organize slides and presentations. Formatting across a presentation is usually a time consuming and frustrating experience. With Auto Fix, PowerPoint will do the hard work for you. The feature automatically adjust spacing, sizes, connectors, and alignments. Microsoft says there are some limitations, such as a lack of support for SmartArt, group shapes, and any slide elements that overlap....