MICROSOFT QUARTERLY HIGHLIGHTS, PRODUCT RELEASES AND ENHANCEMENTS FY22 Q4

Every quarter Microsoft delivers hundreds of products, either as new releases or services or as enhancements to current products and services. These releases are a result of significant research and development investments, made over multiple years, designed to help customers be more productive and secure and to deliver differentiated value across the cloud and the edge.

Following are the major product releases and other highlights for the quarter, organized by product categories, to help illustrate how we are accelerating innovation across our businesses while expanding our market opportunities.

Microsoft 365 Consumer/Commercial

Inspiration library in Microsoft Viva Insights enhances employee experiences and boosts engagement.

Microsoft Editor enhances users' writing experience across social media, email and documents.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams enables users to join meetings in other clouds anonymously using the desktop app.

Together mode creates a virtual shared space for meeting organizers, presenters and other attendees.

In-app purchasing APIs for Microsoft Teams apps allows developers to turn their app into freemium version, where they can choose when to prompt their users to convert them from free to paid plans directly from within their Teams app.

Following is a select list of recently released Microsoft Teams Rooms products, services and enhancements for the quarter.

· Yamaha ADECIA Ceiling Solutiondetects components, configures devices and optimizes audio for any room.

· Yamaha ADECIA Tabletop Solution optimizes audio for medium-sized rooms, supporting remote conferencing experiences.

· Yealink MeetingBoard 65"facilitates digital collaboration with a 65-inch touchscreen display, 4K camera, microphones arrays, speakers, and built-in Teams Rooms on Android.

Advanced Emergency Calling capabilities gives the option to create customizable disclaimer banners within the Calls app.

Dynamic Emergency Calling supports emergency calls and communication with emergency responders.

Following is a select list of recently released Microsoft Teams capabilities on VDI and Cloud PCs products, services and enhancements for the quarter:

· Teams multiwindow supports Azure Virtual Desktop and VMWare, and on Cloud PCs with Windows 365. · Give and Take Control for Microsoft Teams allows presenters to give control of the shared content to another meeting participants. · Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 includes background blur effects. · Teams meeting layouts include Together mode and Large Gallery. · Live captions are available in Teams.

Microsoft Teams Rooms can be displayed horizontally and located below the meeting stage when content is shared or participants are spotlighted.

Microsoft Teams Approvals includes E-sign approvals on mobile and support for DocuSign on Teams chat and channels.

Microsoft Teams chat embedded within Dynamics 365 seamlessly exchanges ideas and collaborates directly and in context, right in the workflow.

Microsoft Forms integrates with Microsoft Bookings app in Teams, supporting virtual appointments.

Windows

Azure AD Join support for Windows 365 Cloud PCs allows IT admins to use their existing Azure infrastructure to assign and provision Cloud PCs to employees.

Following is a select list of recently released Windows 365 products, services and enhancements for the quarter:

· Background effects provide greater personalized meetings.

· Multiwindow support and Call me features provide users with the option to pop out chats, meetings, calls or documents into separate windows to help streamline their workflow.

Endpoint analytics measures user experience and can help identify policies or hardware issues that may be slowing down devices and support. Resource performance and Remoting connection provides insights to Cloud PC performance and makes recommendations to IT admins.

Windows 10 PIN release support in Universal Print sets a PIN for every print job, supporting sustainability goals by preventing the consumption of power, paper and toner.

Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community provides community managers and moderators with the tools to invite customer suggestions and quickly respond to feedback on products and services.

Subscription billing incorporates pricing and billing scenarios necessary to operate successfully at scale.

Microsoft Power Platform

Power BI metrics define, curate and track business metrics and KPIs to help drive better decision-making with scorecards.

Microsoft Industry Cloud

Cloud for Sustainability enables users to amplify progress and transform business through environmental, social and governance (ESG) capabilities. Organizations can track and minimize the environmental footprint of operational systems and enhance accountability across the value chain.

LinkedIn

Launched new tools to help job seekers stand out for their skills on their Profile.

Rolled out a number of new tools in creator mode, including:

· Members with creator mode on and who meet our community guidelines can now host an audio event on LinkedIn.

· Members can add a link to the top of profiles.

· Creators can be more easily discovered across LinkedIn, with improvements specifically within the feed and within search.

Launched additional reactions to provide further personal expression in a professional context.

Launched features in LinkedIn Recruiter around hiring efficiency.

Launched a slate of LMS products and services built with B2B in mind, including B2B Edge, new features for Pages, LinkedIn Business Manager, content and marketing APIs, and an additional certification as part of our Marketing Labs program.

Sales Navigator data validation features improve data quality in CRM and an integration with Gong.

Security, Compliance, Identity & Management

Microsoft Security Experts combines expert-trained technology with human-led services to help organizations achieve more secure, compliant and productive outcomes.

With Microsoft Defender for Business, SMB customers receive enterprise-grade security, including endpoint detection and response capabilities to protect against ransomware and other sophisticated cyberthreats.

Microsoft Entra is a new product family that encompasses all of Microsoft's identity and access capabilities. The Entra family includes Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), as well as two new product categories: Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and decentralized identity.

Microsoft Purview is a comprehensive set of solutions that helps users govern, protect and manage entire data estates.

Microsoft Defender for individuals offers simplified online security that brings multiple protections together into a single dashboard.

Azure

Following is a select list of generally available Azure products, services and enhancements for the quarter. A full list can be found at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/.

Azure Hybrid Infrastructure

Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML) Kubernetes capabilities include:

· Deploy ML workload on customer-managed AKS cluster and gain more security and controls to meet compliance requirements.

· Run Azure ML workload on Arc Kubernetes cluster right where data lives and meet data residency, security and privacy compliance, or harness existing IT investment.

· Use Arc Kubernetes cluster to deploy ML workload or aspect of ML lifecycle across multiple public clouds.

· Use a fully automated hybrid workload in cloud and on-premises to leverage different infrastructure advantages and IT investments.

Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance Business Critical is built for mission-critical workloads requiring the most demanding performance and security and can be used:

· With no limitations on resources - compute, storage and memory

· To deliver a highly available data service resilient to failures

· While using the full feature set of SQL Enterprise edition

Azure Data

Azure Cosmos DB autoscale RU/s entry point is 4x lowerwhile still providing the ability to scale up to handle traffic spikes in traffic.

Azure SQL Migration extension for Azure Data Studioreduces the complexities of database migrations.

Azure Cosmos DB portal - Azure Synapse Link seamless Power BIallows users to build Power BI reports and dashboards with no performance or cost impact to transactional workloads or ETL pipelines.

Azure Synapse Link supports CosmosDB containersto sync data from transactional store to analytical store.

Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server 80 vCore Business Critical leverages the Esv4-series compute series.

Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server Business Critical service tieris equipped with better features and functionality and is best suited for tier 1 production workloads with high-performance transactional or analytical applications.

Ledger in Azure SQL Databasegives users the ability to cryptographically prove that a database has not been tampered with.

Power hybrid and multicloud environments with Azure Arc data solutionsbrings cloud data management to any infrastructure, across customer on-premises datacenters, other third-party clouds and the edge.

Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform fully integrates databases, analytics and governance.

Azure SQL Ledger adds tamper-evident capabilities to Azure SQL Databases and provides a simpler solution for centralized systems.

Business Critical tier of Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance helps customers run mission-critical workloads in hybrid and multicloud environments.

Azure Analytics (Build Data blog)

Azure Data Explorer Inline script deployment with ARM Templatedeploys schema entities without the usage of an external storage account.

Glossary terms in Azure Purview data catalog searchprovides definitions, synonyms and acronyms to different terms used throughout an organization.

Azure Databricks Delta Live Tablesis a framework for building reliable, maintainable and testable data processing pipelines.

Database templates in Azure Synapse Analyticsare industry-specific schema definitions that help organizations break down application-specific data silos by providing a standardized way to store and shape data.

Microsoft Purview Data Estate Insightsprovides a bird's eye view of data estate's health and governance program's adoption.

Stream Analytics query development improvementsinclude a get started experience, improved edit experience and output schema mismatch detection.

Increased size of Stream Analytics jobs and cluster provides more scale to keep up with large volumes of streaming data.

Azure Databricks is a data analytics platform optimized for the Microsoft Azure cloud services platform and offers three environments for developing data intensive applications: Databricks SQL, Databricks Data Science & Engineering, and Databricks Machine Learning.

Updated Azure Data Factory Monitoring Experienceincluding the ability to export data to a CSV file and ability to clear all filters to return to the default filter state.

Azure Serverless and App Dev Services

Java 17 and Tomcat 10.0 on Azure App Service collaborates and contributes to the Java ecosystem.

App Service enables users to access resources in or through a virtual network, without granting inbound private access to their apps.

App Service landing zone acceleratoris a combination of documentation and automation to help users deploy a reference enterprise scale deployment of Azure App Service on App Service Environment v3.

App Service enhancements for WordPress on App Service for Linuxprovide better response times and improved security, delivered by capabilities including support for Azure Blob storage to enhance page read/write times, improved caching and image compression, and virtual network integration to help manage content in a secure configuration.

Durable Functions for Node.jsreduces orchestration time.

Azure Container Apps is a managed serverless container service that offers an ideal platform for application developers who want to run microservices in containers without managing infrastructure.

Open Service Mesh extension for Azure Arccan be configured with Service Mesh Interface APIs and works by injecting envoy proxy as a sidecar to each application instance, and brings a new Azure Portal experience for onboarding.

Custom node configuration on AKSallows users to configure or tune operating system settings or the kubelet parameters to match the needs of the workloads.

AKS cluster extensionsbuild on top of the packaging components of Helm by providing an Azure Resource Manager-driven experience for installation and lifecycle management of different Azure service capabilities on the Kubernetes cluster.

Developer Tools, Services and GitHub

GitHub Co-pilot provides developers with a new tool to write code easier and faster.

Azure AI (Build AI blog)

OCR supports 164 languages in the Cognitive Services Computer Vision.

Azure Machine Learning managed endpoints and Command Line Interface v2 manages infrastructure by specifying the VM instance type and scale settings.

Azure Cognitive Service for Languageallows users to build custom entity and create custom classification models within defined classes.

Conversational language understandingincludes multilingual transformer-based models as the underlying model architecture and results in significant accuracy improvements over LUIS.

Azure Machine Learning announcements for June 2022brings to life a more mature integration, including support for a broader set of APIs, no code deployment for MLflow models in real-time/batch-managed inference, curated environments with MLflow and integrations with our CLI v2.

Azure Machine Learning managed endpoints handle serving, scaling, securing and monitoring of your machine learning (ML) models, freeing you from the overhead of setting up and managing the underlying infrastructure.

Azure IoT

Industrial IoT Connectivity Partners integrate with Azure IoT Centraland feature enhanced security with support for Private Link, simplified connectivity for industrial connectivity partners for greenfield and brownfield scenarios, and simplified manageability. It also includes features to simplify data reporting and analytics such as ability to catalog dashboards, apply a filter to limit exporting device data under an organization, and capability to duplicate an existing dashboard tile in a new or existing dashboard and modify as needed.

Edge Secured-Core for Windows IoT extends the Secured-Core label into IoT and Edge devices, which helps users easily identify devices that help keep infrastructure secure and safe.

Windows IoT on Arm64brings the full Windows application compatibility to IoT to deliver low-power and low-cost benefits of Arm64 through a multiyear collaboration between Microsoft and NXP, an Industrial IoT provider. Customers can get started by downloading the i.MX 8M Public Preview BSP and user guide. Additional partners announcing support for Windows IoT on Arm64 with their devices include Reycom and Avnet.

Azure Datacenter

Microsoft Switzerland launches Azure Availability Zones in the Switzerland North datacenter region.

Virtual Datacenter Tourexperience and 3D map includes Operations Room experience, focusing primarily on the reliability of our datacenter operations, as well as the people who run our datacenters.

Surface

Surface Laptop Go 2 features a 12.4" vibrant touchscreen, improved HD camera, secure Windows Hello sign-in and a performance boost.

Gaming

Minecraft released The Wild Update and new paid content over the course of Q4, including the Sonic the Hedgehog DLC, Angry Birds DLC and Ice Age DLC.

Age of Empires IV released the Season One update free for all players.

PC Game Pass launched in five new Southeastern Asian countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition released Dynasties of India DLC, the third expansion that adds three new playable civilizations, and Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition released the Knights of the Mediterranean DLC.

Halo Infinite launched Season 2: Lone Wolves, a free-to-play multiplayer, on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Windows 10/11 and Steam. This content update included new maps, modes, themed limited-time events, and an all-new premium Battle Pass that never expires.

Epic Games and Xbox announced their partnership that made Fortnite available on supported browser-enabled devices for free with Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) in 26 countries.

Microsoft Flight Simulator released World Update IX: Italy and Malta.

Microsoft Flight Simulator released the Top Gun: Maverick expansion for players on Xbox Series X|S and PC with Xbox Game Pass, PC Game Pass, Windows and Steam, and on Xbox One and supported mobile phones, tablets and lower-spec PCs via Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Xbox launched a new 2022 Pride collection and partnered with Xbox Game Studios on Xbox Gear Shop. In addition, Xbox launched a Pride top case design via Xbox Design Lab that brings together 34 LGBTQIA+ community flags in an interwoven fashion and can be further customized.

Microsoft Flight Simulator launched World Update X: United States and U.S. territories.

Xbox launched the Xbox App on Samsung 2022 Smart TVs, enabling people in 27 countries to play hundreds of cloud-enabled Xbox Game Pass games.

Microsoft Search, Advertising and News

Microsoft Advertising

Following is a select list of recently released Microsoft Advertising announcements, services and enhancements for the quarter:

· Microsoft Advertising expanded its global footprint to more than 100 new markets, including the launch of Microsoft Advertising in Japan.

· Workday Consumer research with Forrester shows how consumer behaviors are changing as life becomes more hybrid.

· Launched Microsoft Audience Insights, a measurement attribution study partnership with Roku.

· At Elevate, Microsoft announced 10 new vertical ad formats and announced cash back promotions to incentivize shoppers to complete transactions.

· Announced policy changes enabling select cryptocurrency exchanges.

· Announced that PromoteIQ is adopting Microsoft AI to drive innovation in retail media.

Microsoft Edge

Following is a select list of recently released Microsoft Edge announcements, services and enhancements for the quarter:

· Microsoft Edge announced exclusive gaming features rolling out for users to discover, learn, watch and play games directly from the browser on desktop devices.

· Upgrades to Collections in Microsoft Edge support greater organization and inspiration.

· Profile enhancements help keep work and personal separate.

· Microsoft Edge users can view PDF files in read-only preview in Microsoft Outlook and File Explorer, while organizations can enable digital signature validation for PDF files.

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Microsoft Corporation published this content on 26 July 2022 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 26 July 2022 20:19:49 UTC.