Microsoft news recap: LinkedIn expands ‘Premium Platform’, Spend Intelligence firm Suplari acquired, and more

Microsoft news recap is a weekly feature highlighting the top Microsoft news stories of the past week. Sit back, grab some coffee, and enjoy the read!

Microsoft’s FY21 Q4 earnings: Commercial Cloud is a broken record of success for the company, 36% growth YoY

Microsoft’s FY21 Q4 earnings are out, and it has shown yet another quarter of impressive results. Overall, revenue reached $46.2 billion, an increase of 21%. Take a look at the breakdown of the results by business area.

Microsoft acquires Spend Intelligence company Suplari

Suplari, a Seattle-based company that provides AI-automated analytics and insights, has been acquired by Microsoft. The financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed. The acquisition will help bolster Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 offering.

LinkedIn joins companies who ‘trust’ employees to work-from-home

As some companies are beginning to ask employees to return to the office, others are taking an approach of trusting employees to continue working from home, if they wish to do so. Microsoft’s LinkedIn has joined the roster of those trusting employees to work from home, a reversal of its previous strategy to increase the number of people in offices, as infections begin to rise once again.

LinkedIn looks to expand its ‘Premium Platform’ after announcing $10B annual revenue

Microsoft’s latest earnings report showed that LinkedIn drove a 46% year-on-year increase in revenue, rising to $10B. Following this, it is reported that LinkedIn is looking to expand its Premium Platform, specifically its experimental Premium News service, to include more publishers, expected to come aboard in the coming weeks.

@LinkedIn’s revenue surpassed $10 billion for the first time this fiscal year, up 27%. It’s a testament to how mission critical the platform has become to help people connect, learn, grow, and get hired over the course of their careers.

— Frank X. Shaw (@fxshaw) July 27, 2021

This week in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams to get auto-delete meeting recording option in September

In September, Microsoft Teams is set to gain a new feature to help manage meeting recordings. It will be possible to set recordings to be automatically deleted on a given expiration date.

Microsoft Teams hits 250 million monthly active users milestone during pandemic

Through the pandemic, Microsoft Teams has seen strong growth as more people work-from-home and find themselves needing to communicate digitally. In its latest update on the usage of Teams, it has been reported that there are now over 250 million monthly active users.

Microsoft Teams now provides phishing protection against malicious links

To protect users against malicious links, phishing protection is now built-in to Microsoft Teams. Leveraging Defender for Office 365 Safe Links protection, organisations will be able to configure Safe Links policies to keep employees safe.

Microsoft Teams public preview now lets users choose where to open Office files

The ability to set the default behaviour of opening Office files in Teams is now available in the public preview, after previously being announced earlier in the month.

That’s it for this week. We will be back next week with more Microsoft news.