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 Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users

As more and more businesses turn to remote working in the face of the global pandemic, Microsoft Teams was able to cross the 75 million daily active users milestone this month.

Build 2020 will reportedly be free to attend online (updated: free registration now open)

Microsoft’s annual Build conference is going online this year. What’s more, it will be free to attend, with registrations now open.

Microsoft is making its Build developers conference free for any devs to attend online this year. Expect more details and registration this afternoon (PT). There will be a bigger dev focus this year, and the "keynotes" will be shorter. News will be a little lighter as a result.

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) April 30, 2020

New details about Surface Earbuds and new Surface headphones leak

Information on Microsoft’s upcoming audio devices, Surface Earbuds and Surface headphones, has leaked. A manual for the Surface Earbuds is reportedly listed on an FCC listing, and gives information on touch gestures, whilst a separate report shows that the Surface headphones could support Bluetooth 5.0, have 20 hours of battery life, and more.

Microsoft rebrands Visual Studio Online as “Codespaces”

This month has seen the announcement that Visual Studio Online will be rebranded to become Visual Studio Codespaces. Amongst the news, Microsoft is also lowering the pricing for Codespaces Azure Compute.

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

Microsoft has published its monthly roundup of all the new features and changes to Microsoft 365, including the official rebranding of Office 365 for consumers that happened on April 21. Many of this month’s updates focus on helping companies and users stay connected, productive, and secure as many users transition to working remotely full-time.

Microsoft Edge improvements

Microsoft Edge received multiple updates this month including InPrivate Search with InPrivate browsing, which will not record Bing searches when a user is browsing in an InPrivate window. When using InPrivate mode, Bing also won’t allow you to sign into your Microsoft account so that your searches won’t be saved to Bing or the Microsoft browsing history.

Microsoft also announced several upcoming Edge features like smart copy that lets users select content and it into a document or e-mail with the same formatting, and new vertical tabs to make it easier for users to organize their existing open tabs. Microsoft Edge will also add some notable security improvements with a new Password Monitor, which will let users know when their passwords may have been compromised and appears to be similar to Firefox’s Monitor service.

Excel adds natural language queries, Outlook gets calendar improvements

For Excel users, the new natural language queries are now generally available on the ribbon inside the Ideas pane. Once added, the new natural language query option lets any user search for data using natural language by simply opening the “ideas” pane in Excel and entering a question in the query box.

New natural language queries in Excel

Outlook will also receive a new feature in the calendar settings that lets the user end meetings early to help avoid creating upcoming scheduling conflicts. The goal of the new calendar feature is to try to give users 5, 10, or even 15 minutes back from every meeting.

Yammer for Teams and mobile app update

In terms of what’s new this month, Microsoft has placed a lot of emphasis on the new Yammer Communities app now available for Microsoft Teams. In addition to their new integration with Teams, Microsoft also released a redesigned Yammer mobile app that brings a new experience for live events, comments, and improved upload times.

Visio adds new features

For Visio users, the web app received multiple improvements and capabilities. Users can now replace a specific shape in a diagram with a different one while allowing the user to retain the connectors, formatting, and everything else the original shape had. There is also a new feature to add images to diagrams across documents, as well as a pinch-to-zoom gesture to make it easier to focus on a specific part of a diagram.

Microsoft 365 Premium

Microsoft 365 Business Premium now includes a full Azure AD Premium P1 license that gives businesses greater flexibility when it comes to letting employees access work apps securely. “With this addition, customers will now get features like Cloud App Discovery, application proxy, dynamic groups, and more, which help employees maintain secure access to work apps from home,” the company explained.

As more companies embrace employees working remotely, Microsoft added a new feature to the Microsoft 365 usage reports that will let let businesses see more into employee activity including calendar and app activity. There’s also a new card in the usage report homepage that specifically looks at how remote work tools are being used during this time, such as whether e-mail or Teams usage has increased or decreased.

With Microsoft announcing this week that Microsoft Teams now has 75 million daily active users, Microsoft is committed to improving the applications and services for remote workers, and this month’s updates add new user experiences, integrations, and security improvements to make working remotely just a little easier.

Geoff Keighley a former video games journalist known for creating The Game Awards ceremony announced a new 4-month digital event named Summer Game Fest today. With E3 being cancelled this year, the Summer Game Fest aims to bring video games fans “a season of breaking news, in-game events, and free playable content.”

Keighly will serve as a curator for the event, which will act as a hub for major game announcements planned for this spring and summer. The organizer has managed to get the biggest game publishers and board including Microsoft, Sony, Bethesda, Activision, EA, Square Enix, and more. Interestingly, Xbox is one of the partners that will give fans access to some playable demos during the event, though details are still unclear at this time.

A number of principles guide @summergamefest — Digital events, in-game events, and playable content. You already know about @Steam Game Festival, and today we're also announcing that @xbox is planning a playable Game Festival too this summer. More to come!

— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) May 1, 2020

The cancellation of E3 2020 in June has certainly left a big void to fill this year. IGN, one of the biggest video games website moved first by announcing its own Summer of Gaming event in June, and it will be interesting to see if IGN’s initiative could be overshadowed by Keighley’s four-months long Summer Game Fest.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced its plans to sunset Wunderlist, the task manager app it acquired in 2015 that has now been replaced by Microsoft To-Do. Wunderlist will finally shut down on May 6, and the Redmond giant has started sending emails to Wunderlist users to remind them to import their tasks into Microsoft To-Do as soon as possible.

If you have yet to make the transition to Microsoft To-Do, here’s a step by step guide to help you import your Wunderlist tasks into the app:

1. Download the Microsoft To Do app on Windows 10 or macOS
2. Sign in with your Microsoft account, or create one if you don’t already have one
3. Go into Settings, and click on the Wunderlist button to import your tasks

Microsoft To Do now offers plenty of power-user features including list sharing, subtasks, folders, reminders and due dates, file attachments, as well as a dark mode. Since Microsoft has recently added Microsoft To Do to the Microsoft Mobile Apps and Experiences org, you should expect this app to get even more attention in the future.

Even though Wunderlist will stop syncing tasks starting May 6, users will still be able to migrate tasks and lists into Microsoft To Do until June 30. Do you think Microsoft To Do has already surpassed Wunderlist, or will you miss using the latter? Let us know in the comments below.

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Microsoft To Do: Lists, Tasks & Reminders

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‎Microsoft To Do

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In response to more schools and universities banning all in-person and drive-through graduation ceremonies amid the COVID-19 outbreak, Microsoft has announced a free limited-time virtual graduation plan for schools, allowing students to celebrate their graduation on Microsoft Teams during the lockdown. The company announced the limited-time offer for the holders of a Microsoft Office 365 A1 faculty license on its Educational blog yesterday, adding that the offer would be only valid until July 1.

“Users with the Microsoft Office 365 A1 faculty license, which is free for educational institutions, will have the ability to host and broadcast Teams live events for a limited time. That means users with A1 faculty licenses can host a virtual graduation, alumni summit, or any live event for up to 20,000 attendees, at no extra cost,” the company explained.

To cope with the increasing need to communicate virtually, the software giant has also extended the maximum length of live events to 16 hours, along with the ability to hold 50 concurrent live events through May 2020. Furthermore, Microsoft understands that graduations and celebrations come in various forms. The company suggested a couple of ways you can celebrate your accomplishments:

• Celebrate with photos and videos: Use FlipGrid, PowerPoint or Microsoft Sway for a simple online celebration.
• Create a pre-recorded digital graduation: A pre-recorded event may be ideal if you are not considering a live event or if you’ll have attendees in multiple time zones.
• Host a digital graduation with Microsoft Teams live events: If a live event is preferred, consider incorporating both live and pre-recorded content including speeches by faculty and students, graduate slideshows, and even musical or other artistic performances.

With this virtual graduation opportunity, Microsoft has once again proved that it has students in mind during these unprecedented times. Even though a virtual event may not be as exciting as a physical gathering, it’s hopefully a good enough initiative for the thousands of students expected to graduate this year.

In a new blog post, Microsoft is opening up about how its Teams service made the three-day-long 2020 NFL Draft possible. The company explained the major hurdles faced by the league due to the Coronavirus, and how Microsoft was in a unique position to help ensure teams could still pick from their pool of upcoming stars for the new NFL season.

According to the blog post, using Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft products to ensure the NFL draft could go on in virtual form was “the ideal solution.” The company highlighted its seven-year partnership with the league, which has helped NFL teams “transform their technology both on-field and off.”

More importantly, though, the post explains the technical aspects of how Teams was used during the April 23-25 event. There were apparently 32 separate private Teams channels within the NFL organization for each NFL team, where guests could join. Each club was then able to communicate from within their own organization and also with the NFL in this private channel, without seeing the other clubs’ activities. In Microsoft’s words:

“Each club would be given access to a form, where they could fill in the draftee’s name, college and other information. If the team “on the clock” submitted incorrect information, the club’s private channel would be notified of the error; if everything was in order, the NFL would authenticate the pick, then a Microsoft tool called Power Automate would automatically post it on the private “Head Table” channel and simultaneously relay it to Commissioner Goodell’s Surface tablet so the pick could be transferred to the paper card and announced on-air.

To ensure Teams was able to handle all this traffic, Microsoft spent a few weeks with a team of people from the NFL to do a dry run and a mock draft of 100 people. “Teams is a very flexible collaborative tool, It was a coming together of Microsoft Teams as the shell, private channels for security, Forms for a simple way to submit the picks, and Power Automate to make sure all this routing is enforced,” said Jeff Teper, Microsoft Teams corporate vice president.

Microsoft’s post also explains how some NFL teams like the Jaguars and the Kansas City Chiefs easily became familiar with Teams. The app was apparently used behind the scenes by these teams before the draft, too, with features like screen sharing, meeting recordings, and more coming handy.

The 2020 virtual NFL Draft was watched by over 15.6 million people. It was an all-time high, up 37% from 2019, passing the NFL’s previous high of 12.4 million viewers in 2014.

Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members can enjoy another Free Play Days event this weekend. The open-world RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the action-adventure game Yakuza 0 and the retro platformer Sonic Mania are all free-to-play through Sunday, May 3 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.

All three games are also discounted during the event, and all your progress will be saved if you decide to purchase them. However, it’s worth noting that both Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Yakuza 0 are currently free to play with Xbox Game Pass.

Microsoft’s Xbox Free Play Days event have been pretty regular in the past couple of weeks, and the company seems well aware that more people have been playing games at home since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier this week, the company announced that the number of active Xbox Live active users had grown to nearly 90 million during the past quarter.

The Microsoft Store listing is now live for the Xbox One version of the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla video game just a day after its full official reveal.

While this latest entry in the Assassin’s Creed franchise isn’t available to pre-order digitally just yet, this listing does re-confirm that it will support HDR10 and 4K Ultra HD when played on an Xbox One X console and there is an official game description which offers some further details.

In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, become Eivor, a legendary Viking raider on a quest for glory. Explore England’s Dark Ages as you raid your enemies, grow your settlement, and build your political power.

• Lead epic Viking raids against Saxon troops and fortresses.
• Dual-wield powerful weapons and relive the visceral fighting style of the Vikings.
• Challenge yourself with the most varied collection of enemies ever in Assassin’s Creed.
• Shape the growth of your character with each choice and carve a path to glory.
• Explore a Dark Age open world, from the shores of Norway to the kingdoms of England.
• Personalize your experience by growing your clan’s settlement.

The listing, as expected, doesn’t show a release date but the game has been confirmed for a 2020 holiday release on both the Xbox One and next gen Xbox Series X.

Are you excited for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or are you unimpressed with what you’ve seen so far? Share your thoughts with the community in the comments below and then follow us on Pinterest and Facebook for more Xbox gaming news.

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Following Microsoft’s  latest FY20 Q3 earnings report yesterday, among the questions asked by investors interested future outcomes for the company was one that addressed the 300 million pound elephant in the room that’s manifested itself as a competitor productivity communications service, Zoom and how Microsoft plans to combat its goliath like mindshare.

While the question was expertly fielded by the combo of CEO Satya Nadella and CIO Amy Hood who tag-teamed an answer about commitment to Teams and its relative explosive growth of 70% year over year, the mindshare reference to Zoom’s market presence does highlight yet another misconception perpetrated by Zoom’s less than scrupulous tactics.

Shortly before Microsoft got on the mic today to announce that its latest productivity communications platform Teams racked up 75 million daily active users, would-be competitor Zoom held a victory lap for roughly a month with a rather impressive 300 million daily active user count.

While Microsoft’s 70 percent spike month over a month may seem modest in the shadow of Zoom’s 300 million claims, it seems Zoom may have mistakenly misrepresented their initial user accolades. Senior editor at The Verge Tom Warren shines some light on a quiet edit made to the Zoom blog just a few days ago, deleting the “more than 300 million daily users” claim and updated the reference to read “300 million daily Zoom meeting participants.” While it’s a subtle semantic correction, the distinction is quite vast.

Zoom has been lying about its daily active users. The company said it had "more than 300 million daily users," earlier this month, and it has quietly deleted the references. It's 300 million meeting participants, and Microsoft is now at 200 million https://t.co/PTcZT5pgLr

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) April 29, 2020

Daily users and daily meetings are counted differently and most communication services draw a line between the two as they often represent the number of individuals participating in usage of the service versus the number of times the platform is pinged by an individual. 300 million meetings a day isn’t anything to scoff at but it is a bit different than confirming 75 million distinct users a day.

As of now, Zoom is keeping its daily user numbers close to the vest as it presumably attempts to leverage every new opportunity its COVID-19 related mind share has brought it. In the same vein, Microsoft is pushing Teams as the face of its productivity communications tool and leveraging its relative growth, and a 70 percent spike over the past three months is a good indicator that its gambit is paying dividends for investors.

Microsoft is continuing to refresh, refine, and update its products at a rapid pace. Today, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio Online would now be known as Visual Studio Codespaces, and the company will also be dropping the price of the service by up to 50% along with new options to run Codespaces inside lower-performing virtual machines.

The new rebranding is set to begin in the next few weeks and will include a new tagline saying that “Codespaces are simply the most productive place to code.” According to Microsoft’s blog, many developers and users of Visual Studio Online indicated that the service was much more than simply an editor in the browser, and the changes announced today were a direct result of that feedback. “One of the most consistent things we’ve heard is that the ability to create cloud-hosted dev environments is having a positive impact in more ways than we had thought,” the company said today

Lower Pricing

Starting on May 19th, Microsoft will lower the price of Codespaces Azure Compute resources with new pricing tiers that provide more resource flexibility to run smaller Codespaces:

• Basic (2 cores, 4 GB of RAM) instance type for those who want to try remote development for the first time. Basic instances will be reduced from $.24 per hour to $.08 per hour.
• Standard (4 cores, 8 GB of RAM) Linux instance type will be reduced from $.45 per hour to $.17 per hour.
• Premium (8 cores, 16 GB of RAM) will go from $.87 to $.34.  Codespaces may also incur a storage charge of $.0088 per hour for the 64 GB SSD storage, which can be billed down to the second.

Remote Development

Over the past month, Microsoft has been working to make remote development even better for its users. In addition to today’s news that gives users more flexibility in picking their sizes, Microsoft has also made significant improvements related to their self-hosted environment capabilities. Anyone can now register any machine to Visual Studio Codespaces and either connect to it using Visual Studio Code or Microsoft’s browser-based editor.

Another new remote feature Microsoft recently added was a new “bring-you-own” Dockerfiles or images to Codespace. A user can configure Codespace to point to an image from a registry like Docker Hub or placing a custom Dockerfile in a local repo.

Anyone can begin using Visual Studio Online today, and we expect that there will be more news in May during Microsoft’s virtual Build conference in May.

Following the official announcement yesterday, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla got its first cinematic trailer today, which includes an Xbox logo right at the beginning of the video. Ubisoft may well have a marketing deal with Xbox for this game, which will likely be showcased during the May 7 Inside Xbox episode that will focus on next-gen games reveals. A reply from the official Ubisoft Twitter account to today’s Inside Xbox announcement suggests that it will be the case.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will apparently expand the RPG mechanics introduced in Assassin’s Creed Origins and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, with the ability to choose a man or woman character, get some romance possibilities, and forge political alliances. It’s been confirmed today that the game will be released on Xbox One and Xbox Series X in Holiday 2020, but Reddit user jnborwn925 also saw today on the game’s Best Buy listing today that it will support Smart Delivery.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla confirmed to use Smart Delivery for Xbox One and Series X via Best Buy from xboxone

With Smart Delivery, Microsoft is allowing developers of cross-gen games like Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla to deliver the right version of that game on whatever Xbox console you’re playing on. In other words, you’ll only need to buy the game once and your console, whether it’s an Xbox One or an Xbox Series X, will download the version of the game that’s optimized for your hardware.

Back in February, CD Projekt also confirmed that its upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 game will also support Smart Delivery. “Gamers should never be forced to purchase the same game twice or pay for upgrades,” the company said at the time.

It’s nice to see that Ubisoft and CD Projekt Red are on the same page, though Ubisoft is a much bigger developer and it’s not clear yet if all upcoming Ubisoft games will support Smart Delivery. It also remains to be seen if other big publishers such as EA, Activision, or Rockstar Games will also support Microsoft’s gamer-friendly initiative.

The month of April is coming to a close, which means it is now time to take a look back at everything that was new in Teams for the fourth month of the year. From background blur, features for video chats, new IT admin options, and more, here’s a look at everything that was added to Teams recently.

As always, we will be starting with the stuff you care about most: meetings and calling. On this front, Microsoft added a lot of features that helps Teams better compete with Zoom. These include an increase in the number of simultaneous videos in Teams, a Raise Hands features background effects, and more.

First off, Microsoft increased the number of simultaneous videos in Teams meetings. It went up from 4 to 9, allowing users to get a better view of who is in the meeting stage. In addition, Microsoft also announced a new raise hands feature, which allows meeting attendees to identify that they’d like to speak. This feature will be rolling out early next week.

Moving on, Teams also picked up a background effects feature, which lets you customize your video backgrounds with pre-selected images. As a result, it also became possible to “unofficially” set your own custom background, too. As for the mobile apps, Teams on iOS finally picked up the option to blur backgrounds, and live captions during meetings became available for iOS and Android versions of the Teams app.

The rest of the new features for calling in Teams includes a new ability to end the meeting for all participants. This ties in with a new option that lets meeting attendees share system audio in Team events, and record 1:1 chats. Microsoft also temporarily raised default limits until July 1, 2020 for live events hosted in Teams, Stream, and Yammer. This is designed to support organizations impacted by the Coronavirus.

Looking at just the new chat features, Microsoft finally introduced a long-promised new Yammer app for Microsoft Teams. This new app allows users to enjoy the Yammer experience right inside Teams, and stay connected with what’s happening across their organization. Finally, there are some new badges for the praise feature in Teams. Courage, Oprimisigm, and Inclusive, these badges are themed for those who really are making a difference in these challenging times.

Although the bulk of the features this month were for end-users, IT Admins also got some new stuff to play with. For one, a new Meetings dashboard in the Microsoft Teams admin center was introduced. This dashboard provides insights about usage, user feedback, health, meeting details, devices, and more from one central hub. Microsoft says this feature will be coming soon.

Other features wrapping up the month include the ability to Improve voice quality with local media optimization for direct routing, and more ways for admins to control profile picture settings on Teams. Smaller features include batch policy assignment and some more ways to control meetings, such as lobby settings. There also was the introduction of new analytics and reports experience for the admin center. Microsoft says this will provide administrators insights into the usage of Teams apps in their environment allowing them to manage risk and make informed decisions.

Xbox fans, it’s time to mark your calendars: Microsoft has just announced that it will finally showcase Xbox Series X games on the next Inside Xbox livestream scheduled on Thursday, May 7 at 8AM PT. The brief announcement teased a “first Look next-gen gameplay from our global developers partners, and it will be interesting to see if some new third-party games will be revealed during the show.

You want to see games for the Xbox Series X? We want to show you games for the Xbox Series X.

Check out First Look next-gen gameplay from our global developers partners within #InsideXbox on Thursday, May 7 at 8am PT. pic.twitter.com/xVdgIeRBJX

— Xbox (@Xbox) April 30, 2020

So far, we’ve heard about a couple of upcoming cross-gen titles that will be ship on both Xbox One and Xbox Series X, and the list includes the first-party game Halo: Infinite, CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. These three games will also support Smart Delivery, meaning that you’ll only need to buy them once and your Xbox One or Xbox Series X console will download the version of the game optimized for your console.

With 12 teraflops of computing power, support for 120 FPS, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and other technologies like variable rate shading, the Xbox Series X is expected to deliver a true generational leap. However, it’s really up to game developers to make good use of this new powerful hardware, and we’ll soon have a better idea of what to expect of next-gen Xbox games.

It’s worth noting that Sony has yet to announce a similar event for PlayStation 5 games, so Microsoft is once again the company that’s moving faster. The Redmond giant was the first to announce its new console during the Game Awards Ceremony in December, and it was also first to reveal the full specs of the Xbox Series X in March. Let’s hope that the games we’ll see next week will not disappoint.

It’s been a couple of weeks since Microsoft released a minor update for PowerToys with some bug fixes for Windows 10 users, but a new version is finally available. The latest update packs a highly anticipated automatic update option, as well as important updates to FancyZone.

Why hello #powerToys 0.17 into the world. Some great improvements. https://t.co/N37lS8e6Mw

— Clint Rutkas (@ClintRutkas) April 29, 2020

Here is the full changelog for PowerToys version 0.17:

• PowerToys can now update itself #1686
• FancyZone can now snap to two zones (still experimental since it doesn’t support restoring the app to two zones)
• Per machine installation fixed, non-admin user will be able again to use PowerToys after the regression in 0.16.
• Fixed most of the FancyZones Virtual Desktop bugs.
• Fixed several FZ bugs including proper handling of taskbar position.
• PowerToys icon in the Start menu will always show ????

To see the latest features of PowerToys, you need to head over to the GitHub releases page to download the latest version. For anyone interested to play around with PowerToys, don’t forget to check out our hands-on with the version 0.16.

If 2017’s Sonic Mania was a love letter to fans of old-school Sonic games, another cult-classic franchise from the Sega Megadrive era is coming back to life today with Streets of Rage 4. The new side-scrolling beat ’em up game is out on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Windows today, and Xbox Game Pass subscribers can play it for free on launch day.

If an official announcement is likely imminent, a Microsoft France employee in charge of communications for Xbox teased the game’s arrival on Xbox Game Pass yesterday, and we can confirm that the game is already available to download from the Microsoft  Store. The game supports Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Live Cloud saves, so you can play it on both Xbox One and PC

There aren’t many games like Streets of Rage these days, and most reviews have been highlighting the addictive gameplay, extensive roster of characters, and excellent soundtrack. Streets of Rage 4 supports 4-players local multiplayer, as well as two-players online co-op.

The addition of Street of Rage 4 is definitely a nice surprise for Xbox Game Pass subscribers ahead of the arrival of Red Dead Redemption 2 in the catalog on May 7. If you have yet to subscribe to Xbox Game Pass, we remind you that you can get one month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for just $1.

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Streets of Rage 4

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$24.99

While Microsoft remains committed to delivering the best video conferencing experience during these unprecedented times, this week the software giant has expanded its Teams devices ecosystem with a series of new Microsoft Teams certified devices. The latest additions include speakerphone, headsets, cameras, phones, and Teams rooms accessories that work seamlessly with Microsoft Teams.

One of the key highlights of this range is the Lenovo ThinkSmart View Teams phone, which is much more than a “phone” with its built-in screen. The ThinkSmart View features a high-quality speaker and microphone, along with a wide 8″ HD display. Apparently, this device has the capability to transform your personal or common area space into a conference room to streamline the calling and meeting experience. Microsoft’s blog post highlights its capabilities as follows:

ThinkSmart View reduces downtime in meetings with one-touch join, supports face to face interaction in portrait or landscape layout, and assures conversation privacy with a camera shutter and a microphone mute switch.

Microsoft launched its device Certification Program earlier this year, with the intent to offer a high-quality experience with third party devices when used with Microsoft teams. All these devices have been designed to ensure that they are easy to set up and use to meet your growing video conferencing needs.

If you are interested to learn more, we invite you to check out Microsoft’s support website for details about these Teams certified devices.

During Microsoft’s FY2020 Q3 earning calls yesterday, CEO Satya Nadella announced that Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft’s gaming subscription service had crossed more than 10 million subscribers. Even though the software giant previously mentioned that it had “millions” of Xbox Game Pass subscribers, yesterday was actually the first time that the company shared some actual numbers.

Xbox Game Pass for Console launched almost three years ago in June 2017, and what has often been described as a “Netflix for video games” is having real momentum. In a blog post on Xbox Wire today, Xbox head Phil Spencer shared some interesting facts about how Xbox Game Pass subscribers have been engaging with games and other gamers on Xbox Live since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic

“We’re still early on this journey, and in the last two months we’ve seen how important gaming can be to our community. Since March, Xbox Game Pass members have added over 23 million friends on Xbox Live, which is a 70% growth in friendship rate. Game Pass members are also playing twice as much and engaging in more multiplayer gaming, which has increased by 130%,” Spencer said.

If Microsoft already said that Xbox Game Pass members play more games than the rest of Xbox One owners, the Netflix comparison could become finally true once the subscription service integrates with Project xCloud, Microsoft’s cloud gaming platform currently in public preview. After an integration of Xbox Game Pass with Project xCloud was first teased at X019 back in November, Phil Spencer reiterated today that “Later this year our cloud game streaming technology, Project xCloud, will come to Game Pass—so you and your friends can stream and play the games you love together on your devices.”

It’s still not exactly clear if all Xbox Game Pass games will be playable on mobile devices and Windows 10 PCs via Project xCloud. Moreover, Microsoft still isn’t saying if this will all be free for Xbox Game Pass members, or if the premium Xbox Game Pass Ultimate tier will be required for Project xCloud.

For now, the Project xCloud public preview just hit three new European countries this week, with eight more to follow next week. The service already works great on Android, but the iOS version is currently restricted to Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Screenshots of the PC version of Project xCloud leaked a couple of weeks ago, but the Xbox team has yet to announce when the game streaming service will be available on Windows 10.

During Microsoft’s FY20 Q3 earnings call earlier today, the company’s CEO, Satya Nadella, revealed that the number of active Xbox Live users has grown to nearly 90 million worldwide.

Microsoft ceased reporting on specific Xbox Live numbers back in 2019, instead opting for reporting on growth percentages which can sometimes be misleading. The reveal of an actual number suggests a growing confidence in the growth of the company’s gaming platform which is a good sign with the Xbox Series X console launching later this year.

For a sense of how much Xbox Live has grown, back in the FY16 Q4 earning report, Microsoft stated that they had reached 55 million active Xbox Live users. That’s 35 million new users in around four years. Not bad for an established service that’s been around since 2002.

Most of the growth appears to have happened over the past year though as in the FY19 Q4 report, the last time numbers were reported, Xbox Live was said to have 65 million active users.

It’s important to state, though, that these Xbox Live numbers don’t necessarily indicate a growth in Xbox One console ownership or usage as the Xbox Live service is also used in some video games such as Minecraft which can be played on Sony’s PlayStation 4, the Nintendo Switch, and on mobile devices. Ori and the Blind Forest, which launched on the Nintendo Switch recently, likely increased Xbox Live numbers a bit as perhaps did the free-to-play Microsoft Solitaire and Gears Pop titles which are now available on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.

Xbox Game Pass numbers were also published in the FY20 Q3 report with the video game subscription service now sporting over 10 million individual subscribers across the Console, PC, and Ultimate variants. This is the first time Xbox Game Pass subscriber numbers have been released which also suggests strong confidence in this relatively new initiative as well.

Specific numbers weren’t released for the Project xCloud game streaming service, which is understandable as it’s still in testing, but there are apparently hundreds of thousands of users already using it.

Overall, Xbox content and services revenue is said to have increased 2% this past quarter.

For details on the rest of Microsoft’s FY20 Q3 earnings and how they were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, check out our coverage here and then follow us on Twitter for more Microsoft and Xbox news.

Microsoft just posted its FY20 Q3 earnings and despite a global pandemic, the company seems to be firing on all cylinders in almost every business sector the tech giant operates in.

According to Microsoft’s official earnings press release, the company generated $35.0 billion in revenue for the quarter, posting a 15% increase year over year for the same period.

Microsoft’s increased revenue haul is reflected in the company’s $10.8 billion net income return that also tops last year’s return for the same three months earnings, by 22%.

While the COVID-19 pandemic only accounts for a small time in for Microsoft’s total quarterly revenue, executive vice president and CIO Amy Hood does credit the extraneous situations brought on by the global virus, throughout its filings in various business sectors.

“In this dynamic environment, our sales teams and partners executed a solid third quarter, with Commercial Cloud revenue-generating $13.3 billion, up 39% year over year. We remain committed to balancing operational discipline with continued investments in key strategic areas to drive future growth.”

Office Commercial Products

Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes was $11.7 billion and increased 15% (up 16% in constant currency), with the following business highlights:

• Office Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 13% (up 15% in constant currency) driven by Office 365 Commercial revenue growth of 25% (up 27% in constant currency)
• Office Consumer products and cloud services revenue increased 15% (up 17% in constant currency) with continued growth in Office 365 Consumer subscribers to 39.6 million
• LinkedIn revenue increased 21% (up 22% in constant currency)
• Dynamics products and cloud services revenue increased 17% (up 20% in constant currency) driven by Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 47% (up 49% in constant currency)

Intelligent Cloud

Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $12.3 billion and increased 27% (up 29% in constant currency), with the following business highlights:

• Server products and cloud services revenue increased 30% (up 32% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 59% (up 61% in constant currency)
• Enterprise Services revenue increased 6% (up 7% in constant currency)

More Personal Computing

Revenue in More Personal Computing was $11.0 billion and increased 3% (up 4% in constant currency), with the following business highlights:

• Windows OEM revenue was relatively unchanged year over year
• Windows Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 17% (up 18% in constant currency)
• Search advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs increased 1%
• Xbox content and services revenue increased by 2%
• Surface revenue increased 1% (up 2% in constant currency)

In summation, Microsoft was able to return roughly $9.9 billion to shareholders highlighting a 33% increase from 2019 despite the early signs of a potential global recession emerging at the tail end of its earnings quarter. The company qualifies COVID-19 related disruptions as having “minimal impact” on its bottom line.

Looking beyond the numbers, Microsoft’s Q3 earnings represent a company running lean with significant cloud gains and minimal expenditures, however, it should be noted that its relatively flat Surface hardware numbers and lowered Windows licensing gains highlight a trend that may eventually begin to drag on the company’s next reported earnings.

Lowered LinkedIn traffic, minimal Windows licenses and, supply chain issues for partnered OEM PC efforts could also be an issue for Microsoft as world economies shift in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Coronavirus outbreak and subsequent lockdowns forced millions of people to work from home and they are currently relying on video conferencing tools such as Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. More specifically, the education sector is using these platforms to host online classes. On the other hand, thousands of businesses and govt organizations now use these collaboration tools to conduct virtual meetings.

With more than 5,000 members in an org-wide team, it can be sometimes difficult to make conference calls with your team, especially when you have to deal with the background noise. There could be someone who would be simply typing meeting notes on their PC, an annoying sibling shouting in the background or a student who keeps asking questions in the middle of a presentation.

It is one of the reasons why the ability to mute everyone in a meeting is now one of the popular requests from Microsoft Teams users. If you’re on the same boat, you are in luck. This week, Microsoft has announced that it will soon be delivering a feature which would allow the meeting organizers to “Mute all participants” during Microsoft Teams meetings. On the Microsoft Teams UserVoice forum, Microsoft detailed that the company has increased the priority for this feature, it is now timed for release within a quarter.

Based on your feedback, we have increased the priority for this feature. The feature team is working on this and are planning to release this quarter. Stay tuned for updates. Thanks.

Over two months in the making now, this is a major change from before, where you could only mute individual meeting participants in Teams meetings. However, Microsoft is yet to update the Microsoft 365 Roadmap to show that it is in development. But it is interesting to see that Microsoft is working pretty hard to rapidly improve Microsoft Teams, as a real-time noise suppression capability is also coming very soon. According to The Verge, the software giant has been reassigning engineers to quickly roll out Microsoft Teams’ features, which were initially planned for later this year.

Do you think that the Mute All feature for Teams would be helpful in remote meetings? Sound off in the comments section below.

Zoom’s popularity pretty much exploded since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, with the video conferencing app reaching 300 million daily users this month. Microsoft Teams is also seeing increased usage since March, with Microsoft recently announcing 44 million daily active users.

Google, which is also competing with Zoom, Microsoft Teams and others in the video conferencing space must certainly be feeling the heat. Indeed, the company announced this morning that Meet, its premium video conferencing app, would become free to use for everyone with a Google account.

“Since January, we’ve seen Meet’s peak daily usage grow by 30x. As of this month, Meet is hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day. And as of last week, Meet’s daily meeting participants surpassed 100 million,“ said Javier Soltero, the former Outlook and Cortana boss who is now the head of Google’s G Suite.

Google Meet is currently available on the web, iOS and Android, and Soltero emphasized that the app respects your privacy. “Your Meet data is not used for advertising, and we don’t sell your data to third parties,” the exec said.

This free version of Google Meet will support up to 100 participants, matching what Zoom currently offers with its free tier. However, Google will beat Zoom’s 40 mins limit on group meetings by imposing no duration limit until September 30th, when meetings will be limited to 60 minutes.

Google will start opening up Meet to all users starting next week, and you can already sign up with your Google account to be notified when the app is available for you. In case you missed it, Facebook also announced its new Messenger Rooms last week which will support real-time video chat with up to 50 people, so it’s clear that the biggest tech companies won’t allow Zoom to keep dominating the videoconferencing space.