Microsoft, along with seven other organizations that are part of the consortium to convert a portion of the Bletchley Park into an Institute of Technology, have been awarded government funding for the project. The companies will refurbish Block D of the building, which was formerly the home of the Britain codebreakers in World War II, thanks to the £28 million grant.

According to Microsoft’s blog post, approximately 1,000 young adult students are expected to attend the new Institute each year to gain technical qualifications and training in areas such as cybersecurity. The company also estimates that there will be more than 500,000 positions for highly skilled workers to fill digital roles by the year 2022, which is about three times the number of students that graduate computer science in the UK over the last 10 years.

According to the General Manager of the Customer Success Unit at Microsoft UK, Derrick McCourt:

“In a world being transformed by technology, many of the jobs and opportunities of tomorrow will require skills and expertise rooted in technical aptitude. This new Institute of Technology at Bletchley Park will offer a much-needed pathway for young people to develop digital skills and practical expertise so vital to building a fulfilling career as well as addressing the digital skills gap across the UK.”

Various other consortiums of universities, colleges, and companies have also been invited by the UK government to bid £170 million of funding to build a network of twelve technology institutes. The Prime Minister Terresa May announced the funding plan, saying that:

“I firmly believe that education is key to opening up opportunity for everyone – but to give our young people the skills they need to succeed, we need an education and training system which is more flexible and diverse than it is currently.

“New technologies are transforming the world of work, and to harness the opportunities on offer we must equip our future workforce with the technical skills they need to thrive, and that the economy needs to grow.

“These new Institutes will help end outdated perceptions that going to university is the only desirable route and build a system which harnesses the talents of our young people.”

The group that Microsoft is in will also be led by the Milton Keynes College, and includes other members such as McAfee, KPMG, Evidence Talks, VWFS, Activate Learning, and the Cranfield University, and will be supported by the Bletchley Park Trust.

Microsoft has released an update to the Xbox beta app for Android devices. The company has been working on improving the user experience of messaging, and now users are able to see those enhancements live in the beta app.

Additionally, the update also moves to Google’s new push notification platform, so users who wish to continue to receive notifications are encouraged to update “as soon as possible” before the older now deprecated notification system is shut down next month.

Microsoft has been working on improving the often slow messaging system for a good minute now, as the company has recently also released performance improvements in a recent Alpha build of the upcoming 1904 Xbox One update. Additionally, improvements are also expected to make their way to the iOS app sometime soon.

If you’re interested in giving the Xbox beta update a try, you can download it from the Google Play Store. Interestingly, Microsoft has chosen to make this a separate app from the main one, as opposed to allowing users to subscribe to become beta tester as it has chosen to do with Microsoft Launcher and Edge on Android.

Download
QR-Code

Xbox beta

Developer:
Microsoft Corporation

Price:
Free

Microsoft has just announced the next six new games coming to Xbox Game Pass this month. First of all, Arkane Studios’ survival horror game Prey will join the catalog tomorrow, April 11, along with The Golf Club 2. Prey will be the latest Bethesda game to join the Xbox Game Pass line-up after Doom, Fallout 3 and 4, and The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited.

The other big new game coming to Xbox Game Pass this month is Monster Hunter: World, Capcom’s critically-acclaimed action RPG title released back in January 2018. The game will be available on Game Pass on April 18, along with The Walking Dead: A New Frontier. The latter is the third season of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead series of episodic games, and we remind you that the seasons one and two are already available on Xbox Game Pass.

The episode 2 of Life is Strange 2 will also be available on Game Pass on April 24, three months after the first episode was added to the catalog. Square Enix said back in January that all future episodes will be added to Game Pass three months after their official release, which means that the upcoming episode 3 (to be released on May 9) should join the Xbox Game Pass catalog in August.

Lastly, Resident Evil 5 will be available on Xbox Game Pass on April 25. A couple of Resident Evil games have left the catalog in recent months, so it’s nice to see a new episode being added to the game subscription service. That’s six new Xbox Game Pass games in total that Microsoft announced today, but as asual, there may be a few more surprises coming later this month.

Microsoft has announced that it has expanded its UK Azure regions by as much as double their original size thanks to the addition of Availability Zones within the South region. This adds up to a whopping fifteen times the computing power since they were first made available back in 2016.

According to the company’s blog post, the zones will give businesses increased protection, as businesses leasing at least two zones within the same region (either West or South) are guaranteed to have access to at least one 99.99% in case of a failure of another area. As Microsoft UK’s chief executive, Cindy Rose, states,

“The Microsoft cloud has become a core component to the strategies of thousands of UK organizations since the launch of services from our UK cloud regions in 2016. We continue to make significant investments to ensure that our customers are able accelerate their digital transformation journeys and their adoption of cloud services. By doubling our UK regions and increasing our compute capacity by more than 1,500%, our customers can have the confidence they can access any Azure services available in UK regions whenever they want. The launch of Availability Zones takes Azure to a new level in the UK by offering customers increased reliability, business continuity and peace of mind for their data and services.”

In addition to the new Availability Zones, the company has also announced the general availability of Azure DevOps in the South Region. This will allow users residing in the area enhanced access to the company’s suite of software development tools.

Microsoft has long been invested in the UK, and notes its customer base of as many as tens of thousands of businesses invested in their platform from within the country. One of these customer’s is ClearBank, with its COO Nigel Walder noting that: “We welcome Availability Zones in UK South as it will enable us to provide improved resilience and scalability more effectively as ClearBank continues with the launch of new products. Since the inception of ClearBank, Azure has been a core component of our platform and the enhanced zonal resiliency will ensure we can serve our customers even more effectively.”

As Microsoft’s largest developer conference of the year looms over the horizon, the company has finally released a partial schedule for the event.

The current publishing covers a number of sessions that will be offered over the four-day event but leaves out the other conference tangibles such as roundtables, happy hours, breakfast and the like.

Developers attending BUILD 2019 can look forward to choosing between 123 sessions to sit through that include topics ranging from building Hybrid Cloud apps to Code-free data integration at scale. Compared to BUILD 2018, the current listing of sessions is only a partial unveiling as it is roughly 300 sessions short from last year.

Either Microsoft has really cut the cruft from its conference or developers can anticipate more Windows and Microsoft 365 sessions crop up as the conference grows near; with company perhaps, wanting to keep spoiler-like session titles out of the public domain for now.

As it was in 2018, developers should expect to hear a lot more about Azure, Machine Learning, AI and Open source development at this year’s conference, but for the more casual audience, many are looking forward to news about Windows Lite, Chromium powered Edge, PWAs and Windows Core OS. Hopefully, Microsoft will deliver on both fronts at BUILD 2019.

With only one third of the sessions listed, we recommend checking back here for updates and additions as the days go by.

Despite Microsoft Teams being a direct competitor to Slack, the latter has just announced some useful new integrations with Office 365. First of all, the new Outlook Calendar app for Slack will be able to display actionable notifications for calendar invites, or Skype meetings, with direct links to Skype for Business.

The new Outlook Calendar app for Slack is also capable of automatically changing someone’s Slack status using information from Outlook calendar. As an example, a user’s Slack status will automatically change to “in a meeting” when Outlook indicates it.

This new Outlook Calendar app for Slack isn’t the whole story, as there’s also a new Slack for Outlook add-in. Once installed, the add-in will make it possible to forward any emails in Outlook to a Slack channel, or private messages.

Lastly, the existing OneDrive app for Slack has been updated with the ability to quickly import and search files from the cloud storage service. Slack is also now able to display previews of Word, Excel and PowerPoint right within the app. “From responding to calendar invites to sharing files, these updates are the first in a series of steps to integrate the work you create in Office 365 with the collaboration taking place in Slack,” the company said today.

Microsoft has released new statistics that explains the differences of the availability of broadband in the United States per statistics from the FCC versus its actual usage, and has called for the FCC to make changes in collecting the data. According to the company’s blog post, The FCC estimates that there are as many as 24.7 million people without access to Broadband Internet of at least 25 megabits per second. However, according to Microsoft’s own anonymous data, as many as 162.8 million people do not use the Internet at such speeds.

To help fix this ongoing issue, Microsoft recommends that the FCC make various changes in the way that it collects and counts the data. For starters, it suggests that the committee should remove the “could provide” option from the Form 477 submitted to ISPs, and only measure fully covered areas. Right now, the form asks them if ISPs are “providing or could …without an extraordinary commitment of resources provide broadband service to an area.” Since the ISP can check yes to either question, many of the areas that aren’t yet fully covered are counted as having full access to high speed broadband Internet.

The committee should also measure both the availability of as well as the actual usage of high-speed broadband Internet, according to the Redmond giant, and make other changes to improve its data collection of broadband availability before it releases its new report on the issue. For example, the FCC counts data within blocks, and ISP’s can check a whole block as covered even if access is available to only a few households within a large area.

Microsoft has been committed to closing the “broadband gap” for some time now with its Airband Initiative, and has said that it will remain so as it to works with members of the Commerse Committee and with Congress to expand broadband access as quickly as possible. Because as the company says, much of the U.S. economy relies heavily on broadband access, so much so that the issue has major impacts on other problems such as unemployment.

Microsoft finally made its new Chromium-based Edge browser available for Windows 10 users yesterday, and it’s currently possible to choose between two different channels, Dev and Canary. The company said that preview builds for the new browser would be coming soon for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and macOS, but it’s actually already possible to install the new browser on older version of Windows.

As a matter of fact, the leaked Microsoft Edge build that was discovered last month already worked on Windows 7, and it looked pretty good with the Aero interface and built-in support for PWAs.

PWA's on Windows 7! Awesome! pic.twitter.com/evevvzdhCy

— Arif Bacchus (@abacjourn) March 24, 2019

As reported by Bleeping Computer today, the Edge Dev and Canary installers do work on Windows 7, it’s just that the .exe files are hidden when you visit the new Microsoft Edge Insider website with a non-Windows 10 PC. Fortunately, you should be able to find the installers on this download page, even when you visit it on a non-Windows 10 PC.

Bleeping Computer had no issue running the Edge Insider Dev build on a Windows 7 PC, though the report notes that watching videos on Netflix didn’t work, probably because of missing DRMs on the OS. We don’t have a Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 PC around to test the new Edge browser on these versions of Windows, but it would be surprising if it didn’t work.

If you have yet to try Microsoft’s Edge Insider web browser, we remind you that you can install the Dev and Canary versions side by side: The Dev version will get new builds every week, while the Canary version will be updated daily. There’s already a lot to like in these Insider builds, even though Microsoft is still in the process of removing or replacing some features available in the Chromium open source project.

While Microsoft has officially taken the wraps off its Insider and developer-focused Edge browser replacement, the work to a finished consumer product is still miles ahead of the company’s engineers.

However, there are some kudos to give the Edge team as they have gone from announcement in late December to a relatively usable product in roughly five months.

The expediency in the release of Microsoft’s new Chromium-powered browser has come at cost and the Edge team has noted all the missing, removed and perhaps, soon-to-be-replaced features users have come to expect from the industry leading web browsing alternatives.

According to a recently published list, Chromium Edge testers will find that their builds lack the following:

While that is a long list of missing features a traditional Chrome user might come to long for if switching to the new developer and insider builds of Edge, Microsoft does note that it has simply replaced some of these features with their own solutions.

Which ones?

The 27-slide Power Point identifies Identity and Single Sign-On (SSO), PlayerReady DRM, and Services integration as early changes, alongside more subtle additions such as smoother scrolling protocols in BlinkGen Property Tree (BGPT) Memory Reduction in DLL prefetching and Native Caret browsing among others.

There are several other areas of interest and investigation the Edge team is looking into and would love contribute to, but for now, testers will have to settle with waiting for build updates to get the incremental changes they need, to make Chromium Edge their go-to browser of choice.

Perhaps, because the design of the main unit of the Surface Pro has remained relatively consistent, owners have sought to add customization through its accessories as a way to differentiate their device from the next persons. Microsoft has released many different Surface Type Covers over the years, adding a model with a built-in Fingerprint ID as well as the various Signature Type Cover models with alcantara finish.

Today, the company unveiled the Surface Pro Signature Type Cover in Blush Blend, which will be exclusive to John Lewis & Partners in the UK. The exclusive offering keeps the same feel of Microsoft’s Signature Type Cover experience with Alcantara fabric, but comes in a new two-tone blended color scheme reminiscent of dry and wet sand on the shore.

Discover the new, beautiful 'Blush Blend' Signature Type Cover exclusively available at @jlandpartners.

We love the blend of colours and it looks even more fantastic in-person, let us know what you think!

Learn more: https://t.co/6XeJjaGL5o#Surface #MySurface pic.twitter.com/HW4r554Mkj

— Surface UK (@Surface_UK) April 8, 2019

The Blush Blend Type Cover comes in one option for now and it’s a cross blend of navy blue to light peach (it looks like) and offers a color changing dynamic dependant on light and motion. If you live in the UK, the JL&P Type Cove can be snagged for £149.99 starting today at the JL&P website, here.