Microsoft has updated its Flow service which can now perform multiple steps at the same time as others. “One simple example for this is using our new Approvals feature,” the Microsoft’s Stephen Siciliano says in a post on the official Flow blog. “Imagine for an incoming request for approval from both Finance and Sales, but you don’t want for one to approve before the other to sees the request. With the new parallel functionality, you can dispatch both requests simultaneously.”

This update has also added five completely new features as well. Here’s the official descriptions of each one:

Approvals – With our modern approvals experiences, you can quickly create an approval workflow for your data in SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, Twitter, Visual Studio Team Services, MailChimp and many others. As part of the approval process, approvers will receive email notifications about pending approvals, and can view and respond to all approval requests in a brand-new, unified approvals center.

Benchmark Email – Online email marketing solution to engage subscribers, target an audience, send beautiful, responsive emails and track results.

Capsule CRM – Online CRM for individuals, small businesses and sales teams wanting a simple, effective and affordable solution.

LiveChat – LiveChat is an online customer service software with live support, help desk software and web analytics capabilities.

Outlook Customer Manager – Outlook Customer Manager helps you to graduate from managing contacts to building relationships. It is part of the Office365 Business Premium subscription.

Microsoft Flow is a service that allows for communication between different apps and can be used to create workflows (hence the name) that are completely automated and require very little input from the user.

Are you a Flow user? What feature do you like the most?

The earnings are in for Quarter 3 of fiscal year 2017, offering investors and fans alike a look at how things are going for Microsoft as they move forward with their business plans. There are some ups and downs this quarter, with Office and gaming revenue on the rise and Surface revenue taking a considerable dip.

Here’s a look at the highlights:

· Windows OEM revenue increased 5% (up 5% in constant currency)
· Windows commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 6% (up 6% in constant currency)
· Surface revenue decreased 26% (down 25% in constant currency)
· Search advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs increased 8% (up 9% in constant currency)
· Gaming revenue increased 4% (up 6% in constant currency)

Increases from ad revenue, gaming, cloud services, and OEM revenue all show signs of gradual improvement. On the other hand, a sharp drop in revenue hit the Surface line, tanking numbers down 26%. That’s a pretty huge loss of revenue for any one period of time, and might prove as some reasonable cause for alarm for investors looking at the hardware as possible inroad into the company encroaching Apple-like territory. That being said, it may also be a by-product of the fact that we haven’t had a big announcement regarding the Surface Pro line in quite a while.

The Q3 earnings report leaves investors with a split impression, with numbers doing exceptionally well for everything besides Surface products. We’ll be getting a better idea of how things shake out as investors take the time to digest some of the information in the Q3 report.

Looking to get a little bit more involved in the racing scene, but want to stick to the comfort of your Xbox One? The new app for the Mazda Road to Indy has arrived, offering a bunch of new programming that can offer racing fans programming they’ll be able to enjoy through a dedicated channel on their Xbox One.

This marks a milestone for the racing community as they continue to try and get a hold of a different demographic, trying to spread their reach outside of the average racing fan. While it will be difficult for the app to compete with the massive library of content already available for streaming through apps like Netflix, Hulu, and just the Xbox store, it’ll definitely appeal to a niche, and making that niche more appealing for newcomers.

If you’re interested, the app is available right now on Xbox One.

Yesterday, Microsoft held a Digital Difference media event in New York City, featuring dialogue and insights around advancements in several major areas, including health, retail, transportation, robotics, sports fan engagement and consumer goods. While several Microsoft customers and partners were showcased at this event, we had a chance to go hands-on with a simulated demo of Microsoft’s own Connected Vehicle technology, guided by Christan Berg, Product Manger, Business Intelligence, and Analytics at Microsoft.

In this case, the Connected Car was a simulator, using the Xbox Game Forza 6 to simulate the external environment. There were also sensors on the simulator, measuring steering wheel input, and acceleration and braking. Outward facing cameras, and an inward facing camera in the form of a Kinect was also present in the simulation.

According to Christan Berg, machine learning is able to analyze and measure the driver’s stress, anxiety, and engagement to create a driver score. The driver score also measures how much time your eyes are on and off the road, showing that the car can tell if you’re looking at the right things. Importantly, the technology is adaptive, so it knows when it can disturb you, and when you need to concentrate.

As detailed at the Consumer Electronics Show, Christan Berg holds true to the fact that the automotive industry is going through rapid transformation powered by Industry 4.0. In fact, one of the key changes is the Connected Car, and estimates show that a quarter billion connected vehicles will enable new in-vehicle services and automated driving capabilities by the end of the decade. Christan Berg believes that this rapid transformation has an immense opportunity in the automotive industry, including safer cars, more reliable cars, and cars that make you more productive, whether you’re doing a conference call, or catching up on emails.

Berg detailed that in order to enable all these scenarios, cars will need to generate up 25GB of data per car per hour. So to help automakers keep up with these changes and deal with the data, Microsoft created the open source Microsoft Connected Vehicle platform, based on the Azure cloud (and available on GitHub.)

At the end of the day, the Connected Vehicle demo introduces Microsoft’s vehicle telemetry solution built on Microsoft’s Azure and the Internet of Things. The advanced analytics, data, and business intelligence derived from this driving simulation are visually quantified by Power Bi and spotlights the products and services solutions made possible for auto dealers, insurance providers, manufacturers and drivers across the world.

Two months ago, Microsoft invited Xbox Insiders to test a preview of its new Xbox Game Pass. For those unfamiliar, this is a new game subscription service that will give Xbox One gamers access to a catalog of over 100 Xbox games for $9.99 per month. The service will officially launch later this Spring, but the Xbox team is already thinking about how the Xbox Game Pass could disrupt the gaming industry, just like Netflix did with TV shows.

In a lengthy interview with The Guardian, Xbox head Phil Spencer explained that single player, story-driven games are increasingly competing for attention with “Games as a service” like Destiny or Tom Clancy’s The Division. “The audience for those big story-driven games… I won’t say it isn’t as large, but they’re not as consistent,” said Spencer. “You’ll have things like Zelda or Horizon Zero Dawn that’ll come out, and they’ll do really well, but they don’t have the same impact that they used to have, because the big service-based games are capturing such a large amount of the audience,” he added.

As a result, Spencer thinks that it’s very important for the video games industry to create new business opportunities for story-driven games. Drawing a comparison with the high-quality exclusive TV shows that you can find on Netflix or HBO today, Spencer thinks that gaming subscription services could give much more creative freedom to developers of story-driven games:

I’ve looked at things like Netflix and HBO, where great content has been created because there’s this subscription model. Shannon Loftis and I are thinking a lot about, well, could we put story-based games into the Xbox Game Pass business model because you have a subscription going? It would mean you wouldn’t have to deliver the whole game in one month; you could develop and deliver the game as it goes.

Spencer is convinced that television has now reached a golden age of creativity, and if you already watched Games of Thrones or House of Cards you’ll probably agree with him. “The storytelling ability in TV today is really high, and I think it’s because of the business model,” added Spencer. “I hope as an industry we can think about the same. Subscription services might spur new story-based games coming to market because there’s a new business model to help support their monetisation.”

Including exclusive story-driven games into the Xbox Games Pass could certainly make the subscription service much more valuable for Xbox gamers, and it could even drive Xbox One sales if these games are really good. However, old-school gamers who like to “own” their games may not like this at all. And more importantly, it’s not clear why game developers would prefer to restrict their games to a limited audience of subscribers, especially since Sony’s Playstation 4 sold much better than the Xbox One to this day.

Do you think a Netflix-like business model could benefit story-driven, single player games, or do you think gamers and the video game industry are not ready for this yet? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Earlier this week, Microsoft released a new cumulative update for the Windows 10 version 1703, aka the Creators Update. Unlike the usual Patch Tuesday updates, which include both security fixes and other general improvements, this latest cumulative update was described by Microsoft as a non-security update with only “quality improvements.”

As Microsoft’s Michael Niehaud explained on TechNet this week, you can expect to see more of these updates every month going forward (via Neowin).

Based on feedback from customers, we are making some adjustments to the updates that we are releasing for Windows 10, version 1703 (also known as the “Creators Update”). With these changes, we will routinely offer one (or sometimes more than one) additional update each month. These additional cumulative updates will contain only new non-security updates, so they will be considered “Updates” in WSUS and Configuration Manager.

Installing these non-security cumulative updates will change the minor build number, as did the one released earlier this week which bumped the OS to build 15063.250. For consumers like you and me, this means that you’ll be asked a little more often to install updates and reboot your computer. This new update schedule will also affect Windows Insiders on the Release Preview Ring, which will “get these same updates, but earlier in the process before they are published broadly to Windows Update, WSUS, and the Windows Update Catalog,” explained Niehaus.

If you’re worried about these updates disturbing your workflow, we remind you that the Creators Update gives Windows 10 users more control over the update process: once an update is ready to be installed on your PC, you can either pick a time that suits you best or “snooze” the update for three days.

As Niehaus explained, this new update schedule will also affect business users using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and System Center Configuration Manager to manage the deployment of Windows updates. Those new non-security cumulative updates will usually be labeled as “Updates” in both tools, but in some cases they will appear as “Critical Updates” when they “address more critical issues that could be affecting organizations,” said Niehaus.

Either way, these non-security cumultative updates won’t be installed automatically on PCs that have been configured with Windows Update for Business policies: organizations will be able to deploy them immediately, push them to only a subset of devices or not deploy them at all. “There is no harm in doing this since the same fixes will be included in the next “Update Tuesday” cumulative update (along with all the new security fixes). To clarify, Niehaus added in the comments that this new update schedule is meant to allow business users to test non-security fixes earlier than before:

Before, most organizations picked up new security and non-security updates in the cumulative update released on Update Tuesday. Now those non-security updates will be available a couple of weeks earlier. This gives you the opportunity to validate these non-security fixes, in advance of the Update Tuesday package (which will include the same fixes, so if you don’t deploy this non-security update, you’ll still get the same fixes a couple of weeks later).

For now, this new update schedule won’t affect users of Windows Server 2016, though Niehaus said that “we’re looking at the potential for doing this for other Windows releases at some point in the future.” Overall, this is the first major change to “Windows as a Service,” and we’ll see how it goes. There is probably a fine line between keeping your OS up to date and reaching “update fatigue,” so let us know in the comments if you think this new update schedule could be an annoyance for consumers and business users.

Adam Mudd, the man who created the program responsible for at least 1.7 million attacks on Xbox Live, Minecraft’s servers, Microsoft, and other online services has been sentences to two years in prison as reported by The Guardian.

According to the report, Mudd, who is 20 years old now, earned over £386,000 in US dollars and bitcoins in sales of his program and that there were “more than 112,000 registered users of Mudd’s program who hacked about 666,000 IP addresses. Of those, nearly 53,000 were in the UK.”

The report states that Mudd had been suffering from “undiagnosed Asperger syndrome” but that he was also described as being “bright and high-functioning” by his lawyer with the judge, Michael Topolski QC, concluding that Mudd knew exactly what he was doing and the consequences his actions would have on business and security. “I’m entirely satisfied that you knew full well and understood completely this was not a game for fun,” Topolshi said. “It was a serious money-making business and your software was doing exactly what you created it to do.” Mudd was also accused of personally carrying out at least 594 of the distributed denial of service attacks between December 2013 and March 2015. He pleaded guilty.

Do you think two years is sufficient punishment? What do you think could have been done to prevent this situation? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

Activision has just given us some much-anticipated information about Call of Duty: WWII, the next installment in the popular shooter franchise that will be released on November 3. The game is being developed by Sledgehammer Games and will be a return to Call of Duty’s WWII roots. “We’re talking boots- on- the- ground gameplay delivering a visceral and immersive gameplay experience unlike anything we’ve seen before,” explained Activition in a blog post today.

The company also published today the game’s reveal trailer and you can watch it below. Unlike the one’s for Call of Duty: Infinity Warfare which received an unprecedented amount of dislikes on YouTube, the reception for this one seems much more positive so far.

“Call of Duty: WWII focuses on the actions of a squad from 1944 to 1945, but will also touch on events from 1940 to 1944 to help set the stage for the narrative and establish the characters,” explained Activision. The game’s single player campaign will take place in the European theater of conflict, and the company also share the following details about multiplayer gameplay:

• War: This narrative-driven mode brings a gripping new layer of excitement to Axis vs. Allies team play.
• Divisions: A new approach to Create-a-Class and character customization as you enlist in a division and progress through the ranks.
• Headquarters: A brand-new, social feature for Call of Duty, where you rally and interact with your fellow soldiers.

Call of Duty: WWII is already available for digital pre-oder and pre-download on the Xbox One, and you can choose between the $59.99 standard version and the $99.99 Digital Deluxe Edition. Pre-ordering the game will also give you access to the Private Beta which will be available later this year. Sound off in the comments if you’re willing to pre-order the game after watching the reveal trailer.

Last week, Microsoft messed up its ticket giveaway for the Xbox E3 Fanfest, when far more than the 400 available tickets were given away, causing Microsoft to pull back and start over again this week.

Initially, those disappointed fans were somewhat appeased with a 3 month Xbox Live Gold pass, but they got an additional surprise today as the company tried once again to release those 400 tickets.

According to a post on Reddit, this time the giveaway didn’t last long, with all 400 tickets gone after only 2 minutes. Once the giveaway was complete, Microsoft made a couple of additional announcements:

3/ #XboxFanFest 1st, fans who secured a FanFest ticket today will also get an E3 Expo Pass…”

— Chris "Mr FanFest" Moneyrumble Munson (@moneyrumble) April 26, 2017

If you were lucky enough to win a ticket, you’ll also get access into E3 Expo itself, which for the first time ever is opening up to the public, having been locked down to press, industry insiders, and game developers up until now.

But those fans who tried last week and were disappointed weren’t left out, either:

4/ #XboxFanFest And 2nd, fans who registered on April 19, but DIDN'T get a FF tix today…..will receive an E3 Expo Pass.”

— Chris "Mr FanFest" Moneyrumble Munson (@moneyrumble) April 26, 2017

E3 takes place June 13-15 at the LA Convention Center, with the Xbox media event happening this year on Sunday June 11th, moved up from its usual Monday time slot to avoid getting caught “in the middle” of other pre-E3 events.

Microsoft is widely expected to show off Project Scorpio, lots of games, and maybe even a few surprises at this year’s E3. We’ll be there to bring you all the latest, so stay tuned, and btw if you’re going to FanFest, let’s talk!

If you’re not done hearing about the latest work collaborating tool, Microsoft Teams has received an update today with a few new features. The Slack competitor became generally available last month and since then the team has been eager to respond to its ripe UserVoice forum with a better experience.

Here is what’s new:

• Wiki supports Markdown: Now you can use Markdown in Wiki. Use the same Markdown syntax that applies to chats and messaging to format Wiki sections on the fly. If Markdown isn’t your thing, you’ll still be able access all the same formatting options from your toolbar.
• Link to a channel or team: Now, you can grab a shareable link to a channel or team just by clicking the more icon next to the channel or team name. Copy and paste the link in a message or email to give someone a quick and easy entry point to key conversations, files, and contacts.
• A better viewing experience: We made some performance improvements to your Files view in channels. Now, when you’re navigating to your Files, the view will load even faster.
• New refresh button: We added a refresh button at the top corner of the Files tab in each channel. You now have an easy way to check for new files or any other changes that might have happened since you last looked.
• New upload indicator: Now, when you upload a file to the Files view or OneDrive in a channel, you’ll see an indicator letting you know your upload is in progress. From there, you can track your progress or cancel uploads for multiple files at a time.

Just in case you missed it, Teams on Android also got an update yesterday with essential channel creation and profile picture features.

Of course, we at OnMSFT are excited to see Teams adding to its repertoire of collaborative features. But there still some areas that could use a few tweaks. If you’re interested, check out my personal review of Microsoft Teams.

If you’re an IT Pro who needs the latest in-depth information about Windows 10 and related technologies, you now have a new place to find everything you need. In a new blog post on Microsoft’s TechNet website, the company announced that it’s moving all its technical documentation to docs.microsoft.com (not to be confused with Microsoft’s Docs.com service).

“This move, from the TechNet Library to Docs, is part of our ongoing commitment to make it easier for you to find the content you need and have a great experience viewing that content from any device—phone, tablet, or PC,” explained the company. Additionally, IT Pros can suggest additions or updates to all English content: to do that, they can click on the Edit button in the top right menu, which will lead them to the corresponding GitHub page.

Here are some of the different sections you might want to check on the Windows IT Center:

• Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile
• Windows Server 2016
• Windows for Education
• Windows Store for Business
• Microsoft Edge
• Surface, Surface Hub and HoloLens

Microsoft is also inviting IT Pros to share their feedback on the new experience, and you can do that on the dedicated UserVoice website.

Sometimes, even a tech giant like Microsoft can find themselves between a rock and a hard space. A few weeks ago, the Azure team switched up the branding logic for its Azure Active Directory login pages. But that didn’t sit too hot with the consumers.

Employers and employees that encountered the updated login were finding themselves less efficient as a result of miscommunication. Even though the proposed changes were meant to make it easier for employees and B2B guests what they were signing into, it seems the plan backfired. With what some called a ‘sudden change’, many were confused and even frustrated enough to leave their two-cents for Microsoft.

As a response, the Azure team is rolling back the changes to the Azure AD login page. Alex Simons explained in the announcement that they will be revisiting the plan to inform and communicate changes like these in the futures. It seems the team is taking this commitment to interacting with the feedback seriously too. Program Manager Ariel Gordon even listed off ways that the team will be adjusting for futureAzure AD releases that will affect businesses.

1. Future login UX change that affect business customers will be announced ahead of time
2. Changes will be tested via flighting, and incorporate a Preview period that allows us to gather broader feedback from you
3. For most disruptive design changes, we’ll introduce an opt-in period of at least 30 days, giving everyone a chance to update their support and training materials

No doubt we’ll see a revamped version of this login update later down the line. As pointed out int the blog post, this was also a step to mainstream Azure AD with Microsoft accounts. At least this time, everyone will be expecting it.

The business world, ready or not, is facing rapid changes as companies move to the cloud, and today Microsoft showcased a number of those companies who are making a “Digital Difference.” Our own Arif Bacchus liveblogged event this morning in New York City, where Microsoft CVP Judson Althoff hosted a panel discussion on the transformation to the cloud and showcased a number of new partners now taking advantage of the Microsoft Cloud.

Among them, UBS, the “world’s largest wealth manager,” is using Azure to power its risk management system, and has plans to move more business applications into the Azure cloud. As usual, security is a big focus and a big advantage for Microsoft:

Key to UBS’s move to Azure was a significant focus on regulatory compliance. Microsoft’s Financial Services Compliance program — a unique program that allows firms and regulators to deeply examine Microsoft cloud systems, services and processes — provides transparency into Microsoft cloud operations. This ensures UBS and regulators that Microsoft has taken the proper steps to secure data and mitigate risk. In addition, Azure’s industry-leading compliance portfolio ensures UBS can move to the cloud while meeting current compliance requirements, as well as plan for future regulations.

Maersk, a “global leader in container shipping and ports,” and a big win for Microsoft with its 88,000 employees working in 130 countries, announced today that it too is making a Digital Difference, making Microsoft its preferred cloud partner and using Azure to power its app store and help drive business model innovations.

Microsoft is pushing hard to compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services for the almost inevitable move to the cloud by businesses of all sizes, and are rolling their efforts into a new initiative, the Digital Difference.

We’ll have more from the event today, and more news on Microsoft’s efforts as they come, so stay tuned!

Michelle Obama, the former First Lady of the United States, will be one of the featured speakers at Microsoft’s Envision 2017 conference. The former attorney and role model for women will join other high-profile speakers such as Vice Chair of General Electric Beth Comstock, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and many other Microsoft execs including CFO Amy Hood and Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela.

https://twitter.com/MSFTEnvision/status/856908165639798784

For those unfamiliar, Envision is a new business executive conference that Microsoft introduced last year in April. This year though, Envision will become a part of Microsoft Ignite, which is the company’s big conference for IT professionals. “The partnership between business and IT leaders has never been more important, so Microsoft Ignite will now cater to both audiences and help foster collaboration between the two,” explained Capossela in December.

Microsoft Envision will kick off on September 25 in Orlando, Florida, and you can register and get more information about it on the dedicated website.

Microsoft today is holding a Digital Difference media event, and we’re here live! The event features great dialogue and insights around advancements in several major areas, including health, retail, transportation, robotics, sports fan engagement and consumer goods. A wide range of global companies and digital start-ups are here, and they are sharing how they’re using technology to create new business models and products.

Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President at Microsoft, and Abbie Lundberg, a researcher at Harvard Business Review are scheduled to speak at this event, so be sure to follow along with us right here at the event in New York City by reading our live blog below.

In a surprising move, Microsoft has just revealed a new wearable which will be powered by Windows 10. The TrekStor IoT wearable will be a Windows 10 IoT (Internet of Things) Core-based B2B commercial-grade device that can connect to the cloud, run apps designed in the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app format, will be using Microsoft Cognitive Services, and will have built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionality.

The 1.54 inch screen will be made from Gorilla Glass 3 and the hardware is described as having “the processing power and battery life to perform its line-of-business functions” which could include sending and receiving text and voice messages.

No further information has been revealed on the TrekStor IoT wearable but the official blog post does state that right now it’s being created for work environments and not the casual consumer.

Microsoft has experimented with wearables before with their now seemingly cancelled Microsoft Band product. The TrekStor IoT wearable will be created by a Third Party however so there will be very little financial risk on Microsoft’s party if this new concept fails to take off.

Would you be interested in another Windows 10-powered wearable? Let us know in the comments.

A host of new information for Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite was released today that sheds some light on the characters that will be featured in the game and the release date.

Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite is now due for release on Xbox One and PC on September 19th this year and is set to include the following playable characters: Iron-Man, Captain Marvel, Megaman, Ultron, Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye, Rocket Raccoon, Chun-Li, Strider Hiryu, Chris Redfield, Captain America, Sigma, Morrigan, and Ryu. The game will feature a story mode and several unannounced characters will launch as DLC after they game’s release. Here’s the new trailer that was released alongside today’s information.

Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite will release in three different versions. The Standard Edition will contain the base game and its pre-order will include the Warrior Thor and Evil Ryu premium costumes. The Deluxe Edition comes with the game and the 2017 Character Pass (all six post-launch characters). The pre-order of the Deluxe Edition will also unlock the Warrior Thor and Evil Ryu premium costumes as well as the Gladiator Hulk and Command Mission X ones.

A special Collector’s Edition will come with everything in the Deluxe Edition as well as four interlocking figures and LED-powered Infinity Stone replicas.

Digital pre-orders are now live in the Xbox Store: Pre-order Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite here

Are you excited for Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite on Xbox One? Let us know which character you want to play as in the comments below.

The classic 90s video game, Night Trap, is getting a special 25th Anniversary release on Microsoft’s Xbox One in Spring this year. The game is famous for being at the center of the violent video game debate in the 90s and along with Mortal Kombat was responsible for the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) in the U.S.A. Despite having no nudity or graphic violence, the game was eventually banned and never received a second printing. Here’s the official game description and announcement trailer.

Night Trap tells the story of five teenage girls spending the weekend at the Martin home. As a member of the Special Control Attack Team, your job is to monitor the home and protect the girls using an intricate system of cameras and traps as it is being invaded by vampires.

Are you excited to play Night Trap on your Xbox One? Let us know in the comments below.