Product marketing manager for Microsoft 365 Admin, Scott Schnoll has announced that an update to the UI and settings options for Admins of “very small businesses” will begin rolling out soon.

In his announcement, Schnoll referred to the update as a new “Admin Simplified View,” which scales back the number of Admin accessible options to a more unified experience, encompassing the following directives:

• Adding users
• Installing Office
• Turning on Teams
• Adding e-mail and calendars

To help VSBs also focus on the administrative essentials, we are introducing a new experience in the Microsoft 365 admin center called the admin simplified view. This experience can be used by Global admins in any organization that has Microsoft 365, but it is designed primarily for VSBs.

The experience provides you with access to users, teams, and billing information in one view, and it guides you through simplified flows of top actions to take, such as adding users, installing Office, and enabling Teams, email, and calendaring. To revert to the complete admin center experience, you can click Dashboard view.

The more simplified Microsoft 365 Admin should appeal to customers that host applications on dedicated native software versus implementing a more cloud approach to development as well as paying for less than 10 M365 Business subscriptions monthly or annually. Fortunately, Microsoft is not making this an all or nothing situation but plans to allow customers to toggle between the new simplified and the older one, ala Google Ads or the new Facebook desktop UI.

Microsoft is testing its new admin simplified view over the next few months with early versions going to targeted release customers as soon as next month.

Microsoft has released a fresh update for its PowerToys suite of tools, bringing it to version 0.27. This update is mostly focused on multi-monitor support improvements in FancyZones and brings a new look for built-in tools such as Image Resizer and Color Picker.

Today we shipped #powerToys 0.27.0. We have done a lot of accessibility improvements, drastically improved multi-mon support in FancyZones, a more powerful Color Picker and wrapped up about 100 issues too.https://t.co/E5SUA21l2C

— Clint Rutkas (@ClintRutkas) December 1, 2020

The company noted that it skipped version 0.26 for “higher priority work,” and the much-awaited Video Conference Mute utility is expected to launch next week with the experimental v0.26.

“This will be coming in about a week’s time. We need additional work done here to ship this out. It will be 0.28 Experimental and will be 0.27 + The video conference utility. We skipped 0.26’s release for higher priority work,” the company explained.

Here is the full changelog for PowerToys version 0.27:

General

• Installer improvements including dark mode
• Large sums of accessibility issues fixed.
• Worked on localization effort. If you find issues, please [make us aware so we can correct them][loc-bug].

Color Picker

• Updated interface and new editor experience done by @martinchrzan and @niels9001

FancyZones

• Multi-monitor editor experience now drastically improved for discoverability.
• Zones being forgotten on restart
• Added in ability to have no layout

Image Resizer

• Updated interface

PowerToys Run

• Removed unused dependencies

PowerRename

• Added Lookbehind support via Boost library

As usual, the new PowerToys version is available to download from the official Github page. If you’re interested, you can also check out our separate post to learn more about the multi-monitor improvements made to FancyZones.

Red Dead Redemption 2’s online mode, Red Dead Online, is now available on Xbox Series X and Xbox One consoles as its own stand-alone title meaning that those interested in exploring the open-world online game can do so without purchasing the full single-player campaign.

Coming in at $19.99, Red Dead Online is significantly cheaper than buying the full Red Dead Redemption 2 game at $59.99 or even $99.99 for its Ultimate Edition. As an extra incentive to attract new players, Red Dead Online has been given a temporary discount of 75% bringing its price down to just $4.99.

Pretty insane.

Here’s the full game description along with trailer and store links:

Step into the vibrant, ever-evolving world of Red Dead Online and experience life across frontier America. Forge your own path as you battle lawmen, outlaw gangs and ferocious wild animals to build a life on the American frontier. Build a camp, ride solo or form a posse and explore everything from the snowy mountains in the North to the swamps of the South, from remote outposts to busy farms and bustling towns. Chase down bounties, hunt, fish and trade, search for exotic treasures, run your own underground Moonshine distillery, or become a Naturalist to learn the secrets of the animal kingdom and much more in a world of astounding depth and detail.

Join millions of fellow players in the American West, and experience a world now packed with years’ worth of new features, gameplay and additional enhancements. Includes Red Dead Online. Red Dead Redemption 2: Story Mode must be purchased separately.

Have you played Red Dead Online before or will this be your first time? Let us know in the comments below and then follow us on Pinterest and Twitter for more Xbox gaming news.

Download
QR-Code

Red Dead Online

Developer:
Rockstar Games

Price:
$9.99

Rocket League, the popular vehicular soccer game that recently became free to play will soon be optimized for Xbox Series X|S consoles. The patch for next-gen consoles will go live on December 9 alongside the game’s second season, which will introduce a new Rocket Pass, a new Arena named Neon Fields, as well as a new Limited Time Mode.

If you got your hands on an Xbox Series X or Series S console, the December 9 patch will introduce new Quality and Performances on the two consoles. Here’s what to expect:

Xbox Series X

• Quality: 4K resolution at 60 FPS with HDR
• Performance: Game runs at 2688×1512 resolution (70% of 4K) at 120 FPS with HDR

Xbox Series S

• Quality: 1080p Resolution at 60 FPS with HDR
• Performance: Game runs at 1344×756 (70% of 1080p) Resolution at 120 FPS with HDR

Keep in mind that you’ll need a 120 Hz screen to play Rocket League at 120FPS, and those are going to become more common in the TV market with the new HDMI 2.1 norm that supports 4K gameplay at 120 FPS. There are already a couple of Xbox Series X|S optimized games that support 120 FPS on the new consoles, including Dirt 5, Gears 5, Star Wars Squadrons, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection. We hope to see more games offering a 120 FPS option in the coming months.

Rocket League is one of the rare games that support both cross-play multiplayer and cross-platform progression, and you’ll need to create a free Epic Games account to benefit from these features. While Rocket League is now free to play on all platforms, the Xbox One version still requires an Xbox Live Gold subscription.

In this heightened work-from-home environment, some companies are looking for optimization techniques and tools to stave off would-be extemporaneous employee distractions and Microsoft’s Productivity Score would seem like an ideal solution.

However, the MPS tool has recently come under heavy criticism by privacy advocates claiming the software is a “full-fledged workplace surveillance tool.”

Privacy concerns arose when as Austria-based digital rights researcher Christie Wolfie determined that the MPS feature of Microsoft 365 is essentially a work monitoring tool. By utilizing scores across communication, content collaboration, network connectivity, meetings, Microsoft 365 App health, etc to rank employee productivity admins are privy to a ton of triangulating data about employee behavior that arguably crosses privacy thresholds.

Wolfie’s argument gathers further steam when examining the granular level of specificity MPS offers IT and Microsoft 365 Admins, down to how many days an individual employee has sent emails, used chat the chat, used ‘mentions’ in email, etc.

Employers/managers can analyze employee activities at the individual level (!), for example, the number of days an employee has been sending emails, using the chat, using 'mentions' in emails etc.

Microsoft promo video:https://t.co/68sCJaFs9f

Via Heise:https://t.co/hklmHtbF75 pic.twitter.com/Fabgi6koTN

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) November 24, 2020

Today, Microsoft attempted to fend off mounting concern over MPS with corporate VP for Microsoft 365 Jared Spataro issuing a press release stating upcoming changes to Productivity Score.

At Microsoft, we believe that data-driven insights are crucial to empowering people and organizations to achieve more. We also believe that privacy is a human right, and we’re deeply committed to the privacy of every person who uses our products. As part of that commitment, we’re making the following changes to Productivity Score:

• First, we’re removing user names from the product. During the preview, we added a feature that showed end-user names and associated actions over a 28-day period. In response to feedback over the last week, we’re removing that feature entirely. Going forward, the communications, meetings, content collaboration, teamwork, and mobility measures in Productivity Score will only aggregate data at the organization level—providing a clear measure of organization-level adoption of key features. No one in the organization will be able to use Productivity Score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365.
• Second, we’re modifying the user interface to make it clearer that Productivity Score is a measure of organizational adoption of technology—and not individual user behavior. Over the last few days, we’ve realized that there was some confusion about the capabilities of the product. Productivity Score produces a score for the organization and was never designed to score individual users. We’ll make that clearer in the user interface and improve our privacy disclosures in the product to ensure that IT admins know exactly what we do and don’t track.

Spataro also highlights that Microsoft 365 App health, network connectivity, and endpoint analytics – do not include user name as an order or precaution and employee privacy. Ultimately, the service looks to perform very similarly to its October debut, with the aforementioned changes. Microsoft continues to stress its data-driven modus operands as it places most of the responsibility on the employer and how much of its analytics gathering it utilizes and for what purposes.

Do you remember Microsoft’s custom “softwear,” the Windows Ugly Sweater? Back in 2018, the company sent out a cool Windows 95-themed holiday sweater to lucky influencers and fans but now is your chance to buy it, too. Microsoft has finally announced that you can now buy one for yourself, with the proceeds helping benefit Girls Who Code.

The new #WindowsUglySweater has arrived — and this year it’s supporting a fantastic cause! ​

Get yours today (they disappear fast!) and you’ll be supporting @GirlsWhoCode when you do. Good deal, isn’t knit? ????

— Windows (@Windows) December 1, 2020

Available via the Xbox Gear store, you can now pick up the last three Windows Ugly Sweaters online. The first from 2018 features the Windows 95 logo and colors, the second from last year the Windows XP colors, and this year’s is Microsoft Paint. All three are up in the store for prices around $60, and purchases from the sale will help benefit the charity, Girls Who Code. However, it does look as though Microsoft is having a hard time keeping stock. Many sizes are already sold out, so it’s best to act fast.

What do you think of this custom softwear? Will you pick it up for yourself or your family? Let us know in the comments below.

Apple’s M1 silicon continues to hail praise from the industry as being a technology marvel, however, this latest Windows 10 on ARM virtualization feat just reiterates how impressive the new chip really is.

Late last week, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtualization engineer tinkered with an M1 Arm-based Mac and Windows 10 on ARM and concocted a result that runs circles around Microsoft’s own flagship WoA device.

While the traditional Apple solution to running Windows on a Mac doesn’t appear to be in the pipeline, AWS principal engineer Alexander Graf used an open-source QEMU virtualization piece of software to emulate Windows on ARM on a new M1 powered Mac.

Who said Windows wouldn't run well on #AppleSilicon? It's pretty snappy here ????. #QEMU patches for reference: https://t.co/qLQpZgBIqI pic.twitter.com/G1Usx4TcvL

— Alexander Graf (@_AlexGraf) November 26, 2020

Graf’s work was the co-opted by another Twitter user who then ran Geekbench 4 and 5 synthetic tests comparing Windows 10 on ARM’s performance between the dedicated Surface Pro X and an M1 Mac. @imbushuo’s results show that Windows 10 on ARM actually performs better in benchmarking on the M1 versus the Surface Pro X snagging a single-core score of 1,288 and multi-core score of 5,685 on the M1 silicon. However, on Microsoft’s co-produced SQ2 ARM silicon for the Pro X, performance was benchmarked at 800 for single-core and a paltry 3,000 in multi-core performance.

Microsoft doesn’t currently license its WoA software but rather makes it available for devices so reproducing these results officially is still a waiting process for the M1 Mac crowd.

However, with Microsoft refocusing on being where its customers are, there could be a future where WoA becomes a licensed product for Mac users.

Two months ago, Microsoft announced that the desktop version of Microsoft Teams is getting a new feature that would allow users to create tasks from their chat or channel messages. As per the company’s Roadmap, the update has now started to roll out gradually and will be generally available in the coming weeks.

Previously, Teams users had to copy and paste the information manually to create a Planner task. Thanks to this feature, the company has now eliminated the need to switch apps or windows, allowing users to quickly assign tasks directly from any chat/channel conversation in Teams.

The process to create a task is relatively straightforward, as you need to navigate to the specific message, select “More Options,” and click on the “Create task” option. A Planner window will instantly appear on your screen. Just fill in the details, and finally, click the “Create task” button. Once created, these tasks will appear in the Tasks app in Teams, as well as in Microsoft Planner.

The new task management capability is likely to be welcomed by employees who struggle to track important messages to report an issue or ask for something to be done. However, it remains to be seen if Microsoft will improve this functionality by providing a similar Microsoft To Do integration in future releases.

Microsoft’s PowerToys is about to receive a new update that should improve its FancyZones utility. In PowerToys v0.27, the company is introducing an enhanced multi-monitor support, which resolves one of its few outstanding issues.

Why hello improved #powerToys FancyZone multi-mon support coming soon in 0.27. pic.twitter.com/R9vWpexFF5

— Clint Rutkas (@ClintRutkas) November 30, 2020

PowerToys is a collection of handy tools to help power users get more out of Windows 10. It includes utilities such as FancyZones, which helps to set up preconfigured windows on their Windows 10 PCs. While FancyZones already supports seamless multi-monitor snap capability, but there’s a catch.

Right now, users need to launch the utility’s editor configuration screen on the appropriate monitor for setup, but this should change soon. Clint Rutkas, Program manager lead on PowerToys, confirmed that one of the new additions in PowerToys 0.27 is a redesigned UI that directly builds it into the editor, making it easier to customize each specific monitor on Windows 10.

At this point, there’s no ETA as to when the upcoming version will go live, but we will keep an eye on the GitHub release page to let you know as soon as PowerToys v0.27 is available for users.

Microsoft just announced what can be seen as a big change for the Windows Insider program. In a short blog post, the Windows Insider team explained that it now will start shipping new Windows 10 features to Insiders through the Windows Feature Experience Pack, instead of requiring users to install full builds.

Being tested first with Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.1070.0 in the Beta Channel today, Microsoft says this move will benefit Windows 10 users in a few ways. First off, the company believes it can improve certain features and experiences that are now developed independently of Windows 10. This comes as a change, and Microsoft admits that a “limited number of features are being developed this way, so we are starting out very scoped.”

Additionally, the plan is to expand this out in the future to everyone else into the existing way Windows is updated, through Windows Update. But, for now, if you’re a Windows Insider, these are the new features you’ll be seeing once you install the latest Windows Feature Experience Pack.

• Based on Insider feedback, you can now use the built-in screen snipping experience in Windows (WIN + SHIFT + S) to create a snip of your screen and paste it directly into a folder of your choice in File Explorer to save the screenshot there. Try it out!
• Using the touch keyboard in a portrait posture on a 2-in-1 touch device now supports split keyboard mode.

Do note, though that you’ll only be seeing this Feature Experience pack if you’re running the Windows 10 20H2 update, build 19042.662 or higher. It’ll show up in Windows Update, and then you’ll still have to reboot your system to apply the changes.

As you may recall, we first saw the Windows Feature Experience Pack back in June of 2020 with the Windows 10 May 2020 Update. It was then mysterious, but speculation quickly spread that Microsoft could be using this to make Windows 10 more modular. This now confirms those rumors, and it looks as though Microsoft could be setting up for adding new features in Windows 10 in the year 2021.

Microsoft’s online survey creator tool, Microsoft Forms, is finally adding support for collecting responses from specific users or security groups. The company has announced via a Microsoft 365 Admin center message that the feature will begin rolling out in December on its desktop and mobile clients.

With this update, only the users/groups specified by the Form owner will be able to view and submit a response to the form or quiz. The new option should make it easier for owners to manage response collection by preventing all other users from submitting their responses.

The ability to send and collect responses from specific people should help teachers engage with select students or collect feedback from a group of people during business meetings.

Keep in mind that the new option will be disabled by default, and the Form owner will have to enable it manually. The company noted that the change will be applicable to both old forms as well as new ones.

While many of us were safely gaming away this holiday weekend in the US, it was only done so because Microsoft was able to quietly patch a bug that prevented further Xbox Live members’ email addresses to be hacked.

Last week, Motherboard had received some anonymous information about hackers being able to capture the emails associated with any Xbox Gamertag. Through an independent verification, where Motherboard gave the hacker’s test Gamertags, the claims were confirmed.

Fortunately, it seems the anonymous hackers were less nefarious in their intentions because they also pointed Motherboard in the direction of the root cause. A bug in the Xbox Live enforcement portal is how the hackers claimed to gain access to email information from Xbox’s online gamer profiles.

In addition to pointing out the bug, the anonymous hackers also asked that Motherboard report on the issue only after Microsoft had a chance to patch it. The secrecy behind quietly allowing Microsoft a chance to address this was due in large part to a similar bug being used to dox Instagram celebrities back in 2017, a result the anonymous hackers sought to prevent this time around.

Even as the company was made aware of the vulnerability, Microsoft’s Security Response Center waived off immediate concern, citing that while emails “may be considered sensitive information, however since it provides nothing else to identify the issuer, is not something that meets MSRC bar for service.”

Perhaps, the MSRC’s tone-deaf response to an obvious user threat reached the doorsteps of the higher-ups because 24 hours later, Microsoft issued a release regarding an update that we sent out to patch the bug.

Microsoft is working on a new tab management feature that will let users set custom names for browser windows in Microsoft Edge. As noticed by Reddit user Leopeva-2, the experimental feature is not hidden behind any flag and should be available to all Edge Canary Insiders running the recent builds.

The ability to rename multiple tabs is a nifty addition for people who usually have multiple tabs opened in Microsoft Edge. It should make it easier for them to classify their browser windows based on their contents and quickly identify them. Most importantly, it helps to distinguish between different tabs while switching between them using the Alt-Tab shortcut.

To take advantage of this new feature, right-click on the window title bar area, and select the “Name window” option from the context menu. In the set Windows name dialog, enter a unique name click “OK” to confirm the changes. You can repeat these steps to rename all browser tabs you have opened on your PC.

Notably, a similar option is already available in the Canary builds of Google Chrome, designed to improve multitasking and tab management experience for power users. While the new capability is already live for Edge users on Canary builds, it could be a while before the feature makes its way to the Stable channel.