Microsoft has announced that its business communications platform, Microsoft Teams, will be natively integrated into Windows 11 at launch.

The app’s new prominent placement on the operating system’s Start menu was one of the biggest reveals from the ‘What next for Windows’ event on Thursday, with Panos Panay, Microsoft‘s chief product officer, explaining how it will be a quicker way for users to launch and create Teams meetings.

This won’t be a direct installation of the app, rather a selection of its functions readily available in the Start menu. For the full services, users will still need to download Microsoft Teams, which will be available via the Microsoft Store.

“Now you can instantly connect through text, chat, voice or video with all of your personal contacts, anywhere, no matter the platform or device they’re on, across Windows, Android or iOS,” the company said in a blog post. “If the person you’re connecting to on the other end hasn’t downloaded the Teams app, you can still connect with them via two-way SMS.”

The integration is a nod towards the success of Teams over the course of the pandemic and how it is at the forefront of our changing approaches to work. The service surpassed 145 million daily active users back in April, and it has undergone a number of changes over the last 12 months to reposition it as a tool for the hybrid workforce.

However, while Teams took top billing for the Windows 11 event, Skype was hardly spoken of, leading many to suggest it has been pushed out. Skype was originally integrated as an “inbox app” as part of Windows 10, similar to how Teams will function as part of Windows 11, but it was noticeably absent from Thursday’s promotional material.

Antivirus software pioneer John McAfee has reportedly been found dead in a Spanish prison, hours after the country’s highest court approved his extradition to the United States.

The Catalan police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, confirmed a report in El País that the 75-year-old had been found dead in the Brians 2 prison, just outside of Barcelona, late on Wednesday.

McAfee was wanted by American authorities for alleged tax evasion and was arrested last October at Barcelona’s international airport while boarding a flight to Istanbul, shortly after an indictment was made public by prosecutors in Tennessee.

In a statement, the Catalan justice department said that prison officers and medics tried to save McAfee’s life, but were unsuccessful. Judicial staff have been dispatched to the prison to investigate the cause of death, but the statement said that “everything points to death by suicide”.

US authorities claim McAfee failed to report income made from consultancy work promoting cryptocurrencies, public speaking gigs, and the sale of the rights to his life story for a documentary. McAfee, who originally made his name and fortune as a pioneer of antivirus software in the 1980s, claimed his work as a cryptocurrency ‘guru’ earned him $2,000 per day.

His namesake company quickly became a household name and still operates under ‘McAfee‘, despite his departure in 1994. However, since leaving the company, McAfee the man has became notorious for his erratic behaviour and strange lifestyle. This includes two attempts at running for the US presidency, production of herbal medicines, multiple arrests – one for possession of a weapon – and lengthy spells as a fugitive.

Most recently, he was charged by a Manhattan federal court over a ‘pump and dump‘ scheme relating to cryptocurrency he was promoting to his large social media following.

IBM has announced a set of new AI-based fan experiences for this year’s Wimbledon Tennis Championships, which are set to start on Monday.

The tech giant has a 30-year history with the competition, providing innovative features through its Watson AI service.

For the 2021 tournament, three new tools have been launched to help fans to engage with the action, including a ‘Power Ranking’ player leaderboard and personalised guides for spotting new tennis talent. These will be available through the Wimbledon website and official mobile apps.

“With reduced capacity on-site at Wimbledon this year, that digital engagement is more important than ever, and by leveraging AI and hybrid cloud technologies, fans can get the experiences they are used to – no matter where they watch the tournament,” said Kevin Farrar, IBM UK’s sports partnership lead.

The Power Rankings tool uses IBM Watson to analyse player performance and provide a daily update in the form of a leaderboard. It will focus on a player’s most recent match history, combining advanced statistical analysis, the natural language processing of IBM Watson, and IBM Cloud to analyse daily performance data, mine media commentary, and measure player momentum tournament to tournament and match to match.

A series of predictive insights will then be generated, such as a “Ones to Watch” feature, an ‘upset alert’ where the Power Rankings favour a lower-seeded player, and win probability for each match.

In a similar fashion, there is also a Watson-based feature for pre-match insights, which has already been used at the 2020 US Open. This will include a ‘fact sheet’ for every main draw singles match with AI-generated content for player insights that inform fans on current player performance stats ahead of each match. The fact sheet will also feature an ‘In the Media’ section that leverages IBM Watson Discovery to create a custom news archive, and natural language processing to extract key details about each player from trusted news sources.

The final innovation is ‘Personalised Recommendations and Highlights Reels’ which are created through a Rules-Based Recommendation Engine integrated seamlessly across Wimbledon’s digital platforms. This will feature ‘picked for you’ recommended players, to help fans discover newer players by making suggestions based on their current favourite players.

The recommendations will evolve over the course of the tournament and alert the fan to newly recommended players, the company confirmed.

Oracle is launching a rewards programme that promises to help customers speed up their migrations plans, while also reducing their software licensing costs. 

The programme is aimed at existing customers, who might be enticed into adding to their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) plans with rewards that reduce or even “eliminate” on-premise tech licensing support bills. 

The terms of the scheme promise that all Oracle technology license support customers will earn at least 25 cents of Support Rewards for each dollar of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure ‘Universal Credits’ they purchase and consume. These are a form of pay-as-you-go subscription.

More savings can be had for Oracle’s ‘Unlimited License Agreements (ULA)’ customers, who can earn rewards at a 33% rate and potentially eliminate their bill completely by migrating $1.5m of workloads to the Oracle Cloud infrastructure.

“OCI is Oracle’s fastest-growing business because we built a unique Generation 2 cloud infrastructure platform capable of running the most demanding mission-critical workloads faster, more reliably, and more securely than our on-premises systems,” said Oracle CTO and chairman Larry Ellison.  

“We want to enable more customers to take advantage of our Gen 2 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle Support Rewards gives customers an easy way to simultaneously reduce their software support spend as they increase the speed of their cloud adoption.”

The rewards scheme has been launched to help CIOs and IT organisations under pressure to drive company-wide innovations under tight budget restrictions. Oracle has compared them to frequent flyer miles, as a customer’s Support Rewards are automatically added in their OCI Console every month, with Rewards applied anytime.

The support programme has also been praised by IDC’s cloud and edge VP Dave McCarthy, who said its transparent pricing was essential in attracting new business and accelerating the adoption of OCI.

The five largest cities in the UK could lose as much as £322 million a month if offices move to hybrid working long-term, according to new research. 

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) has estimated that London, Manchester, Glasgow, Newcastle and Cardiff could all see revenue from shops, pubs and office-adjacent eateries fall significantly. 

A total of £11.9 billion has already been displaced from city centres during the pandemic, the organisation said, which would have otherwise been spent on inner-city retail and eating out. 

London appears to be the hardest hit, with a total of £8.2 billion lost between March 2020 and May 2021, according to the CEBR. What’s more, the capital is predicted to lose £234 million per month, should businesses maintain a hybrid working strategy for the foreseeable future.

Manchester will see the next biggest loss at £1.8 billion, with an estimated loss of just £48 million per month expected by the CEBR.

The research pulls in Google mobility data which shows that in April 2020, the number of people going to places of work on a weekday was 69% lower than before the pandemic. That figure had only recovered by half at just 34% in May 2021.

Of the five cities, Cardiff had the lowest share of returning workers, at 50% lower than pre-pandemic levels, while Newcastle had the highest share at just 34% lower. 

The popularity of hybrid working environments is rapidly growing as businesses look for realistic ways to manage COVID restrictions and the demands of their employees. Over the weekend, financial giant Deloitte announced that it would allow its 200,000-strong workforce to choose where they work, with its offices set to be transitioned into collaboration spaces. 

What’s more, the UK government is reportedly set to begin encouraging hybrid approaches, according to leaked documents seen by the CEBR.

The Conservative Party had previously sent out muddled messages on remote working, suggesting people should come back into the office after the first lockdown, citing concerns around the loss of footfall traffic to shops and eateries. Despite the expected losses in revenue, the document reportedly suggests the government is actively looking at ways to help people to continue working from home if there is no ‘need’ for them to be in an office. 

Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, has been appointed chairman of the board following a unanimous vote by the company’s independent directors.

It’s the first time in more than 20 years that the tech giant has had the same executive in both CEO and chairman roles, with co-founder Bill Gates the last to hold the titles simultaneously.

Although we won’t know how this will specifically change Nadella’s day-to-day workload, the chairman is usually tasked with ensuring the board is effective in setting and implementing the company’s direction and long-term strategy. In this regard, it appears Nadella has been given more responsibility and more scope to shape the company’s future, having gained the support of the directors during his time as CEO.

John Thompson, who Nadella is replacing as chairman, will take on the role of ‘lead independent director’ with a mandate to head up the performance evaluations of the CEO. Thompson has played a significant role in Nadella’s rise at Microsoft, leading the team that appointed him CEO in 2014, not long after Thompson, himself, originally took over as chairman. Prior to this, Bill Gates held the chairman role, alongside Steve Ballmer as CEO.

Although he had stepped down as CEO in 2000, Gates still retained control of Microsoft, and its technological vision, as chairman. He also kept a position on the board long after relinquishing that role to Thompson, finally fully departing the company in 2020 to focus on his charity work.

The partnership of Nadella as CEO and Thompson as chair has seen Microsoft pivot towards cloud computing, with its hugely successful Azure platform, which Nadella originally headed up.

The firm is now one the biggest companies in the world, matching the likes of Apple and Amazon, which were all valued at around $1 trillion in 2019.

Slack has announced a new ‘Schedule Send’ feature that allows users to queue up messages to send at specific dates and times.

Set to start rolling out on Thursday, the function will appear as a drop-down menu that pops up when users click on the ‘send’ arrow in the chat box.

Slack will offer both pre-filled options, like “tomorrow 9am”, as well as the ability to set a custom date and time to send the message. Users can schedule messages up to 120 days in advance and they can reschedule, edit, or delete them before they’ve been sent.

The feature will work in both channels and direct messages, and also for temporary groups and threads. It’s available for both the desktop service and the Android and iOS mobile apps, with users of the latter needing to press and hold the ‘send’ arrow to see the drop-down menu.

“Today we launched Scheduled Send to empower users to communicate and collaborate in a way that works best for them,” the company said in a statement, adding that “teams shouldn’t be obligated to sync their schedules in order to communicate effectively.”

The function will be important for large businesses with offices and employees in different time zones, but also for companies planning to mix in-office and remote working with various shift patterns. It will allow Slack users more opportunities to fully switch off by preventing out-of-hours notifications, but it also means that some messages won’t get buried by others before the recipient starts their shift.

Given accusations that apps like Slack contribute to an ‘always-on’ culture, some may question why it has taken so long to add a feature of this kind to the platform, particularly as a similar feature has been available on Gmail for some time. 

A message scheduling feature is also available on Microsoft Teams, although the Slack version appears to offer a slightly easier user experience.

Google is aiming to broaden the appeal of its online productivity suite, Google Workspace, by making it free to anyone that has a Google account. 

This means that all of the company’s three billion users, from enterprise to education, can access the full Google Workspace platform, and apps like Gmail, Chat, Docs and more, without the need to pay for a subscription. Some paid-for tiers will remain, however, along with a new tier designed exclusively for sole traders.

There are also new features for the free tier that address specific challenges workers will face with the switch to hybrid working, These include updates to Google Chat, new subscription offers and greater security across the platform. 
 
“Collaboration doesn’t stop at the workplace – our products have been optimised for broad participation, sharing and helpfulness since the beginning,” said Javier Soltero, VP and GM, Google Workspace. 

“Our focus is on delivering consumers, workers, teachers and students alike an equitable approach to collaboration, while still providing flexibility that allows these different subsets of users to take their own approach to communication and collaboration.”

The biggest change for free users is that Google Rooms has evolved into ‘Google Spaces’. This is effectively a private chat area, similar to those found Slack or Microsoft Teams, where groups of users can chat and collaborate via text or video call.

There are a range of new functions within this, such as ‘threads’ and presence indicators that let users know if participants are free or available to talk. Users can also pin messages to Spaces so that important announcements don’t get lost amongst the general chatter. 
 
Google is also adding a Companion Mode to Google Meet which it claims allows everyone to continuously contribute to meetings, no matter if they are in the office or at home.

For the paid-tier, Google has added client-side document encryption which will allow businesses to use their own encryption keys.

Zoom has unveiled a new range of desk phones fit for the office and the home that includes high-definition video and built-in collaboration software.

These are the first two products to come from the firm’s ‘Zoom Phone Appliance’ programme, which combines its conferencing software with hardware from electronics specialists Poly and Yealink.

Both are fairly traditional-looking desk phones, but also feature a large touch screen and webcam, though the Yealink version also comes with physical keys. Zoom suggests these devices are a “new category of hardware”, optimised for the so-called hybrid workforce that mixes home and office working.

“The traditional workplace is evolving and adapting, and our goal is to empower the workforce to accomplish more by blurring the lines between voice and video,” said Graeme Geddes, head of Zoom Phone and Zoom Rooms. “The new Zoom Phone Appliance program boasts a selection of purpose-built Zoom Phone hardware from Poly and Yealink, streamlining communications, removing friction, and enabling a powerful communications experience.”

The devices have been designed for simple installation and low maintenance, so that they are just as easy to use at home as they are in the office. The desk phones also feature ‘Zero-touch provisioning’, which Zoom claims minimises the need for IT support with a centralised management system and regular updates. What’s more, the phones will work with your regular Zoom account, so no additional licensing is required.

Both the Poly and Yealink devices include ‘always-on’ Zoom capabilities, where meetings can be scheduled and joined instantly, and more traditional desk phone functions such as audio calls and voicemail.

The touch screen display also includes an interactive whiteboard that can be shared with colleagues and exported to other devices. The system can also be synced with the user’s calendar – which includes Google Calendar.

These are the “inaugural class” of Zoom Phone Appliances, the firm said, with other products and features to follow, potentially from other partners.

Cisco has unveiled an all-new suite of services for its Webex platform with features it hopes will serve as the foundation for “inclusive” hybrid work environments.
 
The cloud firm’s research estimates that 98% of future meetings will include at least one remote participant and that this requires more broad investment into non-traditional conference rooms. 

Its new suite of services, which also sees the introduction of a new Webex logo, includes an end-to-end events platform, an analytics tools to track audience engagement, speech optimisation, machine learning software to improve video quality, data-loss prevention and collaborative hardware to enable use either in the office or at home. 
 
“Cisco’s collaboration business is incredibly essential to our customers,” said the company’s CEO, Chuck Robbins. “With all the integrations the team has added – 800 new features and devices since September – we truly have the most comprehensive meetings, calling, messaging, and event management solution on the market powering the future of hybrid work.
 
The analytics tools will include functions for polls, Q&As and an audience engagement service which Cisco calls an “industry first”. This will be integrated across all collaboration experiences with the polling feature available now in Meetings.
 
The Camera updates include a “People Focus” function whereby machine learning and AI technology is used to individually reframe meeting participants who are spread across a room. This will remote participants to feel more connected, according to Cisco, with everyone in the meeting able to benefit from seeing body language, facial expressions and more. 
 
The suite will also come with security features to prevent loss of data for Webex, which automatically blocks and removes confidential information and prohibits users from posting classified content rather than redacting or deleting content after it is posted. Additionally, European Webex customers will be able to host and process their content within the EU.
 
The new suite is available now and is priced at 40% lower than “a-la-carte”, according to Cisco. Webex Desk, a desktop video device option for home offices and small meeting spaces, will be made available for order later in June for $1,249.