On 23 March 2016, Microsoft released Tay to the world, a chatbot built through a collaboration between the company’s research and Bing divisions. Unlike other chatbots, this was designed as a proof of concept to show that artificial intelligence could interact with users effectively across very human communication media – in this case, Twitter.

Unfortunately, Microsoft hadn’t quite understood the dangers of releasing a tool that learns from user interaction into the Twittersphere, a place not exactly known for constructive criticism and polite political discourse. Exploiting its “repeat after me” function – it’s still unclear whether this was built in or a learned function – users were able to expose the @TayandYou account to inflammatory statements about some of the internet’s most popular talking points of the time, whether that was Gamergate, feminism, or simply entries from the Urban Dictionary.

Within days, this self-described “AI with zero chill” had been transformed into an accomplished purveyor of hate. The chatbot was supposed to demonstrate how AI can learn from environmental cues and communicate nuanced ideas in a language familiar to those on Twitter. What we got was a bot that echoed some of the more hateful sides of the internet, either through the parroting of genuine messages or users attempting to derail the project.

Microsoft said at the time that it was “deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay”, and that it would “look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values”.

Tay was meant to show just how far Microsoft’s research teams had outpaced those of its rivals in the AI arms race. Instead, it was a catastrophic failure, proving that technology capable of learning and making its own decisions based on its environment needed to have guardrails, not just in development but also in its application.

It’s clear the experiment served as a wake-up call for a company that, until that point, had little in the way of internal processes to govern how such technology was developed. Some three months after it pulled the plug on Tay, CEO Satya Nadella would go on to pen an article in Slate, that tackled the issue head on, arguing that AI and humans can exist in harmony if strict development safeguards exist – something that is now regarded as the genesis of Microsoft’s current internal policies.

Heading into the Aether

By 2017, Microsoft had started work on turning Nadella’s ideals into something a little more tangible, deciding that the answer was to involve as many voices as possible in development. To this end, Microsoft created the Aether Committee, an internal ethics board made up of representatives from all the various departments involved in the development and delivery of AI products. Today it includes people from its engineering teams, sales teams, and research departments, as well as a representative from Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Economist.

“One way of accounting for the broad use of the technology across a range of different sectors is to bring a range of perspectives to the actual work,” says Natasha Crampton, head of Microsoft’s Office of Responsible AI. “As much as possible, you want to try and have a diverse group of people actually building the technology. That then helps you try and avoid the situation where your training data is a miss-match for the real world conditions for which the technology is used.”

Aether, which stands for ‘AI, Ethics and Effects in Engineering and Research’, was the first step in creating greater accountability and communicating what can and can’t be done at a development level among the many teams operating across the globe. The committee was tasked with ensuring that any work on AI being done at the company followed a set of new principles now being championed by Microsoft – fairness, reliability in its purpose, safety, privacy and security, and inclusivity of wider society, all of which are underpinned by the ideas of transparency and accountability.

While Aether proved useful for communicating these new ideas, the committee functioned solely as a non-binding advisory body, promoting fairly vague principles without the powers to create or enforce policy. Its limitations in affecting change soon became clear and in 2018, Microsoft created the Office for Responsible AI, a separate department responsible for enforcing new development policies and maintaining oversight of all AI development, with the help of the committee.

“You can think of the Office for Responsible AI as the governance complement to the advisory function of the Aether Committee work,” explains Cramption, who has headed up the unit since July 2019. “So together, we have this company wide approach where we use Aether as this thought leadership body to unravel some of these really thorny questions, and my office sort of defines the company wide approach and roles.”

Crampton and her team have been tasked with coming up with a set of internal policies to help govern the development of AI at Microsoft – in other words, safeguards to prevent a repeat of Tay. A large part of that is case management, which ensures that new and existing projects are able to effectively translate academic AI papers into something fit for the real world, as well as improving communication between development, sales and public-facing teams – something that was clearly ineffective during the rollout of Tay in 2016.

One way it does this is by assessing projects for ‘sensitive use cases’– anything that’s likely to infringe on the fundamental human rights of the end user or lead to the denial of services (such as a loan application), anything involving the public sector, or any service that could harm the end user, either physically, psychologically, or materially. Through this, the Aether committee and OFRA can triage use cases as Microsoft works with customers, and pass recommendations up to the senior leadership team.

At least, that’s the idea. Most of Microsoft’s AI policies are still in a pilot phase.

“We’ve been piloting the standard for coming up to five months now and we’re starting to get some interesting learnings,” explains Crampton.

“We’re imminently about to bring on more groups as part of our phase 2 – the rollout is accompanied by research and a learning process as we go, because the whole point of the pilot is to make sure that we are refining the standard and improving it as we learn more. Based on what we see now, my expectation is that by the end of the next financial year, so in 2021, we will have it rolled out across the company.”

Owning up to mistakes

Microsoft’s work in this area is as much about righting the wrongs of the past as it is about ensuring AI is built for everyone. Tay was certainly a blemish on Microsoft’s development history, but the incident also shattered any trust the public had placed in AI-based software and served as validation for those who feel the technology is overhyped, or perhaps even dangerous.

“We’ve tried to approach this in a humble way, recognising that we don’t have all the answers yet … these are really tough challenges that we’re confronting,” says Crampton.

“The near term role of it is to really be a champion for developing new practices … to uphold our principles. I really want to be forward leaning on that and really try and do what we did for privacy or security and embed responsible AI considerations into our thinking when we’re developing technologies.”

Crampton believes her soon-to-be company-wide AI policies are a reflection of a maturing Microsoft, a company trying to be more responsible with how it develops software, and how it speaks to its customer base.

“When customers come to us and ask us to help them with solutions, we think about how we can help the customer with a product in a way that upholds our principles,” says Crampton. “And … sometimes we are conscious of how a system may be expanded in the future.

“A number of our AI technologies are building blocks, especially when we think about some of our cognitive services. By design, we make available the building block and the customer adds various components. If we use facial recognition as an example, we provide the [facial] matching technology, but the customer adds their cameras, their database, their people and their processes. Recognising that there are all of these different actors, different people contributing different things to create an overall system and interaction between components is really important, and so is the accountability between different players.”

“We really try hard to communicate the limitations of our technology,” adds Crampton. “In the past, I think Microsoft has really just focused heavily on the capability. We think it’s important to talk about the limitations as well. And so we are trying to communicate those to our customers so that they are educated about the downstream issues that could arise.”

​Amazon Web Services has unveiled a free open source operating system called Bottlerocket, designed specifically to run containers on bare metal or virtual machines.

Bottlerocket is being pitched as a purpose-built operating system designed with a single-step process to make it far easier to automate updates, while also cutting out much of the unnecessary elements found in general-purpose software.

Its biggest selling aspect is its dual partition setup, running as active and inactive. When an update is issued, the inactive side is changed first, with the system then switching the positions of the partitions in order to complete the update.

The OS also uses image-based updates, which means the update can be rolled back in its entirety if necessary, helping to reduce downtime and minimise process failure. This is in contrast to most general-purpose operating systems which use a package-by-package approach.

As part of the slimmed-down design, Bottlerock takes a different approach to authentication and secure login normally found on general-purpose systems. There’s no SSH server to support secure logins, although users can use a separate container to access admin controls.

The new OS also supports all the container tools you might expect, including Docker images and anything conforming with the Open Container Initiative standard. The system is also built with some third-party components, including the Linux kernel, the container’s runtime, and Kubernetes. 

The OS is currently in a preview state, and is hosted on GitHub alongside a host of tools and documentation to support its use. Among these is a Bottlerocket Charter, which claims that the OS is open and “not a Kubernetes distro, nor an Amazon distro”, adding that such a platform can only be built with the support of a wider community.

Despite its open nature, the OS is optimised to work best with AWS tools out of the box, specifically Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

The OS is currently available in a free public preview as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Elastic Cloud Compute. Once released to general availability, Bottlerocket will come with three years of support, incorporated into AWS support plans at no extra cost.

​Avast has announced it will be closing down its Jumpshot data analytics unit, only a day after launching an internal investigation into data-sharing practices following user complaints.

On Tuesday, the company was accused of collecting customer online behaviour data and passing it on to its Jumpshot unit, where it was then sold to third parties, according to an investigation by PC Mag and Motherboard.

Avast has denied the allegations contained in the report and, according to company CEO Ondrej Vlcek, both Avast and Jumpshot have “acted fully within legal bounds” and have “committed themselves to 100% GDPR compliance”.

However, announcing the decision on Thursday, Vlcek said that a review of Avast’s practices revealed that the “data collection business is not in line with our privacy priorities as a company”.

“Protecting people is Avast’s top priority and must be embedded in everything we do in our business and in our products. Anything to the contrary is unacceptable,” said Vlcek.

“I firmly believe it will help Avast focus on and unlock its full potential to deliver on its promise of security and privacy. And I especially thank our users, whose recent feedback accelerated our decision to take quick action,” he added. “As CEO of Avast, I feel personally responsible and I would like to apologize to all concerned.”

Vlcek also said the decision would impact “hundreds” of Jumpshot employees and customers, but that it was “the right thing to do”.

Avast intends to continue paying Jumpshot vendors and suppliers in full during the wind-down process, and will begin notifying customers shortly. It also added that the closure would not affect its 2019 fiscal results.

Having once led the anti-virus market, Avast is now considered the fifth-largest provider of security software behind Symantec, McAfee, ESET and Bitdefender.​

​It’s now official: Microsoft’s extended support for Windows 7 has now come to an end, marking the retirement of an operating system that enjoyed enormous success and popularity over its ten-year lifetime.

Organisations across the globe should now be working to ensure Windows 7 is removed from their environments, although, given the nature of software migration, it’s very likely that the operating system will maintain a large market share for many months to come.

The moment is bittersweet, as although Windows 10 has been the most popular desktop operating system globally since December 2017, the decline of Windows 7 has been remarkably slow given that it first hit the market in 2009. An intuitive design, stable performance and a much-loved taskbar were a breath of fresh air following the widely criticised Windows Vista, something that helped maintain its popularity through the disastrous launch of Windows 8.

The death of Windows 7 seems to have hit some harder than others, but fortunately, the measured, stable, and not at all unhinged IT industry has decided to give the software the send-off it deserves.

The outpouring of love on social media ranges from touching to the truly bizarre.

However, the best tribute so far comes courtesy of employees at Databarracks, who decided to express their reverence of the software by holding a traditional Viking funeral, complete with a little boat.

Touching stuff.

As of December 2019, Windows 7 held a market share of just under 27% globally, although this varies considerably depending on the demographic you look at. In the regions of Africa and India, for example, almost 40% of desktops are running Windows 7, while areas such as the US and the UK lead the way with 18% and 16% respectively.

The numbers stand in stark contrast to those of Windows Vista and the much younger Windows 8 – a sign that the ghost of Windows 7 is almost certainly going to linger for many years to come.

Those that have been heavy reliant on Windows 7 should have already started to migrate away from the OS. However, for those looking for tips about how to move operations over, we’ve put together this handy guide, although perhaps it’s time you start looking for Microsoft alternatives.

HPE missed analyst estimates in its fourth-quarter earnings report on Monday, largely driven by slowing demand for core products and wider economic uncertainty.

Shares slumped 4% in after-hours trading, prompted by a drop of 11% in the company’s Hybrid IT division, by far HPE’s largest unit comprising its servers, storage and data centre products. Revenue for the unit came in at $5.67 billion, just short of the $5.74 billion expected by analysts.

The company’s Intelligence Edge unit, a field that HPE has aggressively targeted, also saw revenue slump by 6.5%, falling from $773 million to $723 million year over year.

In September, HPE CEO Antonio Neri warned that turbulent economic factors, including trade tensions, were creating “uneven demand” and would rattle customer confidence for some time to come.

Commenting on this week’s earnings, he said: “We had a very successful fiscal year, marked by strong and consistent performance. Through our disciplined execution, we improved profitability across the company and significantly exceeded our original non-GAAP earnings and cash flow outlook, while sharpening our focus, transforming our culture and delivering differentiated innovation to our customers as they accelerate their digital transformations.

“I am confident in our ability to drive sustainable, profitable growth as we continue to shift our portfolio to higher-value, software-defined solutions and execute our pivot to offering everything as a service by 2022,” Neri continued. “Our strategy to deliver an edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service is unmatched in the industry.”

There were some positive signs for the company. Quarterly profit was slightly higher than analyst estimates, earning 49 cents per share compared to the 46 cents per share that was anticipated, as reported by Reuters.

HPE also gave a positive outlook for the year ahead, estimating a $1.01 to $1.17 per share in profits and $1.78 to $1.94 per share in adjusted profits.

The earnings report brings to an end a year marked by a series of strategic acquisitions that will likely serve to further diversify HPE’s earnings in 2020. In May the company acquired supercomputing giant Cray, a deal that came as somewhat of a surprise but will certainly lead to more developments in its high-performance computing division.

HPE also acquired the intellectual property of big data analytics specialist MapR in August. This deal included a bunch of AI technology and expertise that HPE said would be put towards its Intelligent Data Platform.

Microsoft Teams has surpassed 20 million daily active users, an increase of 7 million since July, the company has revealed.

The collaboration suite, available as part of Microsoft’s premium Office 365 brand or as a free version, exceeded the popular Slack platform as being the most used business chat app earlier this year.

In fact, Teams now only sits behind Microsoft’s other chat platform Skype for Business in terms of popularity. However, the company has made it clear in the past that Teams will eventually supersede Skype as its primary tool.

Although Slack has grown to 12 million daily users as of October, that modest growth has been dwarfed by the successes of Microsoft Teams. Slack shares fell as much as 10% following Microsoft’s announcement on Tuesday, and have fallen 18% since the company’s public launch in June.

Meanwhile, Workplace by Facebook reported in October that it had surpassed 3 million subscribers, up one million since February.

Microsoft announced a batch of updates for Teams at its annual Ignite conference earlier this month, including a simple sign-on mechanism for front line workers, new integrations with Yammer and Skype, an expansion of the Advanced Threat Protection suite to cover messages within Teams, and the general availability of private chats.

Microsoft’s Office 365 subscription gives premium access to the Teams app, alongside its traditional productivity software. Commercial Cloud, the division that Teams falls under, is one of the highest performing areas of the company, making up over one-third of its overall revenue, according to third-quarter figures.

Slack hasn’t spent the year idle, having overhauled the underlying technology of its desktop app in July to help reduce RAM usage by 50% and improving loading times by 33%. The company also added new features in August that help admins manage permissions, and a Workflow Builder in October, that allows users to automate routine functions using custom workflows.

Microsoft’s enormous flagship Ignite conference is now over for another year, but the roadshow has only just started – the company is set to visit a total of 30 different countries between now and mid-April 2020.

It was perhaps the largest conference I had ever attended personally, and featured a massive number of updates across its software and cloud portfolio. Major highlights include a new hybrid cloud platform dubbed Azure Arc, a new strategy and look for its Edge browser, and a raft of updates for its Teams suite.

What struck me most, however, was Microsoft’s pragmatic attitude to both its investments and long-term goals. Whether the result of shrewd thinking or simply a realisation that the market isn’t where the company wants it to be, Microsoft is looking to compromise.

Perhaps the most prominent example of this was in its security content. Ignite’s security and compliance keynote – the first of its kind for Microsoft – was packed with updates across Microsoft’s portfolio. However, despite the announcements, Microsoft wanted attendees to leave with 3 simple rules to follow: Turn on MFA, stay up to date, and use SecureScore (the company’s built-in compliance tool).

In fact, speaking with executives after the show, I learned that these rules had been baked into every security presentation across the week, some 21 sessions. Every presenter was told to include one last slide that reminded users to turn on MFA.

It’s a self-confessed compromise from a company that has spent a number of years trying to pivot its customers towards passwordless security. In the words of Alex Simmons, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s Identity division, this is “the new Microsoft, it’s a little bit more empathetic”.

Passwordless remains an incredibly important part of Microsoft’s security strategy, but it’s clear that this goal is still some distance away – at least three years according to Simmons. While it’s managed to onboard over 100 million of its users to things like biometric security, it still has around 700 million left to go. It’s clear that customers aren’t quite ready to completely change their own approaches to security. Whether that’s due to the complexity of legacy hardware, or simply a reluctance to change, the company isn’t quite meeting its customers where they are.

It’s clear then why Microsoft is now making its MFA tool free for every user – it’s a reluctant nod to customers, saying: “If you’re going to use passwords, at least do it properly”.

The same can be said for Microsoft’s ambition for its Edge browser. The industry was eager to see what the company would do with its modernised platform, having just moved to the Chromium source code. It was never going to be enough to say that Edge now has parity with Google Chrome over things like compatibility and performance. Microsoft knew that, and from the way Edge is now being sold it seems the company is no longer trying to compete with rivals that are too far ahead in the race.

Instead, the company has taken quite a bold, and potentially innovative, step to try and fuse together the capabilities of a web browser with the data of a company’s intranet. Edge is now pitched as a business companion tool that quite frankly could make the browser relevant again in the market.

Microsoft has had a difficult year, no more so than with a Windows platform that’s been plagued with bugs and shoddy launches. Those experiences, backlash from customers and its growing irrelevance in certain markets seems to have humbled the company, and so it’s now time to start meeting customers where they are, rather than telling them where they need to be.

Microsoft Ignite has delivered an enormous number of updates across the company’s product portfolio and in particular its collaboration platform, Teams.

To make life a little easier for readers we’ve rounded up the most important changes, some of which are available now, with others being accessible through Microsoft’s preview programme.

Simple sign-in for Microsoft 365

Microsoft has added a bunch of authentication features to its 365 platform that will also filter down to Teams. Most of these are aimed at what the company calls “firstline workers”, defined as those employees who act as the first point of contact for a business, typically retail staff.

Firstly, SMS sign-in is coming to Teams, allowing users to log onto the service with their phone number and an SMS authentication code, effectively removing the need to remember passwords. Likewise, a Global Sign-out feature is also on its way for Android devices that lets workers sign out of all their 365 apps, including Teams, with one click.

Firstline managers will also soon be able to manage user credentials directly. The goal here is to reduce the strain on IT support by allowing managers to, for example, help employees reset passwords without having to turn to support teams.

All of these authentication features are currently in preview but are expected to become generally available before the end of the year.

Content management and Yammer integrations

There are also a bunch of new features designed to make it easier to access and manage files and tasks across its Microsoft 365 portfolio from inside the Teams app.

Aside from a few minor tweaks to permission options, some bigger changes include being able to preview files from 320 different file types, support for relevant People cards and recent files that are now displayed alongside chat windows, and the ability to sync Team files to a PC or Mac.

Customers will also be able to migrate conversations they’ve had in Outlook into the Teams app before the end of this year and in the first quarter of 2020, the company plans to add a new UI for tasks created in Teams, Planner or To Do.

Finally, Yammer, the enterprise communications app that at one time looked like it was going to be scrapped, will be integrated into Teams in a preview state by the end of the year, before rolling out generally in 2020.

The app has received a complete redesign, being the first to be built from the ground up using the Microsoft’s Fluent Design System – Microsoft’s latest design language. For Teams, this means that the app can be accessed directly from the left rail, although this new version is unavailable until its private preview in December, with general availability at some point in 2020.

Emergency calling

Speaking of communications, US customers are now able to use a feature called Dynamic Emergency Calling, which also provides the current location of the user to emergency services. Currently, the feature supports those on Microsoft’s Calling Plan, although Direct Routing users will eventually be supported before the end of the year.

There were also a number of smaller announcements for the calling function. Music on Hold is a fairly self-explanatory new feature, offering the option to play music for any caller placed on hold or put into a queue. Location Based Routing allows customers to control the routing of calls between VoIP and PSTN endpoints. And finally, larger organisations with a global footprint can now choose the nearest Microsoft media processor to handle their calls, which should improve overall performance.

Upgrade to Microsoft Teams Rooms

Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR), the successor to Skype Room Systems, also received a handful of updates, the biggest of which is compatibility with Cisco WebEx and Zoom, allowing Teams users to connect to these services directly. This should be available starting in early 2020, beginning with WebEx.

The second big announcement is the launch of a new managed service called Managed Meeting Rooms. This will provide cloud-based IT management and security monitoring for meetings, as well as support onsite services through a partner network. This service is available now in private preview and is expected to launch generally during spring 2020.

Enhanced security

There have also been a tonne of security and compliance updates for IT admins.

Firstly, Microsoft’s Advanced Threat Protection has been extended to messages within Teams, offering real-time protection against malware and malicious scripts. Similarly, the option to apply policies that block groups from sharing files with each other now also covers files stored within SharePoint.

Admins have also been given more options concerning the length of data policies, with the option to enforce restrictions for a single day, as well as new PowerShell functions designed to make it easier to assign policies across larger Teams groups. It will also soon be possible to manage device usage and deployments through a single management portal.

Private chat and customised conversations

The option to chat privately inside a Team is now generally available to all users, allowing customers to create separate chat windows that can be viewed and accessed by a select few of the team’s members.

The multiwindow feature is also coming to Teams from the first quarter of 2020, allowing users to pop out chats and meetings into a separate window. Users will also be able to pin specific channels to the left rail, allowing them to keep track of most-commonly used conversations.

Finally, the Teams client is also heading to Linux, with a public preview being made available before the end of 2019.

Virtual consultations

A new feature called Virtual Consults is available in private preview, designed to make it easier for organisations that rely on sensitive consultations with their customers, such as healthcare professionals or customer service agencies, to arrange calls. The feature brings with it built-in meeting transcriptions, cloud-recording and the option to blur out backgrounds if they are in a location that would otherwise distract from the meeting.

Developer tools

A healthy chunk of upgrades were also reserved for the Teams developer community.

Firstly, Microsoft has made the tools available as part of its Power Platform more accessible in the Teams environment. Power Apps developers are now able to publish their creations as Teams apps directly to the company’s app library, making it easier for users to find them. The whole process of adding apps has also been made easier. As for users, they will eventually be able to pin these custom apps to the left rail, once this comes into play before the end of 2019.

Power BI is also receiving some updates that will translate to Teams next year, including the ability to create interactive cards within Teams conversations for users to engage with. The Power BI tab in Teams will also be given an upgrade, making it easier to select the right reports.

Microsoft kicked off its Ignite conference this week with the reveal of its Azure Arc platform, a set of tools designed to simplify the management of deployments across multiple clouds, on-premises, and edge.

The platform also allows for Azure services and management tools to be expanded to new infrastructures, including Linux and Windows Server, as well as all Kubernetes clusters spread across multiple cloud types.

The idea is to create a single, centralised hub so that users can apply existing tools, such as Azure Resource Manager, Azure Shell, Azure Portal, Azure API, as well as its policy and security protocols, across all deployments. This effectively allows customers to run Azure services irrespective of where the deployment resides.

The move symbolises Microsoft’s effort to accommodate customers that are reluctant, or unable, to become entirely hybrid by allowing them to be more flexible in how they use Azure tools. It also extends many of the benefits of cloud to those parts of a business still reliant on on-premises infrastructure or private data centres, which can now be plugged into Azure.

Specifically, the Azure Portal tool within Arc will give customers a unified view of all Azure data services running across all on-premises and cloud deployments, and the Azure Kubernetes Service can be used to spin up new clusters if they run out of on-premise capacity, the company claims.

What will perhaps matter most is that this expanded availability will also allow customers to make use of all the security and compliance tools integrated into Azure, including controlled access and company policy enforcement.

“With Azure Arc, and with it, the arrival of multi-cloud management in Azure, we are now seeing perhaps the biggest shift yet in Azure’s strategic evolution,” argues Nick McQuire, VP and head of Enterprise and Artificial Intelligence Research at CCS. “It means that Microsoft is becoming more attentive to customer needs, but it is also an indication that battlelines of competition in cloud are shifting towards managing the control pane.”

“In embracing hybrid multi-cloud, Azure Arc also validates the big investments made by key competitors over the past 12-18 months most notably IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat and Google Cloud’s Anthos. The stage is set for AWS to follow suit next month at reinvent.”

Microsoft has released a major update for its Edge browser, which introduces a new logo and a host of business-focused features designed to fuse together intranet and internet search.

It’s arguably the first major change of direction for Edge since it migrated to the Chromium source code late last year, and is a clear attempt to reassert itself as a relevant browser.

Currently in preview, the new update introduces the ability to access company intranet directories from within the Edge browser. For example, entering the name ‘Sofia’ into the Edge search bar will bring up the details colleagues that the user is likely to be searching for, based on previous interactions or similar projects.

Another example Microsoft gave was an employee searching for how many days they are allowed to take off for jury duty, with the top result being the company’s own policy taken directly from the organisation’s intranet.

Given that the new version of Edge is built on the Chromium source code, it’s unsurprising to hear that Edge now has performance parity with Google’s Chrome and is now a perfect match in terms of website compatibility. However, the company explained that it was keen to innovate beyond that to remain competitive.

“We see a unique opportunity to bridge the tradeoffs of today’s web search with more complete solutions that Microsoft can uniquely address,” explained Yusef Mehdi, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Modern Life & Devices division. “The irony is that it is easier to find an obscure piece of information on the much larger internet, than it is to find a simple document on your company’s intranet such as a paystub portal, a pet at work policy, or the office location of a fellow employee.”

Employees will be able to use natural language search to find colleague titles, team names, office locations, floor plans, definitions for company acronyms, and a wide set of internal company information, Microsoft explained.

“As company information continues to expand to terabytes, petabytes and zettabytes of information, this will only get more complex,” added Medhi. “We will unite the internet with your intranet with Microsoft Search in Bing so that you can increasingly access more of your important data in a single browse and search experience.”

Drag and drop search

Another feature, known as Collections, allows workers, such as those involved in procurement, to drag and drop items from search results into a list that can be shared to others, complete with all the appropriate images and metadata for those items. It’s also possible to export this list into Excel, which will automatically input the metadata into a spreadsheet.

A product demo also revealed that each user will be given a personalised homepage, which was largely influenced by their account being logged into the Azure Directory. This meant that links and data from the company’s intranet could be displayed in the place of trending news stories.

InPrivate and baseline cookie blocking

Alongside the business update, the company was also keen to showcase its new privacy protections, including default anti-tracking filters, which it has been working on since June, and an incognito mode dubbed InPrivate, which the company claims offers the most effective protection on the market.

“We’re taking a new, more protective stance to help you on the web. ‘Balanced’, which is what we do by default… gives you more protections than any other browser. If you really want to have your data and privacy secure, you’re going to want to with Microsoft Edge.”

These options can be tweaked in the Edge settings. By default, Edge will block all trackers originating from sites you haven’t actually visited, but a ‘Strict’ option is also available, which will block the “majority of trackers from all sites”, and potentially break some website functions that rely on cookies.

The second feature, the InPrivate mode, is pitched as being a more robust version of Chrome’s Incognito. Medhi explained that Chrome’s version “keeps your browsing safe and private, but what you don’t know is that you can be accidentally logged in on Gmail and your search is not private”, referencing this story from earlier in the year.

“When you navigate to a page (in Edge), we will actually prevent you from being accidentally logged in, and all those searches are kept on the machine, they don’t go back to the server.”

Release schedule

A handful of smaller announcements also accompanied the new Edge launch, including an expansion to the App Assure program to cover the new browser, as well as an expansion of the FastTrack deployment program to rollout Edge in Q1 of 2020.

The release candidate for the new Edge browser is available to download now for both Windows and macOS, with the company aiming for general availability by 15th January.