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Microsoft acquires FSLogix to enhance the Office 365 virtualization experience
The way Microsoft 365 enables customers to shift to a modern desktop experience puts it at the heart of workplace transformation. A modern desktop with Windows 10 and Office 365 not only offers the most productive and most secure computing experience, it also saves IT time and money, and allows for a focus on driving business results. For many companies, their specific needs require a modern desktop be virtualized.
To help extend our virtualization capabilities and provide an even richer experience for Microsoft 365 customers, we are excited to announce the acquisition of FSLogix.
FSLogix is a next-generation app-provisioning platform that reduces the resources, time and labor required to support virtualization. From small businesses to very large global enterprises across numerous industries, FSLogix solutions enhance customer experience and productivity, while reducing support requirements for IT departments.
In September 2018, we announced Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop – a Microsoft 365 service that empowers customers to run a modern desktop experience on Azure. It is the only cloud-based service that delivers a multi-user Windows 10 experience that is optimized for Office 365 ProPlus and includes free Windows 7 Extended Security Updates. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale Windows and Office on Azure in minutes, with built-in security and compliance.
With this acquisition, customers will benefit in a number of ways. Through customer engagement, we know that Microsoft Office applications are some of the most highly used and most commonly virtualized applications in any business. Office 365 ProPlus is currently the best Office experience, and, with FSLogix enabling faster load times for user profiles in Outlook and OneDrive, Office 365 ProPlus will become even more performant in multi-user virtual environments (including Windows Virtual Desktop).
We are excited to welcome FSLogix to Microsoft, and we look forward to the impact its technology and its people will have on our customers’ virtualization experience.
The post Microsoft acquires FSLogix to enhance the Office 365 virtualization experience appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
O PHC EXEC Talks está a chegar.
Diversity and inclusion update: The journey continues
Earlier today, Microsoft released its fourth annual comprehensive workforce demographic report. This report reflects our commitment to continuous improvement, finding new ways of reaching diverse talent pools and continuing to evolve a culture of inclusion throughout every level of the company.
The takeaway from today’s report is this: We are seeing signs of progress, and some of the seeds planted in prior years are beginning to take root, but we know we have more ahead of us than behind us. We know that diversity for our employee population requires a long-term commitment and success will not happen overnight. We must also continue to foster an inclusive working environment that will enable all our employees to do their best work and serve the diverse needs of our customers around the world. In short, we need to build on the past year’s progress and recognize we have a lot of work still to do.
Consistent with last year’s disclosure, today we are sharing not only Microsoft’s numbers in a stand-alone fashion, but we are also providing a snapshot of Microsoft and LinkedIn’s representation in two key categories: women globally; and racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S.
Microsoft & LinkedIn
This year and going forward, we’ve aligned reporting of our workforce representation data with the end of our fiscal year; all year-over-year comparisons appearing in this post will compare June 30, 2018 to June 30, 2017.* As of June 30, 2018, the total combined percentage of women who work at Microsoft and LinkedIn stood at 28 percent, up one percentage point from the same time last year. The percentage of African American/Black employees at the two companies increased from 3.8 percent to 4 percent; and the percentage of Hispanic/Latinx employees saw a similar year-over-year increase from 5.5 percent to 5.7 percent. For a look at LinkedIn’s stand-alone workforce demographics, click on LinkedIn Diversity.
A Look at Microsoft’s Numbers
Women at Microsoft – Gains Along the Continuum
Our efforts to recruit, retain and grow the careers of women at Microsoft resulted in an increase in female representation at the company of 1.1 percentage points compared to last year, from 25.5 percent to 26.6 percent.
We’re seeing gains along the continuum, from early-in-career employees to women in more senior roles. For example, the percentage of female interns at Microsoft increased from 40.4 percent to 42.5 percent in the past year. In addition:
- The representation of women in technical roles increased nearly one and a half percentage points – from 18.5 percent to 19.9 percent.
- The representation of women in leadership roles increased almost a full percentage point, from 18.8 percent to 19.7 percent.
These increases in representation are important because they are one indicator of how our work to develop groundbreaking technologies and solutions across the company is increasingly informed by a wider range of perspectives and experiences. These figures also represent a longer-term trend of women in technical and leadership roles at Microsoft.
Women at Microsoft
Racial & Ethnic Minorities
In terms of race and ethnicity, we saw slight year-over-year growth in total representation as well as in tech and leadership roles.
The representation of African American/Black employees increased from 3.9 percent to 4.1 percent, and the representation of Hispanic/Latinx employees increased from 5.8 percent to 6.0 percent.
We saw modest increases for both African American/Black and Hispanic/Latinx employees in leadership and tech roles, as well:
- African American/Black representation in tech roles increased from 2.5 percent to 2.8 percent
- African American/Black representation in leadership roles increased from 2.3 percent to 2.4 percent
- Hispanic/Latinx representation in tech roles increased from 4.2 percent to 4.5 percent
- Hispanic/Latinx representation in leadership roles increased from 4.2 percent to 4.4 percent
Racial & Ethnic Minorities
We also pay close attention to leading indicators to see how we are doing at attracting new employees to come work at Microsoft. In the past year, for example, more than half of our U.S. interns were women, African American/Black and Hispanic/Latinx.
Board of Directors and SLT Representation
Our board of directors remains among the most diverse of any company in the technology industry with six of 14 board members either being women or ethnic minorities. Our 15-member Senior Leadership Team includes three women and three racial or ethnic minorities.
The Road Ahead – The “How” Behind our Efforts to Improve
Anyone who has followed the issue of diversity in tech over the past several years knows that impacting workforce demographic numbers – particularly in large companies – requires persistence and a long-term commitment to improve.
There are no quick fixes. True, long-lasting change can only come from dedicated, intentional efforts throughout the entire technology ecosystem – such as building an early appreciation for technology as a fulfilling academic or career path, inspiring talented people to consider joining the technology industry, investing in the ongoing development of our talent, building more connections for a sense of belonging, and increasing the skills of managers and leaders to better support the growth and success of their employees.
Whether it is enhancing our inclusive hiring practices, embedding inclusion into our DNA as a company, or holding leaders accountable for diversity and inclusion within their own organizations – all of these things factor into how we are approaching our D&I efforts at Microsoft.
Broadening our Aperture: Finding Talent in New Ways
We know that there is great talent and potential in our world. We’re continuing to push ourselves to engage in developing the pipeline, while also challenging our assumptions on where and how best to identify talented employees. We’re investing in a wide range of initiatives and programs to identify great people who can help Microsoft grow and innovate. Here are a few examples:
- DigiGirlz gives middle school and high school aged girls opportunities to learn about careers in technology, connect with Microsoft employees, and participate in hands-on computer and technology workshops.
- Black Girls Code helps provide girls of color ages 7-17 exposure to computer science and technology so they can start seeing themselves in and working towards roles in tech.
- The Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS) program led by Microsoft helps high schools build and grow sustainable computer science programs. Approximately 53,000 students have participated in a TEALS class since 2009, 30 percent of whom have been female and 30 percent of whom have been a racial or ethnic minority. The number of girls and minority students participating in a TEALS program has grown over 400 percent in the past five years.
- We continue to be a leading funder and board member of Code.org which works at-scale across the country and has made diversity in computer science a major priority. This past year, 45 percent of the students in Code.org’s K-12 classes were female, and 48 percent were minorities.
- Our strategic partnership with the National Center for Women in Technology’s (NCWIT) Aspirations in Computing program has channeled more than 13,000 high school girls into the computer science pipeline.
- The Microsoft Software & Systems Academy provides military service members and veterans with critical technology skills and job opportunities as they transition into the civilian workforce.
- Our Military Spouse Training Academy is a new pilot program that provides spouses with technology skills training.
- Our engagement in tech apprenticeship programs helps identify and develop talent for the industry through curriculum and on-the-job training. Microsoft is one of the founding hiring partners for Apprenti, a registered apprenticeship program recognized by the U.S. Department of Labor.
- We also created our own immersive apprenticeship, called the Learning Engineering Acceleration Program (LEAP), to develop as software engineers and technical program managers for Microsoft’s core engineering groups.
- Through our Inclusive Hiring program, we are innovating new approaches to recruit people with disabilities. Our Autism Hiring Program is just one example of the promise and potential of these programs.
As we pivot to new technologies like AI, the Cloud and Quantum computing, we need to have a real-world approach to finding talent wherever it may exist, not just in computer science classrooms at four-year universities. The world around us is growing each day with advances in technology and industry, so too must our approach to finding, growing and advancing talent.
Inclusion as a Core Priority
Our efforts to expand the talent pipeline and grow our inclusive hiring practices can be considered foundational to Microsoft’s overall D&I efforts. But we’re not content to simply rely on existing programs to get people into the company – we are pushing ourselves to treat employees like we are recruiting them every single day. Inclusion – the way we engage with and learn from each other and remind each other we belong here – is critical to what we’re building at the company. Our efforts to attract diverse candidates can only move us forward if we provide the opportunity for people to do their best work and feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves.
We are deepening our commitment to building a more inclusive environment through programs like expanded parental leave, unconscious bias training and the continued support for and growth of our eight Employee Resource Groups. More recently, we made Inclusion a “core priority” for all employees at Microsoft, which means that as part of the performance review and growth process, every employee is invited to deepen their learning about diversity and make inclusion a daily – and personal – part of their job.
Leader Accountability
We are also continuing to hold leaders accountable by tying a portion of their compensation directly to diversity progress within their respective organizations and increasing manager adoption of inclusive practices through targeted training sessions, learning/feedback solutions and toolkits.
Our approach is holistic. While each of these initiatives is designed to have some measure of individual impact, we look at them collectively and believe the whole is greater than the sum of their parts.
Final Thoughts
Seeing signs of progress with the state of diversity inside Microsoft should not be equated with being content, because we are anything but. The numbers we are sharing today tell us we are on the right path – but we know we’re still in the nascent stages of our journey. True success should be defined along a continuum that includes more than just point-in-time numbers.
While I have only been in my role for four months, I am energized by the challenges and opportunities in front of us. We are driven by a mission that is inherently inclusive: empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Employees at all levels and in all functions own the cultural transformation by their individual actions. And Microsoft’s commitment to diversity and inclusion is deeply connected to its purpose to create the technologies that will fulfill its mission to help all achieve more. Mission, culture, purpose – the right fuel for our ongoing journey.
*Disclosures in prior years were based on a September 30 reporting date.
The post Diversity and inclusion update: The journey continues appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
Microsoft introduces guidelines for developing responsible conversational AI
As more of our partners, clients and customers set out to design conversational interfaces such as chatbots and virtual assistants, they often ask us for advice on how to develop these technologies in a way that will benefit people while also maintaining their trust. Today, I’m excited to share guidelines that we’ve developed for responsible development of conversational artificial intelligence, based on what we have learned both through our own cross-company work focused on responsible AI and by listening to our customers and partners.
The field of conversational AI isn’t new to me or to Microsoft. In fact, I’ve been working on conversational interfaces since 1995 when we developed Comic Chat, a graphical chat service that was embedded in an early version of Internet Explorer. The lessons we’ve learned from those experiences, and from our more recent work with tools such as Cortana and Zo, have helped us shape these guidelines, which we follow in our own efforts to develop responsible and trusted bots.
These guidelines are just that – guidelines. They represent the things we’ve found helpful to think through, especially when designing bots that have the potential to affect people in consequential ways, such as helping them navigate information related to employment, finances, physical health and mental well-being. In these situations, we’ve learned to pause and ask: Is this a situation in which it’s important to make sure there are people involved to provide judgement, expertise and empathy?
In addition to these guidelines, we hope you’ll take advantage of other tools we offer, such as the offensive text classifiers in the Microsoft Bot Framework to protect your bot from abuse and Microsoft Azure Application Insights to build traceability capabilities into your bot, which are helpful in determining the cause of errors and maintaining reliability.

In general, the guidelines emphasize the development of conversational AI that is responsible and trustworthy from the very beginning of the design process. They encourage companies and organizations to stop and think about how their bot will be used and take the steps necessary to prevent abuse. At the end of the day, the guidelines are all about trust, because if people don’t trust the technology, they aren’t going to use it.
We think earning that trust begins with transparency about your organization’s use of conversational AI. Make sure users understand they may be interacting with a bot instead of – or in addition to – a person, and that they know bots, like people, are fallible. Acknowledge the limitations of your bot, and make sure your bot sticks to what it is designed to do. A bot designed to take pizza orders, for example, should avoid engaging on sensitive topics such as race, gender, religion and politics.
Think of conversational AI as an extension of your brand, a service that interacts with your customers and clients using natural language on behalf of your organization. Remember that when a person interacts with a bot that represents your organization, your organization’s trust is on the line. If your bot violates your customer’s trust, then their trust in your organization may in fact be violated. That’s why the first and foremost goal of these guidelines is to help the designers and developers of conversational AI build responsible bots that represent the trust in the organization that they represent.
We also encourage you to use your best judgment when considering and applying these guidelines, and to also use the appropriate channels in your organization to ensure you’re in compliance with fast-changing privacy, security and accessibility regulations.
Finally, it’s important to note that these guidelines are just our current thoughts; they are a work in progress. We have more questions than we have answers today. We know we’ll learn more as we design, build and deploy more bots in the real world. We look forward to your feedback on these guidelines and working with you as we work toward a future where conversational AI help us all achieve more.
Related:
Read: Responsible Bots: Ten Guidelines for Developers of Conversational AI
Learn more about Microsoft’s approach to AI and take a look at our book, The Future Computed
About Lili Cheng, Corporate Vice President, Conversational AI
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