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Microsoft Is Changing How Searches  Will Work

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Change is coming to the way Microsoft handles search across its ecosystem.  If you use the home edition of Office, you’re not likely to notice, but if you use Office 365, the changes will be significant.

Here’s what’s happening:

First of all, the search bar will get bigger, taking a more prominent and visible place on your screen’s real estate.

Second, anywhere the company utilizes a search box (from their Bing search engine, to the OS itself, to Teams, Office and more), the plan is to provide a unified and consistent look that is intended to improve the overall user experience.

The box itself is getting a makeover and will soon start offering suggestions based on your previous search behaviors.  For instance, it may present you with a list of frequently used email contacts or documents that you’ve recently edited, with the list updating dynamically as you begin typing a term into the search field.

In addition to that, you’ll soon be able to search for commands within a given application, so instead of hunting around on the menu bar for the function you’re looking for, the search box will take you right to it, showing it among the search results.

If you’re signed into your Office 365 account, the search results will also include any documents you have saved in OneDrive or SharePoint and relevant conversations in Yammer and Teams if you use those.  It also may feature contacts from your company directory.

Most significantly, since the Bing search engine is itself a search box, those results will be displayed alongside relevant webpages.

If you’re curious to see it in action, it is currently available today as an opt-in beta/preview mode for corporate users.  It’s also available in both Outlook and SharePoint mobile apps.  The general public will be able to see it in action as soon as the second quarter of 2019, when the new functionality will be expended to Office Home, Office Desktop and Windows 10 itself.

Google May Be Getting Rid Of Google Plus

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If you’re one of the relatively few people who use Google+ in something other than an Enterprise setting, be advised that the clock is ticking.  Google has just announced that they’re sunsetting the service.  It will be going offline for consumers at some point over the next ten months.

The reasons for their decision are complex.  In part, it stems from the fact that the company readily acknowledges that it has “low usage and engagement,” which is underscored by the fact that 90 percent of Google+ user sessions last less than five seconds.

Another major component driving the decision is that the company suffered serious pushback when it revealed a previously undisclosed security flaw that exposed users’ profile data.  The company patched the issue in March of this year (2018), but the company’s long delay in going public with the flaw didn’t sit well with Google+’s user base.

Note that the company plans to continue offering Google+ for Enterprise customers to facilitate intra- and inter-company communications. In fact, they plan to roll out a raft of new features in the year ahead.

Google also recently announced other changes. Pending API changes, one new feature will limit developers’ access to data on Android devices and user Gmail accounts. Also, contact interaction data will soon be off limits, as will call logs and SMS permissions.

There are changes coming to Gmail itself as well, where developers will be sorely limited in how much access they have to user emails.

As Ben Smith (the company’s VP of engineering) explains, “Only apps directly enhancing email functionality–such as email clients, email backup services and productivity services (e.g., CRM and mail merge services)–will be authorized to access this data.”

Any developer who currently has this level of access can expect a security assessment and agree to the company’s new rules.  We’ll provide more details as they become available, but broadly speaking, these are good changes that will enhance data security for the company’s legions of users.

Windows 10 Adoption Continues To Grow

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Windows 10 is far and away the fastest growing version of the OS in the company’s history.  It recently hit an installation base of a staggering 700 million devices after about three years on the market.

Note that these installation figures include installs not just on PCs, but also on Surface Hubs, Xbox, HoloLenses and smartphones.

Unfortunately, as impressive as that number is, it falls well short of Microsoft’s original estimate of a billion installs in three years.

The smaller than expected number of smartphone installations is the key reason behind the shortfall.   Initially, the company had envisioned these devices adding several hundred million installations to the total count. However, when Microsoft switched gears and decided to abandon the smartphone market, it was inevitable that they would fall well short of their original target.

It matters because part of Microsoft’s pitch to developers was the massive (projected) size of the Windows 10 market.  Now that the official numbers are in, and the final count is some 30 percent lower than anticipated, part of that appeal is understandably gone.

Even so, a market made up of 700 million devices is certainly nothing to sneeze at and developers are heavily invested in the platform, so it would make little sense for them to abandon it now.  Not to mention the fact that the number of installations is expected to continue to grow at a healthy clip for the foreseeable future.

Inside the Windows ecosystem, 43 percent of Windows PCs are currently running Windows 10, with another 45 percent still running Windows 7.  Given that support has officially ended for Windows 7, it’s all but guaranteed that Windows 10 will ultimately reach one billion installations. It will probably  reach a bit more than that as users continue to slowly migrate away from Windows 7.

At the end of the day then, although Microsoft’s time frame was a bit too aggressive, it looks like they’re going to hit the magic number.

Google’s Emergency Location Service Improves 911 Response

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Google is making a small but pivotal change as it relates to calls placed to 911 operators.  Having recently finalized a complex partnership with RapidSOS and West (two emergency technology companies) and T-Mobile, Google will now send location data from its “Emergency Location Service” when an Android user places a 911 call.

If the caller is a T-Mobile customer, the information will be passed along via the carrier. Where 911 call centers use RapidSOS, Google will send the location data via the technology company.  In the US Virgin Islands, Google has made the same arrangement with the Emergency Tech company, West.

While the announcement may raise some surprised eyebrows, the change has been in the works for more than a year. Google has spent much of that time testing.  Their findings were that the location data Google sent over was more accurate and arrived more quickly than the data the 911 call centers had been getting previously.

Not to be outdone, Apple announced in June of this year that it was developing a similar service for iOS users, and that beginning with iOS 12, Apple devices would automatically send location data to emergency call centers when users dial 911.

Even privacy advocates agree that this is generally a good move, and it’s one of the growing number of instances where smart use of technology can save lives.  Anything we can do to give our nation’s emergency call centers an edge is an important change. Currently, those call centers take an average of 140,000 calls a day, so this is by no means a trivial issue.

Kudos to both Google and Apple for taking bold action on this issue.  While we may not like the idea of having our location data shared, in this particular instance, it certainly seems like a smart play.

G-Suite Users Can View Employee Productivity With Work Insights

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Google has recently made some changes and improvements to its G-Suite. It introduces new tools designed to allow managers and admins greater visibility into how the people in their organizations use the G-Suite.

Currently, the “Work Insight” tool is available in beta and displays information on how G-Suite is deployed at the team level.

While this will be a boon to all organizations, it will be especially valuable for organizations moving from legacy tools to the G-Suite.  It will also serve to shine a light on teams or individual employees who could benefit from additional training on specific applications and provide valuable information on cross-team collaborations.

Where collaboration is concerned, the thinking is that admins would be able to see, for example, how many members of a sales team are working collaboratively with the marketing department. They could also see whether that collaboration is happening via face to face meetings or via co-created documents.

In addition to the Work Insight tool, Google also announced the availability of the G-Suite Security Center, which is an investigative tool that provides admins with a dashboard they can use to monitor a variety of security metrics.

The two big advantages to the new Investigation tool are:

It gives admins the power to scale an incident response as needed, up to and including scaling it across an entire domain

It adds integrated remediation to the detection and prevention capabilities already available to admins in the G-Suite.

Taken together, these changes should make life much easier for both managers and admins, providing better data which can be transformed into hard-hitting business information.  If you use the G-Suite at all, be sure to check out these new tools at your next available opportunity.  Both are excellent additions.

Android May Be  Coming To More New Cars Soon

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Google scored a major coup in the auto industry. They just inked a deal that will put the Android OS in every car made by the global auto alliance Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi. It sold a staggering 10.6 million vehicles around the world last year.

The tech giant has struggled to get its foot in the door, primarily because auto makers have been hesitating on handing over the keys to their Infotainment and other computerized systems, in fear of being shut out of the data collected by those systems.

It’s a fair complaint and a valid concern, but Google has been working hard to build trust in the auto world and has taken a variety of approaches.

Their first move was to build an OS called “Android Auto” which mirrors the functionality of the Android OS but offers scaled down functionality which means it falls well short of “Android running on a car.”

Having gained some ground with that approach, they next introduced Android Automotive, which is essentially the entire Android OS, geared specifically for vehicular use.  They showed off their work last year at the 2018 I/O Tech conference, and their persistence paid off.

It’s a big win on all fronts.  The automakers win by retaining access to their data, while handing off the software function to a company with a long history of getting it right.

Google wins because it expands the Android ecosystem in a whole new way. Consumers win because it offers a seamless (and improved) user experience and makes it easier for an auto owner to sync their Android device to their car.

Google also wins because they get access to all the data generated by the in-auto OS after gaining permission from the user.  Plus, having scored a partnership with one major auto alliance, others will surely follow, which will further expand the tech giant’s footprint.

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