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Latest Windows 10 Update Causing Audio Issues

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Microsoft hasn’t been terribly impressive lately when it comes to Windows 10 updates.  In fact, it’s fair to say that they’ve been a complete mess.  Just recently, they’ve issued updates that have deleted user files and caused crashes after creating incompatibilities with keyboard drivers. Now, (courtesy of the most recent Windows 10 update), many users are reporting that they’ve got no sound due to corrupted or incompatible audio drivers.

The company has made hasty corrections to their previously botched updates and patches, but as yet, there has been no official word from the company about a fix for the audio driver issue. The legions of Windows 10 users aren’t happy about it, and are taking to social media to express their displeasure.

All over Reddit and Twitter, dissatisfied Windows 10 users are up in arms about the string of shoddy updates that have created more problems than they have solved.

Since Microsoft hasn’t released a fix for the latest debacle, the company’s massive user base has begun investigating and have come up with a workaround.

In a nutshell, if you’ve installed the latest Windows 10 update and lost your audio as a result, go into your device manager and look for an audio driver that has “SST” as part of the name.  If you find one on the list, right click that device and select “Update Driver.”  Once the driver has been updated (which may require a system restart), your audio functionality should be restored.

As mentioned at the start, this isn’t the first time the company has issued a botched update, and the problems only appear to be getting worse over time.  It seems clear at this point that Microsoft doesn’t have enough support staff to identify and prioritize bugs reported by their army of beta testers.  Until that changes, we can expect issues like this to continue.

New Windows 10 Update Pulled For Unintended Data Deletion

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Microsoft is having problems, and those problems are spilling out onto the company’s massive user base.  In a highly unusual move, the company pulled its latest Windows 10 update after receiving numerous complaints from users about missing files.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time the company has had problems with updates to their OS.  Back in April, the company delayed a planned update because at the last minute, Blue Screen of Death issues were discovered.  In another instance, they had to rush out a patch after an update to fix Chrome and desktop freezing issues that impacted more than half a billion machines.

These issues have led many to begin questioning the company’s QA/QC process.  It’s a fair question, because the issues described above are far from trivial, and should have been caught.

At the core, it appears that the main problem is communication. Research has revealed that these issues were caught, they simply weren’t flagged for review because they didn’t get a sufficient number of upvotes by the beta testing user community.

Windows 10 represents a significant departure from the company and a new era of openness.  While Windows 8 was designed with little to no user input, Microsoft opted to open the Windows 10 development process up, relying on more than ten million beta testers to try out their new features and solicit feedback on.

Unfortunately, there appears to be a few gaps in their process, and those gaps are allowing serious problems to go un-noticed until they are in the wild.

Another problem is that because the company is relying so heavily on their massive beta test group, they phased out their dedicated Software Test Engineering staff. This was during a massive round of layoffs that came about a year ahead of the Windows 10 release.

Apparently, the decision to remove the STE group from the equation was premature, and given the recent flood of problems, the Windows 10 feedback program appears to be in need of a serious overhaul.

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.

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.

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.

Microsoft Allowing More Time For Major Windows 10 Updates

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Microsoft has been making two major Windows 10 releases every year, giving businesses 18 months before they need to move to the next update. This plan and schedule is part of the company’s “Windows as a service” paradigm, designed to ensure that Windows 10 gets new features, as opposed to the company’s former practice of a new Windows release every three years.

In most respects, the new paradigm has to be regarded as the superior approach, but unfortunately, the pace is a bit too fast for some businesses. High level executives have pushed back, asking for more time and flexibility to update the OS, so they can be sure that business critical apps work with the latest update.

Microsoft has heard, and more importantly, they’ve listened. However, business owners didn’t get everything they wanted. Here’s the scoop:

The company is planning to release a series of cloud-based tools that will make app compatibility testing easier, and has agreed to give IT admins more time to update. As things stand now, all currently supported feature updates of Windows 10 (Enterprise and Education editions) are supported for 18 months. The company is expanding that to 30 months, but only for their September release. The March updates will still only be supported for 18 months.

While not a perfect solution, it does give everyone some of what they wanted. Businesses will have an extra year to apply the latest features if they stick to the September cycle, while firms that don’t need the extra time can simply continue on as they are.

Jared Spataro, the Corporate VP of Microsoft 365 summarized the changes this way:

“You’ve been talking, and we’ve been listening. We recognize that it takes time to both upgrade devices and operationalize new update processes. Today’s announcements are designed to respond to your feedback and make it easier, faster, and cheaper to deploy a modern desktop.”

On the whole, this is very good news indeed.

Encrypted Chats Are Now Available In Skype

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Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it had entered into a partnership with Open Whisper Systems, the makers of the Signal app.   The purpose of the partnership was to bring Signal’s open source, end-to-end encryption protocol to Skype.

As of the latest Skype builds, that is now a reality.  Stable versions of Skype have been released for Windows, macOS, Linux, android, and iOS.  If you haven’t yet upgraded to the latest versions and want to begin making use of the new protocol, you should upgrade to Skype v8.15.0.306 if you’re an Android user, or Skype v8.28.0.41 if you’re a Windows user.

The new feature is called “Skype Private Conversations.”  To access it, just press the “+Chat” button at the top of your contacts sidebar and select “New Private Conversation.”

A couple of caveats here.  First, both parties will have to have the latest version of Skype to make use of the feature.  Second, a new private conversation needs to be started from each device.

Assuming that’s the case, Skype sets up keys to encrypt the conversation. Note that as the name of the protocol indicates, this is end-to-end encryption, which means that the messages remain in an encrypted state even while in transit between the two devices that are communicating.

It’s a good feature, and a long-overdue addition that makes Skype even more useful.  At present, however, the implementation is a bit cumbersome. It won’t see widespread adoption until a majority of the Skype user base has upgraded to the latest version.

Nonetheless, this is an excellent development that will, over the medium term, make communications more secure.  Be sure your team is aware, and if you want to begin using encrypted chat right away, make sure that all users upgrade to the latest version.

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