New Alliances And Cloud Offerings Announced By Microsoft

Microsoft is always innovative and tends to search for new ideas to make their products more user friendly and popular. One such effort taken by Microsoft to remove the barriers from cloud adoption is by starting new partnerships and products with the assumption that most of the businesses will tend to rely on cloud services more by the year 2017. Brad Anderson, the Vice President of Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise edition said that the future of the business depends on mobility/Cloud and that “the future is now.”

He said, “Our differentiated Cloud innovations, comprehensive mobile productivity solutions and developer tools help all of our customers realize the true potential of the Cloud era." As a part of their project, to launch wide range of new products, Microsoft used the TechEd North American forum, which is similar to Microsoft help forum. The new product includes the introduction of private connections to the Cloud. Moreover, there is Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, which will help the users to make connections that are private between on premises environment and Azure.

By starting partnerships with companies like Equinix, BT, AT&T, TelecityGroup, SingTel, Zadara Storage and Verizon, new options for embracing the cloud will be offered by ExpressRoute. This will also include some features like security, low latency, fast speeds, and other reliability features. By enabling a single file share from multiple virtual machines, Microsoft Azure files streamline the cloud storage. This will help to save huge sums of money and time. In addition, Microsoft also introduced some computer-intensive virtual machines, reserved IP addresses and in-region and cross-region virtual networking connections.

The preview of the Azure API Management is also available and the users can make use of it to create new business models and to improve the inter-departmental information sharing. This is mainly done by revealing APIs with the use of cloud based services. In the coming month, we will see the introduction of the preview of Azure Site Recovery, which was formerly called as Hyper-V Recovery Manager. With the introduction of this, the users can recover the files more effectively and by paying lesser costs.

With this new feature, a customer can easily recover or replicate virtual machines in Windows Azure, if any error or failure occurs in the main datacenters. Moreover, Microsoft is also introducing a preview of Microsoft Antimalware for Azure, which will help the users to install antivirus software for both virtual machines and cloud services. For more news and information regarding this, refer the Microsoft help forum.

Review Of Facebook Messenger App For Windows Phone

Every day, new third party software companies are releasing their apps in the Windows app store. Facebook Messenger was amongst the first to release their Microsoft 8 compatible app in the Window app store because of its popular demand. Even with its swiftness, a lot of users contacted the Microsoft help forum inquiring why Facebook is not integrated into Windows 8 by default. Like its previous versions, it lets you send messages, photos and stickers to your Facebook friends.

Getting Started with Facebook Messenger

After installation, you will be prompted to log in using your Facebook account upon loading. Once the website has loaded, the app will further request for your phone number, so that even people who have your phone number can contact you in the messenger, even if the person is not friends with you in Facebook. Do note that this feature is optional and can be opted out of.

Facebook Messenger Features

If you are a Facebook user, chances are you have been using the mobile Facebook messenger app for some time. Even if you are a first time user, you will feel familiar once you start using the app because of the design similarity with Facebook.com.

The main screen, which is called Recent, will show all the recent conversations you had with your friends. Upon installation, this screen will not have any conversations. Upon use, you will see the last message, name and display picture of the friends you had conversation with.

Next to the photos, a narrow color icon shows if the user is online or not. If the icon is blue, it shows that the user is using the Facebook Messenger App and is currently logged in and available. If the icon is grey, it means that the user is not online at the moment.

By swiping your finger or tapping on the pages, you can enter the other pages in the app. These are Messenger and Active respectively. As the name suggests, Active gives a list of users that are online at the moment while Messenger gives the complete list of all your friends. Both these pages could have been integrated into a single one which shows the entire friend list and online contacts. The current design is redundant and rarely used by most users.

If you have any issues installing or running the Facebook Messenger on Windows 8 platform, feel free to contact the Microsoft help forum.

Flash Media Errors On YouTube In IE 11

IE 11 is the latest version of the Internet Explorer released by the tech giant Microsoft. Like other versions of Internet explorer, IE 11 also shows some issues while playing Flash media and many such problems in displaying Flash sites are being reported at the Microsoft help forum. All the Windows operating systems like Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 experienced this issue. The users have experienced many problems like freezing completely to BSODs to repeated warnings to download the latest Flash player and site not loading properly.

These problems have been noted many times and up to now, Microsoft has not come up with any fix or explanation. Earlier this month, an IE patch was introduced and it was supposed to solve the issues associated with displaying flash sites. However, that did not happen. Now, the only solution left to the use is either to use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

A little knowledge about its history is required to understand the nature of the problem. There are three primary infection targets for Windows PCs. One is Adobe Flash, the other is Adobe Acrobat and the final one is browser-based JavaScript. As a result, many of the Windows customers have suffered a lot because Adobe was unable to fix the security holes.

At the time of launch of IE10 along with Windows 8 operating system, the flash player was included within the IE browser and the customers do not need to download and install the flash player separately.  The Flash Player in IE came up with a lot of features. However, only the flash sites that were in Microsoft’s white list could be accessed. But, the sites that are not in the white list will be blocked automatically and the flash plug-in will not be played.

However, the things went on to change very quickly, when Microsoft came up with an announcement that they decided to turn the Flash white list of IE10 to IE10 Flash blacklist. As a result, the operation of the built in Flash player will be as before but the XML file that containing the white list websites was modified to accommodate new sites that were in the black list. This has led to many problems.

Therefore, Microsoft needs to find a very quick fix to solve the problems while playing Flash sites in Internet Explorer 11. To know more about the problem and fixes, visit the Microsoft help forum.