Microsoft is rolling out a host of new email security features for Office 365 later this quarter, as it looks to thwart hackers and criminals.

‘Insider spoofing’ or faking the CEO’s email address to trick the CFO into transferring millions to criminal bank accounts is big business. Now Microsoft is using big data and reputation filters to try and squish the threat.

According to the FBI, between October 2013 and August 2015, 7,066 US businesses have fallen prey to ‘business email compromise’, netting criminals an estimated $747m.

Non-US victims lost a further $51m over the period, with the FBI estimating a 270 percent increase in identified victims since January 2015, when it first released figures about the threat category.

As Microsoft notes, when a corporate email domain is spoofed, it makes it hard for existing filters to identify the bogus email as malicious.

However, Microsoft reckons it has achieved a 500 percent improvement in counterfeit detection using a blend of big data, strong authentication checks, and reputation filters in Exchange Online Protection for Office 365.

It’s also rolling out new phishing and trust notifications to indicate whether an email is from a known sender or if a message is from an untrusted source, and therefore could be a phishing email.

The company is also promising a faster email experience as it vets attachments for malware and new tools to auto-correct messages that are mis-classified as spam. The aim is to boost defences without impairing end-user productivity.

Malicious email attachments remain a popular way for attackers to gain a foothold in an organization and, as RSA’s disastrous SecurID breach in 2011 showed, a little social engineering can go a long way to ensuring someone opens it.

Microsoft’s new attachment scanner, called Dynamic Delivery of Safe Attachments, looks to reduce delays as it checks attachments for potential threats.

Currently it captures suspicious looking attachments in a sandbox with a ‘detonation chamber’ where it analyses it for malware in a process takes five to seven minutes.

Microsoft hasn’t figured out a faster way to analyse the attachment, but instead of holding up the email as it conducts the scan, it will send the body of the email with a placeholder attachment. If the attachment is deemed safe, it will replace the placeholder and if not, the admin can filter out the attachment.

The feature is part of Microsoft’s Office 365 Exchange Online Protection and Advanced Threat Protection services.

The company is also tackling false-positive spam, or legitimate messages that are mis-identified as spam, and vice versa, with a new feature called Zero-hour Auto Purge, which allows admins to “change that verdict”.

“If a message is delivered to your inbox and later found to be spam, Zero-hour Auto Purge moves that message from the inbox to the spam folder; the reverse is true for messages misclassified as spam,” Microsoft notes.

Microsoft is testing this approach with 50 customers and says it will be rolled out for all Exchange Online Protection global clients in the first quarter of 2016.

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This year will mark the first full year of release for Microsoft’s new OS. A look at what’s in store for Windows 10 this year.

Windows 10 was described as the “last version of Windows” – an OS that would evolve over time rather than be superceded.

In the few months since Windows 10’s launch Microsoft says it has been installed on more than 110 million devices. But just what lies in store for the OS in 2016, how will it get better and what new devices will it find its way onto?

1. Windows 10 will begin automatically installing on your old machine

Windows 10 is available as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and 8.1 users and Microsoft is getting increasingly aggressive about moving these users to the new OS.

From this year Windows 10 will automatically begin installing on most Windows 7 and 8.1 machines.

Users will still need to confirm the installation manually for it to continue. However, if they choose not to proceed it’s unclear if they can cancel it altogether, with Jeremy Korst, general manager of the Windows and Devices team at Microsoft, saying only that “the customer will have the ability to delay it for some period”.

If users do upgrade but don’t like Windows 10 they will have 31 days to roll back to their previous OS.

The automatic installation, the result of Microsoft changing the status of the Windows 10 upgrade to a Recommended update, will be preceded by increasingly insistent nag messages to upgrade. These notices are already being shown to some Windows users and have been criticised for not offering an easy opt-out.

2. Microsoft Edge will get extensions

Windows 10 launched with Microsoft Edge, a new browser that cast off a lot of the legacy code holding Internet Explorer back.

However, while speedy and capable on paper, the browser suffers from its share of bugs and is missing support for extensions, a key feature found in competitors such as Chrome and Firefox.

Microsoft will rectify this omission “early next year” when Korst said it will add extensions to Edge in test builds of Windows 10, ahead of being made generally available.

Extensions are small software programs, typically written using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, that augment the functionality of a browser.

Earlier this month, Microsoft accidentally published a website announcing the introduction of extensions to test builds of Windows 10. The site, which was taken down, referenced extensions for Pinterest and Reddit.

Microsoft originally planned to add support for extensions to Edge this year.

3. Windows 10 will blur the virtual and real world

Microsoft’s Windows 10-powered augmented reality headset HoloLens will ship to developers in the first quarter of 2016.

The augmented reality headset places 3D virtual images in the wearer’s vision so that they appear part of the real world – for instance, a Minecraft landscape sits on a coffee table or a Skype video sits on the wall.

After trying a demo of the headset this week, TechRepublic senior writer Dan Patterson said that though the headset had a limited “field of vision”, “the 3D animations are smooth, easy to interactive with, and result in only marginal eyestrain”.

The HoloLens doesn’t come cheap, with the developer kit priced at $3,000 – although Microsoft says this early release is meant for developers and commercial customers.

Although HoloLens has obvious consumer and gaming uses, Microsoft is stressing its use for business and is working with NASA, AutoDesk, Volvo, Dassault Aviation, Case Western Reserve University, and other large organisations to develop applications for it.

4. More security for enterprise

The coming year will also see some notable new features added to the enterprise version of Windows 10.

Key among these additions is Enterprise Data Protection, which will allow companies to separate work and personal data on devices using containerisation file techniques. It will also encrypt data as it moves around the organisation – helping to ensure that information isn’t accessed by the wrong people.

The feature will be rolled out to people testing Windows under the Insider Program “early this year”.

5. Testers will get a peek at even earlier builds

Those testing early releases of Windows 10 under the Windows Insider Program will be able to get earlier access to new features from January this year.

Those who choose to be in the “fast” ring of the Insider Program will receive builds of Windows 10 more frequently in 2016, according to Microsoft VP Gabe Aul.

The price of testers getting their hands on early builds more regularly will be that this software will likely include more bugs, he said. Those testers who prefer stability to early access should opt for the “slow” ring, he said.

6. Cortana will be everywhere

Microsoft is planning a major upgrade to Windows 10, codenamed Redstone, next year – with reports the upgrade will put Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana at the core of the OS.

An unnamed source told The Verge the new Cortana will help users with a much wider range of tasks inside Windows 10, appearing contextually in documents to provide “information and assistance” and giving Cortana control over a wider range of notifications.

The other major upgrade to Cortana will reportedly be an ability to start a task on one device and pick it up on another, for instance if you get a missed call on an Android phone running the Cortana app you could reply from your Windows 10 PC via text.

7. Microsoft doubles down on Windows 10 phones as desktops

A much touted feature of Windows 10 is its ability to run a desktop OS from a phone.

Microsoft’s new Lumia 950 and 950XL handsets can – wirelessly or via a dock – be hooked up to a monitor, mouse and keyboard and used to run a Windows desktop.

The Windows 10 OS can change the look and feel of certain apps, as well as its own appearance, to suit the phone or the desktop, as well as coping with everyday desktop tasks, such as multitasking and copying files from a USB stick.

The expectation is that Microsoft will further commit to this idea of using your phone as a desktop in 2016, with rumours that Panos Panay and the team behind the high-end Surface Book laptop are working on a Surface Phone that will release next year.

8. No more free upgrade

Windows 10 is available as a free upgrade to everyone running Windows 7 or 8.1 but only for a limited time.

The offer of a free upgrade will expire on 29 July 2016 – after which point it seems that users will have to buy a Windows 10 licence.

However, due to the in-your-face tactics that Microsoft is adopting to persuade people to upgrade, it seems unlikely that Windows 7 and 8.1 users will inadvertently miss out on the offer.

9. Windows 10 replaces its predecessors on new PCs

If you’re not a fan of Windows 10 then you should buy a new PC before October.

From the end of October 2016, PC makers will have to sell new machines with Windows 10, rather than Windows 7 or 8.1.

After that point businesses that want to run older Windows versions on new machines will have to rely on downgrade rights or software assurance rights under volume license agreements.

10. Windows 10 Surface Hub arrives

From January 2016 Windows 10 will power another new piece of hardware,Microsoft’s touchscreen computer the Surface Hub.

The successor to its large-screen Perceptive Pixel displays, the Surface Hub will run a custom version of Windows 10 and various apps needed for workplace communication and collaboration, including OneNote, Skype for Business and Office.

The 55-inch, Intel Core i5-based Surface Hub model will sell for $6,999 (estimated retail price), and the Intel Core i7-based 84-inch version for $19,999 ERP.

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Microsoft begins selling its new highest-end Office 365 business plan, E5, on December 1 for $420 per user per year. Here’s what’s included.

Microsoft will charge users $35 per user per month, or $420 per year, for its new highest-end Office 365 business plan.

Microsoft officials went public with the pricing for Office 365 E5, its top-of-the-line commercial Office 365 offering, on November 30 during the company’s Convergence EMEA conference. Office 365 E5 is available to customers for purchase starting, December 1.

Office 365 E4 — the current high-end version of Microsoft’s Office 365 line — sells for $22 per user per month, or $264 per user, per year.

The Office 365 E5 SKU will include Skype for Business (Lync) with support for features including Cloud PBX and Meeting Broadcast; new analytics features, like Power BI Pro and Delve Organizational Analytics; and new advanced security features, such as eDiscovery, Customer Lockbox, and Safe Attachments.

Office 365 E4 includes Skype for Business with Enterprise Voice and unified messaging; the full suite of locally downloadable Office apps; and Power BI for Office 365 (which is being superseded by Power BI pro).

Microsoft is planning to retire E4 and replace it with E5. However, Office 365 E4 will remain on the price list till June 30, 2016, Microsoft officials have said.

The E1 and E3 versions of Office 365 will retain their current prices of $8 per user per month, and $20 per user per month, respectively.

Office 365 E1 users will get new work-management capabilities, as well as Skype for Business’s Meeting Broadcast functionality added to their plans for no additional charge. Office 365 E3 users will get those same two new features, as well as the option to purchase Equivio Analytics for eDiscovery. (Microsoft bought Equivio in January 2015.)

Skype Meeting Broadcast enables users to broadcast of a Skype for Business meeting on the Internet to up to 10,000 people, who can attend in a browser.

Office 365 E5 users get all the features that E1 and E3 users get, plus other analytics and networking functionality, including Cloud PBX and PSTN Conferencing.

The Skype for Business Cloud PBX with PSTN Calling service provides users with the ability to make and receive traditional phone calls in their Skype for Business client, and to manage these calls using hold, resume, forward and transfer.

PSTN Conferencing is initially available to 15 countries on December 1, with a phased roll out to international markets in the future. Cloud PBX is available worldwide starting December 1. PSTN Calling is available in the U.S. starting December 1, with a phased roll out to international markets in the future.

The fine print: PSTN Conferencing users may incur additional per-minute consumption charges, but customer can disable this feature to avoid additional billing. PSTN Calling is paid add-on for E1, E3 and E5. For E5 users, PSTN Calling costs $24 extra (per user, per month) for international and domestic calling, and $12 for domestic calling only. For E1 and E3, the international and domestic calling plan is $32 extra.

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The Microsoft Surface Book is the computer you always wanted to have but couldn’t. So now that it is here, will you buy it?

The latest line of Microsoft Surface personal computers is now available from both the virtual and the bricks-and-mortar Microsoft Store. By most accounts, the Surface Pro 4 and the flagship Surface Book offer impressive performance without sacrificing style or that illusive awe factor typically missing from PCs in general.

With the Surface Book in particular, Microsoft is attempting to change the narrative of the personal computer—to change perceptions in the marketplace. The Surface Book is an aspirational computer and it is intended to inspire desire in the overall PC and computing device market.

Strategic reasons

There are some solid strategic reasons why Microsoft has brought the Surface Book to market.

Giving OEMs a reference for their own hardware and increasing participation in Microsoft cloud services and the ecosystem that goes with it are certainly notable goals of the Surface Book.

But there is even more to it than that.

Hardware

It is important to understand the hardware inside the Microsoft Surface Book. These are the technical specifications of a powerful computing device. You do not buy a Surface Book so your kids can watch movies in the car while you run errands.

With a high resolution screen, SSD storage up to 1TB, up to 16GB RAM, an Intel I5 or I7 CPU, and a customized discreet GPU from Nvidia, the Surface Book is designed for performance and productivity. This is some serious computing power delivered in a small package.

Of course, that power comes at a premium price, but that is where the aspirational part of the strategy comes into play. Microsoft knows it will not sell millions upon millions of Surface Books. That is not its purpose. Instead, Microsoft wants millions upon millions of people to want a Surface Book—to aspire to own one someday.

Microsoft wants the Surface Book to be the notebook computer you would buy if money were not an issue. It wants the Surface Book to be a status symbol PC.

Marketing

This is a bold move by Microsoft and it goes hand-in-hand with the “PC does what?” marketing campaign produced in conjunction with its OEM partners like Dell and Lenovo. These companies are trying to make PCs cool again. They are trying to steal some of the thunder so often associated with Apple.

And while the “PC does what?” campaign gets mocked, mostly by fans of Apple, it is more effective than many believe. Remember the Mac versus PC commercials? People often mocked those as inaccurate oversimplifications of fact, but they still seemed to elevate the “cool” factor of the Mac. It didn’t matter what everyone thought of them; what mattered was the perception they produced.

Bottom line

The Microsoft Surface Book sets a high bar for every other notebook computer that comes to market. Microsoft has carefully crafted a powerful computer with hardware, features, and style no other company can currently match. In a single stroke, Microsoft has made owning a PC cool again. It has made the Windows 10 ecosystem cool again.

Let’s punctuate the point with anecdotal evidence. A number of people have spent much of their professional lives complaining about Microsoft and PCs. They have been working in the Apple’s ecosystem and hating every minute of it. They have been looking for more than what Apple offers for years now. The day Microsoft announced the Surface Book, they ordered one. They haven’t been this excited about buying a computer for a decade.

With this lineup of Surface products, Microsoft has changed the tide and established market momentum. It will be interesting to see how Google and Apple respond. We should see some serious competition now. It also wouldn’t be surprised to see a resurgence in Windows 10 mobile devices later this year. It looks to be an exciting time for consumers. Hang on to your hats.

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Microsoft wants Office 2016 to be the last office productivity suite you will ever need. Here are 10 things you should know about how it plans to make that happen.

On September 22, 2015, Microsoft released Office 2016 to the masses. At first glance, you may not notice much has changed since Office 2013. But when you look deeper, you will find some interesting and productivity-enhancing differences.

For years we’ve been promised wonderful benefits from cloud computing, and Microsoft Office 2016 is trying to deliver on those promises. It’s designed to meet our expectations of what a cloud-based, mobile-ready productivity suite can and should be. Only time will tell if Office 2016 actually delivers the goods, but the initial reviews are promising.

Here are 10 things Microsoft Office 2016 offers as it aspires to be the last productivity suite you are ever going to need.

1: Real-time co-authoring

Co-authoring has been around for a long time for many Office apps, but with Office 2016 that collaboration can now take place in real time. That means you will be able to see what your co-conspirators are doing in a Word document or PowerPoint presentation as they do it—and conversely they will be able to see what you are doing. It won’t even matter where you are or what device you are using.

2: OneNote notebook sharing

OneNote is one of the most useful applications available in Microsoft Office, and it is also one of the least appreciated. Office 2016 allows you to share a OneNote notebook with as many people as you want. And because OneNote works with text, images, worksheets, emails, and just about any other document type you can think of, it can be a great central resource for a team working on a project. That is, if they know to use it.

3: Simplified document sharing

Office 2016 simplifies sharing of documents by adding a Share button to the upper-right corner of your Office apps. Clicking that button will give you one-click access to share your document with anyone in your contacts list. You don’t even have to leave the document to do it. That does sound pretty simple.

4: Smart attachments

If you’re like me, you have to send email attachments just about every day. In previous versions of Office, adding attachments to an email required you to navigate to the location where the document was stored. You can still do that in Office 2016, but if the document in question was one you worked on recently, it will now show up in a list of shareable documents right there in Outlook. Essentially, Office 2016 keeps a universal recently worked on list for you.

5: Clutter for Outlook

Like most of us, you probably get a ton of email every day. Wading through the Outlook inbox to prioritize each email takes time and hampers your ability to be productive. Office 2016 adds a new category to your inbox triage toolbox, called Clutter. You can designate certain emails as low priority and they, and future similar emails, will be deposited automatically into a Clutter folder in Outlook. So now you have four categories for email: important, clutter, junk, and delete.

6: Better version history

Collaboration and creativity can be a messy process, with shared documents changing drastically over time. Office 2016 compensates for potentially lost ideas by keeping past versions of documents and making them available directly from Office applications under the History section of the File menu.

7: New chart types in Excel

The ability to visualize data with an Excel chart has always been a welcome and powerful capability. However, the list of available chart types found in previous versions of Excel needed an update. Office 2016 adds several new chart types to the templates list, including Waterfall, which is great chart if you like to track the stock market. Other new chart types include Treemap, Pareto, Histogram, Box and Whisker, and Sunburst.

8: Power BI

Between the release of Office 2013 and Office 2016, Microsoft spent a great amount of time and capital acquiring technologies that shore up its business intelligence and analytical applications. Power BI, a powerful analytics tool, now comes bundled with your Office 365 subscription. Knowing every little detail about how your business is running is essential information, and Power BI can bring it all together for you.

9: Delve

Delve is another new tool that comes with an Office 365 subscription. The best way to describe Delve is as a central location that gives you access to everything you have created, shared, or collaborated on using Office 2016. It is another recently worked on list, only this version of the list is stored in the cloud—so you can access it from anywhere with any device using the Office 365 Portal.

10: Purchase choices

Office 2016 is generally available only as a subscription. Even if you buy a boxed version of Office 2016, you are buying access to an annual subscription, with one exception. If you purchase the Office Home & Student 2016 box, you pay a one-time fee of $149.99 for just the basic Office apps.

Microsoft has definitely stacked the deck so that the best bang for the buck is a subscription to Office 365, which includes Office 2016 plus all the cloud services. Businesses should be looking at one of the Office 365 for Business subscriptions. It is also going to be your best deal.

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If you were still thinking about placing an order for a new Microsoft Surface Book, then you will have to look somewhere other than the Microsoft store.

While there doesn’t seem to be a massive supply issue with the new Apple iPhone 6s smartphone, in the past we have seen Apple products sell out quickly and deliveries move from days, to weeks, to months. It seems that Microsoft’s new Surface Book may be generating more interest than planned.

Last night I went to the online Microsoft Store to place an order for a base model Surface Book. I found that the only available status when choosing that model was, “Email me when available.” I jumped through the other four models and discovered the same thing. It seems Microsoft is sold out of pre-order stock for all models at its online store.

We reached out to Microsoft to try to find out more about stock status and when buyers could expect to place pre-orders. I also asked if there will be units in Microsoft retail stores on launch day, 26 October. Given that units are sold out online, we may even see people queue up for possible stock in stores.

A Microsoft spokesperson provided the following statement, “We’ve seen strong demand for Surface Book and have sold out of pre-order supply for October 26 availability. We will have limited quantities of Surface Book available in store on October 26 and will be updating online availability with new product ship dates soon.”

UPDATE: Microsoft updated its store and is no allowing customers to pre-order the five Surface Book variations. What you will find instead of an email me when available button is updated delivery expectations, ranging from five to six weeks for three models and seven to eight weeks for two models.

While I was disappointed that I couldn’t purchase a Surface Book through Microsoft directly, I found that Best Buy and Amazon will also be selling this new computer. Best Buy did not appear to be taking pre-orders, but I was able to purchase the Intel Core i5, 8GB, 128GB model from Amazon for $1,499.

The Amazon website does not appear to carry the 256GB i5 without dGPU or 256GB i7 models. The 256GB i5 with dGPU looks to be the only other model available for pre-order. The 512GB i7 model is on the site as an option, but redirects you to the Microsoft Store for purchase and it’s not avaialable there.

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