Tag Archives: Microsoft

On August 29, Microsoft went public with promised cloud outsourcing and hosting changes which officials first outlined earlier this year. These changes, which will take effect on October 1, 2022, still don’t address some of the core customer and partner complaints which led to Microsoft revising its policies in these areas.

Microsoft introduced outsourcing restriction in 2019 that resulted in customers paying more to run Microsoft software in non-Microsoft cloud environments. Customers who had been using AWS and Google Cloud as dedicated hosts for running Windows Server and clients were affected directly, but some of them didn’t realize the extent of the impact until their contracts with Microsoft were up for renewal this year. Microsoft’s changes around its…

It’s probably not what the open source community wanted from Microsoft, but it’s a nice gesture nonetheless.

How are you feeling as an emoji designer? if you think you can do a better job than the big businesses, now’s your chance; Microsoft has just open sourced all of its emoji, allowing users and businesses alike to remix them as they please.

Microsoft’s Emoji Become Open Source

The news broke on The Verge, which had an interview with Jon Friedman, Microsoft’s CVP of design and research. Friedman cites the shift in remote work as the main reason for making Microsoft’s 3D faces open for anyone to use:

Facial expression or body language was sort of disconnected from our communications… so we started to have these other rich conversations that were almost as…

Microsoft has announced a major revamp of its cloud hosting rules within the EU.

The changes will enable EU cloud providers to offer Windows and Office directly as part of a desktop solution they can build, sell, and host on their own server infrastructure, including products that have traditionally been licensed to run only on a customer’s own desktop or on on-premise server computers.

Microsoft announced it has begun migrating its internal SAP systems to S/4HANA under the RISE with SAP umbrella, making SAP responsible for the licensing, technical management, hosting, and support of its SAP applications under a single SLA.

The migration to S/4HANA will serve a dual purpose for Microsoft: modernizing its legacy SAP systems before the end of mainstream support in 2027 and demonstrating to customers that it is capable of hosting and running one of the largest and most complex SAP installations in the world within the RISE framework.

All three major cloud providers host SAP applications for their customers, and all three run at least some of their internal financial systems on SAP.

Microsoft has run SAP internally since at least 1995; Amazon.com is…