EU data watchdogs take aim at Google

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Gurmail Singh

google-privacy-eu

Europe’s largest data-protection authorities have laun
ched a joint action against Google to force it to remedy alleged breaches of EU privacy rules by the search giant.

The move by data-protection authorities from Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands is the first co-ordinated and formal procedure by EU states against a single company on privacy, underscoring European frustration with Google.

European watchdogs can currently impose only fines below €1m but new EU-wide rules could soon empower them to inflict on companies penalties up to 2 per cent of their global annual turnover.

In Google’s case that would add up to about $760m, based on its 2011 revenues. The new rules could be approved by the end of this year by EU lawmakers and member states.

The move comes five months after a probe led by CNIL, the French watchdog representing EU regulators, concluded that Google had failed to give users adequate information about how their personal data were being used across its multiple platforms.

Google responded that its privacy policy respected European law. “We have engaged fully with the data-protection authorities involved throughout this process, and we’ll continue to do so going forward,” it said in a statement.

The Mountain View-based group has faced intense criticism for its privacy policy since it first moved to merge customer data held across its various services such as Gmail and YouTube, which alone holds the data of more than 1bn users.

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The US group said its new privacy terms, which combine 60 former policies into one for all its customers, would allow it to provide a better service. Google Now, which provides intuitive updates based on calendar entries, location patterns and emails, is one example of a service making use of the new approach.

“It is good to see that six national data-protection authorities are teaming up to enforce Europe’s common data-protection rules,” said Viviane Reding, EU commissioner for justice. “I am confident that the European Parliament and the EU member states will strengthen Europe’s enforcement tools substantially in the course of this year.”

EU privacy officials have also criticised aggressive US lobbying on behalf of Google and Facebook to relax new privacy laws being considered by Brussels.

The news comes a day after Google confirmed that its privacy director, Alma Whitten, was leaving after nearly three years in the role.

Ms Whitten was appointed in 2010 after Google admitted that its Street View cars had been recording data from the unprotected WiFi networks of homeowners, for which it paid CNIL a €100,000 fine. Lawrence You, a member of Google’s privacy team, will take over the role.

Google said the move was unrelated to actions by the EU regulators.

The company is also fighting EU competition authorities over the prominence of its own products in Google search results.

Last week Microsoft published, through a consultant, findings of a survey showing that Google’s competitors were being disadvantaged by sitting lower in search results than Google’s own services in areas like shopping and travel. On March 21 2011, complainants in that investigation published an open letter to, Joaquín Almunia, EU vice-president, urging him to take action.

Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, a UK privacy campaigner, said: “Google has repeatedly put profit ahead of user privacy . . . It is essential regulators find a sanction that is not just a slap on the wrists and will make Google think twice before it ignores consumer rights again.”

By James Fontanella-Khan in Brussels and Bede McCarthy in London

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Surface Pro: Available now

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Gurmail Singh

Today is an exciting day for the growing Surface family: Surface Pro is here!

Surface Windows 8 Pro 64gb is available online or from store shelves at all Microsoft retail stores in the U.S. and Canada, at Staples and Best Buyin the United States and from Best Buy and Future Shop in Canada. Customer response to the launch of Surface Pro has been amazing. We’re working with our retail partners who are currently out of stock of the 128GB Surface Pro to replenish supplies as quickly as possible. Our priority is to ensure that every customer gets their new Surface Pro as soon as possible.

Surface Pro gives you the power and performance of an Intel Core-powered PC in a tablet package. Whether you’re a road warrior looking for the one device to pack or you’re looking for a PC that will get the job done and still help you have fun, this is the device for you.

via YouTube

To go along with your new Surface Pro, you can also pick up a new Wedge Touch Mouse Surface Edition and three new Touch Cover Limited Editionsin red, magenta, and cyan which will be available in all markets where Surface is currently sold. Starting today, you can buy a new 64GB standalone version of Surface Windows RT so you can choose a Touch (or Type) Cover of your choice – like one of the Touch Cover Limited Editions I just mentioned!

I’m also excited that as of next Thursday there’ll be 13 more countries in Europe joining the Surface family. On February 14th, we’ll be bringing Surface RT to Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Surface RT and Surface Pro represent countless hours of research, prototyping, experimenting and building an amazing product that really is the ideal stage for Windows 8. Our hope is to share with you here through our blog some of that work in the coming weeks!

Now with the Surface family, you can decide which device best suits your needs. Whether you’re a business professional who needs to use Photoshop while you’re traveling to make edits to a picture, or a blogger wanting a simple and seamless way to update your blog, there’s a Surface for you. Surface Pro, which provides the power and performance of a laptop in a tablet package, is great for taking notes with its pen while you’re sitting in on a meeting and responding quickly to emails while using your Touch Cover (or Type Cover!) keyboard. Surface RT offers the convenience of a tablet with some laptop capabilities. It really is about entertainment first as a tablet with all day battery life all in a package that’s super lightweight.

Well, since I’ve spent some time sharing with you the exciting qualities about Surface Pro, I’m eager for you to get your hands on one. So stop by one of the above mentioned retail stores and check one out for yourself! Oh, and one more thing don’t forget to get yourself a Limited Edition Touch Cover before they’re all gone!

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Overview of the New SharePoint Online

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Gurmail Singh

This version is the first version designed as part of a service rather than a product which makes it more cloud friendly.

At a Glance

They have done a lot of work to increase the amount of files, size of files, size of what you can put online. This means increased scale for larger companies. The image below includes a number of change

changes made to SharePoint Online

There is, of course, a brand new look and feel that looks more like what you expect with Windows 8 UI. You will also see a lot of simplified interfaces to hopefully make your experience easier.
You can now make guest links for non-SharePoint users to access content in SharePoint. This is mainly geared towards sharing of documents.
You can now use Powershell online
There are native mobile apps which will hit the online. It include Windows 8 and iOS
BI: PowerPivot and PowerView are available now. Build offline and then publish online
You can do a hybrid search. FAST has had a lot of changes.
Microsoft Project will come online. It’s an add-on as a separate web app called project web app. (Mark noted that Project has been ready for a while, they just needed to make some changes first.)
The cloud app model with a separate and loosely coupled app works perfectly in SharePoint online. (see the notes on the keynote). It essentially lets you push the app to SharePoint and SharePoint Online provisions a Windows Azure server to run the app and make sure it’s securely accessible from SharePoint
Question: the new guest links, is it available to just documents or are other types of content shareable? Answer: for now it’s only documents.
Question: How do solutions like Bamboo work? Answer: the ecosystem of ISVs is available. They have been doing “Ignite” training and will support a sandbox for these vendors to test and ensure these solutions built on SharePoint remain accessible. If you go to dev.office.com, you can start to muck with the dev app model. (per Mark but I may have misunderstood)
There is a new tool called Napa (??) that is Visual Studio site that would allow you to develop everything online. This helps you make a hosted app that is available on a hundred site collections. Takes advantage of the new cloud app model I’m sure.
Question: with SharePoint online, do I get the full Office apps? Yes, you can either access Office online or as part of the subscription you can download the full office apps.
Question: Can you tell me what the experience would be for just one line of business using the hybrid tools. Can you easily combine this? The answer is yes. Mark promises to walk him through this. In Exchange, the call this “federation co-existence”
BCS was brought to the cloud late and only half of it was brought in a patch release early on in the Office 365 lifecycle. Now, you have much more access to BCS functions and you have access directly to SQL Server on Azure.
Hybrid search will allow you to search both online and on premise indexes. This makes it easier to combine SharePoint on Premise and Online. Brad Stevenson is the expert when it comes to this. See a concurrent session on Hybrid Search. FYI, Microsoft is starting to move all team and portal sites to SharePoint online and they will use hybrid search. This will be a multi-year process for Microsoft.
Question: How many different site collections can you setup per tenant. Right now it’s one public site per tenant. Online allows up to 3,000 site collections so perhaps there will be the ability to change that. That depends on decisions made above Mark since it’s technologically feasible.
SkyDrive Pro extends SkyDrive to SharePoint. Pro just means the files are stored in SharePoint and available online. It works really well with SharePoint online because the setup is already done for you. It also includes folder sync for team site libraries. SkyDrive pro will give you a lot more space. Up fron 500 MB to 7 Gigs.
Question: can you talk to he BI features? Aside from PowerView and PowerPivot, Online also support Excel services. You can access data from a number of locations outside of the cloud. The big question is latency from cloud to on-premise data. To be clear, the powerpivot gallery will not be supported online.
Question: What are the updates like in SharePoint Online? The SharePoint Online does service pack or cumulative updates for you. They send a notification email and note that there will be a read only email of 30 minutes. They resend at 48 hours before the update. It is abstracted from normal users and mostly abstracted from the tenant admins. The upgrade from Office 365 (SharePoint 2010) to the new SharePoint online will be an optional experience. You can run the upgrade on each site collection. Caveat: once you commit then there’s no going back.
SharePoint Dedicated instances have a different upgrade path. But the idea of an upgrade is that they db schema and the site collection upgrades are de-coupled. Schema upgrades take 30 minutes to do. Once done, you have the ability to upgrade on a site collection by site collection basis.
Question: Can you dump content from SharePoint Online to an on-premise installation. Technical answer: No but tools like AvePoint, Quest, Tsunami, and others would allow you to target a source and “migrate” it to your on-premise. It’s actually the reverse of a lot of the ‘to the cloud’ migration.
Question: what can BCS hit? Anything you want but it requires a WCF endpoint for each of the data sources.

More Proof Points

Mark had to cut the questions short so he could get to his second slide. There are a number of things that are different between online and on-premise.

Online and on-premise still have some key differences.

Demo

You can embed a document with an embed link in a variety of places. That’s a great use of RESTful type services to do what slideshare does. Two thumbs up on this.
Office 365 has a new top navigation to access Outlook, newsfeed, people, skydive, and sites
Storage ranges from small business to large enterprises. They are designing to support 2GB documents. They will charge $0.20 per GB per month.
Media Link

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How Office 365 Grows with Your Organization

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Gurmail Singh

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Tesco Gets Social With Microsoft Office 365

Posted on January 12, 2013 by Gurmail Singh

REDMOND, Wash. — Jan. 9, 2013 — Tesco, one of the world’s leading retailers, has

Tesco moves to O365. BYOD, Work from Anywhere, Easy IT and colloboration

chosen Microsoft Office 365 for its companywide collaboration and social platform. The U.K.-based retailer is committed to deploying Office 365 to its employees working at the company’s headquarters, in the field and in stores, across all its locations in Europe and Asia.

“We want to put technology in the hands of all our colleagues, whether in the store, distribution center or office, so they can create value for our customers,” said Mike McNamara, chief information officer, Tesco. “We see Office 365 as an important solution to help us continue to meet that goal.”

Office 365 enables a search functionality that quickly delivers access to experts, information and tools to help employees do their jobs, and it allows people to work more effectively together, regardless of geographic location. It also permits information to flow in a way that supports efficient decision-making by bringing relevant information directly to the user.

via YouTube

One of the challenges businesses face when they experience global growth is that it becomes difficult for staff to work together as a team, share knowledge, find the right person or answer, and consume increasingly unstructured information without feeling overwhelmed and disconnected from the organization as a whole.

“Office 365 will serve as the portal for all Tesco employees, suppliers and colleagues, encouraging a cultural shift to more flexible ways of working,” McNamara said. “This will allow our colleagues to engage with each other and deliver a great shopping experience on any channel, as well as encouraging colleagues to share, re-use, and reward ideas and expertise.”

Tesco also sought to put in place an internal collaboration platform that was more than just a repository for documents. Instead, the company wanted to find better ways of communicating ideas and news to its multinational workforce.

“Office 365 will enable us to be a fully connected organization that works closely together, proactively shares knowledge, motivates loyalty and retention of employees, and encourages better working practices to ensure that we create value for customers,” McNamara said.

More information about how organizations are turning to Microsoft technology is available in the Microsoft Customer Spotlight newsroom.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.