Microsoft : FY21Q2 Product Release List

MICROSOFT QUARTERLY HIGHLIGHTS, PRODUCT RELEASES, AND ENHANCEMENTS FY21 Q2 Every quarter Microsoft delivers hundreds of products, either as new releases or services or as enhancements to current products and services. These releases are a result of significant research and development investments, made over multiple years, designed to help customers be more productive and secure and to deliver differentiated value across the cloud and the edge. Following are the major product releases and other highlights for the quarter, organized by product categories, to help illustrate how we are accelerating innovation across our businesses while expanding our market opportunities. Microsoft 365 Consumer/Commercial OneDrive family and group sharing simplifies the process with one-click sharing to family and groups. Family and group sharing are available in OneDrive for the web and included in all free and paid OneDrive consumer plans, as well as in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans. Microsoft Lists is a Microsoft 365 app that helps customers track information and organize their work. Track issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory, and more using customizable views and smart rules and alerts to keep everyone in sync. With ready-made templates, customers can quickly start lists online, on our new mobile app, and directly from within Microsoft Teams. Lists is now available to all commercial, education, and government plans. Microsoft Forms enables customers to create a survey or quiz on any topic and works on any device via the web and the Office mobile app, making it easy to capture the information you need. SharePoint Syntex uses advanced AI and machine teaching to amplify human expertise, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge. The daily briefing email from Cortanais now available for Microsoft 365 users with Exchange Online mailboxes in English. It is a personalized, actionable brief in Outlook automatically delivered to your inbox to help you start your day on track and streamline meeting preparation. Innovations in Microsoft Search include an updated and expanded search experience powered by Microsoft Search in Microsoft Teams to help find answers, people, files, meetings, and messages in the context of a chat or channel. Microsoft Search also brings personalized search results to Windows desktop's search box,creating a coherent search experience across desktop search, Office.com, SharePoint, Bing, and Edge. AI-powered augmentation of user profileswithskills and projects improves expertise location,and AI enriches search quality by unlocking the content of documents withsemantic search. Organizations can build custom enterprise search experiences with new extensibility features. Excel data types are rich, going well beyond numbers and strings-just one cell value can contain a deep collection of hierarchical data, references to other data types, images, and intelligent actions. They are also connected and can point to live services providing data that can be refreshed at any time. In addition to Stocks and Geography, Power BI and Power Query data types are now available. Money in Excel pulls up to two years of transaction history to get a better picture of your spending habits. It also supports multiple credentials per financial institution. Productivity Score is designed to help IT administrators measure and manage organizational adoption of technology so their people can get the most out of Microsoft 365. Universal app support for Macs with M1 allows our core flagship Office apps-Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote-to run faster and take full advantage of the performance improvements on new Macs. The new Office apps are Universal, so they will continue to run great on Macs with Intel processors. Microsoft Teams Breakout rooms make it easy to divide meetings into sub-groups to facilitate smaller discussions, brainstorming sessions, and learning groups. Organizers can jump in between meetings on their own, deliver announcements to all breakout rooms at once, and bring everyone back to the main meeting at any time. Unique to Microsoft Teams, breakout rooms can be initiated both in Microsoft Teams channels and in Microsoft Teams meetings. AI-based real-time noise suppression helps remove unwelcome background noise during meetings, making it easier to hear speakers in loud and distracting environments. While traditional noise suppression algorithms can only address simple stationary noise sources such as fan noise, our AI-based approach learns the difference between speech and noise and is able to suppress all forms of noise including nonstationary sources that we commonly encounter in meetings, such as typing, eating, and road noise. Live captions with speaker attribution help meeting attendees see who is speaking along with what's being said, making meetings more inclusive and easier to follow along. Polls in Teams Meetings are an easy way to make your meetings more productive and engaging. With polls, meeting presenters can prepare, launch, and evaluate polls before, during, and after meetings, respectively. Attendees can easily view and respond to the polls in the pop-up bubble or chat pane. Microsoft Teams displaysis a category of Teams devices that combine productivity, collaboration, and artificial intelligence into one experience. Teams display is the first all-in-one touchscreen device dedicated to bringing the Teams experience to life. Device as a Service for Microsoft Teamsprovides flexible monthly payments, making it easier and more affordable than ever to get users the devices they need. This service is currently available in the U.S., and availability for additional regions will be coming in 2021. With meeting extensibility developers can now integrate their apps directly into Teams meetings with deep awareness of the meeting context-including roster, roles, and permissions. They can leverage three new extensible meeting content surfaces (Pre- and Post-meeting tab, In-meeting side panel, and In-meeting content notification), to build powerful scenarios and provide users with a richer meeting experience. Power Virtual Agents app for Teamslets you create custom chatbots using a simple low-code authoring experience. Creators can also leverage Dataverse for Teams, easily connecting bots to a built-in relational datastore. Power Automate app for Teamsoffers an enhanced set of templates to automate work in Teams, along with a new designer experience that makes it even easier to get started. By selecting parameters from a few drop-down menus, you can automate routine tasks for yourself and for your team. Microsoft Teams EHR connector lets patients schedule and join virtual visits from within their electronic health record (EHR) system's patient portal. Providers can schedule and launch the visits from within the EHR provider portal. Integration with Epic is currently supported by the Microsoft Teams EHR connector, with other EHR systems coming soon. Windows Windows 10 October 2020 Update introduced many features including: · Alt + Tab. The quick way to access apps and web tabs. With this keyboard shortcut not only can users easily access the apps open on their desktop, but now they can also access their open tabs in Microsoft Edge. · All the tabs you were looking for. Now when users hover over the website icon, they'll see all the open tabs of that site. · A refreshing Start. The Start menu has a more streamlined design. · Smooth Settings. Settings continues to become a more robust place to access security and device details. In advanced display settings, users can change the refresh rate of their display. · 2-in-1 toast elimination. 2-in-1 devices now naturally switch by default to the new tablet experience without the notification toast asking you to switch into the tablet mode when you detach the keyboard. · Noticeable notifications. New app logos at the top of notifications now make it much easier to identify who they are from. · A Taskbar tuned to your liking. Users will enjoy a cleaner, more personalized, out-of-box experience featuring a taskbar specifically curated when getting a new Windows PC. · Your Phone multiapps experience allows users to runmultiple Android mobile apps side by side on Windows 10 PCs on the supported Samsung devices. Dynamics 365 Dynamics 365 Customer serviceincludes capabilities to improve agent productivity with case suggestions and assisted knowledge management as well as real-time translation in omnichannel customer service, utilizing Microsoft deep investments in AI. · Agent suggestions for similar caseshelps improve customer service agent's productivity and case resolution time by finding similar cases. This new AI capability proactively suggests the right cases by parsing through thousands of cases, taking case context and previous history into account. Additionally, agents can also see and collaborate with the agents who serviced those cases and are considered as experts. · AI-driven suggestions of knowledge article searches helps agents find the most applicable knowledge article quickly to increase agent productivity and provide better and faster service to customers. Real-time translation of messages between different languages. This capability allows for real-time translation of messages between the customer and support agent and messages among the support agents, such as supervisors or SMEs who consult and collaborate internally. Dynamics 365 Commerce enables a vibrant online marketplace for the discovery, trial, and sales of core application extensions, connectors to external third-party services (e.g., for Shipping & fulfillment or Payments), and e-commerce themes for relevant page design (e.g., Fashion, Automotive, Health & Beauty). These marketplace offerings can be deployed and used across the Commerce retail channels (in-store, call center, digital, and emerging). Run online events and meetings with Microsoft Teams. The direct integration of Dynamics 365 Marketing with Microsoft Teams offers a scalable and robust platform for phone- and videoconferencing. With this release, you can: · Create and host live events using Microsoft Teams as the webinar provider. · Integrate Teams webinars directly into marketing events. · Set up a webinar event as either a Teams live event or a Teams meeting. · Add event "producers" and "presenters" directly from the Marketing app. · Allow event check-ins for live events and meetings, bringing visibility to online attendance. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Guidesincludesstep-by-step mixed reality instructions for production processes. With mixed-reality instructions, manufacturers can avoid numerous hours of lost productivity, improve throughput per line, reduce the frequency of rework for supported tasks by 50 percent, and reduce technician and worker task time by up to 40 percent. Microsoft Power Platform Users can add Power Virtual Agents as a discrete app from the Microsoft Teams store. The app lets users create, author, manage, and distribute their bots, all within Teams. Power Automate Desktopextends the automation capabilities in Power Automate to on-premises processes and tasks, enabling anyone in the organization to automate desktop or web-based applications. Fueled by low-code Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Power Automate Desktop unifies automation between API-based automation with cloud flows and UI-based automation with desktop flows. The new Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents apps for Teams can be backed by a new relational datastore-Microsoft Dataverse for Teams. Microsoft Dataverse for Teams provides a subset of the full Microsoft Dataverse capabilities but more than enough to get started building apps and bots for your organizations. Microsoft Dataverse for Teams also improves application lifecycle management, allowing customers seamless upgrades to more robust offerings when their apps and data outgrow what comes with their Office 365 or Microsoft 365 licenses. Microsoft Industry Cloud Microsoft industry-specific cloud offerings bring together existing and future capabilities targeted to meet the specific needs across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Azure. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare brings together trusted capabilities to help customers and partners enhance patient engagement, empower health team collaboration, and improve clinical and operational insights. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides: · Patient 360 based on HL7 FHIR: Health providers can get full context into the patient's history and their current encounters, conditions, procedures, and appointments, all fed from the EMR data repository, all built in healthcare common data model, based on HL7 FHIR with direct integration to the Azure FHIR service. · Patient engagement with powerful insights: Use real-time data to build personalized patient outreach programs that create proactive care experiences. · Patient access to healthcare on their terms: Create unique, omnichannel patient experiences and engagements for self-scheduling appointments, physician searches, proactive wellness outreach, care reminders, and online interactions with care agents, patient portals, or virtual health bots. · Care coordination and care management: Maximize the value of care being delivered by helping care teams create actionable insights across care plans and interactions with individual patients, that ensures the patient's needs and preferences are known and addressed. · Home health support: Offer a broad range of medical care and support services by optimizing resource management, planning, and health team efficiency to assign the right healthcare worker to fit the patient's needs. LinkedIn Product Pages is a dedicated tab on your LinkedIn Page to help organizations nurture conversation and build brand affinity with their customers and followers around what they love most about their company-their products. LinkedIn Sales Insights leverages LinkedIn's data to help Sales Ops understand potential business opportunities, get a clearer view of the market, and plan more confidently. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions rolled out updates to help Page Admins organically grow their attendees and collect leads, and boost their reach with ads and retargeting capabilities. Hirers can more easily signal open roles to their networks and beyond, and job seekers can see who's hiring directly in their feed with the #Hiring profile photo frame and the ability to add jobs directly to hiring managers' profiles. New Sales Navigator features help sellers to cultivate relationships with buyers. Security, Compliance, & Identity Our iOS offering for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint adds to the already existing Defender offerings on macOS, Linux, and Android. This release delivers capabilities including anti-phishing, blocking unsafe connections, and custom Indicators. In addition, it offers a unified security experience through the Microsoft Defender Security Center, where security teams can get a centralized view of alerts, incidents, and gain additional context to remediate threats across all endpoints. Endpoint detection and response (EDR) in block mode is a feature in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint that turns EDR detections into blocking and containment of malicious behaviors. This capability uses Microsoft Defender for Endpoint's visibility and detection capabilities and Microsoft Defender Antivirus's built-in blocking function to provide an additional layer of post-breach blocking of malicious behavior, malware, and other artifacts that a primary antivirus (AV) solution might miss. External forwarding of email is a tactic used by attackers to exfiltrate data out of an organization and controlling that process is difficult. With Microsoft Defender for Microsoft 365: External email forwarding controls, we are adding support for more granular controls that allow the Office 365 administrators to easily enable external forwarding for the right people in the organization through the outbound spam policy. Azure Defender for SQL is available for use with SQL Server on premises, in multicloud deployments on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and in virtual machines on Azure. This update coupled with the previously released support for Azure SQL Database means that Azure Defender can protect Microsoft SQL wherever you are running it. Endpoint Data Loss Prevention (DLP) builds on the labeling and classification in Microsoft Information Protection and extends the existing DLP capabilities in Microsoft 365, helping you meet compliance requirements and protect sensitive information on endpoints. Endpoint DLP provides policy tips to help educate users when they are about to violate a policy. Microsoft 365 Records Management is available for Government Clouds (GCC, GCC High, and DoD) to allow users to classify, retain, review, dispose, and manage content without compromising productivity or data security; leverage machine learning capabilities to identify and classify regulatory, legal, and business critical records at scale; and demonstrate compliance with regulations through defensible audit trails and proof of destruction. To help streamline discovery of linked content, Advanced eDiscovery collects and natively groups linked content from OneDrive and SharePoint in the same family as the original Outlook email or Teams and Yammer chat message during review and preserves groups during export-streamlining the eDiscovery process without additional configuration. Admins can confidently set Conditional Access policies on all the Office 365 apps, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Teams, as well as micro-services used by these well-known apps. Password spray detection in Azure AD Identity Protection makes available a new risk detection in the Azure AD portal and via Azure AD Identity Protection APIs. Password spray is one of the most popular attacks, accounting for more than a third of account compromise in organizations. In these attacks, bad actors try common passwords against many accounts from different organizations. The new algorithm in Azure AD Identity Protection uses a supervised machine learning model to examine over 300 aspects of each authentication request, including behavior and IP reputation, to detect and flag sophisticated attack patterns. Admins now can set consent policies for the users in their organizations that can apply to the app, the publisher, or the permissions the app is requesting. Customers can also use Azure AD PowerShell or Microsoft Graph to create custom consent policies for even more control. Publisher verification allows developers to add a verified identity to their app registrations in the Azure AD application gallery, which adds a "verified" badge to their apps and helps in building trust with customers that the app comes from an authentic source. Azure Following is a select list of generally available Azure products, services, and enhancements for the quarter. A full list can be found at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/. Azure Hybrid Infrastructure Azure Stack HCI is a new hyperconverged infrastructure operating system delivered as an Azure service providing the latest up-to-date security, performance, and feature updates. Azure Stack Edge includes a managed Kubernetes environment so you can deploy your containerized apps to the edge using this industry-standard technology. Azure Data The open-source t-digest extension adds a data structure that allows store rank-based statistics such as quantiles and trimmed means in your distributed Hyperscale (Citus) database. The algorithm used in the extension allows high-performance percentile calculations on sizable distributed analytical workloads with improved accuracy. SQL Server Reporting Services workloads can now be migrated into Azure using preconfigured virtual machine images. This enables you to easily see your different virtual machine workloads and manage them. It can also help make your workloads more efficient and enables an easier onboarding experience to the cloud. With this feature, you can leverage additional benefits from moving to the cloud by selecting these preconfigured images on the Azure marketplace. SQL Server Analysis Services workloads can now be migrated into Azure using preconfigured virtual machine images. This feature enables you to easily see your different virtual machine workloads and manage them. It can also help make your workloads more efficient and enables an easier onboarding experience to the cloud. With this feature, you can leverage additional benefits from moving to the cloud since you can select these preconfigured images on Azure marketplace. Azure Analytics By enabling Delta Lake and Common Data Model (CDM) formats in ADLS Gen2, Azure Data Factory (ADF) has enabled an exciting range of new ETL use cases. Read model.json and manifest CDM files, or sink data in ADLS Gen2 in CDM format. Upsert, update, delete, and insert data lake data using Delta Lake. Both of data lake formats support the full range of ADF data flow transformations, now generally available. Azure Data Factory is available in five new regions. Azure Data Factory is now available in five new regions: Switzerland North, Japan West, Canada East, Germany West Central, and UK West. You can now provision Data Factory, Azure Integration Runtime, and SSIS Integration Runtime in these new regions to co-locate your ETL logic with your data lake and compute. You can also use these regions for BCDR purposes in case you need to failover from another region within the geo. Azure Data Factory adds cached lookups and enhanced zoom design to data flows to make viewing and managing large graphs easier with zoom controls. Cached lookups have been added to data flows to allow data engineers to make more efficient and faster design patterns in the cloud with ADF. Store your lookup data in cache so that it can be accessed quickly and easily in other parts of your data transformations. Azure Databricks has received a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High Authority to Operate (ATO) on Microsoft Azure Government (MAG). This authorization validates Azure Databricks security and compliance for high-impact data analytics and AI across a wide range of public sector, industry, and enterprise use cases. With this certification, customers can now use Azure Databricks to process the US government's most sensitive, unclassified data in cloud computing environments, including data that involves the protection of life and financial assets. Azure Databricks provides a fast, easy, and collaborative Apache Spark-based analytics platform as a fully managed service. It helps increase developer productivity, automatically scales with the most demanding workloads, and enables enterprise-grade security that's easy to use on Azure. Azure Databricks availability in Azure Government helps federal agencies, state and local governments, higher education institutions, and government contractors transform their mission-critical workloads while following strict data security and residency guidelines. Now that Azure Databricks is generally available in Azure China, organizations can leverage the same scalable enterprise-grade service they have come to rely on and extend into new markets. Azure China is a sovereign cloud in mainland China that meets a high bar of security and compliance requirements. Azure Serverless and App Dev Services Azure Spot support for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) enables significant savings on compute costs for workloads that can tolerate interruptions. With Resources view in Azure Kubernetes Service, developers can use point and click navigation to see live, in-depth details of the workloads they have access to. Three resource types-deployments, pods, and replica sets-are initially supported. Azure App Service support for Private Endpoints enables you to access your app through a specific IP address located in your Azure Virtual Network (VNet), eliminating exposure to the public internet. With Private Endpoints you can enable hosting secure and internal Line of Business applications, expose your apps inside your VNet without data exfiltration issues, and build secure multitier web applications. Azure Functions custom handlers enable developers to use their favorite language or runtime-such as Go, Rust, and PHP-in Azure Functions. Custom handlers allow users to develop serverless, event-driven applications and take advantage of all available Azure Functions triggers and bindings. Building Azure Functions applications with Java 8 and Java 11 on Linux hosting is now generally available on our Premium, Dedicated, and Consumption plans. GitHub GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 brings built in CI/CD and automation capabilities to the platform with GitHub Actions and Packages. In addition, Enterprise Server customers can now automate Advanced Security, including code and secret scanning, into their workflows as part of the server deployment. GitHub CLI allows developers to access the full functionality of GitHub from the terminal, reducing time spent context switching and offering great flexibility for developers. GitHub CLI is open source and available for all GitHub users. Azure AI Users can now add Canadian French text translation, the dialect of French used specifically in Canada, into your apps, products, and workflows with Azure Cognitive Services Translator. Translate to or from Canadian French into any of the more than 70 languages available in Translator. Learn more about this language release in the Translator blog. Custom Translator platform upgrade (V2) delivers significant translation quality improvements using Microsoft's neural machine translation, a transformer-based architecture. Custom Translator V2 platform upgrade delivers big improvement over standard Translator and the previous V1 platform in many domains. Microsoft researchers have built an artificial intelligence system that can generate captions for images that in many cases are more accurate than the descriptions people write as measured by the NOCAPS benchmark. The breakthrough is a milestone in Microsoft's push to make its products and services inclusive and accessible to all users. Azure IoT Microsoft Azure Digital Twins can simplify the creation of detailed, comprehensive digital models that bring solutions to life. This trusted enterprise-grade platform brings the scale, reliability, security, and broad market availability that enables customers to build production-ready solutions. Azure Playfab When multiple concurrent experiments target the same audience at the same point of a game flow, the combination of experiment variations may alter the user's behavior, thus skewing the results. New exclusion groups in PlayFab Experiments prevent those interaction effects and help teams experiment faster. Surface Surface Laptop Go, our lightest Surface Laptop, started shipping to customers in markets worldwide. It combines style, performance, and all-day battery life, all at an exceptional value. Surface Pro X, our always-on, always-connected ultra-thin and light 2-in-1, was updated in October with a new premium Platinum finish and Signature Keyboard colors, a super-fast Microsoft SQ® 2 processor, and improved Windows on ARM experiences. We also introduced several Microsoft accessories: · The Microsoft Designer Compact Keyboard is a keyboard optimized for modern productivity with Bluetooth seamlessly switching between three devices, available in two colors options. · The Microsoft Number Pad is a number pad with Bluetooth wireless to enable you to get the most out of your PC experience. · The Microsoft 4K Wireless Display Adapter offers the easiest way to project your Windows PC on the big screen and supports 4K resolution. · The Microsoft Bluetooth Ergonomic Mouse brings ergonomic design in several color options and premium wireless performance with a soft thumb rest, a light and durable design, and two customizable buttons. · The Microsoft Modern Mobile Mouse is a lightweight and portable mouse now available in Sandstone. Gaming Improved with the Age community in mind, Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition launched worldwide with Xbox Game Pass for PC, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Windows 10, and Steam. Celebrate one of the most beloved real-time strategy franchises in definitive form with enhanced features, modernized gameplay, 4K Ultra HD graphics, updated multiplayer, new civilizations, and with a fully remastered soundtrack. Cloud gaming (beta) with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate launched 10 new titles available with Xbox touch controls in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Touch controls have been one of the top-requested features for cloud gaming, so the cloud gaming team worked closely with players and game designers to create a familiar experience and support a level of play that gamers are used to with a physical controller. Xbox launched Xbox Series X, the fastest and most powerful Xbox console ever, and Xbox Series S, which delivers next-generation performance at an affordable price in the smallest Xbox ever. The consoles are available across 40 countries and feature the largest launch lineup in Xbox history: 40 new games were playable on day one, 30 with Smart Delivery that are upgraded automatically, as well as thousands of backward- compatible titles across four generations. Xbox Series X|S were also made available with Xbox All Access, which includes the choice of an Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S console plus 24 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, starting at 24.99/month for 24 months with no upfront costs. Xbox All Access is available in 12 countries. Xbox launched the new Xbox Wireless Controller in Carbon Black, Robot White, and Shock Blue, which features more inclusive, ergonomic designs and performance-boosting updates like textured grip on the bumpers, triggers and back case, hybrid D-pads, and a new integrated Share button. The controllers are compatible with Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Windows 10 PC, and mobile devices. Xbox Game Studios launched Gears Tactics for Xbox consoles and with Xbox Game Pass. The fast-paced, turn-based strategy game features an immersive and character-driven story, in which gamers can customize their squad's membership and equipment to succeed in missions against an unstoppable, swarming enemy, complete with massive boss battles. EA Play became available on Xbox consoles, including Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X, as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. This year, members with an Ultimate or PC subscription will be able to download and play games from the EA Play library on Windows 10 PCs. Some EA Play titles are also available on Android via the cloud, including "Mass Effect™: Andromeda," "Mirror's Edge™ Catalyst," "Dragon Age™: Inquisition," and "Plants vs. Zombies™ Garden Warfare 2." Mojang Studios released the biggest DLC mash-up in the history of Minecraft-the Minecraft Star Wars DLC, developed in partnership with Disney. Available in the Minecraft Marketplace, the pack includes content from A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and The Mandalorian, spread out across 12 different planet dioramas. Mojang Studios also introduced cross-platform play to "Minecraft Dungeons," empowering players across Xbox, Windows, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation to play together for the first time. Additionally, Mojang Studios released the "Minecraft Dungeons" Season Pass, which covers the four upcoming DLC packs, including the most recent Howling Peaks DLC, an action-packed trek to the mountain top that features dazzling new armor, weapons, and artifacts, as well as new enemies and challenges for players. 343 Industries announced that "Halo 4"-the final installment in "Halo: The Master Chief Collection" on PC-arrived on Xbox Game Pass for PC, the Microsoft Store, and Steam. "Halo: The Master Chief Collection" Optimized for Xbox Series X|S also launched, featuring a host of newly Optimized and updated features including Smart Delivery and Quick Resume, and 4K resolution on Xbox Series X. The Gears 5: Hivebusters DLC launched across Xbox consoles and PC with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, while also being made available as a separate purchase in the Microsoft digital store. In the new expansion, players join Lahni, Keegan, and Mac-heroes first introduced in Gears 5's Escape mode-in their first mission as Scorpio Squad. The Gears 5: Hivebusters DLC features optimizations for the Xbox Series X|S and new gameplay formats and includes 16 new achievements. Microsoft released the free Virtual Reality update for Microsoft Flight Simulator, compatible with most VR headsets for PC and offering simmers the deepest and most immersive virtual flight experience in the new simulator to date. This free update is compatible across a wide range of supported devices, including most Windows Mixed Reality headsets (including the HP Reverb G2), Oculus, Valve, and HTC headsets. Microsoft Search, Advertising, and News Give with Bing is an extension of Microsoft Rewards-Microsoft Rewards lets you earn points simply by searching on Microsoft Bing, and Give with Bing lets you automatically donate those points to causes you care about. We expanded Give with Bing to seven more markets: UK, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. Bing expanded its intelligent question-answering feature to more than 100 languages, making AI and Bing itself more inclusive and accessible. The Microsoft Bing app on Xbox allows you to search the web, discover trending content, and much more right from your console. This app brings search to the activities you're already doing on your Xbox, such as if you're browsing videos or photos with a group of friends and want to view them on a big screen, or are stuck in a game and want to quickly look up hints without leaving the console. The new MSN eSports hub is a one-stop destination for information related to top esports titles. The data is powered in part by a combination of Microsoft Bing web-scale aggregation and cutting-edge machine learning courtesy of Microsoft Research. Fans can watch the most popular streamers, catch up on the latest news, and stay up to date with upcoming tournaments in a fast, intuitive experience on both desktop and mobile. 2020 Election hub in the Bing search results helps you quickly find the election information you're looking for. Whether you are looking for the best time to take a run, planning a road trip, or chasing powder for a ski day, MSN Weather can help. Our new experience delivers accurate, state-of-the-art forecasts; interactive, animated maps that make the weather easy to understand; and timely weather notifications and news for severe weather events. Microsoft Clarity is a free-to-use analytics product built to help website managers improve their website experiences by better understanding site visitor behavior. With Clarity we've built a set of tools that help people who manage websites make more informed decisions about the modifications they should make to their sites. Microsoft Edge launched new features for the holiday season including Price Comparison that helps people comparison shop online, Coupons that notify you if discounts codes are available on the product pages you visit, a Deals tile on the Microsoft Edge New Tab Page, and more. Other Microsoft Edge features include: · Collections + Pinterest: Through this integration, discover pins on Pinterest related to the items in your Collection. You can also save an entire Collection as a new board on Pinterest. · Collections Price Comparison: When you add a product to your Collection, you can easily see comparison prices across other retailers, helping you find the best price. · Customizable New Tab Page: Easily upload your own photos to the new tab page in Microsoft Edge to personalize your experience. · Web Capture: Capture, save, and share content you find on the web with this screenshot tool built in to the browser. You can also mark them up with your digital pen. · PDF Annotation, and Navigation for Table of Contents: Easily add notes to PDF documents in Edge and navigate through PDF documents with a clickable table of contents. · Friendly URLs: When a long URL is copied from Microsoft Edge, when you paste it will shorten the link to reference the name of the page automatically. © Copyright Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.