REDMOND, Wash. — Oct. 21, 2013 — With the new release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM now available worldwide, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq “MSFT”) on Monday announced a strategic alliance with InsideView Inc. that brings new Social Insights to the cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online service. Microsoft on Monday also announced the availability at the end of the month of a new set of industry-focused business process templates as part of the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM release, delivering customers step-by-step process guidelines designed to improve performance in specific industries.

The new solution, which is now available online in 42 global markets, will be available for on-premises and partner-hosted deployments on Oct. 31. It is designed to offer customers an enhanced user experience that promotes end-user productivity and demonstrates the better together value of Microsoft technologies. This includes interoperability with Yammer, Lync and Skype — delivering sales, service, marketing and industry professionals a seamless and customizable experience.

“CRM today should be an enabler that detects trends, facilitates decisions and suggests actions that lead to successful outcomes and relationships,” said Bob Stutz, corporate vice president of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “This major new release delivers on this promise of customer centricity by bringing together Microsoft technologies in a way that helps businesses and organizations better engage and nurture their customers.”

New social insights

The first phase of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM alliance with InsideView, a leading social intelligence provider, is the introduction of Social Insights capabilities embedded into Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Social Insights puts real-time company and contact information from 30,000 sources into Microsoft Dynamics CRM, helping marketing, sales and account management professionals engage more effectively with prospects to win more deals as a result of less time spent researching and more time selling. Social Insights will be available at no additional cost to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customers in the United States with Professional licenses on Oct. 30, 2013, with broader global rollout coming later in 2014.

New industry templates

The new Microsoft Dynamics CRM release offers customers pre-defined and configurable processes where each stage of a process is clearly outlined, identifying the recommended steps to completion. Building on this design element, Microsoft is introducing new templates for a number of specific industries, such as professional services, manufacturing and financial services, as well as processes for event management and solution selling. These completely configurable business processes incorporate best practices from industry experts and give customers a starting point to build a solution to fulfill their specific industry requirements. In addition, these templates flow onto all mobile devices supported by Microsoft Dynamics CRM, meaning customers can get the benefits of these processes on their favorite supported mobile device. These templates will be available for customers to download at no charge by the end of October 2013.

Designed to help customers match, engage and nurture customer relationships

In addition, the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM features new capabilities to enable sales, marketing and customer care professionals to match customers and prospects to the products and services they want, engage customers at the right moment, and nurture customer relationships.

These personal experiences are delivered through the following:

• A beautiful, new people-first design that offers a simple and immersive layout where all customer information is on one screen, helping people easily see everything they need to know about their customer interactions in one place.

• A new outcome-driven user experience featuring guided processes that help customers reach their desired outcomes. These processes can be tailored to accommodate particular business requirements that enable people to deliver an experience that matches their customers’ expectations. The benefits to organizations include shorter sales cycles, increased win rates and less ramp-up time for new hires.

• The ability to stay pervasively connected to customers and resources by putting social tools in the context of what people are doing. With Yammer, customers can quickly comment on posts or start contextual conversations from within Microsoft Dynamics CRM on-premises and online. Yammer extends across an organization, bringing everyone into the conversation, including nonlicensed CRM customers from within Yammer.

With the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM release, customers get access to new mobile client applications on Windows 8 tablets and iPads, as well as touch-enabled experiences on Windows Phones, iPhones and Android phones coming within the next month, giving customers powerful functionality and analytics on the go, without a separate license fee. These new tablet experiences keep people connected to their data, their team members and, most important, their customers, allowing subject-matter experts to be a click away.*

Over the past few months, Microsoft partners from 48 countries participated in the most highly subscribed-to release preview program to date for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and provided feedback on the new release. Select participants and their stories will be featured in a Global Premiere Event scheduled for Nov. 4, which will stream live at http://aka.ms/dynamicsglobalpremiere. More about the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM release can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm.aspx.

For more information on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Social Insights integration, a news release from InsideView is available at http://www.insideview.com/press/insideview-and-microsoft-raise-bar-crm-sign-strategic-oem-agreement-integrate-insideview-sales. Those interested can follow and engage with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community on Twitter at @MSDynamicsCRM, hashtag #MSDynCRM and #CRM2013, and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/msftdynamics.

About Microsoft Dynamics

At the heart of every successful business are the people who make things happen. Microsoft Dynamics designs modern business solutions that empower individuals with intuitive tools that allow them to do their best work. Our proactive, easy-to-use business applications adapt to the way people and systems work, enabling businesses to rapidly deploy and be forward-looking in an ever-changing world.

About Microsoft

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

* Some functionality requires Wi-Fi, Internet connection or mobile data plan (fees may apply).

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.

REDMOND, Wash. — Oct. 21, 2013 — MetLife Inc., a leading provider of insurance, annuities and employee benefit programs serving more than 90 million customers, has selected Microsoft Office 365 to offset the challenges that can accompany a rapidly expanding global workforce and the company’s global presence. MetLife has begun deployment to its 64,000 employees and expects to have Office 365 fully implemented by November.

“As we expand our global presence, we had to start thinking differently about how to get things done more quickly while still putting our customers first. This absolutely affected the way we evaluated our previous technology investments,” said Jim O’Donnell, senior vice president and chief technology officer, MetLife. “As a whole, the insurance industry can be challenging for consumers to navigate, so getting all of our global employees onto one standardized platform helps us collaborate more effectively and efficiently. In turn, we can ensure the customer experience is as smooth and consistent as possible.”

The move to Office 365 will allow MetLife to reinvest cost savings into mission-critical technologies, which will enable MetLife to further strengthen its focus on customer-centricity. In an increasingly competitive industry, the ability to strongly differentiate the brand as customer-centric will help MetLife face competition from other insurance companies head-on.

“The opportunity to take advantage of Outlook and the other tools included in the Office 365 suite will ultimately help us mitigate the time and distance factors that can be detrimental to customer service. Office 365 supports and enables our strategy of customer-centricity,” O’Donnell said.

More information about how organizations are turning to Microsoft technology is available on 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.

Game Developers, Display Makers, System Builders Express Broad Support

MONTREAL, QC - Solving the decades-old problem of onscreen tearing, stuttering and lag, NVIDIA today unveiled NVIDIA G-SYNC™ technology which, for the first time, enables perfect synchronization between the GPU and the display.

DbWrench Database Design v3.0.1 Released

Version 3.0.1 is a major milestone in DbWrench development and the first release of version 3.

This release focused on significant enhancements to the diagram editor. These enhancements include:

- Diagram lines are now movable.

- A new right angle linking algorithm to reduce line collisions and overlap with glyphs.

- A new diagram glyph color fill algorithm to make diagram glyphs more readable.

- Improved memory management to further improve performance.

A free trial download of this latest version is available at www.dbwrench.com.

Screen shots can be viewed here.

More About DbWrench

DbWrench is designed to increase the productivity of database developers by making creating and modifying databases much easier.

It's features include:

- Graphic entity relation diagram (ERD) designer

    - Forward engineer database designs with automatic SQL DDL script generation

    - Reverse engineer and visualize existing databases

    - A built in syntax highlighting SQL query editor

    - Runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux all in a single license

REDMOND, Wash. — Oct. 17, 2013 — Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announced the global availability of Windows 8.1, a feature-rich update to its popular Windows 8 operating system, enabling customers to create experiences that keep pace with their lives — at work, at home or on the go. Beginning Oct. 17, consumers with a Windows 8 device in more than 230 markets and 37 languages can download the free update via the online Windows Store. Windows 8.1 will also be available on new devices and as boxed software starting Oct. 18 at retail locations around the world.

Windows 8.1 evolves the Windows vision for highly personalized computing while showcasing Microsoft’s continued commitment to rapid and responsive development. It marks a wave of new, innovative devices coming for consumers and businesses — from the convenience and mobility of tablets and 2-in-1s to the productive experience expected from laptops, all-in-ones and specialized industry devices. Many of these new devices are touch-enabled and will deliver advancements in processing power, battery life and design, across a range of price points.

Windows 8.1 offers a host of increased customization refinements and functional improvements, including the following:

• Highly personal. An improved and more customizable Start screen offers variable tile sizes, more background designs and colors so each Windows device looks unique and personal to the individual. In addition, customers can choose how to start their Windows experience — at the Start screen or directly in the familiar Windows desktop — while all their Windows devices stay in sync with their Microsoft account.

• More familiar and easy to navigate. As an iconic part of the Windows experience, Windows 8.1 brings back the Start button as a familiar point of navigation. An updated apps view lets users see all their apps at once for easy access and new clicks and cues, as well as a Help + Tips app that gets them up to speed quickly.

• Enhanced search. The new Bing Smart Search provides the easiest way to find what users need on the device or on the Web in one beautiful and easy consolidated view that’s built for touch. Simply swipe or type from the Start screen, and Smart Search will find it — whether it’s a document on a PC, a photo album on SkyDrive, a favorite app, a song from Xbox Music or a website.

• Wide range of apps and services from the Start. Windows 8.1 is the most complete out-of-the-box experience. It offers a range of apps and services from the Start screen, allowing customers to quickly and easily do the things they love on Windows, such as catching up with friends and family via Skype, emailing effortlessly in the Mail app, watching movies and TV shows on Xbox Video, finding new recipes with the Bing Food & Drink app, or listening to free streaming music via Xbox Music. Windows 8.1 also comes with the new Internet Explorer 11, which is fast, fluid and perfect for touch. Internet Explorer 11 brings enhanced touch performance, speed boosts, and synchronized browsing history, favorites and settings across all Windows 8.1 devices. Windows 8.1 also provides native support for 3-D printing, meaning it will have plug-and-play support for 3-D printers, enable apps to seamlessly print 3-D jobs and understand 3-D file formats.

• The best for multitasking and productivity. Windows 8.1 includes the display and use of up to four apps side by side, flexible windows sizing for each app on the screen, the ability for one app to launch another app, and improved multimonitor support so users can view the desktop or apps from the Windows Store on any or all monitors.

• Deep cloud integration with SkyDrive. Windows 8.1 makes it easier than ever to work from anywhere and know that files are always accessible — across devices and locations. With SkyDrive, users can create, edit, save and share files anywhere, anytime, on whatever device they’re using.

• A beautifully redesigned Windows Store. The new design of the Windows Store improves how great apps are showcased and makes it easier for customers to get the apps they want. Fresh layouts and categories, such as New & Rising, make it easier to stay up to date on the hottest new entries to explore. Personalized recommendations use the Bing advanced recommendation and relevance system to help find new favorites. And with Windows 8.1, apps are updated automatically by default, so users always have the newest and best version of any app, such as Fresh Paint, which now includes watercolor, a new graphite pencil set and a new clean, modern user interface for the latest painting or drawing creations. New and updated apps are also continually being delivered to the Windows Store, including Evernote, Facebook for Windows 8.1, Hulu Plus, Adobe Photoshop Express, eBay, Netflix and NOOK.

Customers can go to http://www.windows.com/shop to learn about the wide variety of new Windows devices available now and throughout the holiday season to find the one that best fits their needs and budgets. More information about Windows 8.1 is at http://blogs.windows.com and http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news.

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

The information contained in this press release is provided for informational purposes only, and Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, with respect to the press release or the information contained in it.

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.