TOKYO — April 2, 2014 — Microsoft Japan Co., Ltd. has announced that Resona Holdings Inc. has migrated approximately 30,000 client terminals to Windows 8 and Microsoft Office 2013. Resona Holdings, which had been running on group client terminals, completed the migration in February 2014, well before Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003 on April 9. This 30,000-unit deployment of Windows 8 and Microsoft Office 2013 is one of the largest ever made.

Resona Holdings, which oversees the operations of Resona Bank, Saitama Resona Bank, Kinki Osaka Bank and other group companies, intends to become a “true retail bank that is highly trusted by our customers and the local community.” Its business revitalization plan prioritizes leveraging “All Resona” comprehensive capabilities, promoting cross-selling and reducing operational costs.

The key features of Resona Holdings’ migration to Windows 8 and Office 2013 include the following:

• Significant cost savings by replacing approximately half the group’s client PCs, and by upgrading the software on PCs used for less than two years.

• Utilization of BitLocker Drive Encryption in Windows 8 Enterprise to create a stronger security environment and maintain compliance.

• With desktop virtualization technology to migrate business applications and Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager to carry out Windows 8 policy design and system configuration, successful migration of approximately 30,000 clients was completed in less than two years.

• Adoption of System Center 2012 Configuration Manager and Microsoft System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection at the same time as migration to Windows 8, use of System Center 2012 Configuration Manager to enable remote automated software installation and dramatically reduce the time required for large-scale upgrades. Also, after migration, use of System Center 2012 Configuration Manager and System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection for PC monitoring, software and patch distribution and security, enabling simple, low-cost client environment management.

“We needed to keep the costs of migrating to a new operating system down by making effective use of the latest system,” said Tetsuya Shiratori, executive officer and general manager, Information Technology Planning Division of Resona Holdings. “We decided to migrate straight to Windows 8, and we had no opposition to taking advantage of the latest products to boost efficiency. In addition to the cost savings resulting from standard Windows 8 functions and the great usability, including boot speed, we also managed the whole migration operation with unprecedented speed through using System Center 2012 Configuration Manager.”

Resona Holdings adopted the following Microsoft products during migration:

• Windows 8 Enterprise

• Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013

• Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager

• Microsoft System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection

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.

SAN FRANCISCO — April 2, 2014 — Wednesday at Build 2014, Microsoft Corp.’s developer conference, the company announced several advances to Windows including Windows Phone 8.1, the availability of Windows 8.1 Update, a converged developer platform, and a $0 royalty licensing program for OEM and ODM partners developing smartphones and tablets with screens under nine inches.

Microsoft detailed new developer opportunities on the Windows platform with a common platform across devices, a single toolset, a common infrastructure across the Windows and Windows Phone stores, and a clear commitment to interoperability. The announcements highlight Microsoft’s continued commitment to its partners and the developer community by maximizing opportunities across the broadest range of devices and services.

Also as a part of the conference, Nokia announced three new Lumia smartphones for Windows Phone 8.1, including the flagship Lumia 930, the affordable Lumia 635 and the first dual-SIM Lumia 630.

“The news today shines a light on continued Windows innovation in ways that benefit our customers, partners and developers alike. Our commitment is to make Windows more personal and accessible to individuals, and to ensure a vibrant ecosystem through closer collaboration with our industry partners,” said Terry Myerson, executive vice president, OS Group at Microsoft.

Windows Phone gets even more personal

Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 8.1 and introduced Cortana, the world’s first truly personal digital assistant with a persona inspired by a much-loved “Halo” character. Powered by Bing, Cortana gets to know you and gets better over time by asking questions based on your behavior and checking in with you before she assumes you’re interested in something. She detects and monitors the stuff you care about, looks out for you throughout the day, and helps filter out the noise so you can focus on what matters to you.

Other new features that make Windows Phone 8.1 smartphones even more personal include Action Center, which complements Live Tiles by showing new activities and notifications at a glance; and Senses, a suite of features that takes the work out of managing data use, storage space and battery life. Windows Phone 8.1 also makes it easier for IT professionals to manage devices and for professionals to connect to essential business apps and services with features such as simplified device enrollment, a built-in mobile device management client, S/MIME for encrypted mail and VPN support.

Windows Phone 8.1 will start rolling out to current Windows Phone 8 users over the coming months. It will also come pre-installed on new phones starting this month. Cortana will launch shortly in the U.S. as a beta, in the U.K. and China in the second half of 2014, and in other countries in 2015. Registered developers can update their phones to Windows Phone 8.1 as part of the developer program later this month.

Windows 8.1 Update: easier to use, runs great on more devices

Continuing its commitment to deliver improvements through regular updates, Microsoft also announced Windows 8.1 Update, which includes improvements that provide more of what people love about Windows across more devices: quicker access to what’s important, a more familiar and consistent experience across touch and non-touch devices, and more ways to discover great apps.

Key features of the update include user interface improvements for mouse and keyboard users, the ability to access the taskbar from any screen and pin Windows Store apps to the taskbar alongside desktop apps and favorite websites, and performance and compatibility enhancements to Internet Explorer 11. These improvements provide faster, more direct access to the things customers care most about, so activities such as powering down, searching the Web and switching between apps are easier than ever. Navigating with the mouse and keyboard will feel more familiar and intuitive because there’s more consistency with where controls are and how they work. Specific to the enterprise, Windows 8.1 Update offers improved Internet Explorer 8 compatibility on Internet Explorer 11, extends mobile device management functionality, and eases deployment with increased predictability for new operating systems and line-of-business apps by leveraging familiar management tools.

Current Windows 8.1 customers will receive the Windows 8.1 Update for free through Windows Update, while Windows 8 customers will receive the update free through the Windows Store, beginning April 8, 2014.*

Making Windows devices more affordable

Microsoft is evolving its Windows business model to enable partners to offer lower-cost devices in the highly competitive smartphone, tablet and PC categories. Microsoft will offer to hardware partners $0 Windows with services including a one-year subscription to Office 365.

With Windows 8.1 Update hardware partners can also more easily build lower-cost machines — such as devices with 1 GB of RAM and a 16GB hard disk drive — without sacrificing the experience customers expect. The combination of new efficiencies and innovations from Microsoft hardware partners means customers will be able to choose from a wider range of Windows devices, particularly budget-friendly notebooks and tablets.

Windows developer platform: easily build innovative apps, reach more people

Microsoft also announced enhancements in the way developers can build applications that target the full range of Windows devices using Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 Release Candidate. Among other new capabilities, with the introduction of universal projects, developers are able to create apps that can be easily optimized to take full advantage of Windows devices. Developers of all types can draw upon their existing skills to deliver shared experiences for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Update. Universal projects allow developers to use approximately 90 percent of the same code, a single packaging system, and a common user interface to target apps for phones, tablets and PCs.

To improve the developer experience on Windows, Microsoft announced updates to Windows Store to improve app discoverability and monetization, as well as easier shopping for end users with improved search, more personal recommendations and better merchandising. In addition, later this week, Microsoft will release the next version of Windows App Studio, a Web-based tool for non-developers that enables the creation of universal Windows apps in a single project.

To help developers build innovative apps for Windows using a natural user interface, Microsoft detailed plans for Kinect for Windows v2, coming this summer, with a new sensor and SDK that will enable developers to create Windows Store apps, with the Kinect sensor, for the first time. The Kinect for Windows v2 sensor offers more precision, responsiveness and intuitive capabilities. Developers and partner companies, such as Reflexion Health and Freak’n Genius, are already doing great things through the Kinect for Windows v2 developer preview program.

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

* ISP fees may apply.

The information contained in this press release relates to a pre-release software product that may be substantially modified before its first commercial release. Accordingly, the information may not accurately describe or reflect the software product when first commercially released. The 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.

Does antimatter fall to Earth the same way matter does? This question has long perplexed scientists due to antimatter’s rarity, and its tendency to annihilate upon impact with matter. Thanks to advances in GPU technology, researchers at Switzerland’s University of Bern are getting closer to being able to analyze the impact of gravity on antimatter by studying the way particles fall when annihilation occurs.
Akitaka Ariga, of the university’s Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics, told attendees during a session at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference Wednesday that conclusive results are just a year or two

Long known as an audio innovator, Dolby Labs wants to revolutionize how you look at movies and TV. The company has been working on displays that feature so-called “extended dynamic range,” or EDR, which promises to be a bridge to video imagery that will duplicate the range of brightness and vivid colors the human eye is capable of seeing. Thad Beier, Dolby’s director of image platform workflow, told NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference that the time had come to deviate from previous approaches, such as 4K resolutions, which focus on squeezing more pixels into displays. Read More.

SAN FRANCISCO — March 27 , 20 14 — Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announced several new and updated applications and services including Microsoft Office for iPad and free Office Mobile apps for iPhone and Android phones. Microsoft also announced the Enterprise Mobility Suite, a comprehensive set of cloud services to help businesses manage corporate data and services on the devices people use at work and at home. In addition, the company announced the upcoming availability of Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium and enhancements to Windows Intune.

“Microsoft is focused on delivering the cloud for everyone, on every device. It’s a unique approach that centers on people — enabling the devices you love, work with the services you love, and in a way that works for IT and developers,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer for Microsoft.

Office productivity when and where you need it

Starting Thursday, Office 365 subscribers can simply add an iPad as one of their chosen devices included in their subscription benefits, and can create and edit documents with Word for iPad, PowerPoint for iPad and Excel for iPad. These apps are available as free downloads from the App Store, enabling people to read and present documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Office for iPad brings full file fidelity across Office on PC, Mac, tablet and phone, and along with cloud storage from OneDrive or OneDrive for Business your files are up to date, wherever you need them on whatever device you want to use. Office for iPad apps have a familiar look and feel that are unmistakably Office but are built from the ground up for iPad, factoring in the unique nature of touch and functionality native to iPad along with what people most commonly want to do on a tablet. More detail on today’s announcements can be found in the Office blog.

Office 365 is Microsoft’s fastest-growing commercial product ever, with increasing popularity of the subscription service among consumers because of the ability to move between devices, share subscription benefits with household members with an Office 365 Home subscription, and have constant access to important Office documents online. In addition to Office for iPad announced on Thursday, Microsoft also offers other iPad-optimized productivity applications, including OneNote, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics AX, Bing, Lync, Outlook Web Access, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Yammer and Skype.

Comprehensive services to help IT embrace b ring y our o wn d evice and the move to software as a service

Customers continue to use more devices and services, and IT needs an integrated and economical way to manage it all. The new Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) provides comprehensive device, identity and access management with data protection from the cloud. EMS includes Windows Intune, Azure Active Directory Premium and Azure Rights Management Services, to give IT the tools they need to help protect corporate assets and enable people to work on the devices they love.

The new Azure Active Directory Premium delivers cloud-based identity and access management with single sign-on to over 1,000 popular software as a service (SaaS) applications, self-service tools for users, and machine-learning-driven security reporting and anomaly detection. With Azure Active Directory Premium customers can reduce their IT costs and more easily manage their users, groups and SaaS application access.

Microsoft also announced additional enhancements to Windows Intune, including support for the Samsung KNOX platform, Remote to My PC capability for Android and iOS devices, and support for the next update to Windows Phone, continuing Microsoft’s commitment to cloud-first mobile device management across all devices.

Availability

Microsoft Office for iPad is available Thursday in 29 languages. The apps require an iPad running iOS 7.0 or later. More information about Microsoft Office for iPad can be found on the Office blog. The new Windows Intune features and Azure Active Directory Premium will be available in April, and the Enterprise Mobility Suite will be available via Microsoft Volume Licensing channels on May 1. More information about these new enterprise mobility solutions is available at Microsoft’s In the Cloud blog.

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.