The Midweek Download: June 27th Edition–Microsoft Acquires Enterprise Social Networks Provider Yammer

The news just keeps on coming! This edition of The Midweek Download has stories on Microsoft acquiring Yammer, TechEd Europe and Windows Phone 8.

Microsoft acquires Yammer. Microsoft and Yammer announced Monday that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire Yammer, a leading provider of enterprise social networks, for $1.2 billion in cash. Yammer will join the Microsoft Office Division, led by division President Kurt DelBene, and the team will continue to report to current CEO David Sacks. Head on over to the Microsoft News Center and read this post by Kurt on The Official Microsoft Blog for the whole story.

Technology professionals gather at TechEd Europe to celebrate the era of the Cloud OS. The IT industry is undergoing a major transformation as cloud computing grows in popularity, and it’s not just in the U.S., it’s worldwide. On the heels of TechEd North America, thousands of IT professionals and developers are gathering in Amsterdam this week – at Microsoft’s full capacity TechEd Europe event – to hear first-hand what the new era of the cloud operating system (OS) is all about. For more on TechEd Europe, read this Tuesday post on The Official Microsoft Blog or visit Jason Zander’s blog (Jason is corporate vice president for the Visual Studio team) or the Visual Studio LightSwitch Team Blog.

Network World: “Windows Phone 8 seen cementing developer loyalty to Microsoft.” “Windows Phone has been full of innovations since day one, but there was also a lot of catching up to do to reach parity with iOS, Android and Microsoft’s previous mobile platform, Windows Mobile. The time for catching up is over,” says Nick Landry, senior product manager with Infragistics, a Cranbury, N.J. vendor of user interface development tools, and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for eight years with Microsoft’s mobile platforms. If you want to read more, check out this June 22 story in Network World. To the left is a screenshot of the new Windows Phone 8 start screen.

Introducing the Photos app for Windows 8. We take a lot of photos that end up in a lot of different places. Some are on our PCs, others end up on a photo sharing service like Flickr or Facebook, and even more are on our phones—sometimes indefinitely. How and where we store and share photos has changed and will continue to change as we take more photos, buy more devices, and share to more places with more people. What we need is one place where we can see, relive, enjoy, share, and immerse ourselves in all of them, all in one place. Head on over to Building Windows 8 to learn more about the Photos app for Windows 8.

Best practices when adding single sign-on to your app. A few months ago, we wrote about how to bring single sign-on and SkyDrive to your Windows 8 apps with the Live SDK. Since then, we made the Windows 8 Release Preview publicly available and we’ve begun to see some inconsistency in the design patterns forming in how apps expose entry points for users to sign in, connect accounts or sign-out of their experience. To help you with these design patterns, we put together some guidelines for apps that want to use a user’s Microsoft account. Read this Tuesday post on the Windows 8 App Developer Blog for the rest of the story.

Customers inspire the new family of Dell XPS and Latitude brands. Dell is committed to listening to its customers — it’s in the company’s DNA and a basic tenet of its corporate brand — and the company consistently takes a step back to listen to what its diverse customer base — from mobile professionals to IT and business decision-makers — want and need in a product. Check out this slideshow on the Microsoft News Center to see a line of new Dell PCs. Below is a screenshot from the slideshow:

XPS 13, XPS 14, and XPS 15 Notebook Family

Bing and PixelSense. Microsoft partner Stimulant put together a beautiful video showing the capabilities of the Bing application built for PixelSense. You can read more about it and watch the video over on Next at Microsoft.

Developer guidance for websites with Flash content in Windows 8. The Windows 8 Release Preview includes a new power-optimized, touch-friendly Adobe Flash Player. Adobe Flash content on compatible websites will now play in Metro style IE10. Metro style IE10 with Flash on Windows 8 enables people to see more of the Web working with high quality, especially compared with the experience in other touch-first or tablet experiences. Head on over to the IEBlog for the rest of the story. Also, don’t miss this Monday post about unprefixed CSS3 gradients in IE10 and this June 20 post on touch experiences in IE10.

That’s a wrap for this edition of The Midweek Download! Thanks for reading!

Posted by Jeff Meisner
Editor, The Official Microsoft Blog

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