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According to TechNewsWorld : M icrosoft on Monday announced the general availability of its Planner collaboration tool, which will roll out in the next few weeks to all eligible customers -- those who have Enterprise E1-E5, Business Essentials, Premium or Education subscriptions to Office 365. Planner lets users create new plans, as well as organize, assign and collaborate on tasks. Users also can update statuses and share files. It provides visual dashboards and email notifications to keep members of a team informed. Planner sets itself apart visually, making it very inviting and extremely easy to use, while "delivering a holistic set of capabilities ... teams need to build plans, assign tasks, collaborate on tasks, and track progress," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement provided to TechNewsWorld by company rep Lenette Larson. "It's a component that has been left out of Office 365 for a while, and I'm surprised it hadn't been integrate

M icrosoft last week announced it would open its Windows Holographic platform to partner firms looking to develop products for the Hololens ecosystem. Microsoft already is already working with a range of partners -- including Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and others -- to build a hardware ecosystem that can support mixed-reality environments, company officials said at Computex. "We are providing an opportunity for our OEM, ODM and developer partners to build devices and experiences that utilize the Windows Holographic platform to build mixed reality perception-capable experiences regardless of whether they are developing for AR, VR or anything in-between," a Microsoft spokesperson said in statement provided to TechNewsWorld by company rep Molly Terrell. "For our OEM and ODM partners, this means new business opportunities through unlocked device capability and experiences. For developers, this represents a first step in growing and scaling our platform," the spoke

Microsoft Drastically Scales Down Smartphone Biz M icrosoft On Wednesday announced ideas to streamline its smartphone business by cutting 1 Microsoft,850 jobs. It will track record an impairment fee of US$950 million, with severance obligations accounting for $200 million of the fee. The restructuring will entail up to at least one 1,350 job losses at Microsoft Mobile Oy in Finland, and 500 more slashes round the world. "We are focusing our phone efforts where we have differentiation -- with businesses that value security, manageability and our Continuum functionality, and consumers who value the same," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "We will continue steadily to innovate across devices and on our cloud services across all mobile programs." "What this is, is an acknowledgment that the overall House windows mobile hardware business has been declining," Ian Fogg, brain of mobile research at IHS Technology, advised the E-Commerce Times. The