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ITPro SnapShot: What Else Happened This Week? (Dec. 9 - 15, 2017)

ITPro SnapShot offers a short and snappy round-up on the week's industry-related announcements and news around the globe. Here's what happened in the last five days.

There's a lot of product announcements every week -- and sooner or later, something gets announced that you'll want to know. Every Friday, we'll connect some of these newsy little dots and draw a picture as to what's going on with tech vendors and industry trends. 

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Announcing the General Availability of Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding, enabling developers to build better conversational bots

It is hard to believe that Microsoft first mentioned intelligent bots at BUILD 2016 and the technology continues to develop and mature.

After spending several months in a preview program, the Redmond company has made all of these bot-related technologies generally available for developers to build their own bots. Using AI and machine learning, these bots can be enabled to learn and adjust their responses to end users based on that learning. It is a perfect first level interaction with customers to address low level inquiries and re-direct them to higher levels of support or information as necessary.

Expanding our partner ecosystem with managed services providers

Google announced its first Managed Service Provider (MSP), Rackspace, earlier this year and now it has expanded that list with 11 more MSPs.

These MSPs are experts in Google Cloud and are built to help you plan and execute your cloud migration. Each also has unique skills that can be key to your own migration to make your move to the cloud as painless as possible.

Cloud storage now more affordable: Announcing general availability of Azure Archive Storage

Microsoft has made its archive storage option on Azure generally available to help customers reduce their overall storage costs by placing data that is not accessed regularly into different tiers of storage.

This process is called Blob-Level Tiering and enables customers to designate a lifecycle for their data so it automatically transitions to theses different storage levels and in turn saves costs along the way.

Amazon EC2 P3 Instances, most powerful GPU compute instances in the cloud, now available in additional AWS Regions

AWS EC2 P3 instances are the next generation of compute-optimized instances that run on up to 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. They are commonly used for high end computations including such activities as machine learning, high performance computing, scientific computing and simulations, financial analytics, image and video processing, and data compression.

These new P3 instances are now available AWS US East (Ohio), Asia pacific (Seoul), and AWS GovCloud (US) regions.

The Microsoft 365 powered device lab kit available for download

This Hyper-V powered lab kit provides you all the tools you will need to plan your Windows 10 deployment. With the extended support lifecycle of Windows 7 expiring in just a little more than two years, if you have not begun this process then it needs to begin soon so you have time to get done well ahead of that January 2020 deadline.

There are tools in this complete lab environment based on Windows 10 Version 1709, aka the Fall Creators update, that will help you with servicing, deployment, management, security, and compatibility between Windows 10, your network, line of business apps, and existing hardware.

Accelerate Windows 10 Migration with Windows Analytics

Another tool that is available to help with your Windows 10 migration planning is Windows Analytics.

As you implement this tool and begin using it you will see data from end to end that gives you insights to your migration challenges and helps you implement a new Windows as a Service (WaaS) process inside of your organization. The three key areas it will provide you data includes upgrade readiness, update compliance, and device health.


But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.

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