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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Now, You Can Deploy to Kubernetes Engine from GitLab With a Few Clicks
This week Google and GitLab announced that they have a new service that integrates the GitLab DevOps tool with the open source Kubernetes Engine. You can now preview code changes and configure continuous deployment directly within GitLab, all with a few steps that connects your Kubernetes resources to a GitLab project.
Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Translate Both Generally Available
Both of these services are now available to AWS users in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland).
Amazon Transcribe and Translate both use deep-learning technologies to provide their respective services.
According to Amazon, Translate supports translation between English and Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Arabic, and Portuguese. Six more languages will be added in the coming months including Japanese, Russian, Italian, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, and Czech.
Transcribe implements voice-to-text translations for any file residing in Amazon S3 storage. You can provide custom vocabularies to help with transcription accuracy, including product names, domain-specific terminology, and the names of individuals.
Announcing the New Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center
Microsoft has been saying Skype for Business would eventually be replaced by communications services within their Microsoft Teams collaboration tool for Office 365 Business subscribers. As part of the transition from one communications tool to another, they're providing an admin center for the two services running concurrently.
The new single pane interface for system admins gives access for the management of users, meetings, messaging policies, organizational wide settings, legacy portals, call analytics, and call quality.
As settings are migrated into this new portal, you will see alerts in the Office 365 Admin Center pointing you towards the new admin site.
Bonus: Microsoft has started populating their IT Pro tutorials for Microsoft Teams and you can see what they initially have available on this page.
Google to Expand Cloud Network Between Australia and Southeast Asia
Google shared details about their latest investment in undersea connectivity to increase reliability for their services to customers in the Asia Pacific region: They're sinking resources into the Japan-Guam-Australia cable system, with the goal of boosting connectivity for their customers across five cloud regions in this area. Check out the Google Cloud Platforms global connectivity network to see how they tie everything together globally.
Amazon WorkDocs Drive Is Now Available for Microsoft Windows Users
Amazon's WorkDocs is their version of Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. They have now released a desktop version of the client sync engine for Windows PC users.
It integrates into File Explorer just like OneDrive does, and gives WorkDocs users the ability to share, favorite, lock or unlock and search files. Since it is all based on storage in the cloud, changes you make on one device through WorkDocs are synced to other devices automatically.
Amazon WorkDocs for Windows Users is available for download from here. This service is available in all AWS Regions which offer Amazon WorkDocs.
Introducing the Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center
Microsoft 365 brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility & Security into one subscription package for business and enterprise customers.
As part of the continuing development of this package of services, Microsoft has upgraded the initial Microsoft 365 Admin Center: it is now called the Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center.
This single pane of glass gives system administrators at-a-glance information about their install base so they can monitor and act as necessary to security and other critical system issues.
The redesigned admin center also provides data admins, compliance officers, security admins, and security operations personnel access to information that allows them to evaluate their companies profile across these services to insure the highest possible security and operations standards are maintained.
Upcoming features that are planned include deployment and management capabilities for security and compliance. As the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) go into effect next month, this type of support is critical for company compliance.
