Microsoft is supporting literally the lifecycle of a developer in the Middle East and Africa says Julien Bertin, Azure Business Lead for Middle East and Africa for Microsoft.
From the time you graduate to the time you retire literally. At every single step of the journey, we have programs to re-skill yourself. Microsoft is fully embracing this journey with the different programs we are launching. Like student certifications. If you are coming out of university and looking for jobs we do placements as well.
Julien made this revelation during an interview with Seth Juarez, Principal Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, for an episode of CodeStories on Channel 9. Where Seth asked Julien what Microsoft is doing to empower developers in the Middle East and Africa region.
Microsoft, Julien notes is one of the first cloud providers to invest in development skills on the African continent. With the launch of two development centers in Kenya and Nigeria.
This enables us and the people in the region to create the skills and generate the value here in the region for Africa.
We want to accelerate digital transformation and the capture of wealth that comes out from digital information. We want to invest in infrastructure, skilling(students and non-graduate students) and enabling innovation in the region.
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Egypt’s Ministry of Education announces it has signed an agreement with Microsoft Egypt to provide a digital educational environment for students and teachers.
This is part of its efforts to ensure the safety of all educational system members. Whilst ensuring learning continues across the country as the world grapples with the coronavirus crisis.
Twenty million students and one million teachers are set to benefit from the unified platform.
The partnership will see the activation of an E-service for the entire Ministry of Education and Technical Education. It will also equip educators and students with solutions such as Microsoft Office 365.
Microsoft will implement the digital educational environment through its local partners Cairo Codes and BlueCloud.
Check out other stories making the news in the technology ecosystem in Africa and the Middle East.
Microsoft is collaborating with Social Change Factory to launch a digital skills initiative in Senegal.
Through the partnership, Social change is offering free access to learning content, recognized Microsoft certification and professional opportunities.
This is part of Microsoft’s Global Skills Initiative programme to help twenty-five million people worldwide acquire digital skills. By giving learners access to learning resources across Microsoft and its subsidiary companies, LinkedIn and GitHub.
The resources include free access to learning paths and content to help learners develop the skills these positions require. As well as low-cost certifications and free job-seeking tools to help learners pursue new jobs.
The initiative will help young job seekers acquire competencies and get certified, notes Yacine Barro, Microsoft West and Central Africa Country Manager during the launch event.
As an immediate response, this initiative consists of helping individual young job seekers to acquire competencies and get certified on them; ensuring they gain the right skills, knowledge, and opportunity to succeed in the post-pandemic world. Microsoft and Social Change Factory will provide free access to learning content from LinkedIn Learning, GitHub and Microsoft Learn. Access to low-cost test that provides industry-recognized certifications. And free connections to LinkedIn Employability tools such as networking and job search tools, coaches and mentorships opportunities.
Yacine Barro
Yaccine also thanks Social Change Factory for helping drive the skills initiative in Senegal.
To learn more and participate in the Microsoft Global skills initiative click to visit the Social Change Factory website.
Pour formez-vous et obtenez une certification Microsoft Global Skills initiative cliquez ici.
Microsoft Teams is upgrading the virtual platform to accommodate larger groups for meetings and classes. As part of this new upgrade, meeting organisers who want to have more people watch a presentation or discussion will soon be able to bring together up to 20,000 participants at a go but for a view-only meeting experience.
And for more interactive meetings—where attendees can chat, unmute to talk, and turn on their videos for real-time collaboration, Teams meetings are growing to support up to 1,000 participants, up from a maximum of 250 participants currently.
These upgrades are part of new features in Microsoft Teams that will make virtual interactions more natural, more engaging, and ultimately, more human. These features offer three key benefits for people at work and in education. First, they help you feel more connected with your team and reduce meeting fatigue. Second, they make meetings more inclusive and engaging. And third, they help streamline your work and save time. It’s all about enabling people everywhere to collaborate, to stay connected, and to discover new ways to be productive from anywhere.
“As the global response to COVID-19 evolves, communities around the world have moved from an era of “remote everything” into a more hybrid model of work, learning, and life. And as we all scramble to keep up, the future of work and education is being shaped before our eyes. At Microsoft, we have spent the last few months learning from our customers and studying how they use our tools,” Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365.
Of the new features announced – the Together Mode – which will be available for users from next month, presents a new meeting experience in Teams that uses AI segmentation technology to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else in the meeting or class. Research has shown that since most people started doing work remotely, many people are feeling less connected and experience more fatigue during video meetings than during in-person collaboration. This mode makes meetings more engaging by helping you focus on other people’s faces and body language and making it easier to pick up on the non-verbal cues that are so important to human interaction.
“It’s great for meetings in which multiple people will speak, such as brainstorms or roundtable discussions, because it makes it easier for participants to understand who is talking,” Spataro explains.
The second feature – the Dynamic view – offers an extraordinary new meeting experience but it’s not intended for every meeting. We believe that traditional video meetings people use every day can also be more engaging and dynamic. A set of enhancements we call dynamic view gives you more control over how you see shared content and other participants in a meeting. Using AI, meetings dynamically optimize shared content and video participants. New controls—including the ability to show shared content and specific participants side-by-side—let you personalize the view to suit your preferences and needs.
The third feature is the Video filters which allows users to subtly adjust lighting levels and soften the focus of the camera to customize their appearance. Also introduced is the Reflect messaging extension which is based on research that shows that employee well-being is more important to productivity than ever. Creating an emotionally supportive environment is key to keeping people healthy, happy, and focused. The new Reflect messaging extension gives managers, leaders and teachers an easy way to check in with how their team or students are feeling — either in general, or about a specific topic like work-life balance, the status of a project, current events, or a change within the organization. IT administrators will be able to install the Reflect extension from GitHub, and then make it available to employees in their organization in the message extension menu.
In addition to the above, Teams users will soon be able to react during a meeting using emojis that will appear to all participants. Live reactions is a shared feature with PowerPoint Live Presentations, which allows audience members to provide instant feedback to the presenter.
Also, during meetings, chat has become a lively space for conversation and idea-sharing and offers an option for people to participate in the discussion without having to jump in verbally. But it can be challenging to pay attention to video feeds, presentations, and chats all at the same time. Currently, Teams users need to manually open a chat window to view the chat screen. Soon, however, chats sent during a Teams meeting will surface on the screens of all meeting participants, making the chat more central to the conversation.
While Teams already provides live captions as a way to follow along with what is being said in a meeting, soon we will add speaker attribution to captions so that everyone knows who is speaking. Live transcripts, coming later this year, provide another way to follow along with what has been said and who said it. After a meeting, the transcript file is automatically saved in a tab as a part of the meeting. “Unless otherwise specified, all of these features will roll out later this year. And they all reflect our vision for the future of work: where everyone is able to contribute and do their best work; where they can move fluidly between experiences, apps, and devices; where AI lends a helping hand to streamline tasks, provide short cuts, and save you time; and where technology contributes to wellbeing and doesn’t detract from it,” explains Spataro.
If you have been planning to skill up on Microsoft’s cloud technology, Azure, here is an opportunity. No matter your level, GreyCampus is offering you their Azure courseware for free during this time of Covid-19.
The courses span; Azure Fundamentals, Microsoft 365 Fundamentals, Azure Administrator, Azure, Architect and Azure Developer.
While social distancing becomes the need of the hour, it calls for self-care, overall well-being and above all staying positive. During these times, we, at GreyCampus, believe learning is the gateway to growth, engagement and success. We have taken an initiative to serve our patrons and community through a wide array of Microsoft official courseware being offered free of charge for a limited period.
The Azure courseware valued at between $800 to $2500 are free till August 2020. To access the courses, visit GreyCampus via this link and register. After registration you will recieve a license code to the registered email address with 24 hours. With the code, you can now start learning.
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