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Cloudy what now? Adobe and Microsoft cosy up with cloud partnership

Integration Dynamics, CRM, Azure and AWS. Jumble words as needed

Ignite Microsoft and Adobe announced a new cloud partnership at the Ignite event this week in Atlanta in a really unclear announcement.

"Adobe will make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform for the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud," says the press release, though the press release does not state whether Adobe plans to move its services away from Amazon Web Services where they are currently hosted.

This security FAQ [PDF] states that "Creative Cloud is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), in the United States, EU, and Asia Pacific."

The press statement does refer to the Azure intelligence services, including machine learning, which Adobe and its customers can use for analytics. Adobe's design products are widely used in the marketing industry, where analytics is key to improve targeting and customer engagement, so there is obvious synergy here.

On Microsoft's side, the company says it will make "Adobe Marketing Cloud its preferred marketing service for Dynamics 365 Enterprise edition." Hmm. Adobe does not have a CRM solution, so this announcement is focused on building integration between Creative Cloud and Microsoft's Dynamics CRM. "The underlying data models will be extensible to enterprise customers, as well as third-party developers and partners," says Microsoft.

Microsoft also announced new security features in Windows and Office 365. Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, a feature of Exchange online which inspects attachments and links, is being extended to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. In addition, the Edge browser is getting a Windows Defender Application Guard, which uses virtualization-based security technology to isolate malicious code.

Outlook for iOS and Android, which previously cached emails in an intermediate cloud service, will now support Exchange Online mailboxes natively so that no mailbox data is stored outside Office 365.

Delve Analytics, a feature of Office 365 which reports on personal and team productivity, is being renamed to Delve MyAnalytics and will get new features. Office 365 users will also get new integration between the Office desktop applications and cloud data.

A feature called Tap in Word and Outlook uses the Microsoft Graph (which analyses relationships within a business) to add content from other cloud-hosted documents. Excel gets a new chart type called Maps, and the company is adding new wizards called Quickstarter for PowerPoint and Sway.®

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