At its European TechEd conference today, Microsoft announced a range of new and improved features for its Linux-loving Azure cloud platform, Office 365, and management tools.
Chief among these was a set of new Office 365 APIs (and corresponding SDKs for iOS, Android, and Windows) exposing mail, calendars, contacts, and documents to developers.
One early adopter of these new APIs is IFTTT ("if this then that"), a popular service for cobbling together a wide range of online services. With IFTTT, it's easy to set up simple triggered actions, and now with Office 365 support, Office events will be able to trigger these actions. For example, users will be able to send themselves an SMS alert every time they receive an e-mail from a particular person.
On Azure, three features to ease managing and automating the cloud platform were announced, two in preview and one in general availability. Azure Operational Insights uses HDInsight, the Azure Hadoop service, to gather data from machines across Azure and deliver it to System Center for IT teams to act on. It will be in preview from November.
Azure Batch will make it easier to deploy workloads to thousands of processor cores, making Azure a better target for scale-out applications. It's available in preview starting today.
Azure Automation, also available today, is a PowerShell-based engine for automating and scheduling Azure tasks.
The company also announced that its cloud-driven mobile device management software, Intune, is being updated in the next few months to include Office mobile and Office 365 management.
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