Technology

"Apps beg us to use our phone when we should be doing something else."

Windows Collaboration Displays are one of the more interesting bits to come out of MicrosoftComputex keynote today. The company hasn&t released a ton of information about the hardware platform. At first glance, they appear to be similar to Microsoftown Surface Hub digital whiteboard offering, but are actually &a non-compute peripheral extending the PC desktop experience to room scale,& according to the company. In other words, they function more along the lines of a large display, rather than a stand alone unit.

The system is built around Microsoft 365 tools and is designed to work with the companysoftware offerings like Office, Teams and Whiteboard. Sensors on the board utilize the companyAzure IoT spatial intelligence capabilities. Therea long blog post about that tech over here, but the system essentially uses room measurements to build adaptive models.

&For example,& the company explains, &in an office environment spatial intelligence can enable better management of heating, cooling, and room-booking systems based on how the space is actually used.&

Microsoft has already signed up a couple of third-party hardware manufacturers to build Collaboration Displays, including Sharp (pictured above) and touchscreen display maker, Avocor. The systems will feature both touchscreen and pen inputs, stereo speakers, a camera and a far-field microphone sytem.

Those products will be available at some point later this year. No word on cost, but Microsoft is promising &low price points,& which likely means they&ll come in under the Surface Hub, which starts at $9,000.

If you have an essential Internet of Things device running Windows 10 IoT Core Service, you don&t want to be worried about security and OS patches over a period of years. Microsoft wants to help customers running these kinds of devices with a new program that guarantees 10 years of updates.

The idea is that as third-party partners build applications on top of the Windows 10 IoT Core Services, these OEMs, who create the apps, can pay Microsoft to guarantee updates for these devices for a decade. This can help assure customers that they won&t be vulnerable to attack on these critical systems from unpatched applications.

The service does more than provide updates though. It also gives OEMs the ability to manage the updates and assess the devicehealth.

&The Windows IoT Core service offering is enabling partners to commercialize secure IoT devices backed by industry-leading support.And so device makers will have the ability to manage updates for the OS, for the apps and for the settings for OEM-specific files,&Dinesh Narayanan, director of business development for emerging markets explained.

It gives OEMs creating Windows-powered applications on machines like healthcare devices or ATMs this ability to manage them over an extended period. Thatparticularly important as these devices tend to have a more extended usage period than say a PC or tablet.&We want to extend support and commit to that support over the long haul for these devices that have a longer life cycle,& Narayanan said.

Beyond the longevity, the service also provides customers with access to the Device Update Center where they can control and customize how and when the devices get updated. It also includes another level of security called Device Health Attestation that allows the OEMs to evaluate the trustworthiness of the devices before they update them using a third party service.

All of this is designed to give Microsoft a foothold in the growing IoT space and to provide an operating system for these devices as they proliferate. While predictions vary dramatically, Gartner has predicted that at least 20 billion connected devices will be online in 2020.

While not all of these will be powered by Windows, or require advanced management capabilities, those that do can be assured if their vendor uses this program that they can manage the devices and keep them up-to-date. And when it comes to the Internet of Things, chances are thatgoing to be critical.