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In January we finally said goodbye to Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Microsoft made its new Edge browser generally available, fixed a search bug in File Explorer, and started rolling out Calls in Your Phone for Windows 10 19H1 and newer.

Back in May of 2018, Microsoft made a big splash by announcing the Surface Hub 2. The hardware was the follow-up to the successful Surface Hub but the company was pushing the software and hardware in an ambitious new direction.

Because Microsoft announced its most recent quarterly earnings this week, this edition of Short Takes is going to obsess over the results, with a deeper dive into key parts of the business.

For the past half-decade or so, Google has been trying feverishly to crack the enterprise market with its cloud and productivity application. While the company has made some serious in-roads, with its cloud services growing and the adoption of its productivity suite, Google Apps, often becoming the preferred choice for small companies, Microsoft still rules the roost for the productivity market.

Microsoft fixed the copy-on-write bug in Outlook for Windows in Exchange Online. The fix stops users removing attachments from sent or received messages. A strong case can be made that the fix should have been present from the start to stop any possibility that clients could comprise Exchange Native Data Protection. Microsoft doesn’t think many people were affected and they could be right, but that doesn’t make the problem any easier to swallow.

It’s that time of the year again and Microsoft has released its earnings for Q2 fiscal / Q4 calendar and the company beat estimates for revenue and earnings per share. The company brought in $36.9 billion in revenue with $11.6 billion of that being Net Income.

Redmond could be looking to phase out the Microsoft Store for Business and Store for Education. Not to be confused with the consumer app that is bundled with Windows 10, the Store for Business and Store for Education allows organizations to control licensing and distribution of public Store apps and to distribute line-of-business apps that are developed in-house.

While almost every business has some type of backup processes in place for their important servers, many of these same companies have neglected endpoint backup. There’s no doubt that servers are more important as they provide a platform for the business-critical applications and services that the business relies on but they are not the only critical component.

The new Request Files feature in OneDrive for Business is great for users but comes with no admin controls. You can block the feature completely with a kludge and use Office 365 audit records to know when people are requesting files. However, Microsoft could make the feature so much better by extending some existing controls to make requesting files work better and more securely.

Microsoft adds a subset of existing Azure server security and auditing features to Azure Arc for organizations that need to manage workloads on different platforms and locations.

In a January 22 post, Microsoft announced a plan to boost Microsoft Search in Bing by including an extension to make Bing the search engine for Chrome for Office ProPlus users. Obviously no one outside Redmond thinks that this is a good idea as forcing users to embrace Bing is unlikely to be popular. But it might happen in mid-February when the next Monthly Channel update for Office ProPlus lands. Stay tuned for developments.

Hot on the heels of this month’s Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has published a security advisory for an Internet Explorer zero-day.