Day: January 14, 2021

Surface Pro 7+ for Business: Here’s what makes it different

Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ for Business.


Image: Microsoft

Many of the typical differentiators of business PCs don’t apply to Microsoft’s Surface line. The form factors are the same, for example, and while business laptops often have a fingerprint sensor, the biometric Windows Hello camera is on consumer models as well.

Even a Surface Go with Windows Home has what’s effectively BitLocker drive encryption (although it’s called ‘Device encryption’ in Settings because home users don’t have the same management options as enterprise admins). With a tablet form factor and USB-C, there are few worries about buying accessories that need to be interchangeable, or whether components will be available down the line because there’s nothing replaceable.

SEE: Cheat sheet: Windows 10 PowerToys (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Businesses do care about the packaging of devices (because they’re on the hook for disposing of — and preferably recycling — it as part of their corporate

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Workday adds vaccine management to Return to Workplace apps

Workday launched a vaccine management system to go with hits human resources applications as corporations aim to return to offices in 2021.

The vaccination management will ride along with Workday’s Return to Workplace applications. Like Salesforce’s Work.com and ServiceNow’s efforts, Workday is looking to enable customers to analyze immunizations, plan for scenarios, engage and support workers and tweak operating models.

Back to the office in 2021? Here are ten things that will have changed | IT budgets 2020-21: Planning for business continuity in uncertain times

Workday’s vaccine management tools include:

  • A control center to view and respond to risks and manage immunization effects on the workforce. Workday is also adding insights on vaccine availability, vaccination rates and adherence. Immunization status will also be categorized by infection type, job profile, location, region and working.
  • Scenario planning to model office space requirements, personal protective equipment needs and worker availability. Enterprises will
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Review of public posts of dozens of Facebook users sharing extreme right-wing views shows how Facebook rewards their lies and helped incubate the insurrection (New York Times)


New York Times:

Review of public posts of dozens of Facebook users sharing extreme right-wing views shows how Facebook rewards their lies and helped incubate the insurrection  —  Right-wing influencers embraced extremist views and Facebook rewarded them.  —  Mr. Thompson is a writer and editor in Opinion.… Read More

Numbers stack up for UK open banking three years on

Nearly six billion calls were made from fintech application programming interfaces (APIs) to bank servers in the UK in 2020 and more than four million open banking payments were completed.

Figures from the UK’s Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) said more than four million open banking payments were made in 2020, compared with 320,000 in 2018, and nearly six billion API calls were made to servers in the UK, compared with just 66.8 million in 2018.

After three years of the UK’s open banking regulation, the OBIE also revealed that about 300 fintech firms currently offer open banking services and 2.5 million consumers use them, with hundreds of thousands of new users added each month.

In January 2018, banks were required to implement the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) Open Banking regulations. This led to the development of APIs in banking to give consumers more control over accounts. Through

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