Microsoft Updates Yammer

Microsoft unveiled a bevy of improvements to its Yammer enterprise social network, focused on helping people connect more easily with their teams.

By default, people who access Yammer via their web browser will be taken to a new “Discovery” feed on the service’s home page that is supposed to better show them relevant content from their groups along with other public teams across their company’s network. It’s supposed to help keep people in closer touch with important discussions they may be missing on Yammer.

After users finish reviewing new content in one group, Yammer will display a pop up banner with a link to the next group they’re subscribed to that has new content. Yammer’s mobile apps will get similar functionality through a new Group Updates feed that lets users see a list of different conversations in various groups all on one screen. That way, they won’t have to look through individual groups to get the same information. That feature will begin rolling out on Android first before making it to Yammer’s iOS app.

In addition, Yammer is also tweaking the design of individual groups’ pages. Now, each group will have a full-width banner at the top of its page, and discussions within the group can now take up a wider space on the page to aid in lengthier discussions. The whole page has also been redesigned to focus users’ attention on important content.

Icons in the left-hand sidebar will show the users that are active in groups they are a part of, so they can stay up-to-date on where conversations are happening in real time. It’s a move that could make Yammer more competitive with popular chat solutions like Slack, which has been growing incredibly rapidly and was recently valued at $2.8 billion.

Yammer’s mobile app also gained support for attaching files from external storage services like OneDrive and Dropbox, inviting coworkers to a user’s network by email and mentioning people in comments.

There’s even more up Yammer’s sleeve on top of all these updates. The social network’s iPhone app will soon have a companion version for the Apple Watch that will let people interact with content from their coworkers.

The updates come at a time when Microsoft is putting more effort into improving its workplace collaboration tools.

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Xerox To Revamp Healthcare IT Business

Xerox Corp said it would overhaul its healthcare IT business and record a related impairment charge of about $145 million in the second quarter.

The company said it would end sales of its integrated eligibility system, a software system which can support operations in call centers and document imaging.

The healthcare business provides administrative and care management solutions to state Medicaid programs and government healthcare programs.

“Going forward, Xerox will focus on managing and completing the current Health Enterprise implementations, and will be highly selective in responding to new Medicaid Management Information System opportunities,” the company said on Friday.

The healthcare business contributes “$2 billion plus” to total revenue, a company spokeswoman said. The company reported total revenue of $19.54 billion for 2014.

“Basically, they are focusing their government healthcare business away from less profitable initiatives that they were pursuing. I see it as a positive,” Cross Research analyst Shannon Cross said.

“From a long-term stand point, it (Medicaid) is a profitable business,” Cross said.

Xerox, which has been shifting its focus to IT services from making printers and copiers, adjusted its earnings estimate for the quarter ended June to reflect the charge.

The company said it now expects earnings from continuing operations of 9-11 cents per share, below its prior guidance of 17-19 cents per share.

Shares of Xerox, which is expected to report second-quarter results on July 24, were up 1.6 percent at $10.79 in afternoon trading.

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Will Apple Go All-In On Car Batteries?

A year and a half ago, Apple Inc applied for eight patents related to car batteries. Recently, it has added a slew of engineers, just one of whom had already filed for 17 in his former career, according to a Thomson Reuters.

The recent spate of hires and patent filings shows that Apple is fast building its industrial lithium-ion battery capabilities, adding to evidence the iPhone maker may be developing a car.

Quiet, clean electric cars are viewed in Silicon Valley and elsewhere as a promising technology for the future, but high costs and “range anxiety”, the concern that batteries will run out of power and cannot be recharged quickly, remain obstacles. Those challenges could also be seen as opportunities to find solutions to take the technology mainstream.

The number of auto-related patents filed by Apple, Google Inc, Korea’s Samsung, electric carmaker Tesla Motors Inc and ride-sharing startup Uber tripled from 2011 to 2014, according to an analysis by Thomson Reuters IP & Science of public patent filings.

Apple has filed far fewer of these patents than rivals, perhaps adding impetus to its recent hiring binge as it seeks to get up to speed in battery technologies and other car-building related expertise.

As of 18 months ago, Apple had filed for 290 such patents. By contrast, Samsung, which has been providing electric vehicle batteries for some years, had close to 900 filings involving auto battery technology alone.

The U.S. government makes patent applications public only after 18 months, so the figures do not reflect any patents filed in 2014.

Earlier this month, battery maker A123 Systems sued Apple for poaching five top engineers. A search of LinkedIn profiles indicates Apple has hired at least another seven A123 employees and at least 18 employees from Tesla since 2012.

The former A123 employees have expertise primarily in battery cell design, materials development and manufacturing engineering, according to the LinkedIn profiles and an analysis of patent applications.

A123, which filed for bankruptcy in 2012 but has since reorganized, supplied batteries for Fisker Automotive’s now-discontinued hybrid electric car.

“Looking at the people Apple is hiring from A123 and their backgrounds, it is hard not to assume they’re working on an electric car,” said Tom Gage, Chief Executive of EV Grid and a longtime expert in batteries and battery technology.

Apple is building its own battery division, according to the A123 lawsuit. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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HP Aims To Boot ‘Useless’ Data

Hewlett-Packard wants to help organizations rid themselves of useless data, all the information that is no longer necessary, yet still occupies expensive space on storage servers.

The company’s Autonomy unit has released a new module, called Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup, that can delete data automatically based on the material’s age and other factors, according to Joe Garber, who is the Autonomy vice president of information governance.

Hewlett-Packard announced the new software, along with a number of other updates and new services, at its HP Discover conference, being held this week in Las Vegas.

For this year’s conference, HP will focus on “products, strategies and solutions that allow our customers to take command of their data that has value, and monetize that information,” said Saar Gillai, HP’s senior vice president and general manager for the converged cloud.

The company is pitching Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup for eliminating no-longer-relevant data in old SharePoint sites and in e-mail repositories. The software requires the new version of Autonomy’s policy engine, ControlPoint 4.0.

HP Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup evaluates whether to delete a file based on several factors, Garber said. One factor is the age of the material. If an organization has an information governance policy of only keeping data for seven years, for example, the software will delete any data older than seven years. It will root out and delete duplicate data. Some data is not worth saving, such as system files. Those can be deleted as well. It can also consider how much the data is being accessed by employees: Less consulted data is more suitable for deletion.

Administrators can set other controls as well. If used in conjunction with the indexing and categorization capabilities in Autonomy’s Idol data analysis platform, the new software can eliminate clusters of data on a specific topic. “You apply policies to broad swaths of data based on some conceptual analysis you are able to do on the back end,” Garber said.

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