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Google today announced that what has been known as Google for Work has been rebranded as Google Cloud.  The new name encompasses many Google apps, platforms and services into one cloud-centric solution for businesses.

Google Cloud spans every layer. It includes all of Google Cloud Platform; our user facing collaboration and productivity applications — now named G Suite; all of our machine learning

tools and APIs, the enterprise maps APIs; and the Android phones, tablets and Chromebooks that access the cloud. All of this, built for the cloud from the get-go.

Moreover, Google Cloud has been engineered in an enterprise appropriate way, with integrated systems that include guarantees at the service level — all components integrated and meeting the SLA for whatever price point the customer chooses.

The change in name and direction of the solution isn’t just about products.  It is also the backend support that Google will provide to their customers to go through the digital transformation that Google Cloud can offer.  As they put it, “We are in it together”.  Customers won’t have to figure it out on their own and that, especially for smaller businesses, can be a huge relief and cost savings.

Microsoft has released an update to their digital notebook app, OneNote, that adds a lot of new features.  The update is build is version 16.0.7369.1775 for those keeping score at home and like version number Bingo.  While it has the usual smattering of bug fixes and performance improvements, there are also some big feature changes to this update.  First, the app now supports multi-window use in Android Nougat.  To this point, if you tried to use OneNote in multi-window, it simply would not open.  That’s a thing of the past now and you can have the app and another app open at the same time on the screen on your phone or tablet.

Another big improvement in this update is the ability to open password-protected sections.  On the desktop version of OneNote, you can password protect those sections with sensitive information.  Previously the Android app (and iOS app for that matter) wouldn’t open up those sections.  That’s fixed and now you can open them although you still cannot create a password protected section within the app.  Support for inserting and viewing embedded files in your notes has also been added in this update.

The Microsoft Garage team (think of it as a developer incubator) has released another new app that is designed to give you news and information based on your unique interests.  The new News Pro app leverages your social network interests to give you more personalized news and information based on your likes on those social networks.  You can sign in with LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook and the information provided to you will be based on your profile on that particular network.  It is a great concept and in playing with the app, it works pretty well.

Google has rolled out another update to Google Photos and if you look at the release notes, you would think it was just a but fix release.  However, the new 2.1 version of the app has a new Assistant card that can help you with photos you shot sideways.  In previous versions of Photos – and other photo apps for that matter – if you shot a photo that was sideways, you would have to manually go in and edit that file by rotating it.  You can still do that in this update to Photos but now the app can analyze your photos and determine if it is sideways.  If so, it will give you an Assistant card suggesting that it can auto-rotate the photo for you without you having to manually do so.