ITPro SnapShot: What Else Happened This Week? (May 11 - 18, 2018)

There's a lot of product announcements every week -- and sooner or later, something gets announced that you'll want to know. Every Friday, we'll connect some of these newsy little dots and draw a picture as to what's going on with tech vendors and industry trends.

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Developing Bots for Hangouts Chat

Google has introduced bot support for is their Hangouts Chat client. Hangouts Chat, made available for general availability recently. The support provides real-time communications and collaboration support for members of teams in the same building, across the country, or around the world.

Bots for Hangouts can already respond to users with text-based replies but now Google has added a new UI for their bots that use a UI called cards. These are similar to a similar feature Microsoft announced at BUILD 2018 for their various clients/services.

Download All Build 2018 Sessions Offline

Microsoft has a large number of videos and related content available for on-demand viewing from their BUILD 2018 developers conference which was held last week in Seattle.

If you are looking to grab that content for offline viewing, follow these instructions on how to download all of that content using PowerShell is what you need.

New Developer Preview: Use Amazon Polly Voices in Alexa Skills

If you are building skills for Amazon Alexa and want to use a different voice then check out Amazon Polly.

This developer preview program, which you must sign up for, will give you access to eight new English voices for your Alexa Skills.

These voices can be mixed and matched within the same skill to add a conversational dimension to the skill.

Three Steps to Prepare Your Users for Cloud Data Migration

The big cloud companies want you to move to their offerings and each of them work to make a case for themselves as your ultimate destination. Sometimes it can be a mixture of cloud providers that you use in order to have flexibility and expanded capabilities.

Whatever your cloud decision is the time comes very quickly when you need to make that migration.

One of Google's Strategic Cloud Engineers shares three key things you can do that will help your users make this move.

Announcing the Insider Dev Tour 2018!

As has become their custom following BUILD, Microsoft has announced their plans for the now annual Insider Dev Tour.

This traveling developer event delivers briefings on all the major product and service announcements made at Microsoft's BUILD 2018 conference.

Program Managers and Software Engineers will be available to talk about the new announcements and give local devs an opportunity to learn how they can use these services in their own work.

There are more than 40 events planned around the globe in regions including Asia Pacific, Europe/Middle East/Africa, Latin America, and North American.

Sign up early as space is often limited.