Microsoft promises to sooth Boards’ users’ Paper Cuts

Microsoft promises to sooth Boards’ users’ Paper Cuts

Microsoft has ripped a small, but rather sharp, leaf out of recent acquisition GitHub’s playbook to help it tackle small but irritating issues with its Azure Boards tool.

Project Paper Cuts for Azure Boards was inspired by GitHub’s Project Paper Cuts, wrote Azure Boards program manager Alison Tai this week, and aims to take a “critical look at the rough edges of Azure Boards”.

“We recognize that throughout the years, our product’s workflows have accumulated smaller issues and usability nitpicks which have failed to become part of bigger product initiatives. This is where Project Paper Cuts comes in.”

She writes that a “paper cut” is a “small to medium-sized experience problem which our users hit day-to-day”. A quick fix should be all that’s needed to solve it, she continued, but these will have a high impact on usability and productivity.

She cited examples of recent changes in Boards to illustrate the point. The first is state order being displayed in process order instead of alphabetically, which enables users to work through them more intuitively. Another is auto-tagging in comments to enable easier collaboration with team mates, while a third is automatic live updates on all new boards.

GitHub launched its own Project Paper Cuts last August. At the time, product manager Luke Hefson wrote: “Internally, we’re fielding feedback with a spotlight on fixes that will have the most impact with the least process, friction, discussion and dependencies, and shipping as rapidly as we can.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft has flagged a number of chunkier updates across the Azure portal.

Highlights include a public preview of Adaptive Network hardening in Azure security centre. This promises to “learn the network traffic and connectivity patterns of Azure workloads and provide recommendations for internet facing virtual machines, and help secure connections to and from the public internet”.

Azure security centre also gets adaptive application control updates for Azure Linux VMs, which should simplify configuring and maintaining application whitelist policies.