Planning and Design Excellence Award

Design Thinking at Scale

Integrating design thinking within an organization is a huge mindset and cultural change not just around applying design-thinking, but about doing so in a way that accommodates changes in the entire product lifecycle, and takes into account customizations and modifications that need to be made to make it “stick” with the culture of a team.

In addition to rolling out a broad-scale change across an entire division at Microsoft, this work also demonstrated a careful and thorough learning analysis along the way. This resulted in tangible artifacts to help us continue to improve our own processes within the Microsoft Office Division, as well as to share with other teams. Truly succeeding at design thinking at scale is as much about the lessons learned about what not to do, as it has been about what was learned that really works and the resulting successes. The combination of the thoughtful approach to how to roll out this change along with the lasting/reusable assets that accompanied it is something that will be of enormous benefit to Microsoft adopted as a best practice company-wide in our continuing mission to craft seamless and soulful experiences our customers love.

Engineering Productivity and Efficiency Award

Research Platform and Tools

A platform and set of tools that provides a central Microsoft IT-hosted service to index and search entire code bases in multiple branches. This set of tools improves engineering productivity and efficiency by allowing users to search, learn from, and reuse code in a number of code bases including Windows, Office, Bing, and Windows Mobile.

The solution provides a set of innovative clients including a Visual Studio plug-in, a standalone client and a web client which enhances the development experience by automatically exposing engineering system data about code files in-context.

The development team was led by Eric Li, and the test team by Shruti Van Wicklen; both deserve credit for the success of the project.

Quality Excellence Award

Improvements to the Development Process of JavaScript Applications

A set of tools that provide comprehensive source, syntax, and semantic analysis and rich code transformations for JavaScript, a language that drives platforms and apps in the browser, in the cloud, and on the desktop (such as the new Win8 app model and new Office apps).

This toolset enables teams to achieve high engineering standards for JavaScript application development, by providing comprehensive source, syntax, and semantic analysis for JavaScript, HTML and CSS, coupled to a rich set of code transformations (minification, obfuscation, optimizations, localization, partitioning, etc.). These capabilities are deeply integrated into the engineering workflow by means of features such as in-source suppressions, VS IDE integration, and tasks for incorporating analysis into complex internal build systems.

Privacy Award

Honoring Customer Permissions

This team‘s work exemplifies Microsoft’s efforts to ensure that customers can manage permissions and contact information for promotional communications from Microsoft.

HCP provides customers with a complete view of contact information provided to Microsoft for promotional communication use, enabling them to manage both information and related permissions in one place. HCP is a truly company-wide effort with collaboration from the Marketing, Privacy, Engineering, and Legal Groups across Microsoft, including business partners from product groups across the company.

Reliability Award

Windows 8 Modern Application Leak Detection

The Windows 8 modern application leak detection framework has enabled development teams across multiple divisions at Microsoft to discover – and resolve – critical memory and resource leaks during the final stages of the Windows 8 product cycle. The benefits derived from this project extended beyond Windows 8 to the entire Windows ecosystem, as it enabled corrections to be made to the Windows SDK – a resource referenced by thousands of developers worldwide.

Testimonials from developers using the framework highlight the effectiveness of the innovative approach taken by the team. As a result of their efforts, reliability improvements were made to the Windows 8 core platform, and two dozen applications shipping in the box with Windows 8 and the Windows 8 SDK. A planned whitepaper, slated for publication on MSDN will enable Microsoft customers developing on Windows 8 to apply the very same principles embodied through the framework to their own development efforts.

Security Award

Windows 8 with Secure Boot

Today, despite industry leading best practices such as the Software Development Lifecycle, Windows and anti-malware products cannot defend the user if the platform itself is compromised and malware can run during boot. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification’s Secure Boot protocol and Windows 8 helps to change this. UEFI Secure Boot increases protection for a wide range of Microsoft customers and as a direct result, contributes to the trustworthiness of Microsoft products.

Secure Boot is a key element in the vision for end-to-end security, providing a foundation to better protect the Windows client, data and corporate resources by leveraging UEFI’s ability to help ensure that all images launched in the boot path are in compliance with the Secure Boot policy.

The Secure Boot investment, along with Measured Boot and Platform Attestation, completes the Trusted Boot Scenario. When used together with Early Launch Anti-Malware software (ELAM), these security features form a powerful combination enabling an end-to-end trusted experience, and providing an ability to assert that no known malware is running on a Windows client before granting access to critical resources.

Trustworthy Computing All-up Award

SmartScreen Application Reputation – Protecting users from Malware in Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 8

The team’s work on SmartScreen Application Reputation applies the concept of community reputation to programs that users download and run, which helps reduce unnecessary security warnings while also helping users make better trust decisions. This feature was first introduced in Internet Explorer 9 and subsequently into Windows 8 to provide this protection to users regardless of browser choice. Since its release in Internet Explorer 9, SmartScreen Application Reputation has proven to be highly effective at reducing infections from socially engineered malware attacks.

The key innovation of these features in protecting against malware is utilizing positive reputation (rather than negative) to influence the customer’s experience and trust decisions. This somewhat radical approach to address the latency limitation present in all block-based approaches that happens at the beginning of new attacks, before a Web site or program has been identified as malicious. This solution helps users make trust decisions when all other defense mechanisms have failed to provide protection because they do not yet recognize the attack. The net result is a trust-enhancing experience in which users are enabled to make better trust decisions and avoid the negative consequences of malware infection.