The new school year is well un­der­way at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus, and as part of its mis­sion to pre­pare stu­dents for work and life, the uni­ver­si­ty re­cent­ly held its Glob­al Tech­nol­o­gy Show­case (GTS).Mi­crosoft TT was on hand, to help the UWI com­mu­ni­ty bet­ter un­der­stand and use their lat­est in­no­va­tions in de­vices, ser­vices and aca­d­e­m­ic pro­grammes avail­able.

"We are here to raise aware­ness of Mi­crosoft and the many prod­ucts we have to sup­port stu­dents in learn­ing and work," said Yud­histre Jonas, de­vel­op­er and plat­form evan­ge­list with Mi­crosoft TT.New and re­turn­ing stu­dents, as well as lec­tur­ers and oth­er per­son­nel, were treat­ed to in­for­ma­tive pre­sen­ta­tions and de­vice demon­stra­tions:

�2 Win­dows Phone 8–Rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Nokia pre­sent­ed sev­er­al mod­els of the pow­er­ful Lu­mia Win­dows Phone. Nokia gave a live de­mo of the Win­dows Phone App Stu­dio.

�2 Tablets and PCs–An ar­ray of Leno­vo tablets, lap­tops, con­vert­ibles and even a minia­ture desk­top, all pow­ered by Mi­crosoft Win­dows, were on dis­play for stu­dents and fac­ul­ty.

�2 Mi­crosoft IT Acad­e­my–Lec­tur­ers from the acad­e­my gave stu­dents valu­able in­for­ma­tion about their co-cur­ric­u­lar cours­es in Mi­crosoft Of­fice and tech­nol­o­gy lit­er­a­cy which give grad­u­ates full in­ter­na­tion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion as Mi­crosoft Of­fice spe­cial­ists.

�2 Dream Spark–Mi­crosoft TT reps pro­vid­ed in­for­ma­tion on this ed­u­ca­tion sup­port pro­gramme that gives stu­dents and ed­u­ca­tors ac­cess to Mi­crosoft soft­ware for learn­ing, teach­ing and re­search.

�2 2014 Imag­ine Cup Com­pe­ti­tion–Stu­dents re­ceived de­tails on this stu­dent tech­nol­o­gy com­pe­ti­tion with more than US$300,000 in prizes and a free trip to Seat­tle, USA, for the world­wide fi­nals in 2014.

Mem­bers of the UWI com­mu­ni­ty were en­thu­si­as­tic about the GTS and the nu­mer­ous de­vices and ser­vices on dis­play. Mi­crosoft prod­ucts were par­tic­u­lar­ly pop­u­lar be­cause of their pow­er­ful fea­tures and com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with Mi­crosoft Of­fice, the pri­ma­ry op­er­at­ing sys­tem for work and per­son­al com­put­ing."I was look­ing to buy a tablet for my­self and my re­search showed that oth­er op­er­at­ing sys­tems (OS) were too con­fined in func­tion­al­i­ty," said Matthew, a sec­ond year en­gi­neer­ing stu­dent.

"The (Leno­vo) Think pad tablet has the full-fledged Win­dows 8 OS, which is what I need."