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Microsoft — a company most associated with Word documents and Excel spreadsheets — is getting a makeover.

Under new leadership, the software developer is analyzing vast troves of data about its users to create social tools for the workplace. They've got the goods — just think of all those Office emails that bind us together — but the question is, will customers want to cozy up socially with Microsoft, on and off the job?

Old Data, New Strategy

"Microsoft: the social network" is, at first glance, a strange idea. But it makes a kind of sense. While Facebook may have the best map of our personal relationships, Microsoft has the best map of our work lives.

"What drives me, is for you to be able to get more out of every moment of your life," says Satya Nadella, Microsoft's new CEO. "You want to be able to create a document, get to a meeting, be productive in the meeting, have your notes taken in the meeting automatically for you."

While many companies block social media sites in the workplace, companies pay Microsoft to be on the inside, and to store internal documents, calendar items, meeting notes and attendees, contacts and more.

According to a recent quarterly earnings report, more than 1 billion people use Office — that's 1 out of every 7 people on Earth. With just a bit of Big Data analysis, Microsoft could create social tools to help users decide what and who is important to them.

"In a world of abundance of computing, the only thing scarce is human attention," Nadella says. "And our job is to be able to help you get more out of those moments of your life."

And "those moments" don't have to be just from 9 to 5 — Nadella says he wants users to get as much out of the programs in the personal lives as they do at work.

Microsoft is racing to get its web-based version of Office, which is called Office 365, on every smartphone and tablet — which they recently decided to do for free.

That way, Microsoft's personal assistant can follow you everywhere and get more personal. For example, it could integrate your GPS location with your to-do list so that when you step inside your home, you get a reminder.

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Microsoft's Gurdeep Singh Pall spoke with reporters last week at the company headquarters in Redmond, Wash. He explained how Microsoft would analyze data to figure out a user's priorities. Brian Smale/Microsoft hide caption

itoggle caption Brian Smale/Microsoft

Microsoft's Gurdeep Singh Pall spoke with reporters last week at the company headquarters in Redmond, Wash. He explained how Microsoft would analyze data to figure out a user's priorities.

Brian Smale/Microsoft

"These are the things that I should be talking to my daughter about or showing her these things," Nadella says. "That's the idea — of being able to be contextually aware."

Smarter Services

Last week, Nadella invited a handful of journalists to company headquarters in Redmond, Wash., to hear the game plan and meet the managers who will make this happen.

Gurdeep Singh Pall explains that as Microsoft mines the data, it can figure out your priorities. Say you're about to delete an invite to a party, he says. Microsoft might alert you: "Don't delete it, because this happens to be a company party, and this message was sent to a lot of important people in the company."

Julie Larson-Green says that if she wanted to meet with two co-workers who were in different locations, "it can do smart suggestions on where would be best place for us to meet given the time of day, the traffic, the distance between our locations."

Microsoft wants these social features to work inside and outside a company's walls, so that when you jump into a meeting with outsiders, you're prepared.

Nadella also says his group is firm on the revenue model for these projects.

"We're clear that it's about subscriptions," he says. "We want to have a subscription offer, which is for every individual and every organization. And it's not about advertising."

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Which means no pop-up ads inserted into your next PowerPoint presentation.

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But Al Hilwa, an analyst with IDC who used to work at Microsoft, says there could be pitfalls if users aren't given enough control.

"Using Office 365 can't be like using Facebook," Hilwa says. "That doesn't make sense, and that would be a big problem."

Hilwa says that our professional lives are different from our online identities, and that information on Facebook may typically gets shared with everyone, it can't work that way in a workplace.

"If users are in charge of controlling what bits and pieces of facts they can let out, as far as their social graph, then maybe I could see how this might work," Hilwa says.

A key challenge for Microsoft, he says, will be to figure out how to share discretely, without being creepy or irritating.

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It's lunchtime in Douglas, Wyo., a town smack in the middle of the state's booming oil patch, and the line of cars at the McDonald's drive-through wraps around the building. A hiring poster hangs in the window, and the parking lot is full.

Troy Hilbish, a tool hand for the oil field servicing company Schlumberger, says while he didn't know oil prices have been falling, he does know what falling prices mean.

"If the oil prices go up, we drill more," Hilbish says. "If they go down, we don't drill as much."

With gas prices plunging below $3 a gallon in recent weeks, American motorists have plenty to celebrate.

But in oil-producing states like North Dakota and Wyoming, that celebration is muted. If prices stay low, it means fewer jobs and less revenue for governments. While there's concern in those states, there's no panic — yet.

In Wyoming, Hilbish says he has seen prices tank before.

"I ended up picking up a second job and worked on a drilling rig, which was pretty tough," he says. "I got two hours of sleep for three days out of the week." Hilbish fared better than some of his colleagues, who simply got laid off.

Not In Panic Mode, So Far

Oil prices have fallen by more than a quarter since June, and most analysts expect they'll stay low for a while. That poses a problem for shale oil in particular, which has fueled the U.S. oil boom in recent years.

Because shale oil is more expensive to drill than conventional oil, prices have to stay relatively high for it to be profitable.

"Nobody around here is in a panic mode, by any means," says Jim Willox, commissioner for Converse County, which includes Douglas. Like his counterparts in Texas and North Dakota, Willox says so far, lower prices haven't led to a discernible slowdown.

"Right now, I think there's 18 rigs in Converse County that are exploring," he says. "That's one of the highest numbers we've had. We've sat at 10 to 12 to 13 for quite a while. Suddenly, we have 18."

Willox says most people in Douglas are still talking about how much more drilling there's going to be, not whether it's going to slow down. But he acknowledges that historically, energy booms do go bust.

"Nobody knows where we are on the curve," he says. "Are we still on the upward curve? Have we peaked? Are we plateaued? Nobody really knows."

Consultant Niles Hushka recently studied the break-even price — the point when companies start losing money — for oil drilling, county by county, in North Dakota. The break-even price varies wildly by location because of geology and infrastructure, among other things, Hushka says.

"I think what we're seeing right now is an industry that can't quite figure out what's happening," he says.

Hushka's analysis shows that at current prices, drilling new wells is already unprofitable in some places, but not everywhere.

"The industry doesn't want to overreact, because this is an industry that's used to boom-bust cycles," he says. "You have to be careful to make sure that the cycle is a true cycle, and that you're not seeing false statistics and so you might make some decisions that will hurt you."

State budget officers are also scrambling to figure out what's going on. North Dakota gets half of its revenue from oil and had been counting on oil prices staying around $90 a barrel for the next few years.

But last week, the state's revenue estimating group reduced that figure by as much as $18 a barrel. Over hundreds of millions of barrels, that quickly adds up.

States New To Drilling May Feel The Pinch First

Other oil-dependent states are in similar situations.

"It's a heck of a lot less damaging to the state's budget if we miss it on the low side than if we miss it on the high side," says Dan Noble, director of Wyoming's Department of Revenue.

Parallels

As Oil Prices Fall, Who Wins And Who Loses?

Right now, Wyoming is projecting $85 a barrel. Noble says if prices go lower, the state will need to revise its figures. But he's also hoping that shale producers will wildly exceed everyone's expectations, as they have over the past couple of years.

"When they produce more, even though it may be at a lower price, you have another opportunity to actually reach your financial goal," Noble says.

That might be overly optimistic. Most experts agree that while well-developed oil fields like the Bakken in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford in Texas can probably withstand lower prices, areas like Wyoming, where drilling is still in its early days, are likely to feel the pinch.

Willox says that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

"If we develop it at a slower pace, that's OK, because we can deal with it better," he says.

But for workers like Hilbish, a slower pace also means fewer jobs. He's based in California but wants to move to Wyoming, where he's working now.

"I have six kids, a wife," he says. "I think family life up here would be better."

But he might want to wait a few months — and keep an eye on the price of a barrel of oil — before making that decision.

This story was produced by Inside Energy, a public media collaboration focused on America's energy issues.

HealthCare.gov barely worked when it launched last fall, with only six people able to enroll in a plan on opening day. But the new version of HealthCare.gov came out sometime Sunday night, and it's available for window shopping for the first time. A few things to know:

What's different about the site this year?

For starters, it's a working website. Its load times have improved substantially, and the administration says it can handle twice as much traffic volume as last year. For customers shopping for coverage, you actually browse plans — get a sense of what they cost, check eligibility for tax credits (which are under Supreme Court review) and decide whether you want to buy.

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Open enrollment doesn't start until Saturday, so if you go to the site today, what can you do there?

Besides window shopping, you can get an estimated eligibility of the tax credit to help lower premium costs. This was nearly impossible in the first version of HealthCare.gov, which made users jump through ridiculous hoops in creating a user profile, and then they ran into error after error until they either gave up or the site crashed on them.

What's the administration doing to prepare for high traffic to the site after open enrollment starts?

They have been working on contingency plans. President Obama talked about it a little last week, saying, "We're really making sure the website works super well. ... We're double- and triple-checking it."

The Washington Post got ahold of internal documents at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees HealthCare.gov, and found there's a new system in place that detects traffic overloads faster. If it works correctly, it will send users into separate online waiting rooms, instead of putting them in one long online queue, which is how things worked last open enrollment.

What other challenges could come up this year?

For every major software system, hacking is always a threat. Just today, the Postal Service disclosed hackers hit its system, getting employee information from tens of thousands. So to protect HealthCare.gov, programmers from the Department of Homeland Security are trying to hack into the site once a day to test its security.

One thing this system hasn't faced before that could be a concern is re-enrollment in health plans. We know that about 8 million people signed up for health insurance through the Obamacare exchanges last year. When the open enrollment period begins Saturday, those folks are going to re-up or choose new plans through HealthCare.gov.

It's also just a shorter open enrollment period. This year, it runs from Nov. 15 to Feb. 15. Last year, it opened earlier and stayed open longer. So you have a much shorter time frame to shop and buy, if you're in the market.

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President Obama

Last month, hopes were raised when the Nigerian military announced a ceasefire with the militants of Boko Haram, who have been fighting for years to impose Islamic law on Nigeria.

But the Islamist extremists denied there was a truce and have intensified deadly attacks and kidnappings in recent weeks.

In the latest attack blamed on Boko Haram, a suicide bomber dressed as a student targeted boys gathered for assembly at the Government Technical Science College, a boys' high school school in the northeastern town of Potiskum. The attack killed nearly 50 students, some as young as 11.

No one has yet claimed responsibility, but Boko Haram insurgents are being blamed.

As soldiers rushed to the site of the school explosion, angry residents hurled stones at them, accusing the military of failing to protect them, say witnesses.

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Ramatu Usman, shown here with one of her sons, is a 37-year-old mother of 8. She says she was separated from one of her sons, 6-year-old Yahaya Buba, following an attack. He is still missing. Ofeibea Quist-Arcton/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Ofeibea Quist-Arcton/NPR

Ramatu Usman, shown here with one of her sons, is a 37-year-old mother of 8. She says she was separated from one of her sons, 6-year-old Yahaya Buba, following an attack. He is still missing.

Ofeibea Quist-Arcton/NPR

In neighboring Adamawa state, almost 9,500 displaced people now live in a giant camp. They've found refuge in what was a youth center outside Yola, the state capital. The buildings are crammed full of residents.

Boko Haram has seized a string of towns in recent weeks in this arid and impoverished agricultural region of Nigeria — most recently Mubi on the border with Cameroon.

Sylvanus Papka, director of rescue, relief and rehabilitation for Adamawa's Emergency Management Agency, describes how people scatter under fire.

"When they were attacked, everybody was running away, people running helter-skelter," Papka says. "In fact, that made them separate from their families. That's why people are coming in to check for their loved ones. I know most of them have lost everything. They have been sleeping in the bush for the past five days. The parents are looking for their children and also children are looking for their parents."

Ramatu Usman, a 37-year-old mother of 8, is one of them. Usman says her son Yahaya Buba was lost in the panic following last week's attack on Mubi, which is also in Adamawa state. The 6-year-old boy is still missing.

Some new residents have been displaced twice, like Halima Hasan. In August, Hasan fled a Boko Haram attack on her hometown in Gwoza in neighboring Borno state and escaped to the commercial border town of Mubi.

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But the attack on Mubi forced Hasan and other refugees to find yet another refuge, again trekking many miles to this camp in Yola.

Like thousands of others, Hasan is appealing to the Nigerian government and military to put an end to the fighting and restore peace. Boko Haram's most notorious attack, in April, was the mass abduction of more than 200 girls from their boarding school in Chibok in Borno state.

Now, boys are again the target. The group, whose name means Western education is sinful, says boys should receive only a Quranic education. Some have had their throats slit as they slept in their dorm beds. Girls are warned to give up their books, go home and get married.

The army announced last month that the missing schoolgirls would soon be released as part of a deal with Boko Haram. The group rejects the claim. Its leader tauntingly insists the captives have been married off to his fighters after converting to Islam.

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