In Project for the Web in the Timeline view, is there a way to color code the bars e.g., by assignee, team, etc?

​In Project for the Web in the Timeline view, is there a way to color code the bars e.g., by assignee, team, etc?  Read More

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Seriously, who designed this godawful application? It’s needlessly “helpful”, just auto-formatting all my information into whatever dumb setting it wants. I have to export 500 barcodes into a sheet and organize them but of course Excel HAS to jump in and remove ALLLLLLLLL the zeroes at the start so I need to waste my time going in and formatting all the cells to “text” (otherwise they’ll just keep “helpfully” re-formatting all my data without asking me).

Oh man, and don’t even get me started on trying to type the number “102320241016” into a cell. For some reason Excel decided that should be a scientific notation and constantly changes it to “1.0232E+11”.

Honestly why is this a feature? Who thought that we’d all want this? Why is EVERY Microsoft product I am forced to use for job so excessively anti-user? Between excel, teams, and outlook like an hour of my day ends up being spent trying to parse my way through these bloated, poorly running applications. It’s like they’re all designed to try and help but the way they “help” is by being as annoying and in the way as possible which just ends up slowing down everyone who actually knows what they’re doing.

​Seriously, who designed this godawful application? It’s needlessly “helpful”, just auto-formatting all my information into whatever dumb setting it wants. I have to export 500 barcodes into a sheet and organize them but of course Excel HAS to jump in and remove ALLLLLLLLL the zeroes at the start so I need to waste my time going in and formatting all the cells to “text” (otherwise they’ll just keep “helpfully” re-formatting all my data without asking me). Oh man, and don’t even get me started on trying to type the number “102320241016” into a cell. For some reason Excel decided that should be a scientific notation and constantly changes it to “1.0232E+11”. Honestly why is this a feature? Who thought that we’d all want this? Why is EVERY Microsoft product I am forced to use for job so excessively anti-user? Between excel, teams, and outlook like an hour of my day ends up being spent trying to parse my way through these bloated, poorly running applications. It’s like they’re all designed to try and help but the way they “help” is by being as annoying and in the way as possible which just ends up slowing down everyone who actually knows what they’re doing.  Read More

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I can’t add or edit a contact in Outlook 365…whether on the web or in the app. However, I can on my iPhone. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

​I can’t add or edit a contact in Outlook 365…whether on the web or in the app. However, I can on my iPhone. Any suggestions would be appreciated!   Read More

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As the excitement builds for Microsoft Ignite 2024, tech enthusiasts and professionals worldwide are eagerly anticipating the Azure Adaptive Cloud Pre-Days to learn more about hybrid, multicloud, and edge with Microsoft Azure. Scheduled just before the main event (on Monday November 17th), these Pre-Days offer a unique opportunity to delve deep into the innovative world of Azure Adaptive Cloud, facilitating a seamless integration of cloud and edge technologies.

Microsoft Ignite Pre-Days feature two comprehensive workshop sessions, each designed to equip attendees with practical knowledge and tools to optimize and transform their infrastructure and operations and you can still book your spot!

Optimize and Secure Hybrid Infrastructure with a Unified Control Plane

Trying to optimize deployment and management of public cloud and existing local infrastructure to accelerate innovation? Tackle the challenge of unifying and extending existing systems across cloud and edge. Learn about Azure’s adaptive cloud approach, architecture patterns, and deploying cloud-native apps seamlessly using Azure Arc, AI-enhanced tools, and management services across environments. Securely store, process, and derive insights from data throughout digital and physical environments. This pre-day focusing on Azure Arc-enabled servers other Arc-enabled infrastructure.

Transforming Industries with Azure IoT, AI, Edge & Operational Excellence

Join us in a hands-on workshop on industrial and retail transformation. Explore Azure IoT Operations, Kubernetes, and AI-driven solutions like real-time footfall inferencing, intrusion detection, and loss prevention, enhanced by Edge computing. Discover how these innovations, alongside Azure Arc and Microsoft’s adaptive cloud approach, drive operational excellence across industries. Through labs, explore AI and IoT strategies for safer, more efficient, and responsive operations.

Booking and Additional Information

To attend these insightful Pre-Days sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2024, participants must book in advance on the Microsoft Ignite website. Note that these sessions come with an additional cost, reflecting the value and depth of the knowledge and skills imparted.

Why Attend the Azure Adaptive Cloud Pre-Days?

The Azure Adaptive Cloud Pre-Days offer a unique opportunity to:

Gain In-Depth Knowledge: These sessions provide a deep dive into the latest advancements in cloud and edge technologies, offering insights that are not typically covered in regular conference sessions.
Hands-On Experience: Through interactive workshops and labs, attendees gain practical experience that can be directly applied to their own projects and operations. (Hands-on lab only for  “Transforming Industries with Azure IoT, AI, Edge & Operational Excellence”)
Expert Guidance: Learn from industry experts who bring a wealth of knowledge and experience. Their insights and best practices can help you navigate the complexities of modern infrastructure management and operational excellence.
Networking Opportunities: Connect with like-minded professionals and industry leaders. These sessions provide a platform for networking and collaboration, fostering relationships that can lead to future partnerships and opportunities.

The Azure Adaptive Cloud Pre-Days at Microsoft Ignite 2024 promise to be an invaluable experience for anyone looking to optimize their infrastructure and transform their operations with the latest in cloud and edge technologies. By attending these sessions, you will be equipped with the knowledge, tools, and strategies to drive innovation and efficiency in your organization.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to stay ahead of the curve. Book your sessions today and prepare to embrace the future of cloud and edge integration with Microsoft Azure.

More Azure Adaptive Cloud at Microsoft Ignite

The official Ignite session catalog is published. Azure Adaptive Cloud will host 4 break-out sessions, 3 theater style demo sessions,1 Hands-on-lab and  pre-day sessions for a deeper dive on scenarios and architectural patterns.

Adaptive cloud sessions include:

Breakout: Adaptive cloud: Unify hybrid, multi-cloud and edge with Azure Arc
Breakout: Simplify operations with AI: Copilot, Azure Arc, and Azure Monitor
Breakout: Scale apps and data with Azure Arc, Kubernetes, and Microsoft Fabric
Breakout: Operate infrastructure across distributed locations with Azure Arc
Demo: Fortify critical applications with Azure Business Continuity Center
Demo: Bringing the power of Azure AI to your adaptive cloud environments
Demo: Enhance cloud native troubleshooting with Azure Monitor & Chaos Studio
Theater: Explore next-gen industrial transformation architecture patterns
Hands-on-Lab: Accelerate Windows Server modernization and migration with Azure Arc

As you browse through the catalog, you will also see a range of partner and technical sessions that also highlight or relate to the adaptive cloud approach such as “How AI is transforming the Migration economic opportunity for Partners” and “Windows Server 2025: New ways to gain cloud agility and security”.

There is more to come such as Expert Meet-ups where you can meet Azure Adaptive cloud experts from Microsoft, as well was Microsoft MVPs.

Stay tuned and see you at Microsoft Ignite 2024!

​Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More 

I’m experiencing an issue with the New Outlook Desktop application. When I first open it, the search bar at the top is visible. However, after some time, it disappears along with the options in the top right corner (minimize, close, settings, etc.).

The only way to restore it seems to be by closing and reopening Outlook, which is quite inconvenient. I’ve checked the settings but can’t find any option to toggle this feature on or off.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

​I’m experiencing an issue with the New Outlook Desktop application. When I first open it, the search bar at the top is visible. However, after some time, it disappears along with the options in the top right corner (minimize, close, settings, etc.).The only way to restore it seems to be by closing and reopening Outlook, which is quite inconvenient. I’ve checked the settings but can’t find any option to toggle this feature on or off.Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!    Read More

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In this blog post, we will explore how to manage the resiliency and high availability of read workloads offloaded to a Hyperscale named replica. Offloading read workloads to a read replica has many use cases. We’ll discuss a scenario involving Contoso, an energy company that has offloaded their read APIs workloads to named replicas. Contoso uses dedicated named replicas for multiple APIs and reporting workloads to fetch details such as power outage status, energy usage, billing information, business reporting, etc.

Additionally, we’ll explore how to create high availability (HA) replicas for Hyperscale named replicas using the Azure Portal, PowerShell, and Azure CLI.

Brief about named replica: A named replica is a compute-only secondary replica available exclusively in the Azure SQL Database Hyperscale tier. It can be
added on-demand to offload read workloads from the primary Hyperscale replica. Since it uses the same storage as the primary Hyperscale
replica, it does not incur additional storage or license costs. Read applications can connect to a named replica via a dedicated connection
endpoint, and isolated access can be configured for the users. Each named replica can have a different compute size or service level
objective (SLO). It also has its own buffer pool and SSD cache to retain hot data pages in memory or local to the compute node, enhancing
read performance. Read more about named replica

Scenario: Contoso experienced few application connectivity issues due to unplanned outages, such as process crash or load balancing. Azure’s infrastructure can dynamically reconfigure servers when heavy workloads in the SQL Database service, which might cause your application to lose their connection to the database. These errors, known as transient faults, can be investigated and managed by following the practices outlined in the article Troubleshoot common connection issues.

However, Contoso’s issue was prolonged because they didn’t have a high availability (HA) secondary replica for their named replica. Without an HA secondary replica, during an unplanned event, a new named replica is provisioned and recovers automatically, but the failover process can take from a few seconds to minutes, during which the application cannot connect to the named replica. Since Contoso directed critical read workloads to named replicas, even brief outage causes incidents for their customers.

To prevent such prolonged incidents, Contoso added an HA secondary replica for their named replica. This setup ensures that during unplanned outages, automatic failover to the HA secondary replica minimizes downtime. Additionally, Contoso could use the HA secondary replica to handle read workloads from APIs, further enhancing their system performance.

NOTE: The HA secondary replica will have the same compute size as the named replica and will scale accordingly when you scale the named replica’s compute.
Application directing read workload to a named replica can load balance the workload on its HA secondary replica using the connection
string parameter “ApplicationIntent=ReadOnly”.

Let’s discuss the steps to create HA secondary replica for an existing named replica.

Azure Portal

You can create a HA secondary replica for a named replica, you can refer following steps as shown in the animation:

Go to the Azure portal and select your Hyperscale database. 
Under Data Management, select the Replicas. Choose the existing named replica.
Under Settings, select the Compute + storage.
Add desired number of High-Availability secondary replicas to your configuration and select Apply.

PowerShell

The -HighAvailabilityReplicaCount input parameter in ‘Set-AzSqlDatabase’ can be used to add HA secondary replica for a named replica. For more information, see Set-AzSQLDatabase.

To validate if his property is enabled, you can use PowerShell: ‘Get-AzSqlDatabase’. For more information, see Get-AzSqlDatabase (Az.Sql). 

 Example: 

Add a HA secondary replica for a named replica contoso_named_replica_db under logical server contososerver. 

Set-AzSqlDatabase -ResourceGroupName contosorg -DatabaseName contoso_named_replica_db -ServerName contososerver -HighAvailabilityReplicaCount 1

To validate if HA secondary replica is added for a named replica.

Get-AzSqlDatabase -ResourceGroupName contosorg -DatabaseName contoso_named_replica_db -ServerName contososerver | Select-Object -ExpandProperty HighAvailabilityReplicaCount

Azure CLI

By using the –ha-replicas input parameter in the ‘az sql db replica create’ command, you can add a HA secondary replica for a named replica. For more details on this CLI command, see az sql db replica.

To validate if HA secondary replica is added, you can use the CLI command: ‘az sql db show’. For more information, see az sql db show. 

Example: 

To add a HA secondary replica for a named replica contoso_named_replica_db. 

az sql db replica create -g contosorg -n contoso_named_replica_db -s contososerver –secondary-type named –partner-database contoso_named_replica_db –partner-server contososerver –ha-replicas 1

To validate if the HA secondary replica has been added.

az sql db show -g contosorg -n contoso_named_replica_db -s contososerver –query “highAvailabilityReplicaCount”

Limitations:

Named replicas and their HA replica are not automatically load balanced currently. To utilize HA secondary replica for read operations, the application connection string must include the parameter “ApplicationIntent = ReadOnly”.

Named replicas do not support Geo failover or failover groups currently. In the event of a Geo failover where the primary Hyperscale database fails over to a Geo secondary replica, you have two options:

Add a named replica for the Geo secondary replica when it becomes primary to save compute costs by provisioning the replica only when required.
Pre-provision a named replica for the Geo secondary replica to ensure both the primary and Geo secondary environments have the same configuration and replica topology.

Please note that the connection string or endpoint for each named replica is unique. Therefore, you will need to update the application connection string for your application pointing to a named replica on the Geo secondary replica with the new named replica endpoint provisioned for the Geo secondary replica.

FAQs: HA secondary replicas for named replicas:

Question: If we scale a named replica from 40 to 80 cores, will the HA secondary replicas also scale automatically?

Answer: Yes, if a named replica is scaled up or down, the associated HA secondary replicas will scale automatically without any manual intervention.

Question: In the absence of an HA secondary replica, if there is a planned failover (e.g., for maintenance), will the new named replica compute be created before the failover to minimize downtime?

Answer: Yes, for planned failovers, a temporary secondary replica is created automatically, and a hot failover is performed.

Question: If there is an unplanned but manageable failover, such as load balancing, will the failover take more time because a new compute needs to be created, or will the system create a new compute before the failover?

Answer: Load balancing is considered a planned failover. In this situation, a temporary secondary replica is created automatically, and a hot failover is performed.

Question: If there is an unplanned failover due to a failure or problem with the compute, will the failover take more time because a new compute needs to be created?

Answer: Yes, if the failover is unplanned (e.g., due to SQL crashes or replica node failures), it will take more time because a new SQL instance needs to be created and recovered on a different node.

Question: Do the Log service and Page servers have HA secondary replicas by default, independent of the compute HA replica?

Answer: Yes, they maintain internal replicas to ensure resiliency, regardless of whether you add an HA replica.

Conclusion

Creating HA replica for your Hyperscale named replica is a straightforward process that can significantly enhance the reliability and performance of your applications. Whether you use the Azure Portal, PowerShell, or Azure CLI, the steps are simple and effective. By implementing HA replicas, you ensure that your critical read workloads run smoothly and efficiently, even in the face of potential failures. Please share your feedback and questions by leaving a comment; you can also email us at sqlhsfeedback AT microsoft DOT com. We are eager to hear from you all! 

​Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More 

After adding custom buildings in Microsoft Places for users to choose from as their hybrid work location in Outlook, is there a way to hide or remove the generic “Office” location? Currently, users tend to select “Office” (Kontor in Swedish) instead of the specific building, which causes confusion.

​After adding custom buildings in Microsoft Places for users to choose from as their hybrid work location in Outlook, is there a way to hide or remove the generic “Office” location? Currently, users tend to select “Office” (Kontor in Swedish) instead of the specific building, which causes confusion.    Read More

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When trying to complete this secure score item on the “General Tab” it states under Users affected “No data to show”.  Going to the “Exposed Entities” tab I get “Failed to load data, please try again later”. This has been happening for a couple of days since I first looked at this item and I am not able to progress it. Please can you advise…

Also the help link on the “Implementation” tab sends you to the defender home page which isn’t very helpful… 

this link is this
https://security.microsoft.com/%E2%80%AFhttps://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2283220

Thanks

​When trying to complete this secure score item on the “General Tab” it states under Users affected “No data to show”.  Going to the “Exposed Entities” tab I get “Failed to load data, please try again later”. This has been happening for a couple of days since I first looked at this item and I am not able to progress it. Please can you advise…Also the help link on the “Implementation” tab sends you to the defender home page which isn’t very helpful… this link is thishttps://security.microsoft.com/%E2%80%AFhttps://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2283220Thanks  Read More

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Hi, I am trying to install a Win32 app SQL Management Studio (SSMS). The app installed on 2 computers but 5 others are “Install Pending”. Anyone had this before? How can I remotely access the log file on the c: drive?

Thanks

​Hi, I am trying to install a Win32 app SQL Management Studio (SSMS). The app installed on 2 computers but 5 others are “Install Pending”. Anyone had this before? How can I remotely access the log file on the c: drive? Thanks  Read More

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I know that when deleting a Sentinel rule, you need to wait a specific amount of time before it can be redeployed. However, in this tenant, we’ve been waiting for almost a month and are still getting the same deployment error (‘was recently deleted. You need to allow some time before re-using the same ID. Please try again later. Click here for details’). I still want to use the same ID ect. Does anyone have any idea or similar issue why it’s still not possible after waiting for about a month?

​I know that when deleting a Sentinel rule, you need to wait a specific amount of time before it can be redeployed. However, in this tenant, we’ve been waiting for almost a month and are still getting the same deployment error (‘was recently deleted. You need to allow some time before re-using the same ID. Please try again later. Click here for details’). I still want to use the same ID ect. Does anyone have any idea or similar issue why it’s still not possible after waiting for about a month?  Read More

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