November 2024 | Application Package Repository Telkom University

Month: November 2024

Use the Audit Log to Find the Last Accessed Date for Documents

Tony Redmond / 2024-11-15

Exploit File Operations Audit Events to Find Who Accessed a Document Last

I’m speaking about how to master the unified (Microsoft 365) audit log at the European SharePoint Conference (ESPC) event in Stockholm in early December. At this point in the proceedings, the normal panic about putting together a presentation is in full swing, and I’ve been busy creating slides and examples.

In May 2024, I published an article about how to use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to create a report of files in a SharePoint Online document library. The idea is that it’s hard to understand everything that’s in a document library by scrolling through file details in the SharePoint browser app. Sometimes it’s just easier to see things in a report, and it’s definitely easier to figure out which files can be removed to clean up the document library. The temptation to leave well alone is deep in us all, but cleaning out old files from SharePoint has two benefits: it returns some storage quota, and it eliminates some of the potential for digital rot that can affect AI results.

A reader asked if the SharePoint files report could include the last accessed date for documents. The Graph API to List children of a drive item (folder) or the equivalent SDK Get-MgDriveItemChild cmdlet doesn’t return a last accessed date as far as I can see, so some other method must be used.

Analyzing SharePoint Online File Operations Audit Events

The unified audit log is a feature available to all tenants with Office 365 E3 or higher licenses. SharePoint Online creates a profusion of audit events that the audit log ingests on an ongoing basis. In this case, we’re interested in the FileAccessed event, which is logged when someone opens a file. Other events are logged for creation (FileUploaded), modification (FileModified), downloaded (FileDownload), and so on. You might be surprised at how many file operation events are logged for a busy SharePoint Online site. Figure 1 shows the count of file operations for some of documents used to generate the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook over the last six months.

Figure 1: Count of file operations audit events logged per document for a SharePoint Online site

Scripting a Solution Based on File Operations Audit Events

The outline of the PowerShell script to answer the request is:

Connect to Exchange Online with an administrator account.
Run the Search-UnifiedAuditLog to find SharePoint file operations audit events for the target site over whatever period is required. Office 365 E3 tenants store audit events for 180 days. E5 tenants store events for 365 days. Remove any duplicates that might have been fetched from the audit log. You could also interrogate the audit log with the Graph AuditLog Query API, but richer information is fetched by Search-UnifiedAuditLog.
Filter out file events logged by human users. SharePoint Online has many background processes to do things like clean out the recycle bin, preserve files for retention, and so on. We’re not interested in system events.
The full set of file operation events can be used to generate statistics, such as the count of user activity over the period, or the number of operations for individual files. We’re interested in file access events only, so the script populates a separate array with those events.
By grouping the file access events by file name and sorting the events by date, we can easily extract the last accessed date for each file. The result is something like this:

File                                                    User                                 Timestamp
----                                                    ----                                 ---------
01 Introduction and Overview.docx                       paul.robichaux@office365itpros.com   31-Oct-2024 12:34:06
02 Managing Identities.docx                             tony.redmond@office365itpros.com     31-Oct-2024 14:12:54
03 Tenant Management.docx                               paul.robichaux@office365itpros.com   31-Oct-2024 20:21:47
04 User Management.docx                                 paul.robichaux@office365itpros.com   31-Oct-2024 20:21:48
05 Managing Exchange Online.docx                        Andy.Ruth@office365itpros.com        29-Oct-2024 20:45:03
06 Managing Mail Flow.docx                              James.ryan@office365itpros.com       29-Sep-2024 15:07:31
07 Managing SharePoint Online.docx                      tony.redmond@office365itpros.com     14-Oct-2024 13:00:56
08 Managing Tasks.docx                                  paul.robichaux@office365itpros.com   29-Oct-2024 19:40:47
09 Managing Video.docx                                  paul.robichaux@office365itpros.com   29-Oct-2024 19:40:47
10 Managing Microsoft 365 Groups.docx                   brian.weakliamoffice365itpros.com    20-Oct-2024 17:49:23
11 Teams Architecture and Structure.docx                tony.redmond@office365itpros.com     16-Oct-2024 15:02:20
12 Managing Teams.docx                                  Lotte.Vetler@office365itpros.com     04-Nov-2024 19:01:57

Two odd user identifiers for bdc6105c-4e11-4050-82e6-6549f9b99b89 and eba15bfd-c28e-4433-a20e-0278888c5825 can appear in file operation events. I assume these identifiers belong to background SharePoint Online processes, so the script filters these events from the set.

You can download the complete script from GitHub.

Good Example of the Power of the Audit Log

Finding who last accessed SharePoint Online documents and when that access occurred is a good example of why the unified audit log is a great repository of information for tenant administrators and forensic investigators alike. If you’re at ESPC 24 in Stockholm, come along to my session on Decoding the Microsoft 365 Audit Log on Tuesday, December 3 at 10:30am. I’ll share more useful tips about exploiting the audit log there.

Insight like this doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to know the technology and understand how to look behind the scenes. Benefit from the knowledge and experience of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the best eBook covering Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

Microsoft

From questions to discoveries: NASA’s new Earth Copilot brings Microsoft AI capabilities to democratize access to complex data

/ 2024-11-14

But navigating the over 100 petabytes of collected data can be challenging, which is why NASA has collaborated with Microsoft to explore the use of a custom copilot using Azure OpenAI Service to develop NASA’s Earth Copilot, which could transform how people interact with Earth’s data.

Geospatial data is complex, and often requires some level of technical expertise to navigate it. As a result, this data tends to be accessible only to a limited number of researchers and scientists. As NASA collects more data from new satellites, these complexities only grow and may further limit the potential pool of people able to draw insights and develop applications that could benefit society.

Recognizing this challenge, NASA embarked on a mission to make its data more accessible and user-friendly. As part of its Transform to Open Science initiative, the agency seeks to democratize data access, breaking down technical barriers to empower a diverse range of audiences, from scientists and educators to policymakers and the general public.

The challenge: Navigating the complexity of data

NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program is responsible for collecting an incredible variety of data from spaceborne sensors and instruments. This data spans everything from atmospheric conditions to land cover changes, ocean temperatures and more. However, the sheer scale and complexity of this information can be overwhelming. For many, finding and extracting insights requires navigating technical interfaces, understanding data formats and mastering the intricacies of geospatial analysis — specialized skills that very few non-technical users possess. AI could streamline this process, reducing time to gain insights from Earth’s data to a matter of seconds.

This issue isn’t just a matter of convenience; it has real-world implications. For example, scientists who need to analyze historical data on hurricanes to improve predictive models, or policymakers who want to study deforestation patterns to implement environmental regulations, may find themselves unable to easily access the data they need. This inaccessibility affects a broad array of sectors, including agriculture, urban planning and disaster response, where timely insights from spaceborne data could make a significant difference.

Moreover, as new satellites with new instruments continue to launch and collect more data, NASA is constantly faced with the challenge of building new tools to manage and make sense of this growing repository. The agency explored emerging technologies that could not only streamline data discovery but also broaden accessibility, enabling more people to engage with the data and uncover new insights.

The solution: AI-powered data access through Microsoft Azure

To address these challenges, NASA IMPACT worked with Microsoft to develop an AI-driven customer copilot, called Earth Copilot, which could simplify data access and encourage a wider range of users to interact with its Earth Science data. Together, they built the proof of concept AI model that leverages Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and advanced AI capabilities to transform how users can search, discover and analyze NASA’s geospatial data.

The key to NASA’s Earth Copilot lies in the integration of cloud-based technologies like Azure OpenAI Service, which provides access to powerful AI models and natural language processing capabilities that enable developers to integrate intelligent, conversational AI into their applications. This approach allows NASA to integrate AI into its existing data analysis platform — VEDA. These technologies together make it easier for users to search, discover and analyze Earth Science data

By combining these technologies, Earth Copilot enables users to interact with NASA’s data repository through plain language queries. Instead, they can simply ask questions such as “What was the impact of Hurricane Ian in Sanibel Island?” or “How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect air quality in the US?” AI will then retrieve relevant datasets, making the process seamless and intuitive.

An image of NASA’s EARTHDATA VEDA Dashboard. — NASA’s EARTHDATA VEDA Dashboard.

“Azure’s robust suite of services, including machine learning, data analytics and scalable cloud infrastructure, powers this AI prototype,” said Juan Carlos López, former NASA engineer and current Azure Specialist at Microsoft. “We’ve designed the system to handle complex queries and large datasets efficiently, ensuring that users can quickly find the information they need without getting bogged down by technical complexities. Our goal was to create a seamless, scalable solution that could evolve as NASA’s data, tools and applications grow.”

Democratizing data for open science

The collaboration between NASA IMPACT and Microsoft has resulted in a solution that democratizes access to spaceborne data, enabling a broader range of users to engage with NASA’s science data. This has significant benefits for the scientific community, as researchers can now spend less time on data retrieval and more on analysis and discovery. For example, climate scientists can quickly access historical data to study trends, while agricultural experts can gain insights into soil moisture levels to improve crop management.

Educators and teachers can use real-world examples to engage students in Earth Science, fostering curiosity and encouraging the next generation of scientists and engineers. Policymakers can leverage the data to make informed decisions on critical issues like climate change, urban development and disaster preparedness, ensuring they have the most accurate information at their fingertips.

“The vision behind this collaboration was to leverage AI and cloud technologies to bring Earth’s insights to communities that have been underserved, where access to data can lead to tangible improvements,” said Minh Nguyen, Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. “By enabling users to interact with the data through simple, plain language queries, we’re helping to democratize access to spaceborne information.”

The development of this AI prototype aligns with NASA’s Open Science initiative, which aims to make scientific research more transparent, inclusive and collaborative. By removing barriers to data discovery, NASA and Microsoft are setting the stage for a new era of discovery, where insights are not confined to a select few but can be explored and expanded by anyone curious about the world.

Looking ahead: Bridging the gap between data and insights

At the moment, the NASA Earth Copilot is available to NASA scientists and researchers to explore and test its capabilities. Any responsible deployment of AI technologies requires rigorous assessments to ensure the data and outputs cannot be misused. After a period of internal evaluations and testing, the NASA IMPACT team will explore the integration of this capability into the VEDA platform.

This collaboration exemplifies how technology can empower people, drive innovation and create positive change. Solutions like this will be essential in ensuring the benefits of data are shared widely, enabling more people to engage with, analyze and act upon information that shapes our world.

The post From questions to discoveries: NASA’s new Earth Copilot brings Microsoft AI capabilities to democratize access to complex data appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Every day, NASA’s satellites orbit Earth, capturing a wealth of information that helps us understand our planet. From monitoring wildfires to tracking climate change, this vast trove of Earth Science data has the potential to drive scientific discoveries, inform policy decisions and support industries like agriculture, urban planning and disaster response. But navigating the over…
The post From questions to discoveries: NASA’s new Earth Copilot brings Microsoft AI capabilities to democratize access to complex data appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More

Other

New Aqua User Experience: Streamlined Vulnerability Management

/ 2024-11-14

The new Aqua Hub update is designed to take the headache out of vulnerability management, addressing common challenges like alert overload and data consistency issues. With this update, teams get a clean, streamlined view of vulnerabilities that cuts through the noise, so they can focus on the critical issues without getting lost in irrelevant details.

News

Manage PIM Role Assignments with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK

Tony Redmond / 2024-11-14

Add Eligible and Active PIM Role Assignment Requests

I recently wrote about Microsoft’s recommendation to use the UnifiedRoleDefinition Graph API instead of the older DirectoryRole API. In that article, I show how to use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to make role assignments to user accounts. Assignments made in this manner are effective immediately. The assignments are permanent and last until an administrator removes them from accounts.

In many Microsoft 365 tenants where a limited set of administrators run operations, permanent role assignments work well. However, in larger tenants, some additional control is often desirable. Microsoft’s answer is Entra ID Privileged Identity Management (PIM), designed to enable administrators “manage, control, and monitor access to important resources in your organization.” PIM assignments can be permanent, but more commonly the assignments are time-limited to allow administrators to perform tasks on a just-in-time basis without their account needing elevated permissions on an ongoing basis. PIM is not part of the basic Entra ID license granted with Microsoft 365 and administrators need a license like Entra ID P2 to use PIM. See this page for more licensing information.

Microsoft’s Recommendation to use Entra Admin Center to Manage PIM Role Assignments

The PIM overview contains the interesting recommendation that tenants should use “PIM to manage active role assignments over using the unifiedRoleAssignment or the directoryRole resource types to manage them directly.” In other words, Microsoft thinks it better to use the GUI built into the Entra admin center to create and manage PIM role assignments. The reason for this might be that the GUI includes guardrails to stop administrators from making mistakes, which is something to avoid when assigning privileged roles.

In any case, PIM organizes role assignments into two categories:

Eligible assignments are roles granted to users, groups, or service principals (apps) that are not active. These assignments must be activated by the holder (principal) before they can perform the privileged tasks enabled by the role. By default, eligible assignments are activated for a maximum of 8 hours, after which the activation can be extended or renewed.
Active assignments are roles that are currently available for use. An active assignment can be permanent, but more often in PIM it is time-limited.

Both categories have a schedule, and Graph APIs and SDK cmdlets are available to add requests to add, update, and remove assignments from the schedules.

Creating an Eligible PIM Role Assignment

Here’s the PowerShell code to create a new eligible assignment schedule request to add a user account to the User administrator role. Before the New-MgRoleManagementDirectoryRoleEligibilityScheduleRequest cmdlet can run, a certain amount of setup is necessary to fetch the identifiers for the account and role and define the period during which the assignment is eligible. You also need to decide whether the assignment is for the entire directory or an administrative unit.

$User = Get-MgUser -UserId Lotte.Vetler@office365itpros.com
[array]$DirectoryRoles = Get-MgRoleManagementDirectoryRoleDefinition | Sort-Object DisplayName
$UserAdminRoleId = $DirectoryRoles | Where-Object {$_.DisplayName -eq "User administrator"} | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Id
[string]$StartAssignmentDate = Get-Date -format "yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssZ"
[string]$EndAssignmentDate = (Get-Date).AddDays(30).ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssZ")

$ScheduleInfo = @{}
$ScheduleInfo.Add("startDateTime", $StartAssignmentDate)

$ExpirationInfo = @{}
$ExpirationInfo.Add("type", "afterDateTime")
$ExpirationInfo.Add("endDateTime", $EndAssignmentDate)

$ScheduleInfo.Add("expiration", $ExpirationInfo)

$AssignmentParameters = @{}
$AssignmentParameters.Add("action", "adminAssign")
$AssignmentParameters.Add("justification", "Assign User administrator role to user")
$AssignmentParameters.Add("roleDefinitionId", $UserAdminRoleId)
$AssignmentParameters.Add("directoryScopeId", "/")
$AssignmentParameters.Add("principalId", $User.Id)
$AssignmentParameters.Add("scheduleInfo", $ScheduleInfo)

$Status = New-MgRoleManagementDirectoryRoleEligibilityScheduleRequest -BodyParameter $AssignmentParameters
If ($Status.Id) {
   Write-Host ("Assignment for user administrator role for {0} added to eligibility schedule" -f $User.displayName)
}

The values in the hash table holding the parameters for the new assignment looks like this:

$AssignmentParameters

Name                           Value
----                           -----
justification                  Assign User administrator role to user
scheduleInfo                   {[startDateTime, 2024-11-12T17:51:03Z], [expiration, System.Collections.Hashtable]}
directoryScopeId               /
roleDefinitionId               fe930be7-5e62-47db-91af-98c3a49a38b1
principalId                    ce0e26f8-da88-4efa-90ad-d16df1d9500d
action                         adminAssign

The result of a successful assignment as seen in the Entra admin center looks like the example shown in Figure 1.

The eligible role assignment created by PowerShellPIM Role assignment — Figure 1: The eligible role assignment created by PowerShell

The assigned user receives email about the assignment and can use the link in the message to activate their assignment (Figure 2). See this article about approval workflows that you might like to use to control activations.

Email informing user that they've received a PIM role assignment — Figure 2: Email informing user that they’ve received a PIM role assignment

Accounts holding the Privileged Role Administrator or Global Administrator role also receive email to inform them about the new assignment.

Creating an Active PIM Role Assignment

The code to create a PIM active role assignment request is like that used for the PIM eligible role assignment request. In this example, we create an active role assignment schedule request for the Groups administrator role and limit the assignment to a six hour period from now. The duration is expressed in ISO8601 duration format, so PT6H means six hours.

$GroupsAdminRoleId = $DirectoryRoles | Where-Object {$_.DisplayName -eq "Groups administrator"} | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Id
[string]$StartAssignmentDate = Get-Date -format "yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssZ"
$ScheduleInfo = @{}
$ScheduleInfo.Add("startDateTime", $StartAssignmentDate)

$ExpirationInfo = @{}
$ExpirationInfo.Add("type", "afterDuration")
$ExpirationInfo.Add("duration","PT6H")

$ScheduleInfo.Add("expiration", $ExpirationInfo)

$AssignmentParameters = @{}
$AssignmentParameters.Add("action", "adminAssign")
$AssignmentParameters.Add("justification", "Assign Groups administrator role to user")
$AssignmentParameters.Add("roleDefinitionId", $GroupsAdminRoleId)
$AssignmentParameters.Add("directoryScopeId", "/")
$AssignmentParameters.Add("principalId", $User.Id)
$AssignmentParameters.Add("scheduleInfo", $ScheduleInfo)
$Status = New-MgRoleManagementDirectoryRoleAssignmentScheduleRequest -BodyParameter $AssignmentParameters
If ($Status.Id) {
   Write-Host ("Assignment for Groups administrator role for {0} added to active schedule" -f $User.displayName)
}

To remove a role assignment from a schedule, create another role assignment schedule request and state the action to be “adminRemove” rather than “adminAssign.” For example, the request to remove the assignment request created above is:

$AssignmentParameters = @{}
$AssignmentParameters.Add("action", "adminRemove")
$AssignmentParameters.Add("justification", "Remove Groups administrator role to user")
$AssignmentParameters.Add("roleDefinitionId", $GroupsAdminRoleId)
$AssignmentParameters.Add("directoryScopeId", "/")
$AssignmentParameters.Add("principalId", $User.Id)
$Status = New-MgRoleManagementDirectoryRoleAssignmentScheduleRequest -BodyParameter $AssignmentParameters#
If ($Status.Status -eq "Revoked") { Write-Host "Active assignment revoked" }

Required Permissions for PIM

Adding role assignments requires the RoleManagement.ReadWrite.Directory permission. If you’re only reading role information, the RoleManagement.Read.Directory permission is sufficient. In addition, when using delegated permissions, read operations are only possible when the signed-in account holds one of the Global Reader, Security Operator, Security Reader, Security Administrator, or Privileged Role Administrator roles. Write operations, like adding a new role assignment to a schedule, require the signed-in account to hold the Privileged Role Administrator (or Global administrator) role.

Most Will Use the Entra Admin Center

Although it’s straightforward to create and manage PIM role assignment schedule requests with PowerShell, it’s easier to use the Entra admin center. Microsoft has done the work to create and refine the GUI and create the necessary checks to make sure that administrators don’t do something silly. I suspect that most administrators will interact with PIM through the Entra admin center, but it’s nice to know that the option to automate with PowerShell exists too.

Need more advice about how to write PowerShell for Microsoft 365? Get a copy of the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook, available standalone or as part of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook bundle.

Microsoft

Microsoft introduces new adapted AI models for industry

/ 2024-11-13

Today, we’re announcing adapted AI models, expanding our industry capabilities and enabling organizations to address their unique needs more accurately and effectively. In collaboration with industry partner experts like Bayer, Cerence, Rockwell Automation, Saifr, Siemens Digital Industries Software, Sight Machine and more, we’re making these fine-tuned models, pre-trained using industry-specific data, available to address customers’ top use cases.

Underpinning these adapted AI models is the Microsoft Cloud, our platform for industry innovation. By integrating the Microsoft Cloud with our industry-specific capabilities and a robust ecosystem of partners, we provide a secure approach to advancing innovation across industries. This collaboration allows us to create extensive scenarios for customers globally, with embedded AI capabilities — from industry data solutions in Microsoft Fabric to AI agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio to AI models in Azure AI Studio — that enable industries to realize their full potential.

Introducing adapted AI models for industry

We’re pleased to introduce these new partner-enabled models from leading organizations that are leveraging the power of Microsoft’s Phi family of small language models (SLMs). These models will be available through the Azure AI model catalog, where customers can access a wide range of AI models to build custom AI solutions in Azure AI Studio, or directly from our partners. The models available in the Azure AI model catalog can also be used to configure agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio, a platform that allows customers to create, customize and deploy AI-powered agents, which can be applied to an industry’s top use cases to address its most pressing needs.

Bayer, a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of healthcare and agriculture, will make E.L.Y. Crop Protection available in the Azure AI model catalog. A specialized SLM, it is designed to enhance crop protection sustainable use, application, compliance and knowledge within the agriculture sector. Built on Bayer’s agricultural intelligence, and trained on thousands of real-world questions on Bayer crop protection labels, the model provides ag entities, their partners and developers a valuable tool to tailor solutions for specific food and agricultural needs. The model stands out due to its commitment to responsible AI standards, scalability to farm operations of all types and sizes and customization capabilities that allow organizations to adapt the model to regional and crop-specific requirements.
Cerence, which creates intuitive, seamless and AI-powered user experiences for the world’s leading automakers, is enhancing its in-vehicle digital assistant technology with fine-tuned SLMs within the vehicle’s hardware. CaLLM Edge, an automotive-specific, embedded SLM, will be available in the Azure AI model catalog. It can be used for in-car controls, such as adjusting air conditioning systems, and scenarios that involve limited or no cloud connectivity, enabling drivers to access the rich, responsive experiences they’ve come to expect from cloud-based large language models (LLMs), no matter where they are.
Rockwell Automation, a global leader in industrial automation and digital transformation, will provide industrial AI expertise via the Azure AI model catalog. The FT Optix Food & Beverage model brings the benefits of industry-specific capabilities to frontline workers in manufacturing, supporting asset troubleshooting in the food and beverage domain. The model provides timely recommendations, explanations and knowledge about specific manufacturing processes, machines and inputs to factory floor workers and engineers.
Saifr, a RegTech within Fidelity Investments’ innovation incubator, Fidelity Labs, will introduce four new models in the Azure AI model catalog, empowering financial institutions to better manage regulatory compliance of broker-dealer communications and investment adviser advertising. The models can highlight potential regulatory compliance risks in text (Retail Marketing Compliance model) and images (Image Detection model); explain why something was flagged (Risk Interpretation model); and suggest alternative language that might be more compliant (Language Suggestion model). Together, these models can enhance regulatory compliance by acting as an extra set of review eyes and boost efficiency by speeding up review turnarounds and time to market.
Siemens Digital Industries Software, which helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform, is introducing a new copilot for NX X software, which leverages an adapted AI model that enables users to ask natural language questions, access detailed technical insights and streamline complex design tasks for faster and smarter product development. The copilot will provide CAD designers with AI-driven recommendations and best practices to optimize the design process within the NX X experience, helping engineers implement best practices faster to ensure expected quality from design to production. The NX X copilot will be available in the Azure Marketplace and other channels.
Sight Machine, a leader in data-driven manufacturing and industrial AI, will release Factory Namespace Manager to the Azure AI model catalog. The model analyzes existing factory data, learns the patterns and rules behind the naming conventions and then automatically translates these data field names into standardized corporate formats. This translation makes the universe of plant data in the manufacturing enterprise AI-ready, enabling manufacturers to optimize production and energy use in plants, balance production with supply chain logistics and demand and integrate factory data with enterprise data systems for end-to-end optimization. The bottling company Swire Coca-Cola USA plans to use Factory Namespace Manager to efficiently map its extensive PLC and plant floor data into its corporate data namespace.

We also encourage innovation in the open-source ecosystem and are offering five open-source Hugging Face models that are fine-tuned for summarization and sentiment analysis of financial data.

An image of the Azure AI model catalog. — Partner-enabled adapted AI models for industry will be available through the Azure AI model catalog or directly from partners.

Additionally, last month we announced new healthcare AI models in Azure AI Studio. These state-of-the-art multimodal medical imaging foundation models, created in partnership with organizations like Providence and Paige.ai, empower healthcare organizations to integrate and analyze a variety of data types, leveraging intelligence in modalities other than text in specialties like ophthalmology, pathology, radiology and cardiology.

Accelerating transformation with industry agents

Microsoft also offers AI agents that are purpose-built for industry scenarios. Available in Copilot Studio, these agents can be configured to support organizations’ industry-specific needs. For example, retailers can use the Store Operations Agent to support retail store associates and the Personalized Shopping Agent to enhance customers’ shopping experiences. Manufacturers can use the Factory Operations Agent to enhance production efficiency and reduce downtime by enabling engineers and frontline workers to quickly identify and troubleshoot issues.

All this AI innovation wouldn’t be possible without a solid data estate, because AI is only as good as the data it’s built upon. By ensuring data is accurate, accessible and well integrated, organizations can unlock deeper insights and drive more effective decision-making with AI. Microsoft Fabric, a data platform built for the era of AI, helps unify disparate data sources and prepares data for advanced analytics and AI modeling. It offers industry data solutions that address each organization’s unique needs and allows them to discover, deploy and do more with AI.

At the forefront of addressing industry needs securely

At the core of our AI strategy is a commitment to trustworthy AI. This commitment encompasses safety, security and privacy, ensuring that AI solutions are built with the highest standards of integrity and responsibility. Trustworthy AI is foundational to everything we do, from how we work with customers to the capabilities we build into our products.

At Microsoft, we combine industry AI experience, insights and capabilities with a deep understanding of customer challenges and objectives. Along with a trusted ecosystem of experienced partners, we unlock the full potential of AI for each industry and business. Our goal is not just to offer or implement AI tools but to help customers succeed by embedding AI into the very core of what each industry does.

AI transformation is here, and Microsoft is at the forefront of this revolution. As we continue to navigate this new era of innovation, it’s clear that AI will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of business across all industries and that Microsoft will continue to lead the way. To learn more about how customers in a variety of industries are transforming with AI, visit How real-world businesses are transforming with AI.

The post Microsoft introduces new adapted AI models for industry appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Across every industry, AI is creating a fundamental shift in what’s possible, enabling new use cases and driving business outcomes. While organizations around the world recognize the value and potential of AI, for AI to be truly effective it must be tailored to specific industry needs. Today, we’re announcing adapted AI models, expanding our industry…
The post Microsoft introduces new adapted AI models for industry appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More

News

SharePoint Online Intelligent Versioning and Retention Processing

Tony Redmond / 2024-11-13

Trimming Unwanted Versions Stopped by Retention Policies and Labels

Last month, I wrote about the introduction of Intelligent Versioning for SharePoint Online. I think this is a great feature because its automated management of versions created during editing sessions reduces the storage quota consumed to store file versions. The advent of AutoSave for Office increased the number of versions created for files, and keeping 500 or so versions for a file, when some versions only include minimal changes, is effective but expensive.

Microsoft allows tenants a default storage quota for SharePoint Online that’s consumed by items stored in sites and Loop workspaces (containers). If a tenant exceeds their SharePoint storage quota, they must buy more from Microsoft or use Microsoft 365 Archive to move the storage consumed by inactive sites to cheaper “cold” storage.

As I noted in the article, the big issue with the current implementation of intelligent versioning is that it doesn’t work with Purview Data Lifecycle management, aka Microsoft 365 retention policies. If SharePoint Online sites come within the scope of a retention policy or individual documents have retention labels, then the requirement to retain information about files trumps the desire of intelligent versioning to remove unwanted versions for those files.

Checking Expired Versions Trimmed by Intelligent Versioning

Microsoft’s documentation explains how retention works with document versioning. I decided to check out what happens when versions expire for documents in a site with a retention policy in force. On November 6, I noted that several versions were in an expired state (Figure 1).

Expired versions for a Word documentIntilligent versioning — Figure 1: Expired versions for a Word document

The next day, the expired versions were gone from the list. In one respect, this is what you might expect to happen. A background SharePoint Online job detected the existence of expired versions and removed them, which is what intelligent versioning is all about (the process is called trimming).

But the retention policy applied to the site set a five-year retention period and the document had a retention label with a ten-year retention period. The document is a source file for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, and you can never be too careful with source material. The longest retention period wins, so SharePoint Online should retain the file for ten years. However, no trace could be found of the removed versions.

Microsoft’s documentation says that versions for items subject to a retention hold are not automatically purged. In addition, users cannot delete versions from the Version history. When intelligent versioning trims versions in a site without retention policies, the files bypass the recycle bin. This didn’t apply, so it seemed like the site preservation hold library is the logical place to look. However, nothing was found in the preservation hold library except the copy of the file containing all versions prior to the implementation of intelligent versioning in the tenant.

Reappearing Versions

Then the removed versions reappeared in the version history complete with a new expiration date (Figure 2). Interestingly, SharePoint Online adjusted the expiration date for some other versions to make sure that full coverage of changes to the file is available.

Figure 2: The expired versions that were removed reappear with new expiration dates

After chatting with Microsoft engineering, I understand that the observed behavior is quite normal. The expired versions are removed by a background job, only for retention processing to detect that the removed versions are still within their retention period. This causes SharePoint to add a week to the previous expiration date for each version and make the versions available again. The cycle then repeats until the retention period for removed versions lapses to allow SharePoint Online to permanently remove the unwanted versions from its store.

More Intelligence in the Future?

It’s unfortunate that a clash exists between storage management and retention. Microsoft’s current approach is probably the best that can be done for now. I’m sure that they have an eye on the potential to extend intelligent versioning to interact with retention processing better. One possibility is to allow organizations to decide if selective version trimming is permissible, perhaps at a less aggressive level. For instance, it’s OK to remove versions that only contain formatting changes but not OK to remove any that contain text additions or deletions. Perhaps some storage savings are possible without compromising retention. It’s a hard nut to crack.

Microsoft

IDC’s 2024 AI opportunity study: Top five AI trends to watch

/ 2024-11-13

In 2024, generative AI emerged as a key driver for business outcomes across every industry. Already this new generation of AI is having an incredible impact on our world — yet companies and industries are just scratching the surface of what’s possible as they continue to develop new use cases across every role and function.

To help guide organizations on their AI transformation journey, Microsoft recently commissioned a new study through IDC, The Business Opportunity of AI. IDC’s findings show that when organizations truly commit to and invest in AI, the return on investment (ROI) potential grows significantly.

According to IDC, the study’s findings reflect a tipping point as AI gains momentum across industries. As companies worldwide go deeper with AI, Microsoft customers continue to deploy innovative new solutions and discover how tools like Copilot can transform their day-to-day work. In telecommunications, Lumen Technologies estimates Copilot is saving sellers an average of four hours a week, equating to $50 million annually. In healthcare, Chi Mei Medical Center doctors now spend 15 minutes instead of an hour writing medical reports, and nurses can document patient information in under five minutes. Pharmacists are now able to double the number of patients they see per day. In retail, AI models help Coles predict the flow of 20,000 stock-keeping units to 850 stores with remarkable accuracy, generating 1.6 billion predictions daily.

IDC’s 2024 top 5 trends for AI

IDC’s findings align with what Microsoft is seeing as we work with companies across industries to deploy AI. We’ve highlighted more than 200 of our top AI customer stories to show a sampling of how AI is already driving impact today. Below is a look at the top trends we’re seeing in IDC’s study and the impact of those trends on organizations working with AI today.

#1 Enhanced productivity has become table stakes. Employee productivity is the No. 1 business outcome that companies are trying to achieve with AI. The study shows that 92% of AI users surveyed are using AI for productivity, and 43% say productivity use cases have provided the greatest ROI. While productivity is a top goal, generative AI use cases that are close behind include customer engagement, topline growth, cost management and product or service innovation — and nearly half of the companies surveyed expect AI to have a high degree of impact across all those areas over the next 24 months.

Customer snapshot:
At the global marketing and advertising agency dentsu, employees are already saving 15 to 30 minutes a day using Copilot for tasks such as summarizing chats, generating presentations and building executive summaries.
“Copilot has transformed the way we deliver creative concepts to our clients, enabling real-time collaboration. Agility, security and uniqueness are crucial, but our goal is to lead this transformation company-wide, from top to bottom.”
— Takuya Kodama, Business Strategy Manager at dentsu

#2 Companies are gravitating to more advanced AI solutions. In the next 24 months, more companies expect to build custom AI solutions tailored directly to industry needs and business processes, including custom copilots and AI agents. This shows a growing maturity in AI fluency as companies realize the value of out-of-the-box use cases and expand to more advanced scenarios.

Customer snapshot:
Siemens has developed the Siemens Industrial Copilot, which has eased the challenges caused by increasing complexity and labor shortages for dozens of customers in different industries.
“In full appreciation of GenAI’s transformational potential, it’s important to remember that production does not have an ‘undo’ button. It takes diligence and effort to mature AI to industrial-grade quality. The Siemens Industrial Copilot for Engineering significantly eases our customers’ workload and addresses the pressing challenges of skill shortages and increasing complexity in industrial automation. This AI-powered solution is a game-changer for our industry with over 50 customers already using it to boost efficiency and tackle labor shortages.”
— Boris Scharinger, AI Strategist at Siemens Digital Industries

#3 Generative AI adoption and value is growing across industries. Even though it is relatively new to the market, generative AI adoption is rapidly expanding — 75% of respondents report current usage up from 55% in 2023. The ROI of generative AI is highest in Financial Services, followed by Media & Telco, Mobility, Retail & Consumer Packaged Goods, Energy, Manufacturing, Healthcare and Education. Overall, generative AI is generating higher ROI across industries.

Customer snapshot:
Providence has leveraged AI to extend and enhance patient care, streamline processes and workflows and improve the effectiveness of caregivers.
“Whether we’re partnering with organizations on the leading edge of this technology — like Microsoft — and building bespoke solutions through Azure OpenAI Service, advancing clinical research to help cancer patients receive personalized and precise treatments faster, or ‘hitting the easy button’ and adopting established technologies like Microsoft 365 Copilot or DAX Copilot, we have successfully stayed on the forefront of this tech revolution. For example, physicians who use DAX Copilot save an average of 5.33 minutes per visit, and 80% of physicians have reported lower cognitive burden after using DAX Copilot.”
— Sarah Vaezy, EVP, Chief Strategy and Digital Officer at Providence

#4 AI leaders are seeing greater returns and accelerated innovation. While companies using generative AI are averaging $3.7x ROI, the top leaders using generative AI are realizing significantly higher returns, with an average ROI of $10.3. In addition to the enhanced business value, leaders are also on an accelerated path to build and implement new solutions — 29% of leaders implement AI in less than 3 months versus 6% of companies in the laggard category.

Customer snapshot:
Södra is an international forest industry group that processes forest products from 52,000 owners into renewable, climate-smart products for international market. Every day Södra collects and interprets climate impact data to make thousands of decisions for every part of the value chain.
“With innovative AI technology from Microsoft, our business experts and data scientists have been able to help make us more sustainable while also improving revenue significantly.”
— Cristian Brolin, Chief Digital Officer at Södra

#5 Looking ahead: Skilling remains a top challenge. Thirty percent of respondents indicated a lack of specialized AI skills in-house, and 26 percent say they lack employees with the skills needed to learn and work with AI. This dovetails with findings from the Microsoft and LinkedIn 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report, which found that 55 percent of business leaders are concerned about having enough skilled talent to fill roles.

That is why over the past year we have helped train and certify over 14 million people in more than 200 countries in digital skills. And we are committed to working in partnership with governments, educational institutions, industry and civil society to help millions more learn to use AI.

Customer snapshot:
The University of South Florida (USF) is partnering with Microsoft to streamline processes and enhance innovation for all aspects of university operations with AI.
“We’re giving students a leg up to do amazing things with AI as part of tomorrow’s workforce. Our focus on generative AI not only drives operational efficiency but also empowers our community to unlock new levels of creativity and impact, further positioning USF as a leader in AI adoption, which includes being among the first universities in the nation to form a college dedicated to AI, cybersecurity and computing.”
— Sidney Fernandes, CIO & VP of Digital Experiences at University of South Florida

AI’s growing economic impact

While companies today are largely implementing out-of-the-box generative AI solutions and seeing significant ROI, more than half of those surveyed expect to build custom industry and line-of-business applications in the next 24 months — demonstrating that today’s ROI is quickly becoming tomorrow’s competitive edge.

“We are at an inflection point of autonomous agent development and are beginning an evolution from using just off-the-shelf assistants and copilots that support knowledge discovery and content generation to custom AI agents to execute complex, multistep workflows across a digital world,” says Ritu Jyoti, GVP/GM, AI and Data Research at IDC. “With responsible technology usage and workplace transformation, IDC predicts that business spending to adopt AI will have a cumulative global economic impact of $19.9 trillion through 2030 and drive 3.5% of global GDP in 2030.”

Key findings from IDC’s The Business Opportunity of AI study include:

Generative AI usage jumped from 55% in 2023 to 75% in 2024.
For every $1 a company invests in generative AI, the ROI is $3.7x.
The top leaders using generative AI are realizing an ROI of $10.3.
On average, AI deployments are taking less than 8 months and organizations are realizing value within 13 months.
Within 24 months, most organizations plan to expand beyond pre-built AI solutions to advanced AI workloads that are customized or custom-built.
The ROI of generative AI is highest in Financial Services, followed by Media & Telco, Mobility, Retail & Consumer Packaged Goods, Energy, Manufacturing, Healthcare and Education.
43% say productivity use cases have provided the greatest ROI.
The primary way that organizations are monetizing AI today is through productivity use cases. In the next 24 months, a greater focus will be placed on functional and industry use cases.
The top barrier when implementing AI is the lack of both technical and day-to-day AI skills.

Learn how to fuel your AI journey

IDC’s study, which included more than 4,000 business leaders and AI decision-makers around the world, also identifies the top barriers organizations face when implementing AI. As businesses integrate new solutions, they navigate important considerations such as data privacy, responsible use and the need for investment in both technology and skills.

No matter where you are in your cloud and AI transformation journey, Microsoft can help. To learn more about how customers across industries are shaping their AI transformation with Microsoft, please visit Microsoft’s AI in Action page. For more on how to get started in your AI transformation journey, visit Microsoft AI.

IDC InfoBrief: sponsored by Microsoft, 2024 Business Opportunity of AI, IDC# US52699124, November 2024

The post IDC’s 2024 AI opportunity study: Top five AI trends to watch appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

In 2024, generative AI emerged as a key driver for business outcomes across every industry. Already this new generation of AI is having an incredible impact on our world — yet companies and industries are just scratching the surface of what’s possible as they continue to develop new use cases across every role and function….
The post IDC’s 2024 AI opportunity study: Top five AI trends to watch appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More

Microsoft

How real-world businesses are transforming with AI

/ 2024-11-13

One of the highlights of my career has always been connecting with customers and partners across industries to learn how they are using technology to drive their businesses forward. In the past 30 years, we’ve seen four major platform shifts, from client server to internet and the web to mobile and cloud to now—the next major platform shift to AI.

As today’s platform shift to AI continues to gain momentum, Microsoft is working to understand just how organizations can drive lasting business value. We recently commissioned a study with IDC, The Business Opportunity of AI, to uncover new insights around business value and help guide organizations on their journey of AI transformation. The study found that for every $1 organizations invest in generative AI, they’re realizing an average of $3.70 in return—and uncovered insights about the future potential of AI to reshape business processes and drive change across industries.

Today, more than 85% of the Fortune 500 are using Microsoft AI solutions to shape their future. In working with organizations large and small, across every industry and geography, we’ve seen that most transformation initiatives are designed to achieve one of four business outcomes:

Enriching employee experiences: Using AI to streamline or automate repetitive, mundane tasks can allow your employees to dive into more complex, creative and ultimately more valuable work.
Reinventing customer engagement: AI can create more personalized, tailored customer experiences, delighting your target audiences while lightening the load for employees.
Reshaping business processes: Virtually any business process can be reimagined with AI, from marketing to supply chain operations to finance, and AI is even allowing organizations to go beyond process optimization and discover exciting new growth opportunities.
Bending the curve on innovation: AI is revolutionizing innovation by speeding up creative processes and product development, reducing the time to market and allowing companies to differentiate in an often crowded field.

In this blog, we’ve collected more than 200 of our favorite real-life examples of how organizations are embracing Microsoft’s proven AI capabilities to drive impact and shape today’s platform shift to AI. We hope you find an example or two that can inspire your own transformation journey.

Enriching employee experiences

Generative AI is truly transforming employee productivity and wellbeing. Our customers tell us that by automating repetitive, mundane tasks, employees are freed up to dive into more complex and creative work. This shift not only makes the work environment more stimulating but also boosts job satisfaction. It sparks innovation, provides actionable insights for better decision-making and supports personalized training and development opportunities, all contributing to a better work-life balance. Customers around the world have reported significant improvements in employee productivity with these AI solutions:

Access Holdings Plc adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot, integrating generative AI into daily tools and, as a result, writing code now takes two hours instead of eight, chatbots launch in 10 days instead of three months and presentations are prepared in 45 minutes instead of six hours.
Adobe is connecting Adobe Experience Cloud workflows and insights with Microsoft 365 Copilot to deliver generative-AI powered capabilities that enable marketers to increase collaboration, efficiency and creativity.
Amadeus empowers its teams to focus their time and skills on value-added tasks with Microsoft 365 Copilot, by summarizing email threads, chat or transcripts and summing up information from diverse sources.
ANZ has invested in Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot and Copilot in Microsoft Edge to boost productivity and innovation across its workforce.
Asahi Europe & International (AEI) has adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot, saving employees potentially 15% of time previously spent on administrative tasks.
AXA developed AXA Secure GPT, a platform powered by Azure OpenAI Service that empowers employees to leverage the power of generative AI while targeting the highest level of data safety and responsible use of the tool.
Axon Enterprise developed a new AI tool with Azure OpenAI Service called Draft One, resulting in an 82% decrease in time spent on reports, which freed up officers to engage more with their community.
Aztec Group enhanced productivity and client experience by trialing Microsoft 365 Copilot with 300 staff, uncovering “unlimited” use cases and plans for a wider rollout.
Bader Sultan & Bros. Co. W.L.L implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot to enhance employee productivity and speed up customer response times.
Bancolombia is using GitHub Copilot to empower its technical team, achieving a 30% increase in code generation, boosting automated application changes to an average of 18,000 per year, with a rate of 42 productive daily deployments.
BaptistCare Community Services is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to save employees time as they navigate workforce shortage challenges, allowing them to focus more on the people they care for.
Barnsley Council was recognized as “Double Council of the Year in 2023” for its implementation of Microsoft 365 Copilot, which modernized operations and reduced administrative tasks, leading to improved job satisfaction and increased creativity.
BlackRock purchased more than 24,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses spanning all employees, functions and locations, helping improve the Copilot experience, including codeveloping new features and functions.
British Heart Foundation is testing Microsoft 365 Copilot and in its initial test, users estimate that Microsoft 365 Copilot could save them up to 30 minutes per day.
Buckinghamshire Council deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot with staff reporting productivity improvements, quality enhancements and time savings, which are enabling the different teams to do more with less.
Campari Group adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot to help employees integrate it into their workflow, resulting in time savings of about two hours a week from the support of routine activities such as email management, meeting preparation, content creation and skill acquisition.
Capita is using GitHub Copilot for productivity improvements as well as improvements in developer satisfaction, recruitment and retention.
CDW used Microsoft 365 Copilot to improve work quality for 88% of users, enabling 77% to complete tasks faster and increasing productivity for 85% of users.
Chi Mei Medical Center is lightening workloads for doctors, nurses and pharmacists with a generative AI assistant built on Azure OpenAI Service.
E.ON is focused on Germany’s energy transition, leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot to manage the complex grid in real-time, increasing productivity and efficiency for its workforce.
Enerijisa Uretim has adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot to streamline meeting summaries, reformat documents and compile reports, enabling employees to concentrate on more strategic and fulfilling activities instead of spending six hours in meetings.
EPAM is deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot to consolidate information and generate content and documents.
Farm Credit Canada implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot, which resulted in time savings on routine tasks for 78% of users, with 30% saving 30 to 60 minutes per week and 35% saving over an hour per week, allowing employees to focus on more value-added tasks.
Finastra used Microsoft 365 Copilot to automate tasks, enhance content creation, improve analytics and personalize customer interactions, with employees citing a 20% to 50% time savings.
Four Agency Worldwide increased employee productivity using Microsoft 365 Copilot to generate ideas for creative work and support administrative-heavy processes, data analysis and report generation, allowing staff to focus on outreach and less time doing paperwork.
Goodwill of Orange County developed an AI-powered app using Azure AI capabilities to help more people, including those with developmental, intellectual and physical disabilities, work in unfilled e-commerce positions.
Honeywell employees are saving 92 minutes per week—that’s 74 hours a year! Disclaimer: Statistics are from an internal Honeywell survey of 5,000 employees where 611 employees responded.
Insight employees using Copilot are seeing four hours of productivity gained per week from data summarization and content creation.
Joos uses Microsoft 365 Copilot to grow its brand with worldwide collaboration by streamlining meetings, optimizing presentations and improving communications.
Kantar is harnessing the power of Microsoft 365 Copilot by reducing costly, time-consuming IT processes and boosting productivity for employees.
KPMG Australia is using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search and Microsoft Copilot 365 to perform advanced text analysis of dozens of client source documents to identify full or partial compliance, or noncompliance, in a fraction of the time required for manual assessments.
LGT is launching Microsoft Copilot LGT to improve efficiency, showing users save an average of an hour a week even in the pilot phase.
Lotte Hotels & Resorts has been creating a new work culture that allows employees to work more efficiently and focus on the nature of the work by adopting Microsoft Power Platform for automation.
MAIRE is leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot to automate routine tasks, saving over 800 working hours per month, freeing up engineers and professionals for strategic activities while supporting MAIRE’s green energy transition by reducing their carbon footprint.
McDonald’s China chose Microsoft Azure AI, GitHub Copilot and Azure AI Search to transform its operations, resulting in a significant increase in AI adoption, consumption and retention from 2,000 to 30,000 employee transactions monthly.
McKnight Foundation adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot for all staff, saving time, increasing productivity and freeing space to focus on strategic priorities.
Morula Health is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to enhance productivity, streamline medical writing tasks and ensure data security, ultimately improving efficiency and client satisfaction.
Motor Oil Group is achieving remarkable efficiency gains by integrating Microsoft 365 Copilot into its workflows, with staff spending minutes on tasks that used to take weeks.
Nagel-Group uses Azure OpenAI Service to help employees quickly access information which saves time, creates efficiency and transparency, and leads to higher-quality answers overall.
National Australia Bank is leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot for daily productivity and data analysis and insights and Microsoft Copilot for Security to quickly analyze millions of security event logs and allow engineers to focus on more important areas.
NFL Players Association integrated Azure AI Services and Azure App Service into their video review process, reducing review time by up to 73%, significantly increasing efficiency and enhancing player safety through consistent rule enforcement.
O2 Czech Republic boosts productivity and streamlines meetings with Microsoft 365 Copilot, revolutionizing how information is shared and making automation a part of daily work.
Onepoint developed a secure conversational agent based on Azure OpenAI, which delivers productivity gains of between 10% and 15% across all business lines.
Orange Group has over 40 use cases with Azure OpenAI Service and GitHub Copilot across business functions to support employees in their day-to-day tasks, enabling them to concentrate on higher value-added activities.
Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot to improve staff report productivity by saving one to two hours a week, or simple formatting tasks down to a matter of seconds, enabling more resources to deliver frontline services.
PA Consulting transformed its sales operations with Microsoft 365 Copilot, so its people can invest more time on the activities that have the biggest impact for clients and maximize the strategic value they provide.
Petrobras used Azure OpenAI Service to create ChatPetrobras, which is streamlining workflows, reducing manual tasks and summarizing reports for its 110,000 employees.
Petrochemical Industries Company automates work processes to save time with Microsoft 365 Copilot from weeks to days, hours to seconds.
PKSHA Technology is optimizing their time on critical work by increasing efficiency in meeting preparations, data analytics and ideation with the help of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Providence has collaborated with Nuance and Microsoft to accelerate development and adoption of generative AI-powered applications, helping improve care quality and access and reduce physician’s administrative workloads.
RTI International adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot to gain productivity wherever possible, allowing staff to focus on their areas of expertise, delivering even better science-backed solutions for clients.
Sandvik Coromant is using Microsoft Copilot for Sales to drive efficiency and accuracy, shaving at least one minute off each transaction, allowing sellers and account managers to focus their expertise on responding to customers’ needs with analysis, creativity and adaptability.
Sasfin Bank built a solution on Microsoft Azure that centralized 20,000 documents to analyze contract clauses and provide real-time snapshots, moving guesswork into data-driven decision-making.
Scottish Water implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot, reducing mundane tasks to a minimum and thus freeing up time for employees to work on the more meaningful tasks.
Shriners Children’s developed an AI platform allowing clinicians to easily and securely navigate patient data in a singular location, enhancing patient care and improving the efficiency of their healthcare services.
Siemens is leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to improve efficiency, cut downtime and address labor shortages.
Softchoice employees are experiencing firsthand how Microsoft 365 Copilot can transform daily workflows, realizing productivity gains of 97% reduction in time spent summarizing technical meetings and up to 70% less time spent on content creation.
Syensqo utilized Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to develop a custom AI chatbot in three months, which improved their internal data management, decision-making and overall efficiency.
Teladoc Health uses Microsoft 365 Copilot to revolutionize its telehealth operations, automating routine tasks, boosting efficiency and increasing productivity.
Telstra developed two cutting-edge generative AI tools based on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service: 90% of employees are using the One Sentence Summary tool, which resulted in 20% less follow-up customer contact, and 84% of customer service agents are using the Ask Telstra solution.
Topsoe achieved 85% AI adoption among office employees in seven months, significantly enhancing productivity and business processes.
Torfaen County Borough Council utilized Microsoft 365 Copilot to streamline back-office processes, resulting in significant time savings and enhanced productivity for both business and children’s services teams, with further rollouts planned.
Trace3 leveraged Microsoft Copilot to streamline and enhance processes across the business and with clients, such as reducing the time it takes HR recruiting managers to respond to applicants within a couple of days instead of several weeks.
Unilever is reinventing their marketing process with Copilot, saving time on briefing tasks, automatically pulling in relevant market data, content and insights to accelerate campaign launches.
Uniper SE implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot to reduce time spent on manual and repetitive tasks and help workers focus on more pressing work, such as developing enhanced solutions to speed up the energy transition.
Unum Group built a custom AI application to search 1.3 terabytes of data with 95% accuracy using Azure OpenAI Service.
Virgin Atlantic adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot and is seeing real business benefits, including productivity improvements, enabling new ways of working.
Visier built a generative AI assistant that leverages Azure AI and Azure OpenAI Services to deliver workforce analytics and actionable insights for more than 50,000 customers.
Virtual Dental Care developed an AI application Smart Scan that leverages Microsoft Azure to reduce paperwork for mobile dental clinics in schools by 75% and frees dentists to devote more time to patient care.
Zakladni Skola As Hlavkova adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot and saw a 60% improvement in handling administrative documents, decreased lesson preparation from hours to a few minutes, increased inclusivity and enhanced communication with students and parents.

Reinventing customer engagement

We’ve seen great examples of how generative AI can automate content creation, ensuring there’s fresh and engaging materials ready to go. It personalizes customer experiences by crunching the numbers, boosting conversion rates. It makes operations smoother, helping teams launch campaigns faster. Plus, it drives innovation, crafting experiences that delight customers while lightening the load for staff. Embracing generative AI is key for organizations wanting to reinvent customer engagements, stay ahead of the game and drive both innovation and efficiency.

Absa has adopted Microsoft Copilot to streamline various business processes, saving several hours on administrative tasks each day.
Adobe leverages Microsoft Azure to streamline the customer experience, harnessing the power of the connected cloud services and creating a synergy that drives AI transformation across industries.
Acentra Health developed Medscribe, a web application that uses Azure OpenAI Service to generate draft letters in a secure, HIPPA-compliant enclave that responds to customer appeals for healthcare services within 24 hours, reducing the time spent on each appeal letter by 50%.
Alaska Airlines is using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Defender and GitHub to ensure its passengers have a seamless journey from ticket purchase to baggage pickup, and it has started leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to unlock more business value for its customer care and contact centers.
Ally Financial is using Azure OpenAI Service to reduce manual tasks for its customer service associates, freeing up time for them to engage with customers.
BMW Group optimizes the customer experience, connecting 13 million active users to their vehicles with the MyBMW app on Azure, which supports 450 million daily requests and 3.2TB of data processing.
Boyner has tripled its e-commerce performance using Microsoft Azure, seeing a rise in customer satisfaction, engagement, conversion rate and revenue.
Bradesco Bank integrated Microsoft Azure into its virtual assistant, BIA, resulting in reduced response time from days to hours, improving operational efficiency and client satisfaction.
Capgemini Mexico integrated GitHub Copilot to support scalable AI implementations, which has led to improved customer experiences and increased efficiency.
Capitec Bank uses Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft 365 Copilot, enabling their AI-powered chatbot to assist customer service consultants in accessing product information more efficiently, saving significant time for employees each week.
Cdiscount is leveraging GitHub Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service to enhance developer efficiency, optimize product sheet categorization and improve customer satisfaction.
Cemex used Azure OpenAI Service to launch Technical Xpert, an AI tool used by sales agents to provide instant access to comprehensive product and customer solution information, significantly reducing search time by 80%.
Chanel elevated their client experience and improved employee efficiency by leveraging Microsoft Fabric and Azure OpenAI Service for real-time translations and quality monitoring.
City of Burlington created two AI-powered solutions: MyFiles system using Microsoft Power Platform for building permits and CoBy, a 24/7 customer support assistant using Microsoft Copilot Studio.
City of Madrid created an AI virtual assistant with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, offering tourists accurate, real-time information and personalized responses in 95-plus languages.
Cognizant is making performance management more effective and meaningful with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning to help clients across industries envision, build and run innovative digital enterprises.
Coles Group has leveraged Microsoft Azure to enhance its digital presence and improve customer engagement, rolling out new applications to its stores six times faster without disrupting workloads.
Commercial Bank of Dubai used Microsoft Azure to upgrade its application infrastructure, improving transaction security and speed so individual customers can now open an account and start banking in about two minutes.
Dubai Electricity and Water Authority has significantly improved productivity and customer satisfaction by integrating multiple Microsoft AI solutions, reducing task completion time from days to hours and achieving a 98% customer happiness rate.
Elcome uses Microsoft 365 Copilot to improve the customer experience, reducing response times from 24 hours to eight hours.
elunic developed shopfloor.GPT based on Azure OpenAI, leading to increased productivity for customers and saving 15 minutes per request.
Estée Lauder Companies is leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to create closer consumer connections and increase speed to market with local relevancy.
First National Bank (FNB) is using Microsoft Copilot for Sales to help bankers create professional, thoughtful emails in 13 native South African languages, to enhance customer interactions, streamline communications and reinforce its commitment to innovation and customer service.
Flora Food Group migrated to Microsoft Fabric to offer more detailed and timely insights to its customers, enhancing service delivery and customer satisfaction.
Groupama deployed a virtual assistant using Azure OpenAI Service that delivers reliable, verified and verifiable information, and boasts an 80% success rate.
International University of Applied Sciences (IU) adopted Azure OpenAI Service to revolutionize learning with a personalized study assistant that can interact with each student just like a human would.
Investec is using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales to enhance the bank’s client relationships, estimating saving approximately 200 hours annually, ultimately boosting sales productivity and delivering a personalized, seamless customer experience.
Linum is using Microsoft Azure to train their text-to-video models faster and more efficiently without losing performance or wasting resources.
Lumen Technologies is redefining customer success and sales processes through the strategic use of Microsoft 365 Copilot, enhancing productivity, sales, and customer service in the global communications sector.
McKinsey & Companyis creating an agent to reduce the client onboarding process by reducing lead time by 90% and administrative work by 30%.
Meesho leveraged Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service and GitHub Copilot to enhance customer service and software development, resulting in a 25% increase in customer satisfaction scores and 40% more traffic on customer service queries.
Milpark Education integrated Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio and in just four months, improved efficiency and accuracy of student support, decreasing the average resolution time by 50% and escalations by more than 30%.
NC Fusion chose a comprehensive Microsoft solution to make marketing engagement activities easier and accurately target the best audience segments.
Medgate, a telehealth subsidiary of Otto Group developed a medical Copilot powered by Azure OpenAI which summarizes consultations, supports triage and provides real-time translations.
Pacific Gas & Electric built a chatbot using Microsoft Copilot Studio that saves $1.1 million annually on helpdesk support.
Pockyt is using GitHub Copilot and anticipates a 500% increase in productivity in the medium to long term as they continue adapting AI and fine-tuning their software development life cycle.
South Australia Department for Education launched an AI-powered educational chatbot to help safeguard students from harmful content while introducing responsible AI to the classrooms.
Sync Labs is using Microsoft Azure to create AI-driven solutions that have led to a remarkable 30x increase in revenue and a 100x expansion of their customer base.
Syndigo is using Azure to accelerate digital commerce for its customers by more than 40% and expand its customer base.
Telkomsel created a virtual assistant with Azure OpenAI Service, resulting in a leap in customer self-service interactions from 19% to 45%, and call volume dropped from 8,000 calls to 1,000 calls a day.
Torrens University chose to use Azure OpenAI to uplift its online learning experience, saving 20,000 hours and $2.4 million in time and resources.
Trusting Social integrated Microsoft Azure services to launch AI-driven agents that are changing how banks function and transforming their customer’s banking experience.
University of California, Berkeley used Azure OpenAI Service to deploy a custom AI chatbot that supports student learning and helps students with complex coursework.
University of Sydney created a self-serve AI platform powered by Azure OpenAI Service, to enable faculty to build custom chatbots for enhancing student onboarding, feedback, career simulation and more.
Van Lanschot Kempen is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to reduce the time needed for daily tasks, freeing up time to invest in that crucial personal connection.
Virgin Money built an award-winning virtual assistant using Copilot Studio to help build customers’ confidence in their digital products and services.
VOCALLS automates over 50 million interactions per year, resulting in a 78% reduction in average handling time aside from a 120% increase in answered calls.
Vodafone Group is leveraging Microsoft’s AI solutions, including Azure AI Studio, OpenAI Service, Copilot and AI Search, to achieve a 70% resolution rate for customer inquiries through digital channels and reduce call times by at least one minute.
Walmart is using Azure OpenAI Service to deliver a helpful and intuitive browsing experience for customers designed to serve up a curated list of the personalized items a shopper is looking for.
Weights & Biases created a platform which runs on Microsoft Azure that allows developers to keep records, log successes and failures and automate manual tasks.
World2Meet is providing better customer service and operations with a new virtual assistant powered by Microsoft Azure.
Xavier College is modernizing its student information systems on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure to unlock powerful insights, fostering innovation and data-driven decision making.
Zavarovalnica Triglav implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure OpenAI Service to streamline its operations with automated responses and smart rerouting of customer enquiries.

Reshaping business process

Transforming operations is another way generative AI is encouraging innovation and improving efficiency across various business functions. In marketing, it can create personalized content to truly engage different audiences. For supply chain management, it can predict market trends so companies can optimize their inventory levels. Human resources departments can speed up the hiring process, while financial services can use it for fraud detection and risk assessments. With generative AI, companies are not just refining their current processes, they’re also discovering exciting new growth opportunities.

Accelleron used Microsoft Power Platform to support numerous business applications and simplify processes for service agents and employees, resulting in the onboard of new agents in 30 minutes, compared to two days for other solutions.
Accenture developed an AI-powered financial advisor that leverages RISE with SAP on Microsoft Azure to enhance their infrastructure and integrate financial data.
Atomicwork leverages Azure OpenAI to bring together three power capabilities: a conversational assistant, a modern service management system and a workflow automation platform.
Blink Ops fully embraced generative AI to build the world’s first Security Automation Copilot with more than 8,000 automated workflows to help any Security/IT task through prompts.
Chalhoub Group is using Microsoft Fabric to modernize its data analytics and streamline its data sources into one platform, increasing agility, enhancing analytics and accelerating processes.
Cineplex is developing innovative automation solutions for finance, guest services, and other departments, saving the company over 30,000 hours a year in manual processing time.
ClearBank moved its services to Microsoft Azure to gain scalability and efficiency, pushing out 183% more monthly system releases, gaining both scalability and efficiency.
Danske Statsbaner increases productivity up to 30% with help from Microsoft AI solutions.
Eastman implemented Microsoft Copilot for Security, realizing the benefits of accelerated upskilling, step-by-step guidance for response and faster threat remediation.
Fast Shop migrated to Microsoft Azure, creating a self-service culture of access to data, eliminating delays, reducing costs and increasing leadership satisfaction with data while providing more agility in reporting.
Florida Crystals adopted a value-added solution across Microsoft products including Microsoft 365 Copilot to reduce telecom expenses and automate industrial process controls.
GHD is reinventing the RFP process in construction and engineering with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
GovDash is a SaaS platform that leverages artificial intelligence to streamline the entire business development lifecycle for government contracting companies using Azure OpenAI.
Grupo Bimbo is deploying Microsoft’s industrial AI technologies to modernize its manufacturing processes, optimizing production and reducing downtime, driving significant cost savings and empowering global innovation.
Insight Canada implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot to streamline business operations, realizing a 93% productivity gains in functions including sales, finance and human resources.
Intesa Sanpaolo Group enhanced its cybersecurity with AI-enabled Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Copilot for Security, resulting in faster threat detection, increased productivity and reduced storage costs.
Kaya deployed a custom implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power BI to modernize its supply chain, leading to enhanced visibility, improved planning and streamlined inter-department operations.
Lionbridge Technologies, LLC is using Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI Service to accelerate its delivery times and improve quality, reducing project turnaround times by up to 30%.
LTIMindtree integrated Microsoft Copilot for Security, offering automated incident response, integrated threat intelligence and advanced threat analysis.
Mania de Churrasco used Microsoft Azure, Power Platform and Microsoft 365 to achieve high efficiency, security and scalability in its operations, in addition to improving its data intelligence, which indirectly participated in a 20% increase in sales year on year.
National Bank of Greece built an Azure-powered Document AI solution to transform its document processing, improving the bank’s accuracy to 90%.
Nest Bank has revolutionized its operations by integrating Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service, resulting in doubled sales and increased daily transactions from 60,000 to 80,000, showcasing the transformative impact of generative AI in the financial sector.
Network Rail modernized their data analytics solution with Microsoft Azure, helping engineers understand data 50% faster than before and improve efficiency, passenger experiences and safety—all while saving costs.
Nsure developed an AI-powered agent that uses Copilot Studio and Power Automate to reduce manual processing time by 60% while also reducing associated costs by 50%.
Oncoclínicas implemented Microsoft Azure to transform its entire data ecosystem with a web portal and mobile application that performs all image processing and storage.
Pacifico Seguros has adopted Microsoft Copilot for Security to optimize its security operations and anticipate and neutralize threats more efficiently and effectively.
Parexel adopted Azure Databricks and Microsoft Power BI, achieving an 85% reduction in data engineering tooling costs, a 30% increase in staff efficiency and a 70% reduction in time to market for data product delivery.
Paysafe used Microsoft 365 Copilot to streamline meetings, information management, and document creation, addressing language barriers, eliminating time-consuming tasks, and boosting creativity along the way.
Planted is integrating Azure OpenAI to manage everyday tasks more efficiently and facilitate the search for information for innovative process development.
Presidio realized dramatic productivity gains saving 1,200 hours per month on average for the employees using Microsoft 365 Copilot and created 70 new business opportunities.
Qatar Charity used Copilot Studio to increase its call center efficiency, reducing average handle time by 30%, increasing customer satisfaction by 25% and achieving a 40% reduction in IT maintenance costs.
Saphyre uses Microsoft Azure and AI to provide an intelligent cloud-based solution that automates and streamlines financial trading workflows around client and counterparty life cycle management, reducing manual efforts by 75%.
Swiss International Air Lines migrated and modernized with Microsoft Azure, achieving up to 30% cost savings, a remarkable boost in platform stability along with enhanced security visibility.
ZEISS Group uses Microsoft Fabric to create a secure and trusted data supply chain that can be shared effortlessly across a range of business units.
ZF Group builds manufacturing efficiency with over 25,000 apps and 37,000 unique active users on Power Platform.

Bending the curve on innovation

Generative AI is revolutionizing innovation by speeding up creative processes and product development. It’s helping companies come up with new ideas, design prototypes, and iterate quickly, cutting down the time it takes to get to market. In the automotive industry, it’s designing more efficient vehicles, while in pharmaceuticals, it’s crafting new drug molecules, slashing years off R&D times. In education, it transforms how students learn and achieve their goals. Here are more examples of how companies are embracing generative AI to shape the future of innovation.

Air India has incorporated Microsoft 365 Copilot into multiple departments, unlocking a new realm of operational insights that not only provide critical data on flight punctuality and operational hurdles but also empower proactive, collaborative decision making.
Agnostic Intelligencedeployed Azure OpenAI Service to eliminate time-consuming tasks, saving users up to 80% of their time and enabling IT managers to focus on innovation and quality assurance.
Albert Heijn is using Azure OpenAI for everything from customer personalization to demand forecast and food waste projects, making it easier for its customers to change their lifestyle.
Amgen is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to boost productivity and has the potential to speed up drug development and support advancements in their business processes.
APEC leverages Microsoft Azure and deep neural network algorithms to develop an app that enables healthcare providers to capture retinal images, increasing the accuracy to identify Retinopathy of Prematurity (RoP) to 90%.
ASOS is using Azure AI Studio to help customers discover new looks with genuine shopping insights, personalized conversations, naturalism and even humor to enliven the shopping journey.
Auburn University is incorporating Microsoft Copilot to promote AI literacy, accessibility, and collaboration, with the aim to expand educational and economic opportunities for its entire academic community with AI-centric tools.
B3 launched an AI assistant using Azure OpenAI Service that aids 10,000 users a day to answer Brazilians’ questions about how to start investing.
Basecamp Research aims to build the world’s largest database of national biodiversity and apply AI and machine learning to advance bioscience.
Bayer is using Microsoft Copilot to contribute to feeding a growing global population and helping people lead healthier, disease-free lives.
Brembo leveraged Azure OpenAI to develop ALCHEMIX, a solution to generate innovative compounds for its brake pads, drastically reducing the development time of new compounds from days to mere minutes.
Canary Speech can now train new vocal models in as little as two months and handle millions of transactions per month with Microsoft Azure.
CapitaLand simplified internal processes, increasing efficiency to more than 10,000 worker days saved per year and deployed Azure OpenAI Service to build the first AI hospitality chatbot for its lodging business.
Cassidy is using Azure OpenAI Service to enhance efficiency across various industries, supporting over 10,000 companies.
Coca-Cola is implementing Azure OpenAI Service to develop innovative generative AI use cases across various business functions, including testing how Microsoft 365 Copilot could help improve workplace productivity.
Denso is developing “human-like” robots using Azure OpenAI Service as the brain to help robots and humans work together through dialogue.
eFishery is using Azure OpenAI for farmers to get the data and insights on fish and shrimp farming, including more precise feeding and water quality monitoring.
EY developed an application that automatically matches and clears incoming payments in SAP, resulting in an increase from 30% to 80% in automatically cleared payments and 95% matched payments, with estimated annual time savings of 230,000 hours globally.
FIDO is using Azure OpenAI Service to develop an AI tool that uses sound to pinpoint leaky pipes, saving precious drinking water.
Georgia Tech is using Azure OpenAI Service to enhance the electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, achieving rapid data classification and predictive modeling, highlighting the reliability of networked chargers over non-networked ones.
GigXR developed a solution to create the intelligence for specific AI patients using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and other Azure services.
GoTo Group is significantly enhancing productivity and code quality across its engineering teams by adopting GitHub Copilot, saving over seven hours per week and achieving a 30% code acceptance rate.
GovTech used Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to create LaunchPad, sparking more than 400 ideas and 20 prototypes, laying the foundation for the government to harness the power of generative AI.
H&R Block is using Azure AI Studio and Azure OpenAI Service to build a new solution that provides real-time, reliable tax filing assistance.
Haut.AI provides skin care companies and retailers with customizable, AI-based skin diagnostic tools developed with the help of Microsoft AI.
Helfie is building a solution that caters to healthcare providers who can arm their patients with an application to more quickly and accurately access the care they need.
Hitachi will implement Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot to create innovative solutions for the energy, mobility and other industries.
Icertis is providing AI-based tools that will recognize contract language and then build algorithms to automatically choose the right approach based on the content of the contract.
ITOCHU is using Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Studio to evolve its data analytics dashboard into a service that provides immediate recommendations by automatically creating evidence-based product proposals.
IU International University of Applied Sciences (IU) is using the power of Azure OpenAI Service to develop Syntea, an AI avatar integrated into Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, making learning more personalized, autonomous and flexible.
Khan Academy has partnered with Microsoft to bring time-saving and lesson-enhancing AI tools to millions of educators.
Lufthansa Group developed an animated 3D avatar called Digital Hangar to help guide passengers from initial travel inspiration to flight booking through an exchange with an avatar in natural language.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is using Azure OpenAI Service to help accelerate digital innovation in power plants.
Molslinjen has created an AI analytics toolbox that has reduced fuel emissions, improved customer satisfaction and brought in millions of additional revenue.
Novo Nordisk recently published initial results with predictive AI models for advanced risk detection in cardiovascular diseases, including an algorithm that can predict patients’ cardiovascular risk better than the best clinical standards.
Paige.AI is using AI and Microsoft Azure to accelerate cancer diagnoses with data from millions of images.
Pets at Home created an agent to help its retail fraud detection team investigate suspicious transactions.
Plan Heal is using Microsoft AI to create solutions that enable patients to monitor and report health metrics so care providers can better serve them.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is testing a new battery material that was found in a matter of weeks, not years, as part of a collaboration with Microsoft.
Rijksmuseum is harnessing the power of Copilot to make art accessible at scale by joining forces with Microsoft to improve and expand the art experience for blind and low-vision community members.
Royal National Institute of Blind People is using Azure AI Services to develop an AI-based solution that quickly and accurately converts letters to braille, audio, and large print formats.
Schneider Electric provides productivity-enhancing and energy efficiency solutions and is using a whole suite of AI tools to hasten its own innovation and that of its customers.
SPAR ICS created an award-winning, AI-enabled demand forecasting system achieving 90% inventory prediction accuracy.
Suzuki Motor Corporation is adopting Azure OpenAI Service for data security, driving company-wide use with five multipurpose apps.
Tecnológico de Monterrey created a generative AI-powered ecosystem built on Azure OpenAI Service with the goal to personalize education based on the students’ needs, improve the learning process, boost teachers’ creativity and save time on tedious tasks.
TomTom is using Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Kubernetes Service to revolutionize the driver experience.
Unilever is partnering with Microsoft to identify new digital capabilities to drive product innovation forward, from unlocking the secrets of our skin’s microbiome to reducing the carbon footprint of a multibillion-dollar business.
Unity used Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to build Muse Chat, an AI assistant that can guide creators through common questions and help troubleshoot issues to make game development easier.
University of South Florida is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to alleviate the burden of repetitive, time-consuming tasks so faculty and staff can spend this time creatively solving problems, conducting critical research, establishing stronger relationships with peers and students and using their expertise to forge new, innovative paths.
Visma has developed new code with GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Azure DevOps and Microsoft Visual Studio as much as 50 percent faster, contributing to increased customer retention, faster time to market and increased revenue.
Wallenius Wilhelmsen is implementing Microsoft 365 Copilot and using Microsoft Viva to drive sustainable adoption, streamlining processes, empowering better decision making and cultivating a culture of innovation and inclusion.
Wipro is committed to delivering value to customers faster and improving the outcomes across the business by investing $1 billion in AI and training 200,000 employees on generative AI principles with Microsoft Copilot.

Read more:

Get the study: Business Opportunity of AI | Microsoft
Explore Microsoft AI solutions: Artificial Intelligence Solutions | Microsoft AI
Assess your AI readiness: AI Readiness Wizard – Microsoft Adoption
Build a strategic plan for AI: AI Strategy Roadmap | Microsoft AI

IDC InfoBrief: sponsored by Microsoft, 2024 Business Opportunity of AI, IDC# US52699124, November 2024

The post How real-world businesses are transforming with AI appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Other

Enhancing UK Cybersecurity and Resilience: Impact of the New National Bill

/ 2024-11-12

As the digital landscape rapidly evolves, the need for a robust, adaptive security strategy becomes increasingly critical. Cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated and widespread, necessitating a proactive approach to cybersecurity. The UK’s Cyber Security and Resilience Bill represents a significant stride towards fortifying the nation’s defenses against these threats.

News

Microsoft to Separate Copilot and Teams Compliance Records

Tony Redmond / 2024-11-12

Separate Retention Policies Coming for Teams and Copilot Compliance Records

On November 6, 2024, Microsoft issued message center notification MC926899 to inform tenants that they plan to split retention processing for compliance records created by the Microsoft 365 substrate for Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot interactions. The current situation is that Purview Data Lifecycle management allows a single retention policy to apply to both types of compliance records. In the future, you’ll be able to have separate policies. The change is covered by Microsoft 365 roadmap item 407897.

MC926899 says that a Microsoft 365 Copilot license is required to use this feature. That statement is inaccurate insofar as administrator actions are concerned. You can configure a retention policy to process Copilot interactions without a Copilot license. The only need for a Copilot license arises when someone wants to use Copilot in apps, like Copilot in Word or Copilot in Teams.

Microsoft plans to roll out the update to public preview in mid-November 2024 with worldwide deployment in general availability following in January 2025. As always with dates for updates, some slippage can happen.

A Thoroughly Justified Change

The change is totally justified. Storing Copilot interactions alongside Teams compliance records in the hidden TeamsMessagesData folder in user mailboxes was always a short-term exercise to allow Microsoft to claim support for Purview by Microsoft 365 Copilot. Like compliance records generated for Teams messages, the records are modified versions of mail items that hold just enough information about a Copilot interaction to make the data useful for eDiscovery and compliance purposes, such as review by communication compliance policies.

But the biggest reason why this change makes sense is that organizations are likely to have radically different retention strategies for different compliance records. For instance, many organizations like to remove Teams chats after a few days (which is why Purview supports a 1-day retention period for Teams). However, throwing away Copilot interaction records after a day might not be the preferred approach. Being forced to use a single policy that enforces the same retention period to both (Figure 1) is too inflexible, and that’s why creating the ability to have a separate retention policy for Copilot is the right thing to do.

Figure 1: Creating a 1-day retention policy for Teams chats and Copilot interactions

Current Retention Policies and Copilot Interactions

Microsoft hasn’t said what will happen to current retention policies that process both Teams chats and Copilot interactions. My assumption is that they will remain in place and be unaffected by the change. In other words, if you apply the same retention period to Teams and Copilot, you have nothing to do. However, if you process the two types of data together, any flaw in the retention policy settings will affect both, hopefully not to the degree experienced by KPMG in 2020.

The only work item created by the change is for organizations that want to have separate retention policies. In this scenario, administrators will need to remove Copilot interactions from the current policy and create a new policy specifically for Copilot. Unless the organization uses multiple retention policies scoped at different sets of accounts, the update should only take a few minutes.

Storage Location for Copilot Interaction Records

I don’t know yet if Microsoft plans to move the storage location. Yammer (Viva Engage) uses a separate location for its compliance records as does Planner, so it makes sense if the Copilot records move to a new folder. When it does, I’ll have to update my PowerShell script to analyze Copi l ot interactions and report the prompts and responses between users and apps.

The change required by the script should be straightforward. Once we know the folder where Copilot stores its interaction records, the script can use Get-ExoMailboxFolderStatistics to find the Store identifier for the folder and run some code to convert the value to a REST identifier that works with Graph API requests. At least, that’s the theory. I’ll know more when the new retention option is available in tenants.

Keep up to date with developments in Purview by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Our monthly updates make sure that our subscribers understand the most important changes happening across Office 365.

News

Microsoft Recommends the UnifiedRoleDefinition Graph API for Role Assignment Automation

Tony Redmond / 2024-11-11

A New Graph API to Replace Two Existing APIs

The Graph change log update posted on October 21, 2024 contains a simple and blunt recommendation for developers to use the unifiedRoleDefinition Graph resource type (API) instead of the directoryRole and directoryRoleTemplate resource types (Figure 1). Sounds good. Using one API to replace two should simplify development, and the new API delivers more information about Entra ID roles.

Figure 1: Microsoft recommendation to use the unifiedRoleDefinition API

The Impact on PowerShell Scripts

But then you look under the surface and understand that this change affects PowerShell scripts that use Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK cmdlets like Get-MgDirectoryRole (find Entra ID roles) and Get-MgDirectoryRoleMember (find the membership of a role group). This March 2022 article explains how to use those and other SDK cmdlets to assign roles to user accounts.

In effect, if you want to follow Microsoft’s recommendation, you need to upgrade scripts to use cmdlets like Get-MgRoleManagementDirectoryRoleDefinition instead (or the beta version, which provides more information). There’s no necessity to upgrade scripts for the moment, but this issue could arise in the future if Microsoft decides to deprecate the older APIs. All of which creates the question of why Microsoft didn’t simply upgrade the old APIs instead?

I’m sure that there’s good technical reasons for introducing a new API. It’s cleaner for a start because it avoids all the messiness involved in supporting backwards compatibility for an indeterminate period. Professional developers are used to changing APIs and, while they’ll grumble at the need to do more work, the change will happen. Those who write PowerShell might be less happy. There’s a lot happening in the Entra space to force change in scripts already and introducing another change to the mix now sounds like a bad idea that demonstrates a certain lack of sympathy for part-time PowerShell developers, many of whom are struggling to move over to the Graph SDK.

Example PowerShell Cmdlet Changes

Let’s look at the script code changes that might be required. I’ll use the code in the March 2022 article as the base. First, we find the set of Entra ID roles in the tenant.

[array]$DirectoryRoles = Get-MgDirectoryRole | Sort-Object DisplayName

The equivalent with the unifiedRoleDefinition API is:

[array]$DirectoryRoles = Get-MgRoleManagementDirectoryRoleDefinition | Sort-Object DisplayName

In my tenant, the first command returns 36 roles, the second 113. This is because the new API returns all roles and role templates.

Interestingly, the Graph X-Ray tool reveals that the Entra admin center uses the beta version of the cmdlet (Get-MgBetaRoleManagementDirectoryRoleDefinition) when it fetches roles for the All roles page.

Each role has an identifier which is needed to find information about role assignments. To find the identifier for a role, use the role name to filter the set of roles fetched above. For instance, here’s how to find the identifier for the Teams administrator role. This code remains the same:

$TeamsAdminRoleId  = $DirectoryRoles | Where-Object {$_.DisplayName -eq "Teams administrator"} | Select -ExpandProperty Id

Note that the two APIs return different identifiers for roles. If you have hard-coded role identifiers in scripts, the values will need to be updated to match the API.

We want to make a new role assignment to add a user account to the role. To start, we find the set of current role members. With the old API, the command is:

[array]$RoleMembers = Get-MgDirectoryRoleMember -DirectoryRoleId $TeamsAdminRoleId

With the new, the command is:

[array]$RoleMembers = Get-MgRoleManagementDirectoryRoleAssignment -Filter "roleDefinitionId eq '$TeamsAdminRoleId'" -ExpandProperty "principal"

One thing to note is that the information returned for role assignments in the older API only includes user accounts, and the additionalProperties property includes details of the accounts, which means that you can do something like this to see the names of the assignees:

ForEach ($Member in $RoleMembers) {
   Write-Output $Member.AdditionalProperties.displayName
}

This doesn’t happen with the new API. I think two reasons exist why this is so. First, the API includes service principals in role assignments, something that’s important for objects like Azure automation accounts used to execute runbooks or Entra registered apps that need to act in an administrative role. In the assignments listed in Figure 2, only two are user accounts.. Second, the API includes support for scoping (full directory, administrative units, or applications).

Figure 2: Assignments for the Exchange administrator role

Making a Role Assignment

The last example from the article is to assign a role to a user account. The code first checks if the user account already has an assignment, and if not, calls the New-DirectoryRoleMemberByRef cmdlet to make the assignment:

If ($User.Id -notin $RoleMembers.Id) {
  Write-Host ("Adding user {0} to the Teams administrator role" -f $User.DisplayName)
  New-MgDirectoryRoleMemberByRef -DirectoryRoleId $TeamsAdminRoleId -BodyParameter @{"@odata.id" = "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/directoryObjects/$($user.Id)"}

To make a role assignment with the new API, create a hash table to hold the parameters, including the identifier for the role to assign, the identifier of the account or service principal to receive the role assignment, and the directory scope. In this case, the scope is “/”, meaning the entire directory. If you want to limit the role assignment to specific administrative units, include the identifiers for the administrative units instead.

If ($User.Id -notin $RoleMembers.Id) {
  $Assignment = @{}
  $Assignment.Add("@odata.type","#microsoft.graph.unifiedRoleAssignment")
  $Assignment.Add("roleDefinitionId", $TeamsAdminRoleId)
  $Assignment.Add("principalId", $User.Id)
  $Assignment.Add("directoryScopeId", "/")
  New-MgRoleManagementDirectoryRoleAssignment -BodyParameter $Assignment
}

Id                                            PrincipalId                          RoleDefinitionId                     DirectoryScopeId AppScopeId
--                                            -----------                          ----------------                     ---------------- ----------
3ywjKSOT_UKt4h0JevPk3oeS4FkbrPdPgKMI0NHu2Tk-1 59e09287-ac1b-4ff7-80a3-08d0d1eed939 29232cdf-9323-42fd-ade2-1d097af3e4de /

$Assignment

Name                           Value
----                           -----
roleDefinitionId               4c962061-2581-417f-938a-7cc1b38fc2a2
directoryScopeId               /
principalId                    59e09287-ac1b-4ff7-80a3-08d0d1eed939
@odata.type                    #microsoft.graph.unifiedRoleAssignment

In terms of Privileged Identity Management, the resulting assignment is active and permanent, so the new holder can use it immediately and will show up in administrative interfaces as a role holder (and in scripts like my reporting administrative role assignments script, which uses the unifiedRoleDefinition API).

More to Come

There’s lots more to investigate in terms of exploiting the UnifiedRoleDefinition API to automate the management of Entra role assignments. We’ll get to that in future articles. In the meantime, the message is that Microsoft is focused on using the UnifiedRoleDefinition API going forward, so that’s where your focus should be too.

News

Private Channels Just Don’t Get Any Respect

Tony Redmond / 2024-11-08

Launched Just Prior to Covid, Private Channels Lost Impetus when Teams Changed Gears

To much excitement at the time, Microsoft introduced private channels for Teams at the Ignite conference in Orlando in November 2019. Teams was a very different proposition then. The Covid pandemic was still a few months away and less than 20 million people used Teams regularly. Private channels were the first major development in Teams since its launch in early 2017. They were a response to the misgivings voiced in many customers that all members of a team enjoyed equal access to channel conversations and the team’s SharePoint Online site.

Roll forward five years and Teams is in a very different place. The pandemic generated huge demand for online collaboration in general and online meetings in particular. Microsoft had to continually strengthen the Azure-based Teams infrastructure to cope with demand as the number of users swelled continually. Growth has slowed recently, but Teams now has 320 million monthly active users, or roughly 80% of the Office 365 installed base based on the latest numbers released by Microsoft.

After their launch, the initial excitement around private channels soon began to fade. In 2021, Microsoft began to hype shared channels (eventually released in 2022). Focus shifted to the possibilities of trans-tenant collaboration rather than the inward-nature restrictions offered by private channels. You can tell where the latest craze exists by counting the number of sessions offered for a specific technology by large conferences.

ESPC in Stockholm

The agenda for technology conferences like ESCP 2024 in Stockholm (December 2-5) is currently dominated by artificial intelligence because that’s what people want to talk about, despite the fact that AI is still not widely used across the Office 365 base. I’ll still enjoy ESPC, where I speak twice about non-AI topics (Mastering the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK and Decoding the Microsoft 365 Audit Log), and I’ll happily listen to the latest propaganda telling me how to work with AI.

Private channels don’t feature on the ESPC agenda, nor did I see anything on the topic at the Microsoft 365 conference in Orlando last May. I suspect that private channels won’t receive much coverage at the upcoming Ignite conference in Chicago. That’s no reflection on the importance or usefulness of the technology. After all, Microsoft 365 conferences usually avoid allocating sessions to cover Exchange Online, despite the essential role that Exchange plays in the overall ecosystem and the massive changes Microsoft is making for hybrid organizations, like forcing tenants to upgrade servers and the introduction of Exchange Server subscription edition next year.

Odd Session Selection at Some Technology Conferences

If conference programs were selected based on the importance of a technology to Microsoft 365 sessions would be dominated by Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Entra ID (including security), and Teams, with some sessions to cover PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph.

However, that’s not what happens, perhaps because the folks who select sessions are overly influenced by Microsoft marketing (including sponsorship dollars). What else accounts for conferences giving valuable time to cover everything in the Viva Suite, Loop, and the like? Far too many conference sessions are given over to technologies that are marginally interesting in terms of overall usage within tenants. There will always be the need for sessions to cover emerging technologies (AI is firmly in this category), but some conference selections are just odd.

The Worth of Private Channels

Back to private channels. My interest was reawakened the other day when discussing a problem a university had. Like most institutions, the university has a program to allow people to file complaints that are then investigated by the relevant facility. They were advised that they’d need to set up a separate team for each facility to store details of investigations in a secure SharePoint site. No one had considered creating a single team with separate private channels for each facility. Private channels limit access to the subset of the team membership who become channel members. No one else, not even team owners, can access the content in the private channel, including its separate SharePoint Online site.

The advantage of using private channels is the avoidance of team sprawl. Creating a new private channel is as easy as creating a regular channel (Figure 1). After creating a private channel, the only other task is to add members to the channel.

In the case in question, all the people in the university who work on complaints can be members of the team with subsets becoming members of the private channels created for the facilities. Team members share common knowledge such as program announcements and guidelines without compromising the integrity of their investigations in any way.

Another advantage is that people won’t create a group chat to take a discussion to a more limited forum. In fact, people should be discouraged from using group chats for anything that involves sensitive information.

An individual team can support up to 1,000 channels, of which up to 30 can be private channels. Being able to segment confidential and sensitive work across private channels within a team is a nice way to protect information. And if you want information to remain even more private, consider creating a sensitivity label that limits access to the members of a private channel and assigning the label to every document stored in the channel. That way, even if a document “escapes” outside the channel, its content will remain inaccessible.

I use private channels daily. They’re a great host for private collaboration on a need-to-know basis. It’s just a pity that so few people seem to know about private channels.

News

How Microsoft Copilot Generates Compliance Records

Tony Redmond / 2024-11-07

Microsoft 365 Substrate Captures Interaction Details for Microsoft Copilot

After writing about how to use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to analyze the interactions between users and Microsoft 365 Copilot in various apps, I was asked if the code reports interaction records for Microsoft Copilot. This is the free version of Copilot that appears in the Microsoft 365 app when a signed-in Entra ID user account doesn’t have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

The big difference between the free and paid-for version is that Microsoft 365 Copilot can use Graph queries to find email, Teams messages, and documents to ground its queries while Microsoft Copilot is limited to Microsoft’s LLMs and Bing web searches. In addition, Microsoft 365 Copilot comes with extra features, such as custom Copilot agents for SharePoint Online.

Both versions support enterprise data protection (EDP). Microsoft added support for EDP to Microsoft Copilot in August 2024 and the announcement specifically says that information about prompts and responses is retained for eDiscovery purposes.

Asking Microsoft Copilot

My first step to gather information was to ask Microsoft Copilot if it generates interaction compliance records. Figure 1 shows the negative response.

Figure 1: Microsoft Copilot responds to a query about interaction compliance records

Looking Behind the Scenes

As Microsoft Copilot couldn’t answer the question, it was time to look behind the scenes. I figured that the Microsoft 365 substrate would store anything it captured for Microsoft Copilot interactions in the same hidden TeamsMessagesData folder in the user’s mailbox.

Some are curious why Microsoft selected TeamsMessagesData as the storage location for these records. It doesn’t really matter what folder is used if it’s hidden and indexed for eDiscovery, but I think Microsoft chose TeamsMessagesData because the Copilot chats are very much like regular Teams one-on-one chats. The substrate captures Teams compliance records for one-on-one chats in the same folder.

MFCMAPI is the best tool to investigate mailbox contents. After using Microsoft Copilot several times, I opened the TeamsMessagesData folder with MFCMAPI and discovered that the substrate had captured compliance records for the Copilot interactions. Figure 2 shows the record captured for the prompt shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2: A prompt captured for a Microsoft Copilot interaction

Once I located the compliance records, it was easy to update the PowerShell script to extract and report the Microsoft Copilot interactions. The updated code is available from GitHub.

No Data Shown for Responses

I noticed that compliance records captured for Microsoft Copilot responses do not include the response in the Body and BodyPreview properties. The same is true for responses generated for Microsoft 365 Chat (BizChat) responses. Looking back through records for Microsoft 365 Chat interactions, it appears that the only output is any documents located by Copilot to form its response. In Figure 3, we see a reference to a document in a Microsoft 365 Chat response followed by some base 64 encoded text.

A Microsoft 365 Copilot response including some referenced documents — Figure 3: A Microsoft 365 Chat response including some referenced documents

Inputting the encoded text into an online decoder reveals the text (Figure 4). It looks like whatever routine Microsoft uses to generate the compliance record doesn’t decode the text before it’s written into the mail item used to store the record in TeamsMessagesData.

Figure 4: A base64 decoder reveals the full text for a Microsoft 365 Chat response

The encoded state of the information also explains why the Activity Explorer in the AI Hub in the Purview portal can’t display Copilot’s response to a prompt (Figure 5).

The AI Hub's Activity Explorer fails to display a Microsoft 365 Chat response — Figure 5: The AI Hub’s Activity Explorer fails to display a Microsoft 365 Chat response

Summarizing Microsoft Copilot and Compliance Records

The answer to the question is that compliance records are generated for Microsoft Copilot interactions. However, the information logged in the compliance records isn’t as easy to access as it should be. The flaw shared by Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft 365 chat suggests that some buggy code is shared by the two apps. It should be easy for Microsoft to decode responses from base64 before including clear text in compliance records.

The issue is reported, but quite when a fix will appear is anyone’s guess. Hopefully, because the problem means that compliance records aren’t as useful as they should be, the fix should appear soon.

News

Exchange Online Adds Delicensing Resiliency

Tony Redmond / 2024-11-06

A Truly Horrible Name for What’s a Pretty Good Way to Stop User Mailboxes Being Removed in Error

On November 5, the Exchange development group announced the new delicensing resiliency feature. Unfortunately, the blog post for the announcement went out at the same time that the Microsoft Technical Community was in the middle of a major upgrade (it was offline for most of the day), so you might not have seen the news.

Delicensing resiliency is a horrible name for a feature. What it means is that large Exchange Online tenants (with more than 10,000 paid seats) can enable an extra layer of protection for unlicensed mailboxes. Most users are licensed for Exchange Online through a service plan included in a product SKU like Office 365 E3 (Figure 1) or Microsoft 365 Business Premium. An Exchange Online license can be bought separately, but that’s usually only done to enable features like an archive for shared mailboxes.

Exchange Online is licensed through a service plan in the Office 365 product SKUExchange Online Delicensing Resiliency — Figure 1: Exchange Online is licensed through a service plan in the Office 365 product SKU

When a product license containing the Exchange Online service plan is removed from an Entra ID user account, Exchange Online notices that the user’s mailbox is no longer licensed and starts a 30-day countdown clock. Because it is no longer licensed, the user loses access to the mailbox. However, if an administrator assigns an Exchange Online license or service plan to the account, the mailbox reverts to a licensed state and normal service is resumed. If not, Exchange Online proceeds to permanently remove the mailbox and data is no longer recoverable.

One way that organizations guard against inadvertent removal of mailboxes is to make the mailbox into an inactive mailbox by applying a retention hold to the mailbox before removing licenses (or complete account deletion). This mechanism works and supports both mailbox recovery and restore, but the affected users lose access to their mailbox because it’s in an unlicensed state.

Group Licensing Errors

What seems to have happened in the past is that some tenants have made mistakes with group-based licensing. This mechanism allows a group to hold licenses that Entra ID assigns automatically to users when they join the group. Conversely, when someone leaves the group, Entra ID removes the license held by the group.

Exchange Online has supported license stacking since January 2023. License stacking means that a user account can be assigned several licenses of the same type. For instance, they can hold Office 365 E5 and Microsoft 365 E5 licenses, both of which come with an Exchange Online Plan 2 service plan. If one license is removed, the second license remains in place and the user’s mailbox is unaffected. License stacking facilitates license swapping or switching, which happens when a tenant upgrades its licenses and needs to assign new licenses to users while removing old licenses.

It’s possible that some license swaps went wrong in the past due to errors made in group-based assignments. Perhaps users were removed from the group that controlled assignments of the old license without being added to the group that controlled assignments for the new license. It’s easy to see how such a thing could occur. The upshot is that accounts removed from the original group enter an unlicensed state for Exchange Online and lose access to their mailboxes, which is not a great situation to be in as it disrupts internal and external communications and can cause users not to receive email.

The Extra 30-Day Grace Period

Microsoft’s solution is to introduce an additional 30-day grace period during which unlicensed mailboxes remain fully functional. The extra time is intended to allow administrators to realize that a problem has occurred and take appropriate action, which might be something as simple as adding the affected users to a group.

After the 30-day grace period lapses, the normal mailbox removal process clicks into gear and the user loses access to their mailbox. Eventually, the 30-day removal retention period expires, and Exchange Online removes the mailbox permanently.

Tools to Help with Delicensing Resiliency

To back up the extra grace period, Microsoft is providing several tools, including:

A new Get-PendingDelicenseUser cmdlet to check for mailboxes due to be delicensed.
A new Licenses removed recently tab in the Billing section of the Microsoft 365 admin center to list mailboxes in the grace period (with an option to expedite delicensing for a mailbox, meaning that it goes straight into the normal 30-day removal cycle).
Service Health advisories for admins when “delicensing activity” occurs (presumably only when the delicensing resiliency feature is enabled and only covering Exchange Online licenses)
Email notifications to users whose Exchange Online license has been removed telling them to contact their administrator if the removal was in error.

Overall, it seems like a pretty good plan. Of course, I followed the instructions in the documentation to see what happened if I enabled the feature and failed utterly:

Set-OrganizationConfig -DelayedDelicensingEnabled:$true

Set-OrganizationConfig: |Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Tasks.DelayedDelicensedUserException|Your tenant does not qualify for the Exchange Online Delicensing Resiliency feature, which is only available to tenants with more than 10,000 paid licenses.

Oh well. Most mailboxes removed in my tenant are as a result of my actions. I guess I don’t need to worry so much about this kind of thing. But if I was running a tenant with more than 10,000 paid Exchange seats, this is absolutely a feature to enable.

Learn about using Exchange Online and the rest of Office 365 by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Use our experience to understand what’s important and how best to protect your tenant.

News

Loop App Adds More Support for Sensitivity Labels

Tony Redmond / 2024-11-05

Using the Loop App to Protect Pages with Sensitivity Labels

Message center notification MC923176 (1 November 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 111225) announces that workspace owners can apply container management sensitivity labels to workspaces in the Loop app “to prevent oversharing and manage access effectively.” The Loop app entered preview in March 2023 and achieved general availability in November 2023. Microsoft initially anticipated rolling out sensitivity label support in the first half of 2024 as part of a plan to enable external sharing. As described in MC923419, that plan should come to fruition soon with support for guest account access to Loop workspaces.

Microsoft is deploying the MC923176 and MC923419 updates now and expects the deployment to be complete worldwide by early December for both the Loop browser and mobile apps. The updates haven’t yet reached my tenant so I can’t comment on how they work. To set the scene, I investigated how the Loop app supports the use of sensitivity labels to protect pages in Loop workspaces.

Loop Workspaces and Pages

A loop workspace is a container managed by SharePoint embedded. The storage occupied by a workspace is charged against the tenant’s SharePoint storage quota. Workspaces are composed of pages and components. The big thing about Loop is the speed in which it synchronizes changes made to components so that the same data appears anywhere the component is referenced, such as in Teams or Outlook messages.

Applying a sensitivity label to a Loop page is easy. A small shield icon appears at the top of each page. Click the shield to reveal the set of sensitivity labels configured for files that are published to the signed-in account (Figure 1). If a sensitivity label is already applied to the page, you’ll see a tick mark alongside the label in the list.

Figure 1: Choosing a sensitivity label for a Loop page

Oddly, all of my Loop pages had the Public label. This was strange because the label publishing policies used in my tenant don’t specify a default label for documents. However, the policies do specify a default label for email, and I assume that Loop misread the policy and selected the default email label.

The other thing I noticed is that Loop doesn’t support the color coding for sensitivity labels in the same way as the Office apps do. It’s probably because Loop doesn’t support the sensitivity bar used by the Office apps to allow users to update the name, assign a sensitivity label, and view the version history for a file. If you’ve spent time to give sensitivity labels a splash of color, such as using the traffic light system to indicate the relatative sensitivity of a file, the carefully selected colors don’t appear.

Check Label Rights

Sensitivity labels use rights management to control access to documents. If a workspace was previously shared with someone, they won’t be able to access pages in that workspace if the assigned sensitivity labels don’t grant the right to allow them to open and work with the content (Figure 2).

Figure 2: User blocked from accessing a Loop page

Some Odd Implementation Details

The Loop developers seem to have left some gaps in their implementation of sensitivity labels. For instance, a user with the sharing right to open the workspace who is blocked from accessing pages and components can still add new pages, duplicate pages, add a page to another workspace (where they can’t open the page because of the label), or even create a new subpage and edit that component because the subpage doesn’t appear to inherit the label assigned to the workspace (Figure 3).

Figure 3: A user blocked by a sensitivity label can create a subpage

In addition, sometimes a blocked user was able to view the content of a blocked page even while the Loop app informed them that it couldn’t open the page (Figure 4). This situation persisted until the user exited and restarted Loop.

Figure 4: Text is still accessible even if Loop wants to block access to a page

Overall, it seems like the Loop app should do a better job of restricting access to page options when a sensitivity label blocks access to a page.

Finally, if a user who shares a workspace can access a page, they can change the sensitivity label assigned to the page (Figure 5). I don’t think this is a good idea. Only the workspace owner should be allowed to change the assigned label for a page.

Figure 5: A user with sharing rights to a Loop workspace can change the sensitivity label for pages

It’s good that the Loop app is moving ahead to embrace sensitivity labels. The issues described above are the kind often found in first-round implementations. Hopefully, they’ll be resolved soon.

Microsoft

Announcing the General Availability of Windows Server IoT 2025!

/ 2024-11-05

I am very excited to announce the General Availability of Windows Server IoT 2025! This release represents a pivotal achievement in our mission to deliver secure, innovative, and high-performance Windows Server IoT platform tailored to meet your needs. Windows Server IoT 2025 includes innovations in multiple areas including Advanced Multilayer Security, Hybrid Cloud Agility, and AI, Performance, & Scale. For more information, see Windows Server IoT documentation.

ADVANCED MULTILAYER SECURITY 

In an era where cybersecurity is of utmost importance (see the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024 and the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Healthcare Ransomware Report), Windows Server IoT 2025 stands out with a suite of cutting-edge security features designed to safeguard your data and infrastructure. Here are a few key capabilities:

Active Directory (AD): The gold standard for identity and authentication only gets better with new security capabilities to help fortify your environment against evolving threats with greater scalability and improvements in protocols, encryption, hardening, and new cryptographic support.

File Services/Server Message Block (SMB) Hardening: Windows Server IoT 2025 includes SMB over QUIC to enable secure access to file shares over the internet. SMB security also adds hardened firewall defaults, brute force attack prevention, and protections for man in the middle attacks, relay attacks, and spoofing attacks.

Delegate Managed Service Accounts (dMSA): Unlike traditional service accounts, dMSAs don’t require manual password management since AD automatically takes care of it. With dMSAs, specific permissions can be delegated to access resources in the domain, which reduces security risks and provides better visibility and logs of service account activity.

These advanced security features make Windows Server IoT 2025 a robust and secure platform for your IT infrastructure that you should begin evaluation immediately. 

AI, PERFORMANCE, AND SCALE 

Windows Server IoT 2025 is designed to handle the most demanding workloads, including AI and machine learning. Here are some key capabilities: 

Hyper-V, AI, and Machine Learning: With built-in support for GPU partitioning and the ability to process large data sets across distributed environments, Windows Server IoT 2025 offers a high-performance platform for both traditional applications and advanced AI workloads with Live Migration and High Availability.

NVMe Storage Performance: Windows Server IoT 2025 delivers up to 70% more storage IOPs performance compared to Windows Server IoT 2022 on identical systems.

Storage Spaces Direct and Storage Flexibility: Windows Server IoT supports a wide range of storage solutions such as local, NAS, and SAN for decades and continues to this day. Windows Server IoT 2025 delivers more storage innovation with Native ReFS deduplication and compression, Thinly Provisioned Storage Spaces, and Storage Replica Compression now available in all editions of Windows Server IoT 2025.

Hyper-V Performance and Scale: Windows Server IoT 2025 introduces massive performance and scalability improvements that come from Azure. Windows Server IoT 2025 Hyper-V virtual machine maximums:

Maximum memory per VM: 240 Terabytes* (10x previous)

Maximum virtual processors per VM: 2048 VPs* (~8.5x previous)

*Requires Generation 2 VMs 

Windows Server IoT 2025 delivers major advancements across the board for Hyper-V, GPU integration, Storage Spaces Direct (software defined storage), software-defined networking, and clustering. These improvements make Windows Server IoT 2025 an excellent option for organizations looking for a virtualization solution and for organizations looking to leverage AI and machine learning while maintaining high performance and scalability. 

Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More

Microsoft

Power Automate to update columns for content stored in a document library

/ 2024-11-05

Hi everyone,

Wondering if this group could help answer whether it was possible to use power automate to update contents stored in a SharePoint Online Document Library. Basically update the different columns they have (eg. Description, custom columns etc) with data stored on something like a csv file?

Is that doable at all with Power Automate?

Ex.

Doc Library:

ID Name Test Field

1 Test File <Blank>

CSV File:

ID Name Test Field

1 Test File Hello World

Post Power Automate state of Doc Library Content:

ID Name Test Field

1 Test File Hello World

Hi everyone, Wondering if this group could help answer whether it was possible to use power automate to update contents stored in a SharePoint Online Document Library. Basically update the different columns they have (eg. Description, custom columns etc) with data stored on something like a csv file? Is that doable at all with Power Automate? Ex. Doc Library:ID Name Test Field1 Test File <Blank> CSV File:ID Name Test Field1 Test File Hello World Post Power Automate state of Doc Library Content:ID Name Test Field1 Test File Hello World Read More

Microsoft

America’s Partner Blog | Partners Make More Possible: Education

/ 2024-11-05

AI is revolutionizing education worldwide, and our Microsoft partners egroup, Anthology, and Territorium are leading the charge. 71% of education professionals are now harnessing AI to tailor learning experiences, enhance efficiency, and alleviate burnout. Don’t miss the latest episode of Microsoft + Partners Make More Possible with Nina Harding and Carl Hooker to discover how we’re making a remarkable impact together!

Watch the video here!

America's Partner Blog | Partners Make More Possible: Education Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More

Microsoft

फ्लिपकार्ट की शिकायत कैसे करें?

/ 2024-11-05

फ़्लिपकार्ट ग्राहक सेवा अधिकारी से बात करने के लिए 9831×224×914 या O983~1224~914 ▪︎डायल करें । आपको अपनी समस्या को स्पष्ट और संक्षिप्त तरीके से बताना होगा। आधिकारिक शिकायत दर्ज करने के लिए अधिकारी आपसे आपकी ऑर्डर आईडी, पंजीकृत मोबाइल नंबर..

Microsoft

Microsoft GenAI Accelerator: developing the UK’s best and brightest AI-focused startups

/ 2024-11-05

Microsoft launches GenAI Accelerator with NVIDIA and GitHub to boost UK AI start-ups

Important news for all UK startups! Microsoft has launched the GenAI Accelerator initiative in partnership with NVIDIA and GitHub to develop the UK’s brightest and best AI-focused start-ups and springboard them to future success. This initiative will provide exclusive resources and opportunities to companies looking to build, market, and scale up their generative AI products and services.

The Accelerator will run from January 2025 to early March 2025 and is specifically tailored for UK AI start-ups that have secured seed funding and are looking to take their products to the next level. Microsoft is seeking companies whose innovative AI-powered products have the potential to change people’s lives for the better, create jobs, and have significant economic impact.

The Accelerator will culminate in a Demo Day, during which participants will have the opportunity to showcase their products to top venture capitalists and private equity firms.

Participants will receive one-to-one support from Microsoft’s AI ‘Black Belt’ team – specialists in AI and machine learning – as well as access to workshops and help provided by partners NVIDIA and GitHub.

Learn more about the benefits of this initiative and how to apply: Microsoft launches GenAI Accelerator with NVIDIA and GitHub to boost UK AI start-ups.

Microsoft launches GenAI Accelerator with NVIDIA and GitHub to boost UK AI start-ups

Important news for all UK startups! Microsoft has launched the GenAI Accelerator initiative in partnership with NVIDIA and GitHub to develop the UK’s brightest and best AI-focused start-ups and springboard them to future success. This initiative will provide exclusive resources and opportunities to companies looking to build, market, and scale up their generative AI products and services.

The Accelerator will run from January 2025 to early March 2025 and is specifically tailored for UK AI start-ups that have secured seed funding and are looking to take their products to the next level. Microsoft is seeking companies whose innovative AI-powered products have the potential to change people’s lives for the better, create jobs, and have significant economic impact.

The Accelerator will culminate in a Demo Day, during which participants will have the opportunity to showcase their products to top venture capitalists and private equity firms.

Participants will receive one-to-one support from Microsoft’s AI ‘Black Belt’ team – specialists in AI and machine learning – as well as access to workshops and help provided by partners NVIDIA and GitHub.

Learn more about the benefits of this initiative and how to apply: Microsoft launches GenAI Accelerator with NVIDIA and GitHub to boost UK AI start-ups. Read More

Previous 1 2 3 4 … 23 Next

All Categories

Search

Cart

All Categories

Search

Cart

Exploit File Operations Audit Events to Find Who Accessed a Document Last

Analyzing SharePoint Online File Operations Audit Events

Scripting a Solution Based on File Operations Audit Events

Good Example of the Power of the Audit Log

The challenge: Navigating the complexity of data

The solution: AI-powered data access through Microsoft Azure

Democratizing data for open science

Looking ahead: Bridging the gap between data and insights

Add Eligible and Active PIM Role Assignment Requests

Microsoft’s Recommendation to use Entra Admin Center to Manage PIM Role Assignments

Creating an Eligible PIM Role Assignment

Creating an Active PIM Role Assignment

Required Permissions for PIM

Most Will Use the Entra Admin Center

Introducing adapted AI models for industry

Accelerating transformation with industry agents

At the forefront of addressing industry needs securely

Trimming Unwanted Versions Stopped by Retention Policies and Labels

Checking Expired Versions Trimmed by Intelligent Versioning

Reappearing Versions

More Intelligence in the Future?

IDC’s 2024 top 5 trends for AI

AI’s growing economic impact

Learn how to fuel your AI journey

Enriching employee experiences

Reinventing customer engagement

Reshaping business process

Bending the curve on innovation

Separate Retention Policies Coming for Teams and Copilot Compliance Records

A Thoroughly Justified Change

Current Retention Policies and Copilot Interactions

Storage Location for Copilot Interaction Records

A New Graph API to Replace Two Existing APIs

The Impact on PowerShell Scripts

Example PowerShell Cmdlet Changes

Making a Role Assignment

More to Come

Launched Just Prior to Covid, Private Channels Lost Impetus when Teams Changed Gears

ESPC in Stockholm

Odd Session Selection at Some Technology Conferences

The Worth of Private Channels

Microsoft 365 Substrate Captures Interaction Details for Microsoft Copilot

Asking Microsoft Copilot

Looking Behind the Scenes

No Data Shown for Responses

Summarizing Microsoft Copilot and Compliance Records

A Truly Horrible Name for What’s a Pretty Good Way to Stop User Mailboxes Being Removed in Error

Group Licensing Errors

The Extra 30-Day Grace Period

Tools to Help with Delicensing Resiliency

Using the Loop App to Protect Pages with Sensitivity Labels

Loop Workspaces and Pages

Check Label Rights

Some Odd Implementation Details

Sign Up For Newsletters

Information

Contact Us