Category: Microsoft
Category Archives: Microsoft
new Outlook has a bug with the “enter an email address to sign in” input box
I have installed the new Outlook using the method described in this page: Deployment overview for the new Outlook for Windows – Deploy Office | Microsoft Learn
When I launch Outlook (new), the initial Sign in window prompts for an email address and when you start typing the address it won’t let you type more than one character. If you click Continue you can then type the full address but you have to do this each time you launch Outlook (new).
Anybody else find this?
I have installed the new Outlook using the method described in this page: Deployment overview for the new Outlook for Windows – Deploy Office | Microsoft Learn When I launch Outlook (new), the initial Sign in window prompts for an email address and when you start typing the address it won’t let you type more than one character. If you click Continue you can then type the full address but you have to do this each time you launch Outlook (new). Anybody else find this? Read More
Designations for Azure Expert MSP
Hello community!
Could you please inform me, if you know, since when the partner designations Data & AI, Digital & App Innovation, Infrastructure have been requirements for Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Service Provider (MSP) recertification?
Hello community!Could you please inform me, if you know, since when the partner designations Data & AI, Digital & App Innovation, Infrastructure have been requirements for Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Service Provider (MSP) recertification? Read More
Azure Speech To Text Phoneme Detection
Hello, I am working on a very niche speech detection app that Azure has been very helpful for but I still have some large hurdles to cross.
I would like to be able to detect a user sounding out individual phonemes. Right now, Azure’s STT can split up words into phonemes for you but it refuses to provide transcriptions of phonemes by themselves. For instance, Azure will happily translate audio of you saying “la” as phonemes /l/ and /a/, but if you exclusively make the “L” sound with no vowel, azure will not respond with any phoneme data and will continue waiting for more audio. Is there any way to force Azure STT responses to be as granular as possible? I would like to be able detect isolated phonemes even when they do not combine to become a word. I am interfacing with Azure through Unity FYI.
Thanks
Hello, I am working on a very niche speech detection app that Azure has been very helpful for but I still have some large hurdles to cross. I would like to be able to detect a user sounding out individual phonemes. Right now, Azure’s STT can split up words into phonemes for you but it refuses to provide transcriptions of phonemes by themselves. For instance, Azure will happily translate audio of you saying “la” as phonemes /l/ and /a/, but if you exclusively make the “L” sound with no vowel, azure will not respond with any phoneme data and will continue waiting for more audio. Is there any way to force Azure STT responses to be as granular as possible? I would like to be able detect isolated phonemes even when they do not combine to become a word. I am interfacing with Azure through Unity FYI.Thanks Read More
Drive mapping in SharePoint
Hello
Please i need your help on this issue.
I would like to know how to have my SharePoint drives mapped in File explorer
Hello Please i need your help on this issue. I would like to know how to have my SharePoint drives mapped in File explorer Read More
Is it Possible to require appointments to be on the hour?
When my calendar has an appointment from 10-10:30, the Bookings page will make an appointment available to clients from 10:30-11:30, but I want to make every appointment begin at the top of the hour even if I had a opening from 10:30-11. Is this possible?
When my calendar has an appointment from 10-10:30, the Bookings page will make an appointment available to clients from 10:30-11:30, but I want to make every appointment begin at the top of the hour even if I had a opening from 10:30-11. Is this possible? Read More
Behind the Scenes: Meet Ben Truelove, Principal Designer and Accessibility Champion at Microsoft
Happy Friday Microsoft 365 Insiders!
Join us in celebrating Ben Truelove, Principal Designer & Accessibility Champion at Microsoft. His journey from dreaming of invention to pioneering inclusive technology is a testament to the power of passion and purpose. “The community has a motto, ‘nothing about us without us,’ which means that the people who will benefit” says Ben.
His story is a must-read for anyone passionate about creating an inclusive world: Behind the Scenes: Meet Ben Truelove, Principal Designer and Accessibility Champion at Microsoft :globe_showing_europe_africa:
Thanks!
Perry Sjogren
Microsoft 365 Insider Social Media Manager
Become a Microsoft 365 Insider and gain exclusive access to new features and help shape the future of Microsoft 365. Join Now: Windows | Mac | iOS | Android
Happy Friday Microsoft 365 Insiders!
Join us in celebrating Ben Truelove, Principal Designer & Accessibility Champion at Microsoft. His journey from dreaming of invention to pioneering inclusive technology is a testament to the power of passion and purpose. “The community has a motto, ‘nothing about us without us,’ which means that the people who will benefit” says Ben.
His story is a must-read for anyone passionate about creating an inclusive world: Behind the Scenes: Meet Ben Truelove, Principal Designer and Accessibility Champion at Microsoft :globe_showing_europe_africa:
Thanks!
Perry Sjogren
Microsoft 365 Insider Social Media Manager
Become a Microsoft 365 Insider and gain exclusive access to new features and help shape the future of Microsoft 365. Join Now: Windows | Mac | iOS | Android Read More
Device Manager – Windows changes settings without my permission
I’m getting no traction from Dell, Microsoft, or any other support sites so I am posting here.
I have a major problem with my settings in Device Manager. I have a brand new Dell laptop.
I have drivers that control the touchpad on my laptop. I have set the “Allow the computer to turn off the device to save power” setting unchecked on all of my touchpad drivers.
Windows will randomly enable this setting without my permission. The result is that sometimes when I wake my laptop from Sleep, the touchpad is not working.
How do I stop Windows from changing this setting? The change is happening automatically and I want it to stop.
Before one of the idiot Microsoft employees or independent advisors jumps on here:
– This is a brand new computer, have had it for 1 week
– This happens with the factory drivers and the updated recent drivers directly from Microsoft and Intel
– The touchpad has already been replaced with a new touchpad, behavior still occurs
– My user account is an Administrator account
– I already have all of the newest Dell updates and Windows updates, including Bios updates
I’m getting no traction from Dell, Microsoft, or any other support sites so I am posting here. I have a major problem with my settings in Device Manager. I have a brand new Dell laptop.I have drivers that control the touchpad on my laptop. I have set the “Allow the computer to turn off the device to save power” setting unchecked on all of my touchpad drivers.Windows will randomly enable this setting without my permission. The result is that sometimes when I wake my laptop from Sleep, the touchpad is not working.How do I stop Windows from changing this setting? The change is happening automatically and I want it to stop.Before one of the idiot Microsoft employees or independent advisors jumps on here:- This is a brand new computer, have had it for 1 week- This happens with the factory drivers and the updated recent drivers directly from Microsoft and Intel- The touchpad has already been replaced with a new touchpad, behavior still occurs- My user account is an Administrator account- I already have all of the newest Dell updates and Windows updates, including Bios updates Read More
Microsoft Power Platform Solution Architect Survey
Link to Survey:
https://microsoftlearning.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6Dm7FppZcUYEepw
Link to Survey:
https://microsoftlearning.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6Dm7FppZcUYEepw Read More
Secure your corporate data using Microsoft Edge for Business
By: Santos Martinez – Sr. Product Manager – Microsoft Intune Architect
In today’s digital landscape, ensuring the security of corporate data is paramount for businesses globally. As Intune administrators, security professionals, and decision makers, you play a crucial role in safeguarding sensitive information. This post provides an overview of a new Secure your corporate data in Intune with Microsoft Edge for Business guide that is available to empower you to navigate this intricate terrain using Microsoft Edge for Business in Intune.
What is Microsoft Edge for Business?
Microsoft Edge for Business is a dedicated browsing experience designed specifically for work environments. It’s secure by default and provides a productive and secure work-browser across both managed and unmanaged devices.
Why Microsoft Edge for Business?
Microsoft Edge for Business is essential because it offers a visually distinct, secure, and user-friendly work browsing experience. It separates work and personal browsing into dedicated browser windows, each with its own favorites, cache, and storage locations. This ensures that personal data remains private, while work data is secure. It’s particularly beneficial in today’s remote work environment where data security is paramount.
Screenshot of the Microsoft Edge for Business account and sign-in page.
Benefits and features
Microsoft Edge for Business offers many advantages, from streamlined IT operations to improved user experience, and enhanced security. With Microsoft Intune, the experience for managing Microsoft Edge for Business policies reduces complexity, saving time and resources.
App protection policies
Intune app protection policies (APP) are rules that ensure an organization’s data remains safe or contained in a managed app. Secure your corporate data in Intune with Microsoft Edge for Business guide navigates implementing these policies to ensure secure access and usage of enterprise applications.
Screenshot showing an example prompt in Microsoft Edge that prevents a user from copying content from a website.
Zero Trust Methodology
The Zero Trust security strategy transforms the way organizations approach security. It has become the new standard for security strategy in response to the evolving threat landscape. The Zero Trust methodology is based on the concept of “never trust, always verify” and aligns with three key principles.
Verify explicitly – always authenticate and authorize based on all available data points, including user identity, location, device health, service or workload, data classification, and anomalies.
Use least-privilege access – limiting user access via just-in-time (JIT) and just-enough-access (JEA), risk-based adaptive policies, and data protection to help secure both data and productivity.
Assume breach – minimize blast radius and segment access. Verify end-to-end encryption and use analytics to get visibility, drive threat detection, and improve defenses.
Guided steps
This Secure your corporate data in Intune with Microsoft Edge for Business guide provides a wealth of information and practical advice on various aspects of using Microsoft Edge for Business and will walk you through the following scenarios:
Microsoft Entra Conditional Access: Learn how to create an Entra Conditional Access policy and Intune app protection policy for browsing on Android, iOS, and Windows.
App protection policies: Understand how to ensure secure access and usage of enterprise applications when implementing app protection policies.
Mobile Threat Defense integration: Discover how to enhance the overall security posture of your organization by using the secure enterprise browser to integrate with the Windows Security Center or any Mobile Threat Defense Partners.
App configuration policies: Gain insights into how Microsoft Edge for Business and mobile application management can be used to protect your organization from various cyber threats.
Microsoft Edge for Business user experience: Understand how security measures impact users.
Troubleshooting: Benefit from a series of examples on how to troubleshoot app protection policies.
For example, the first step in Secure your corporate data in Intune with Microsoft Edge for Business guide shows you how to secure Microsoft Edge for Business with Microsoft Entra conditional access policies. In this scenario, you’ll create a conditional access policy using Microsoft Intune by following these steps:
Navigate to the Microsoft Intune admin center
Select Endpoint security > Conditional access > New policy
On the Conditional Access policy pane, set the following details:
Name: Secure Enterprise Browser Policy
Users: All Users or Specific Group dedicated to using the policy
Target Resources: Cloud Apps – Office 365
Conditions:
Device platforms: Include – Windows, Android and iOS
Client Apps: Browser
Filter for devices: Exclude – is Compliant Equals True
Grant: Require app protection policy
Session: N/A
Note: Set Report-only to On until you confirm that the policy is working as expected. Once confirmed, set this setting to Off.
Select Create to enable the policy.
After you have successfully created the recommended conditional access policy, be sure to evaluate the results and enable the conditional access policy afterwards.
For more steps and additional in-depth guidance, review the Secure your corporate data in Intune with Microsoft Edge for Business guide in Microsoft Learn.
The use of Microsoft Edge for Business with Intune provides a robust and secure browsing experience. By implementing the different recommended policies, you can ensure secure access and usage of web and SaaS applications, protect your organization from various cyber threats, and provide an enhanced browsing experience for users. Secure your corporate data in Intune with Microsoft Edge for Business guide also gives you some tips and tricks along with troubleshooting examples when implementing app protection policies for Microsoft Edge for Business. You can find them in Step 6. Troubleshoot Microsoft Edge for Business data security
If you have any feedback or questions, leave a comment below or reach out on X @IntuneSuppTeam. Stay tuned for more insights and updates on this topic! Remember, in the evolving landscape of cyber threats, “never trust, always verify”. Let’s embrace the Zero Trust methodology and make our digital space safer and more secure!
Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More
M365 Community Conference: What’s New and Next for Microsoft Viva and the Employee Experience
Session: What’s New and Next for Microsoft Viva and the Employee Experience
Speakers: Kirk Gregersen, Kristi Kelly, Michael Holste, Nick DeFalco
Excited to hear about the future of Microsoft Viva, I was looking forward to this session. I have been involved in this world for a number of years, ever since Microsoft Viva was launched. I was looking forward to hearing about the future, the success stories and how Viva can help organization succeed. Fortunately, I was not disappointed.
The session took us on a journey to tackle the challenges that organizations face transforming their practice with AI and how Microsoft Viva can help them on that journey.
The Challenge
Kirk Gregerson, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Viva steps on to the stage.
Kirk started with a trip down memory lane where he talked about his journey at Microsoft. His first project was one that a lot of us remember. Microsoft Frontpage 2002 with FrontPage Server Extensions, the forerunner of SharePoint and an incredible start to his career!
Copilot Shift
Kirk introduced the effect Copilot will have and how it will affect change within organizations. To be successful, organizations will need to rapidly adapt and involve their staff in the transformation. He mentioned how it offers a terrific opportunity and a challenge for organizations – ensuring they use it to gain and maintain a competitive edge.
Enabling businesses to leverage Copilot effectively involves shifting the culture and empowering the people to harness this transformative potential. The question is how to achieve this.
The Microsoft Viva team spoke with customers on the Copilot Early Adoption Program and shared their insights. The team showed examples of Copilot in Viva and the benefits including case studies.
Business leaders were interviewed on the potential of AI, with the consensus being that it is going to be responsible for the success of their businesses.
Kirk, discussed the core areas where AI will impact businesses, and these included:
Productivity.
Collaboration.
Operations.
User experience.
Wellbeing.
The challenge is that expectations are high and so the question Kirk asked was,
“How do businesses meet the expectations of the business leaders?”
He leads us into how Microsoft Viva’s Employee Experience capability has a huge part to play. Its role is to bring people within the organization on the journey to drive and manage this transition.
This shift starts with people and creating connection between the people and the business. Employees who are connected and bought into the business’s mission are known as engaged employees.
Engaged employees have an enormous impact on the business. Kirk shared some incredible stats on how listening to your people leads to engaged employees and the huge positive impact they have on the business.
89% of employees who feel that companies listen to them and their feedback to drive change are more engaged in the business.
Engaged employees are 12x less likely to leave their company.
Engaged employees are 3x less likely to burn out.
2x businesses with engaged employees had a higher stock price than their competition.
Two key tools that track how Copilot is being adopted and how well it is working are:
Copilot Impact Dashboard
Microsoft Viva Personal Insights.
Kirk talked about how the research and experience team have discovered that high performance teams have the following behaviors:
Measurement of how they are working using insights.
Measurement of how they feel with tools such as Viva Pulse and Viva Glint.
Next, Viva Goals was discussed and how it helps give those teams focus and purpose. This is done by aligning them around goals and business direction.
However, as we all know strategy is fluid and is constantly changing. How do you keep people up to date?
Viva Amplify and Viva Connections are key to addressing this challenge, providing a platform to keep the workforce up to date with the latest thinking and direction so that they can contribute and give feedback.
Finally, Viva Learning and Viva Skills are used to help the business by having the right people with the right skills.
Kirk then introduced Nick DeFalco.
Measure and Productivity
Nick DeFalco, Product Manager for Workplace Analytics, took the stage to talk about Measurement.
Nick talked about how measurement is key to the success of a change management process.
“Without measurement how do you know when you have been successful?”
He asked:
What do you measure?
Where can you find insights and reporting?
He suggested that the place to start is with Microsoft Copilot Dashboard within Viva Insights. Nick took us through some of the key reports. One that stood out was sentiment analysis by Microsoft Entra ID Group (Departments) for distinct characteristics such as quality, speed, punctuality. These can be used to highlight problem areas or anomalies between the different groups of users.
Nick introduced Viva Insights, which allows measurements and reports to be customized to give better insights. An example of this is Case Handling times. By monitoring this metric, it is possible to see which teams perform better and which don’t. This understanding of behavior in those teams can help improve this metric.
Another important thing to measure is the feelings of people who work in different ways. How do the working experiences of employees vary when they work from the office, home, or hybrid?
One of the main take aways that I took from this session was a scenario where the team were looking to answer – why were the high performing sales people high performing?
Using Viva Insights and the metrics available an investigation was performed. The question was:
“What differentiates the most successful salespeople from everyone else?”
Copilot in Viva Insights was used to ask which metrics should be considered to answer this question. This led to Copilot suggesting that one key differentiator was the number of internal connections that the salespeople have.
The finding from this investigation was that a salesperson with 85 or more connections was 3.1x more likely to be successful! This meant that the salesperson was able to look after their customers better, because they knew who to speak to within their company to unblock orders and give the customer better service!
“A salesperson with 85 or more connections was 3.1x more likely to be successful.”
However, after gaining this insight, how do we influence and increase the connections that the rest of the sales team have?
Nick showed the Network analysis overview report with Microsoft Viva Insights. Originally in November 2023 the organization could see that there was not much connection between Sales and Customer Service. This resulted in changes being made to connect the two departments more. And by February 2024 the connection between Sales and Customer Services was much stronger. This helped improve the overall sales team’s success and improve the business success overall.
Nick then turned to Viva Glint and Organizational insights.
One of the key questions that organizations should ask in employee surveys is, “are you clear on your goals?”
Whilst there is value in the measurement-based questions, there is gold in the verbatims provided by the employee survey.
However, the process to identify the themes and key points is time consuming. Copilot in Glint can summarize the information from these surveys.
The findings from the employee feedback were:
“Overall they feel happy but need clearer view of the priorities in the organization and need more information from leaders so that they can support the strategy of the business.”
The discussion turned to new joiners and seeing how the employee feedback changed for new starters. Viva Glint can use Tenure and drill down into a subset of the users. The findings were: new joiners really struggled to find content about strategy and vision. This really impacted on how effective they felt they could be. This is likely to impact if they will stay in the short-term.
These comments were essential to being able to find the real concerns of the employees. With Copilot the team were able to distill 7000 responses down to 22 main comments. These can then be used by the leaders to focus and understand the key actions that they need to take.
Copilot in Viva Glint has been in a private preview and one of the customers getting huge value from the platform is Phillips 66.
Kirk introduced Cassidy Pott from Phillips 66 to the stage and a fascinating fireside chat ensued.
Cassidy is the Employee Experience lead and looks after 55000 employees.
Her journey from IT Management Systems has given her a unique insight into the art of the possible. She could then apply her skills and experience from this and help her as the Employee Experience Lead.
The first comment that she had was how easy Viva Glint was to use. She was a bit skeptical about Copilot in Glint. However, this shifted quickly. The surveys that were conducted with question suggestions from Copilot in Glint resulted in feedback from management that they had the best discussions with their teams.
“Managers fed back that the survey’s resulted in the best discussions with the teams they had ever had!”
The first step on Cassidy’s journey was organizing the migration from Viva Glint in LinkedIn to Microsoft 365. She was expecting a slow and complex process and was surprised that the migration was incredibly easy. She and the IT team stated it was probably the easiest migration they have been involved in!
Kirk asked Cassidy, “What are the benefits that you are seeing?”
Cassidy said that the tooling was integrated into the current workflows, which was the main advantage. They did not need to add new tools and another separate application, but they could use Microsoft Teams to distribute things. Also, since the toolset is part of the Microsoft 365 platform, they can link content together without obstacles between the different systems.
Next, the conversation turned to Copilot in Viva Glint.
Kirk asked what Cassidy’s experience had been with Copilot in Glint. She was very positive about the experience and described it as follows:
“In 2 minutes, I realized how fantastic it (Copilot in Glint) was and the capacity that it is going to create”.
Cassidy described how she started to use Copilot in Glint. When she puts together a survey, she will spend time designing the survey and then gets the results and reports on it.
One of the huge challenges with the survey are the results. The sheer volume of data, taking all the answers and making sense of it all takes a lot of time. How would you read and manage the 14000 comments?
However, with Copilot in Glint this becomes very easy. Within 20 seconds, Cassidy was able to summarize all the comments. What was great is that it matched the feedback that they had manually put together. What was more, Copilot picked up on something that had been missed!
Due to the speed of feedback, Copilot allowed them to start doing more research. This included other themes such as communication and collaboration. Previously, they just did not have the time to do this additional research but now they can!
Cassidy told a story about how one of the managers was looking for some answers from the research and asked how long it would take. Cassidy responded that it would be about two months.
Well, with Copilot in Glint, Cassidy was able to give the manager an answer before they had finished the meeting! The result was that Copilot in Glint allowed them to do something that would have taken two months in one hour!
What Next
Kirk asked, “What is next?”
Cassidy explained that they want to spend more time going over the comments and seeing what other insights and feedback they can glean from the content.
She is really looking forward to being able to do real-time analysis and feedback more quickly. They also want to bring these tools to the leadership team so they (the management team) can analyze and work on the findings too.
Advice?
Kirk asked “Do you have an advice?”
A good way to start using Copilot in Glint is to use a survey that you already have findings for. Cassidy did this and this built trust with the tool because the results matched her findings. Using this approach, you can get fast feedback and check if the results are correct or not.
Communications
Next up, Kristi Kelly, Principal Product Manager of Copilot and AI Experiences for Microsoft Viva, walked up on the stage and coolly addressed the audience with “Well I didn’t trip up the stage!”
Kristi moved the conversation to Communications and the impact of Viva Amplify and Viva Connections.
In most organizations with Microsoft Viva the conversations start in the Employee Hub, this might be with Viva Connections or the SharePoint Intranet homepage.
Viva Connections is an incredible ecosystem with over 1500 Viva Connection card applications published by third parties. Amazingly, the application is in the top 3 of most used Microsoft Teams applications. Actually, this should not be a surprise because it is the Microsoft Teams mobile app where Viva Connections shines and makes up a big part of the story.
Viva Connections is key at pushing out news and campaigns.
Kristi announced that Viva Amplify will shortly be rolling out Viva Connections as a direct endpoint.
Kristi then introduced a case study where an organization needs to upskill the workforce in AI. The goal is to communicate and direct people towards this outcome and a set of overall goals.
She explains – to achieve this we need to reach out to people via different channels including Outlook, SharePoint/Viva Connections and Teams.
Viva Amplify analytics and the Publication Report helps the team identify that the distribution and reach is there but the engagement is low. The insights gleaned from Viva Amplify show that the messaging needs to change and be more engaging.
The network analytics from Viva Engage are key and with these reports it is possible to see how to keep people engaged and the topics that are most important for the employees. Additionally, these reports help us retain staff by keeping them engaged.
One of the key reports to monitoring staff retention levels is the Employee Retention report, which shows how communication is influencing employee retention levels.
Copilot resources.
The Viva Engage team have built a community template, the Copilot Adoption community which helps organizations increase the reach of Copilot within the business. This is available in your Microsoft 365 now.
The template helps organizations to engage, share best practice and built a knowledge base which the rest of the organization can use.
Time for a demo
Kristi showed how Viva Answers can help teams to find answers to their questions and increase the capture of knowledge. The top questions feature is a great way of showing everyone how important knowledge is to the organization and aims to inspire the teams to ask more questions and seek more answers.
AI powered questions means that users can get answers automatically if the question has already been asked and this means that 66% of questions are automatically answered without the need to post the question!
“With Viva Answers, 66% of questions are automatically answered without the need to post the question.”
Copilot in Viva Engage can really help community leaders to work out the type of information that communities need. The use of Copilot allows to keep the flow of questions and information going and this really helps engagement. As these questions help people understand how they contribute and help and support others. This helps make the community stronger and have more engagement.
Kristi talked about how conversation starters are research backed and provided by experts within Microsoft.
Kristi continued the demo and gave us a tip on how we can help more successful engagement and change with a new initiative by using model behavior. This is where you show the behavior that you are looking for. This is often a problem where people are not sure how they are supposed to behave. So, Kristi uses Copilot to help her get started.
This knowledge and experience help her to engage people and bring them along on the journey so that they get involved and allow us to reach the goal!
Kristi closes her section with an announcement that Copilot in Viva Engage is rolling out today!
A video case study starts with a well-known pizza brand, Dominos. The case study explains how Viva helped them establish a single communications platform and break down barriers across the organization.
Their main challenge has been trying to connect with the store managers across their 100000-person organization.
They rolled out Viva Goals and OKRs throughout Dominos, the result is that they have seen a significant increase in performance.
One of the ways that they measured is by asking their employees “How well do you know the business goals and objectives?”
Dominos at the start of their journey scored poorly. However, with Microsoft Viva to improve communications, the tide has turned, and the score has been increasing with each subsequent survey.
The great response they had has been from the stores. They now feel that they can engage and provide feedback. This is helping Dominos to keep improving and pushing forward across the entire organization.
Skilling
Michael Holste, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft Viva, steps on the stage to talk about skilling with Microsoft Viva.
Michael talks about how organizations need to upskill and reskill, which is where people are trained in new job roles.
He highlighted that these capabilities are key if we are to implement transformation with AI.
Viva Skills
The key question is, how do we get skilling at the end user and organization levels?
One of the key tools is Viva Skills which uses the LinkedIn Skills Graph. This maps skills to job title and links these skills to learning content which can then be used to as the training content to be used to bring those employees up to speed with that ability.
He explains how reporting allows us to see where the gaps are in those skills and the content that can be used to address that need.
Michael introduces a scenario where an organization needed to use AI to transform.
Michael starts by looking at the skill landscape and quickly is able to see that skills are weak in Product Development and Research. Additionally, they found that actually they do have a foundation in the Machine Learning skill, which is fundamental to driving the transformation with AI.
Armed with this information the organization can take action to address these skills challenges.
Ryan turned attention to Viva Learning.
Viva Learning
Michael talks over how Viva Learning brings key training content to the employees. Using the skills found earlier we can find and tailor learning content to the needs of the teams and organization to build capability in those areas.
He explains how the Viva Skills service works. The Viva Skills system will continue to learn and add skills as it understands the skills repertoire found in a business’s Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
A new feature has been introduced is Viva Learning Academies. This feature allows learning to be associated with Viva Goals. Finally, we can link the learning and skills based on the goals of an organization!
Finally, Michael closes his part with a discussion of Copilot in Viva Learning. Here Copilot can help us to find key learning information. He shows a demo where he is looking for introductions to AI. Copilot provides examples of learning courses and more to help people quickly find the right training for their needs.
Close
Kirk returns to the stage and closes the talk, explaining the journey we have been on. He shows a slide of the current state of the Viva Innovations across the Viva Suite of products which shows an impressive array of the latest features and features to come this year.
You can find out more about these Viva Innovations on the Viva Roadmap (https://aka.ms/viva/roadmap).
The session was a great overview with some fantastic insights, learning and inspiring real-world stories which I am personally going to find useful when speaking with customers and my team..
Simon Doy is a Microsoft MVP, Viva Explorer, core team member of the Maturity Model for Microsoft 365 team and owner of iThink 365. He is passionate about helping organizations be successful using Microsoft 365 and through their people by connecting the people to one another and the business to build a happier, more productive and profitable and engaged workforce who are invested in driving the business forward.
Blog: https://www.simondoy.com
X / Twitter https://www.x.com/simondoy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simondoy
Website: https://www.ithink365.co.uk
Viva Explorers: https://www.vivaexplorers.com
Maturity Model for Microsoft 365: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/community/microsoft365-maturity-model–intro
Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More
Partner Blog | What’s new for Microsoft partners: April 2024 edition
Over the past few months, we have continued to add benefits and resources to the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program to help you and your customers realize the most from our latest technology. These changes have been informed by partner feedback and developed with the diversity of the partner community in mind.
In this blog, you’ll find links to expert insights, redesigned learning materials, and updated benefits to accelerate your growth in the coming year.
Announcements
State of the Partner Ecosystem: Chief Partner Officer Nicole Dezen showcased the latest Microsoft partner business news, changes, updates, and momentum in her annual State of the Partner Ecosystem post on the Official Microsoft Blog. Learn about program updates, including new designations and certifications for partners. Find out how we are equipping partners through AI skilling, and read about partners delivering AI solutions around the world.
New benefits packages: In January, we launched three new benefits packages designed to help partners at various stages of growth to develop their business. Find out which package is right for you by reading more on the partner blog.
Realigning global licensing for Microsoft 365: Last year Microsoft updated the way Microsoft 365, Office 365, and Teams were licensed in the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland. We have recently announced our plan to extend that approach worldwide to ensure globally consistent licensing. Learn more.
Continue reading here
Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More
Protect Against OWASP API Top 10 Security Risks Using Defender for APIs
Overview
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Foundation is a nonprofit foundation dedicated to improving software security through community-led open-source projects, education, and transparency. The OWASP API Security Project focuses on strategies and solutions to understand and mitigate the unique vulnerabilities and security risks of APIs. In this post, we’ll dive into how Defender for APIs (a plan provided by Microsoft Defender for Cloud) provides security coverage for the OWASP API Top 10 security risks.
Defender for APIs offers full lifecycle protection, detection, and response coverage for APIs. Defender for APIs helps you to gain visibility into business-critical APIs. You can investigate and improve your API security posture, prioritize vulnerability fixes, and quickly detect active real-time threats.
Concepts
Security recommendations – Recommendations in Defender for Cloud are based on the Microsoft cloud security benchmark. The Microsoft cloud security benchmark is the Microsoft-authored set of guidelines for security and compliance best practices based on common compliance frameworks. This widely respected benchmark builds on the controls from the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with a focus on cloud-centric security. For a complete list of API security recommendations, see Security recommendations – a reference guide
Security alerts – Security alerts are the notifications generated by Defender for Cloud’s workload protection plans when runtime threats are identified in your Azure, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments. For a complete list of API security alerts, see Security alerts – a reference guide
Attack path analysis – Defender for Cloud uses environment context to perform a risk assessment of your security issues and subsequently identifies the biggest security risk issues. Defender for Cloud then analyzes which security issues are part of potential attack paths that attackers could use to breach your environment. To learn more, see Identify and remediate attack paths
Defender for APIs – OWASP API Security Coverage Mapping
OWASP API Risk
Defender for APIs Security Coverage
Broken Object Level Authorization (API1:2023)
(Security alert) Parameter enumeration on an API endpoint – A single IP was observed enumerating parameters when accessing one of the API endpoints
(Security alert) Distributed parameter enumeration on an API endpoint – The aggregate user population (all IPs) was observed enumerating parameters when accessing one of the API endpoints.
Broken Authentication (API2:2023)
(Security recommendation) API endpoints in Azure API Management should be authenticated – API endpoints published within Azure API Management should enforce authentication to help minimize security risk.
(Security recommendation) API Management calls to API backends should be authenticated – Calls from API Management to backends should use some form of authentication, whether via certificates or credentials.
Broken Object Property Level Authorization (API3:2023)
(Security alert) Previously unseen parameter used in an API call – A single IP was observed accessing one of the API endpoints using a previously unseen parameter in the request.
(Security alert) Unusually large response payload transmitted between a single IP address and an API endpoint – A suspicious spike in API response payload size was observed for traffic between a single IP and one of the API endpoints.
Unrestricted Resource Consumption (API4:2023)
(Security alert) Suspicious population-level spike in API traffic to an API endpoint – A suspicious spike in API traffic was detected at one of the API endpoints.
(Security alert) Suspicious spike in API traffic from a single IP address to an API endpoint – A suspicious spike in API traffic was detected from a client IP to the API endpoint.
(Security alert) Unusually large request body transmitted between a single IP address and an API endpoint – A suspicious spike in API request body size was observed for traffic between a single IP and one of the API endpoints.
(Security alert) Suspicious spike in latency for traffic between a single IP address and an API endpoint – A suspicious spike in latency was observed for traffic between a single IP and one of the API endpoints.
(Security alert) API requests spray from a single IP address to an unusually large number of distinct API endpoints – A single IP was observed making API calls to an unusually large number of distinct endpoints.
(Security recommendation) API Management direct management endpoint should not be enabled – The direct management REST API in Azure API Management bypasses Azure Resource Manager role-based access control, authorization, and throttling mechanisms, thus increasing the vulnerability of your service.
Broken Function Level Authorization (API5:2023)
No coverage
Unrestricted Access to Sensitive Business Flows (API6:2023)
(Attack path analysis) Internet exposed APIs that are unauthenticated carry sensitive data
(Security alert) Suspicious spike in API traffic from a single IP address to an API endpoint – A suspicious spike in API traffic was detected from a client IP to the API endpoint.
Server-Side Request Forgery (API7:2023)
No coverage
Security Misconfiguration (API8:2023)
(Security recommendation) API endpoints that are unused should be disabled and removed from the Azure API Management service – As a security best practice, API endpoints that haven’t received traffic for 30 days are considered unused and should be removed from the Azure API Management service.
(Security recommendation) API Management APIs should use only encrypted protocols – APIs should be available only through encrypted protocols, like HTTPS or WSS. Avoid using unsecured protocols, such as HTTP or WS to ensure security of data in transit.
(Security recommendation) API Management secret named values should be stored in Azure Key Vault – Named values are a collection of name and value pairs in each API Management service.
(Security recommendation) API Management should disable public network access to the service configuration endpoints – To improve the security of API Management services, restrict connectivity to service configuration endpoints, like direct access management API, Git configuration management endpoint, or self-hosted gateways configuration endpoint.
(Security recommendation) API Management calls to API backends should be authenticated – Calls from API Management to backends should use some form of authentication, whether via certificates or credentials. Does not apply to Service Fabric backends.
Improper Inventory Management (API9:2023)
Inventory dashboard – Centralized inventory of all managed APIs and related API security findings.
External exposure – Classify which API endpoints are exposed externally.
Sensitive data classification – Classify APIs that receive or respond with sensitive data, to support risk prioritization, including integration support with Microsoft MIP Purview.
Unsafe Consumption of APIs (API10:2023)
No coverage
API Security Testing
Microsoft Defender for Cloud supports third-party tools to help enhance the existing runtime security capabilities that are provided by Defender for APIs. Defender for Cloud supports proactive API security testing capabilities in early stages of the development lifecycle (including DevOps pipelines). The support for third-party solutions helps to further streamline, integrate, and orchestrate security findings from other vendors with Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
This support enables full lifecycle API security (extending to OWASP API top 10 risks), and the ability for security teams to effectively discover and remediate API security vulnerabilities before they are deployed in production. To learn more, see the following: Partner applications in Microsoft Defender for Cloud for API security testing (preview)
Next Steps
To learn more about how Defender for APIs augments the security offered by Azure Web Application Firewall (Azure WAF) and Azure API Management, see the following: Defender for APIs Better Together with Azure Web Application Firewall and Azure API Management.
To learn more about how Azure API Management helps mitigate risks against the OWASP API risks, see the following: Recommendations to mitigate OWASP API Security Top 10 threats using API Management
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App Service *.azurewebsites.net TLS Cert Renewal for Web Apps, Functions, and Logic Apps (Standard)
This blog contains information about *.azurewebsites.net TLS certificate changes for Web Apps, Functions, and Logic Apps (Standard). Customers should not be impacted by this change. The scope of services affected includes Web Apps, Functions, and Logic Apps (Standard); Logic Apps (Consumption) and resources hosted on an ASE are not impacted. This change is limited to public Azure cloud; government clouds are not affected.
Every Web Apps, Functions, and Logic Apps (Standard) has its own default hostname that goes by “<resource-name>.azurewebsites.net” where App Service secures it with a wildcard *.azurewebsites.net TLS certificate. The current intermediate Microsoft PKI Subordinate CA certificates were set to expire on June 27th, 2024. App Service used these intermediate certificates in the default TLS certificate *.azurewebsites.net. On March 13th, 2024, App Service renewed the TLS certificate and used a new set of Subordinate CAs while the root certificate remained the same. Due to the distributed asynchronous nature of the renewal process, there isn’t an exact date when the new TLS certificate will be visible to individual Web Apps, Functions, and Logic Apps (Standard).
Terminology and Concepts
Certificate Authority: (CA) An entity that is responsible for the creation, issuance, revocation, and management of certificates. The term applies equally to both Roots CAs and Subordinate CAs.
Root CA: The top level Certification Authority whose Root Certificate is distributed by Application Software Suppliers and that issues Subordinate CA Certificates.
Root Certificate: The self‐signed certificate issued by the Root CA to identify itself and to facilitate verification of certificates issued to its Subordinate CAs.
Subordinate CA: (Sub CA) A Certification Authority whose certificate is signed by the Root CA or another Subordinate CA.
We expect that this change will be a non-event and will not impact customers. However, you may be impacted if an application has incorrectly taken a hard dependency on the *.azurewebsites.net TLS certificate, for example by way of “certificate pinning”. Certificate pinning is a practice where an application only allows a specific list of acceptable Certificate Authorities (CAs), public keys, thumbprints, etc. Applications should never pin to the *.azurewebsites.net TLS certificate. Applications requiring certificate stability should use custom domains in conjunction with custom TLS certificates for those domains. You can refer to the recommended best practices section of this article for more information.
Recommended best practices
Certificate pinning of *.azurewebsites.net TLS certificates is not recommended because the *.azurewebsites.net TLS certificate could be rotated anytime given the nature of App Service as a Platform as a Service (PaaS). In the event that the service rotates the App Service default wildcard TLS certificate, certificate pinned applications will break and disrupt the connectivity for applications that are hardcoded to a specific set of certificate attributes. The periodicity with which the *.azurewebsites.net TLS certificate is rotated is also not guaranteed since the rotation frequency can change at any time.
If an application needs to rely on certificate pinning behavior, it is recommended to add a custom domain to a Web Apps, Functions, and Logic Apps (Standard) and provide a custom TLS certificate for the domain which can then be relied on for certificate pinning.
Note that applications which rely on certificate pinning should also not have a hard dependency on an App Service Managed Certificate. App Service Managed Certificates could be rotated anytime, leading to similar problems for applications that rely on stable certificate properties. It is best practice to provide a custom TLS certificate for applications that rely on certificate pinning.
Refer to our documentation for best practices for Azure App Service for more information.
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FAQ: Marketplace private offers through CSP?
Q: is it possible for a customer procuring Azure via a CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) to make Marketplace purchases? If so, can this also be a private offer from the ISV (even if it’s likely the CSP managing the subscriptions/billing ID for the end customer)?
I am particularly interested in how the customer will get the ISV SaaS solution deployed at their end (in this case through the CSP who own the subscription).
A: It really depends on the CSP –> customer agreement. Some CSPs charge for purchasing from the marketplace, for others it is free. There are two common scenarios:
1- The customer creates a separate subscription/billing account as “pay as you go” and did the purchase of a private offer
2- The CSP purchased the offer on the behalf of the customer and here they can choose to overcharge or not
Assumed the following:
1- In order to receive a private offer, you need to “own” the billing accountID – usually in this scenario, it belongs to the CSP
2- You still need to be an Enterprise Admin or Billing Account owner to purchase (it is not always allowed by the CSP)
Overall:
The customer should get in contact with the CSP, either getting the right setup or agreeing on the “overcharge”
You should also refer to the following documentation related to this topic:
Video tutorials
Private Offers for CSP Partners Overview
Private Offer Creation by ISVs for CSP Partners
The CSP Partner Private Offer Purchase Process
Q: is it possible for a customer procuring Azure via a CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) to make Marketplace purchases? If so, can this also be a private offer from the ISV (even if it’s likely the CSP managing the subscriptions/billing ID for the end customer)?
I am particularly interested in how the customer will get the ISV SaaS solution deployed at their end (in this case through the CSP who own the subscription).
A: It really depends on the CSP –> customer agreement. Some CSPs charge for purchasing from the marketplace, for others it is free. There are two common scenarios:
1- The customer creates a separate subscription/billing account as “pay as you go” and did the purchase of a private offer
2- The CSP purchased the offer on the behalf of the customer and here they can choose to overcharge or not
Assumed the following:
1- In order to receive a private offer, you need to “own” the billing accountID – usually in this scenario, it belongs to the CSP
2- You still need to be an Enterprise Admin or Billing Account owner to purchase (it is not always allowed by the CSP)
Overall:
The customer should get in contact with the CSP, either getting the right setup or agreeing on the “overcharge”
You should also refer to the following documentation related to this topic:
Configure ISV to CSP partner private offers in Microsoft Partner Center – Marketplace publisher | Microsoft Learn
Video tutorials
Private Offers for CSP Partners Overview
Private Offer Creation by ISVs for CSP Partners
The CSP Partner Private Offer Purchase Process Read More
Running python/flask app on IIS using ASP.Net Core Module handler
Looking for insight into running/flask app using a modern/maintained method.
wfastcgi is essentially deprecated (version 3.0.0 was released 7 years ago).
HttpPlatform handler was replaced by the asp.net core module even before that (2016).
I’ve made some progress using the ASP.Net Core Module handler – but when I try to launch the app I get an error:
Application ‘/LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT’ with physical root ‘C:inetpubwwwroot’ failed to start process with commandline ‘“C:Python312python.exe” C:inetpubwwwrootapp.py’ with multiple retries. Failed to bind to port ‘11905’. First 30KB characters of captured stdout and stderr logs from multiple retries:
Nothing in the python log.
Any feedback appreciated.
Looking for insight into running/flask app using a modern/maintained method. wfastcgi is essentially deprecated (version 3.0.0 was released 7 years ago).HttpPlatform handler was replaced by the asp.net core module even before that (2016). I’ve made some progress using the ASP.Net Core Module handler – but when I try to launch the app I get an error:Application ‘/LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT’ with physical root ‘C:inetpubwwwroot’ failed to start process with commandline ‘“C:Python312python.exe” C:inetpubwwwrootapp.py’ with multiple retries. Failed to bind to port ‘11905’. First 30KB characters of captured stdout and stderr logs from multiple retries:Nothing in the python log. Any feedback appreciated. Read More
Stakeholders AI
amMicrosoft Legal international Organisation and Stakeholders partners for Cloud business.
amMicrosoft Legal international Organisation and Stakeholders partners for Cloud business. Read More
pnp Modern Search – People – Search Source Scope
Hi everyone,
I’m looking for some advice from anyone that has experience of the SharePoint ‘pnp Modern Search’ (v4) tool.
We have a requirement to build a people search which does not search across the tenant ‘GAL’, but instead would search to a more localised scope, for example a SharePoint list within the scope of the site hosting the pnp Modern Search page.
I had a look at the documentation (Create a useful People Search – PnP Modern Search (v4) (microsoft-search.github.io)) and in the section ‘Configure Search Results’ there is mention of a ‘Result Source ID’ which appears to be where the scope is defined. Unfortunately I can’t find more detail than this in the documentation, IE to specify what other sources would be acceptable and if these include a local SharePoint list.
I would like to try and determine the answer for this before configuring and deploying only to find the required functionality is not available.
Thanks very much for your help!
Hi everyone, I’m looking for some advice from anyone that has experience of the SharePoint ‘pnp Modern Search’ (v4) tool.We have a requirement to build a people search which does not search across the tenant ‘GAL’, but instead would search to a more localised scope, for example a SharePoint list within the scope of the site hosting the pnp Modern Search page. I had a look at the documentation (Create a useful People Search – PnP Modern Search (v4) (microsoft-search.github.io)) and in the section ‘Configure Search Results’ there is mention of a ‘Result Source ID’ which appears to be where the scope is defined. Unfortunately I can’t find more detail than this in the documentation, IE to specify what other sources would be acceptable and if these include a local SharePoint list. I would like to try and determine the answer for this before configuring and deploying only to find the required functionality is not available. Thanks very much for your help! Read More
Talk Track for SaaS Azure Platform Validation
Azure Marketplace seeks to make the publishing flow as streamlined as possible. We don’t want lengthy, manual engagements to review a publisher’s solutions to validate if it is built on top of Azure (like others public cloud marketplace do, taking 2+ weeks for review). Toward that end, the new page within the transactable SaaS offer creation flow will capture additional information from the publisher to enable the marketplace team to perform validation that the transactable offer is built on Azure.
Experience
The information gathered will enable post-publish validation that the offer is built on Azure in accordance with SaaS offer requirements for Azure Marketplace. For details on the policy, go here: Azure platform policy for SaaS offers.
The new page is found under the new Supplemental content tab and will act like a survey to gather information about the publisher’s SaaS offer to understand if it is fully hosted in the publisher’s Azure or fits another SaaS model. The information gathered will enable post-publish validation that the offer is built on Azure in accordance with SaaS offer requirements for Azure Marketplace. For details on the policy, go here: Azure platform policy for SaaS offers. If there are any questions or concerns regarding how the solution is built on Azure, a notification will be sent and the publisher will receive a follow up.
This SaaS validation will not qualify the publisher’s offer for Co-sell or make it Azure benefit eligible (MACC eligible), but it will make that process smoother and quicker in the future.
As some policies are validated post-publish, successfully publishing an offer does not mean it has been fully validated to conform with all policies.
The page functions like a survey with dynamic content based on the information provided about the SaaS offer. See the start of the page below seen under the Supplemental Content tab:
As long as the page is completed and the publisher seeks to Review & Publish, the offer submission will not be blocked in the publishing process. The validation will be initiated as the SaaS offer is published and will trigger a review post-publish. SmartCert tooling will initiate notification if there are any questions or concerns regarding how the solution is built on Azure, a notification will be sent, and the publisher will receive a follow up. Note: if a managed ISV has an existing offers that is found to be in non-compliance, the Certification team will work with the PDM/PTS for that ISV on the outreach and next steps.
The page should not show up for non-transactable SaaS offers (i.e., Contact Me listings). If the page does not show up for the offer, then it is not required, and no action is needed for that offer.
Timing
During Public Preview starting January 31, the module will be visible, but the completion will be optional for existing SaaS offers. We have notified publishers on March 1st, and publishers with existing offers must complete this information within 90 days. This module will move to GA and completion will be require for all transactable SaaS offers May 31st.
Support Standard Response:
The Supplemental Content module is now part of the publishing flow for SaaS offers that are intended to transact through the Azure Marketplace. The module will be required to complete publishing for each transactable SaaS offer. If an offer is not a transactable offer, then the information is not required, and the Supplemental Content module will not show up for your SaaS offer.
For new offers, this module will become available when you select the SaaS offer type and setup the offer to be transactable through the Azure Marketplace.
For existing offers, (1) please go to Partner Center, (2) navigate to the Marketplace Offers workspace, (3) review your offers and select a SaaS offer to update, (4) in the SaaS offer select the “Supplemental Content” tab, (5) complete the module, and (6) after you are finished, select “Review and Publish.” The module will need to be completed for each of your SaaS offers and the questions are specific to that SaaS offer.
If the Supplemental Content tab does not show up for a SaaS offer, then that listing is most likely a listing-only offer (i.e., Contact Me), does not require the information, and no action is needed from you for that offer.
This information will be required for appropriate SaaS offers within 90 days of notification (March 1st).
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Combine FinOps best practices and Microsoft tools to streamline and optimize your workloads
Cloud adoption is not a one-and-done endeavor, but an iterative process. Constant innovation means there are new and better cloud-based solutions available every day. That impacts your cloud workloads and the way you manage them. And as your use of cloud grows, so does the scale of your cloud deployments. If you’re a large enterprise organization, you may have hundreds or even thousands of cloud subscriptions. To keep costs in check, you need to continuously examine your workloads or subscriptions to understand how to get the most from cloud. You need a way to cut through the noise so you can prioritize your attention and resources and focus on your desired business outcomes.
Workload management is the process of defining how your resources are running in a given Azure environment. It means running resources only when necessary and at the level or capacity needed for the active workload. An effective workload management and automation plan can significantly reduce costs by adjusting configuration to match supply to demand dynamically, ensuring the most effective utilization. Are your workloads running all the time or are they running based on your business or organizational needs? Learn to optimize your cloud and build your skills to make the most of Azure. Once you understand how your workloads operate day-to-day you can automate certain processes to keep everything running at optimized levels.
FinOps best practices tie in closely here. FinOps encourages collaboration within your organization, increasing visibility into your cloud investment to all levels of the organization while helping you gain more financial control and predictability to optimize cloud spend.
This blog was written to help you better understand workload management and automation within the FinOps Framework and how to implement it in Azure using specific tools within Microsoft Cost Management and Advisor. Let’s take a closer look at each of these tools and how you can use them in conjunction with FinOps capabilities to understand and forecast your bill, optimize workload costs, and control your spending.
Microsoft Cost Management
Once you’ve begun migrating to Azure, you can use Microsoft Cost Management to continually track and monitor your cloud spending and improve the cost-effectiveness of your current investments. Microsoft Cost Management is available to anyone with access to a billing account, subscription, resource group or management group. You can access Cost Management within the billing and resource management experiences or separately as a standalone tool optimized for FinOps teams who manage cost across multiple scope. For ad-hoc exploration of cost data you can use cost analysis in Azure portal. If you need to integrate with your custom reporting, you can automate cost data exports.
Microsoft Cost Management enables you to access your cost datasets through Exports and the exported data can be analyzed using tools like Microsoft Fabric. Let’s take a closer look at these two tools.
A new and improved Exports experience
Data is important if you want to build and analyze custom reports, but FinOps datasets are often large and challenging to manage. We recently improved the Exports experience to help you streamline your FinOps practice. The new Exports experience, currently in preview, includes automatic exports of more cost-impacting datasets, including price sheets, reservation recommendations, reservation details, and reservation transactions, optimized to handle large datasets while enhancing the user experience.
The new Exports functionality also improves file manageability and reduces download latency. File partitioning, which breaks files into manageable smaller chunks, and file overwrite, which replaces the previous day’s file with an updated file each day in daily export, helps you save on storage and network costs. We’ve also added support for the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) dataset, which combines amortized and actual costs and reduces data processing times. If you want to understand the details of an invoice and the resources that went into those charges, use Exports to download the data into a storage account. Depending on the file size, you can then use a custom reporting system solution such as Fabric, Excel or PowerBI to analyze the data.
Use Fabric to simplify your analytics needs
Once you have the data you want, how do you visualize it, analyze it, and build custom reports? That’s where Microsoft Fabric comes in. Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution. With Fabric, you don’t need to piece together different services from multiple vendors because Fabric offers a comprehensive suite of services, including data lake, data engineering, and data integration, all in one place, giving you a highly integrated, end-to-end, and easy-to-use product designed to simplify your analytics needs. By creating a single platform with tools for every data professional in a unified experience and architecture, Fabric reduces the cost and effort of integrating analytics services.
Fabric also includes Copilot functionalities. With Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, you can use natural language to create dataflows and pipelines, write SQL statements, build reports, or even develop machine learning models. Copilot in Fabric is currently in public preview with Power BI, Data Factory, Data Engineering, and Data Science experiences. For example, in Power BI, you can create reports and summarize your insights into narrative summaries in seconds. In Data Factory, you can simply describe how you want to ingest and transform the data using natural language and Copilot does the rest. When working in a notebook in Data Engineering or Data Science, you can more quickly enrich, model, analyze, and explore your data.
Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is designed to help you focus your efforts and save time on cloud optimization. It orchestrates and guides your journey to create and maintain well-architected workloads on Azure. Several tools within Advisor can help you optimize your workloads. Let’s take a closer look at them:
Get tailored recommendations with Advisor Reviews
How do you determine how to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to optimizing your Azure workloads? Advisor Reviews, which is only available to those who have field assistance, allows you to apply a set of filters and get automated recommendations to improve each of your resources and subscriptions. And the Azure recommendations under this scenario are personalized even more. A Microsoft representative learns about your mission-critical workloads, analyzes your applications, and manually inputs tailored recommendations to help you improve resiliency. The recommendations are prioritized according to our best estimate of significance to your environment and available through Advisor so you have a single point of entry to view them.
View recommendation details – such as recommended actions and impacted resources – and solution options, including postponing or dismissing a recommendation. If you accept recommendations, you can then check your Advisor Score to see if the changes you invested in improved your score. Periodically return to Advisor to review and implement recommendations to continuously improve your workloads.
Identify gaps with Advisor Assessments
We recently introduced a new Assessment tab within Advisor that you can use to improve your workloads in the areas that matter most to your business. Advisor Assessments is a new experience in Azure Advisor that curates a set of questions about your infrastructure to help us identify gaps and opportunities in your workloads across five pillars: reliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence, and performance efficiency. This is especially useful for early cloud adopters or early Azure customers. Based on the type of assessment you choose, you will be guided through a series of curated questions about your Azure infrastructure, workload etc. Based on your responses, we will generate tailored and prioritized recommendations to improve your Azure architecture. To use these new assessments, you’ll need Contributor Access on a subscription to take the assessment and Reader Access on a subscription to view the generated recommendation.
Previously, the results of these assessments were available for export where you could work on them offline. Now, everything is available in one place, so you can take assessments on, and receive recommendations directly within, the Advisor platform. There is no limit on the number of assessments that can be taken for a subscription, although you’ll be notified if someone else has already created an assessment for the same subscription/workload. To see all Microsoft assessment choices, go to the Learn platform > Assessments.
Understand where you can reduce spend with the Cost Optimization workbook
The Cost Optimization Workbook brings together all vital information about potential savings and opportunities for rate optimization and highlights tactical recommendations to help you understand how and where you can reduce spend. For example, the workbook will highlight any discounts available to you that you might not yet be taking advantage of. Within the workbook, you can use the Tabs function to focus your cost-reduction efforts in the areas of Compute (including Savings Plan), Azure Hybrid Benefit, Storage, and Networking. Use Filters to focus on a specific workload, apply a recommended optimization directly from the workbook, or share insights with your team.
We’re currently working to bake automation into the workbook for use cases within compute, storage, and networking so you can take an iterative approach to reducing costs. For example, if you find a workload that has virtual machines (VMs) that are not allocated but still incurring costs, the workbook will search for them and send an alert so you can choose to stop it. Not only will the Cost Optimization Workbook provide you an opportunity to find potential savings, but the workload management automation piece impacts other capabilities like your budget and real-time decision-making.
Estimate the cost of creating new or expanding existing deployments with the Pricing Calculator
The Azure Pricing Calculator is a web-based tool that makes it easier to plan and estimate the cost of creating new or expanding existing deployments by providing cost estimates based on the services used. With this tool, you can estimate the cost of running your workloads and explore various configurations of many different Azure services as you identify which SKUs and how much usage keeps you within your desired price range. The calculator also provides a cost estimate for your Azure consumption with your negotiated or discounted prices and strategic pricing offers such as Azure Hybrid Benefit, Reserved Instances and Azure savings plan for compute. The estimate is split into upfront and monthly costs. Your input from the Pricing Calculator can also help estimate the cost of any changes to your deployed workloads. That data can help inform more specific recommendations based on your current usage.
We’ve recently added six example scenarios to the Pricing Calculator, such as “add an enterprise data warehouse” or “add advanced analytics on big data.” Depending on your chosen scenario, the Pricing Calculator will walk you through the pieces you’ll need to build that scenario and the estimated cost. For example, if you want to add Azure Web Apps to deliver value faster to your customers with a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline that pushes each of your changes automatically to Web Apps, you will need a VM, storage, bandwidth, and several services or functions. Once you select those pieces, you can choose how and where to deploy them and apply any savings plans. Not only does the Pricing Calculator help you understand the ingredients you’ll need to achieve your new scenario, it also provides a cost estimate based on your choices so you can better plan your next move.
Reducing costs by ensuring effective utilization
Each of the tools discussed here can be used to enable FinOps capabilities and help you develop an effective workload management and automation plan to reduce costs by adjusting configuration to match supply to demand, ensuring the most effective utilization. In addition, we recently released a FinOps Review Assessment based on guidance from the FinOps Foundation framework that can help you work to align your business with FinOps practices and principles.
You can learn even more about using FinOps best practices for workload management and automation at aka.ms/finops/solutions.
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Join us at Embedded World 2024
We are excited to invite you to join us at Embedded World 2024, where we will be showcasing our latest innovations and sharing our latest vision for the future of industrial transformation. Embedded World 2024 is the world’s largest trade show that focuses on edge compute and embedded devices and held each year in Nuremburg, Germany.
One of the focal points of the event is our new adaptive cloud strategy, which is designed to help businesses like yours seamlessly integrate cloud technology into their physical operations and stay ahead of the curve in an ever-changing digital landscape. Our adaptive cloud approach unifies teams, sites, and systems into single operations, application, and data model, enabling organizations to leverage cloud-native technology and AI to work simultaneously across hybrid, multi-cloud, edge, distributed computing, and IoT.
At the event, you will have the opportunity to learn more about our adaptive cloud strategy, get hands on training, see it in action, and speak with our experts about how it can benefit your business. You will also have the chance to network with other industry professionals and explore the latest trends and developments in the world of edge and cloud technology.
How can you connect with our experts from Microsoft and our partners during Embedded World:
Connect with us in Hall 5 Stand 353
Visit our booth in Hall 5 to immerse yourself in innovative demos and experiences, connect with product and partner experts on featured products, and meet one-on-one with Microsoft leaders.
Attend sessions at the Exhibitor Forums
Explore the Embedded World Exhibitor Forums throughout the day and listen to Microsoft experts and our partners throughout the 3 days on a wide variety of topics.
Unleashing the Power of AI in EDA for Chip Design
April 9 | 9:00 am
Understanding the ROI of a 5G-enabled factory
April 9 | 12:00 pm
The digitizing physical operations with AI opportunity, for the embedded market
April 9 | 5:00 pm
Customer story: Designing with iMX8 and Windows IoT
April 9 | 5:00 pm
Security fundamentals in Windows IoT Enterprise
April 10 | 9:00 am
Accelerating AI on the intelligent edge: Qualcomm and Microsoft vision
April 10 | 5:00 pm
Windows IoT on Arm
April 11 | 9:30 am
Navigating the IoT Security Regulations Landscape
April 11 | 11:00 am
Unveiling Advantech’s Edge-to-Cloud Journey towards AIoT Fulfillment
April 11 | 11:30 am
Modernize your infrastructure and applications with Azure Arc and AKS at the edge
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