We are excited to announce the launch of the Community News Desk on the Microsoft Tech Community, where you will find community experts and calls, content from events a and community members, and shows like Mondays at Microsoft to help you stay up to date on all that is happening across Microsoft products. We are launching our News Desk with our first set of content from Microsoft 365 Community Conference. With over 3k attendees and experts from inside and outside of Microsoft the content we delivered there will help you build your skills and get all you can from your Microsoft 365 services.

We have so much great insights to offer with our line up of sessions from M365 Community Conference!  With new content coming each week you can skill up from anywhere:

OPENING KEYNOTE | “The Age of Copilots” with Jeff Teper (President of Collaboration Apps and Platforms) | 
GENERAL SESSIONS

“Reshaping productivity with Copilot for Microsoft 365” with Bobby Kishore and Dan Parish 
“The future of work with Microsoft Teams” with Sumi Sing, Manik Gupta, and Mark Swift 
“Transforming Communications with AI” with Steve Clayton [part of the Transformation track]
“Content Management and Collaboration for the AI Era” with Zach Rosenfield, Lincoln DeMaris, Melissa Torres, Sesha Mani, and Ashu Rawat 
“What’s new and next for Microsoft Viva and the employee experience” with Kirk Gregersen, Kristi Kelly, Michael Holste, and Nick DeFalco 
CLOSING KEYNOTE | “Delivering Business Value and User Satisfaction in the Era of AI” with Karuana Gatimu 

We have also made available the first of our brand new content from our Transformation track at the conference that empowers communications and HR professionals with insights on how to improve the employee experience.  Our first sessions include: 

The Transformation track for communicators, HR, and business stakeholders in workplace experience [sessions] + full details

Dive deep into strategies, insights, and best practices to modernize communications and engage employees. Develop an actionable plan that aligns stakeholders to drive the transformation that matters to your organization, whether you want to nurture a high-performance organization, foster culture, and diversity, accelerate innovation, or ensure successful adoption of technologies like Copilot and AI. Take away prescriptive product guidance from experts, inspiration from thought leaders and real-world learnings from peers across industries.

“Planning a corporate communications strategy with SharePoint News and Viva Amplify” with Maeneka Grewal, Naomi Moneypenny, and Dave Cohen 
“Leveraging AI for communications” with Dan Holme 
“How Microsoft is transforming communications & engagement” with John Cirone 

There’s more to come from on this important topic right here over the coming weeks.

Our launch also includes the expansion of the already successful Microsoft 365 and Power Platform YouTube channel to serve even more parts of our community by renaming it Microsoft Community Learning.  Subscribe to this channel – and don’t forget to turn on notifications – to get our weekly drops of skilling content, see all our community calls and learn from community members like yourselves.

This is the continuation of the work we’ve been doing in our Global Community Initiative and we’re so excited about all we will be bringing to you through this channel.  Now do these three things:

Subscribe to this blog to stay up to date on all the Microsoft Community has to share
Subscribe to our Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel
Tell your friends so they can discover more with you!

Stay tuned about how you can submit YOUR content to our channels and our partnership with Microsoft Learn through our Community Skills Challenge in coming weeks!  We hope you are as excited as we are about the Community News Desk and we look forward to highlighting all that’s happening across our space.

​Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More 

By: Aasawari Navathe – Sr. Product Manager | Microsoft Intune

With the May (2405) service release of Microsoft Intune, users are now able to access the BitLocker recovery key of their Intune enrolled devices using the Intune Company Portal website. This enables users to self-resolve, rather than contacting their helpdesk, when they’re locked out of their machines and need to access their BitLocker recovery key.

What are the prerequisites?

Enrolled Windows device into Intune tenant
Ability to log into the Intune Company Portal website from a device (doesn’t need to be enrolled)
Permission to view your BitLocker recovery key (if one exists in Microsoft Entra ID)

We’re working to add the ability to view the BitLocker recovery key from the native Company Portal apps on other platforms like Apple iOS/iPadOS and macOS. The Intune Company Portal website can be used on other platforms.

How does this work?

After opening the Intune Company Portal website, navigate to the Devices node, select the enrolled Windows device, and click “Get recovery key” under Device Encryption. If there are multiple recovery keys found, click “Show recovery key” under the one with the key ID that is needed. Users may then use this recovery key to complete the recovery process on their enrolled Windows device without reaching out to the helpdesk.

Example BitLocker Recovery Key for a Windows device in the Microsoft Intune Company Portal website.

Features for BitLocker recovery key access in Microsoft Entra ID

We heard the customer feedback on what level of control IT admins need within their organization for this scenario. While Intune helps configure policy to define the escrow of BitLocker recovery keys, these keys are stored within Entra ID. There are three capabilities within Entra ID that are helpful to use in conjunction with self-service BitLocker recovery key access for users.

Tenant-wide toggle to prevent recovery key access for non-admin users

This setting is located in the Entra ID > Devices > Device settings.

The tenant-wide toggle for restricting users from their BitLocker recovery keys.

This setting determines if users can self-service to recover their BitLocker key(s). The default value is ‘No’ which allows all users to recover their BitLocker key(s). ‘Yes’ restricts non-admin users from being able to see the BitLocker key(s) for their own devices if there are any. Learn more: Manage devices in Microsoft Entra ID using the Microsoft Entra admin center.

Example scenario where a Windows recovery key could not be retrieved in the Microsoft Intune Company Portal website.

In the event that the admin has restricted recovery key access for users, users will receive the message “Recovery key could not be retrieved” in the Company Portal website.

Auditing for recovery key access

Audit Logs within the Entra ID portal show the history of activities within the tenant. Any user recovery key accesses made through the Company Portal website will be logged in Audit Logs under the Key Management category as a “Read BitLocker key” activity type. The user’s User Principal Name and additional info such as key ID is also logged.

Learn more: Learn about the audit logs in Microsoft Entra ID.


Entra Conditional Access policy requiring a compliant device to access BitLocker Recovery Key

With Conditional Access policy (CA), you can restrict the access to certain corporate resources if a device is not compliant with the “Require compliant device” setting. If this is set up within your organization, and a device fails to meet the Compliance requirements configured in the Intune Compliance policy, that device cannot be used to access the BitLocker Recovery Key as it is considered a corporate resource which is access controlled by CA.

In this case, you may see an error like below which suggests using a compliant device for recovery key access.

With the 2405 release, get started on this new capability for user self-service BitLocker recovery key access with the Intune Company Portal website!

Let us know your thoughts or if you have any questions, by leaving a comment below or reach out to us on X @IntuneSuppTeam.

​Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More 

 What is Azure Cosmos Database

It’s a fully managed, distributed NOSQL & relational database.  

Topics to be covered  

NoSQL Vs Relational Databases 
What is Azure Cosmos DB 
Azure cosmos DB Architecture 

Azure Cosmos Db Components 
Multi-model (APIs) 
Partitions 
Request Units 

Azure cosmos DB Access Methods 
Scenario: Event Database 
Creating Resources using Azure cosmos DB for NoSQL 

What is a NoSQL Database? 

NoSQL, standing for “Not only SQL,”. It’s a highly scalable storage mechanism for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.  

What is a Relational Database?  

A relational database is a way of storing and organizing data that emphasizes precision and interconnection. It uses a structured table with predefined schemas to store data. 

Structural Difference

Relational Vs NoSQL 

What Is Azure Cosmos DB? 

Simply it’s Microsoft’s premium NoSQL database service. 

Key Benefits 

Fully-managed Service – Focus on your app, and let Microsoft handle the rest. 
No Schema – NoSQL, no schema, no problem. 
No Index Management – All data is automatically indexed. 
Multi-Model – It helps you cover a variety of databases by providing APIs to interact with.

Cosmos DB for NoSQL API – It’s the default API which provides support for querying items in an SQL style. It also supports ACID transactions, stored procedures and triggers. 
Table API – stores simple key-value data. This is geared towards users of Azure Table storage to use this API as a premium feature. 
Apache Gremlin API – It’s for working with graph databases. 
Apache Cassandra API – it’s a wide-column store database, well known for distributing petabytes of data with high reliability and performance. 
MongoDB API – Document database built on MongoDB.  

Global Distribution – Azure is in more than 60+ Regions and 140+ Countries, in all these regions and countries azure cosmos DB is available. This is not the case for all other services offered in Azure. 
Guaranteed Performance and Availability – Azure cosmos DB provides 99.99 % Service Level Agreement (SLA) for throughput, consistency, availability and latency.  
Elastically scalable – You can achieve this by 

Provisioned – you specify what you service will scale up to. 
Autoscale – The service will scale automatically according to the workloads. 

Azure Cosmos DB Architecture 

What Are Azure Cosmos Components 

Database Account – Top-level resource that determines the public name and API. 
Database – Namespace for your containers. Manage users & permissions 
Container – A collection of items (similar to a table). Your Api choice will manifest various forms of our container, ie table, collection, graph, etc. 
Item – Atomic data structure of a container ie document, row, node, edge 

How is multi-model possible? 

The database engine of Azure Cosmos is cable of efficiently translating and projection the data models onto the Atomic-Record-sequence based data (ARS) model. 

By utilizing the ARS abstraction layer Cosmos Db can offer various popular data models and translate them back to ARS. This all happens under the same database engine efficiently at a global scale. 

Available APIS 

Partitions 

These are the chunks in which your data is stored. These are the fundamental units of scalability and distribution. 

Logical – This is dividing each partition based on a partition key of your choice. 

Physical – Physical storage of your data, with one or more logical partitions mapped to it. Azure will map the logical partitions to the physical partitions for you. As you increase physical throughput, azure will automatically create new physical partitions and remap the logical ones as it needs in order to satisfy those requests. 

Partitions: Tips to keep in mind 

Partition key will affect the database performance and ability to scale. 
Avoid hot partitions – (partitions which are not evenly distributed) by choosing keys with high cardinality and distinctness over time. In our example above, using a serial number of the phone is unique hence creating an even distributed partition. Model is not a great key to use in the end because it will cause all items to be in one partition instead of being evenly distributed. 
Hot partitions result in rate limiting and inefficient use of the throughput that you’ve provisioned as well as potentially higher costs. 
Microsoft Transparently handles physical distribution – your work is to choose a good partition key that is good for your application and data also the throughput and storage associated with it. 

Request Units  

Request units normalize database operation costs and become a uniform currency for Azure Cosmos DB throughput. Query operation requires more RU/s than the rest because we are using more system resources to perform a query operation. 

Flavors for Provisioning RUs 

Provisioned – in this case, you know what you want and just provision it. You will get dependable billing because you know how many Rus you’re going to be billed for. Main fall back is hitting rate limits 
Auto scale – It lets you set certain parameters and the system will scale up and down the RUs needed as necessary should you hit a higher peak of work. 
Serverless – Pay only for what you consume. This option frees you from the need to pick specific parameters like auto scale or be locked into a specific one via provisioned option. 

Planning Your Request Units 

Two granularities – Provisioning your throughput at the database or container level or both. 

Database level – The throughput you choose will be shared among all containers under that database. 
Container Level – you have a specific throughput to a certain container. 

Billing Hourly – No matter which option method you use, you’ll be billed for the highest RU of the hour. 

Azure Cosmos DB Access Methods 

Data Explorer – A graphical data utility built straight into the Azure Portal 
SDK – use your favorite language to consume Azure Cosmos DB 

.Net 
Java 
Spring data 
Node.js 
Python 
Go 

Rest APIs –manage data using HTTPS request 

Creating Resources in the Azure Portal 

Let’s Create Account 

Search for Azure Cosmos DB 

Create Azure Cosmos DB Account 

Choose the API according to your use case. I’ll go with NoSQL option for this demo. 

Under create Azure cosmos DB Account page 

Choose your subscription. 
Choose or create a resource group. 
Create the account name (make it unique). 
Choose the availability zone if you want to improve your apps availability and resilient. 
Choose the location of your DB according to the available data centers. 
Capacity Mode enables you to define the throughput. The Provisioned option also comes with a free tier option. 

Select Geo-Redundancy will enable your database to be available to the paired region ie East US and West Us or South Africa North and South Africa West. For this demo ‘South Africa West’ is not included in my subscription 
Multi-region writes capability allows you to take advantage of the provisioned throughput for your databases and containers across the globe. 

Under networking, your Azure Cosmos DB account either publicly, via public IP addresses or service endpoints, or privately, using a private endpoint. Choose according to your use case. 
Connection Security Settings – I will go with TLS 1.2 

Backup policy defines the way your backup will occur.  

Periodic lets you define the interval (minutes or hours) and backup retention (How long you would like your backups to be saved) – in hours or days and Backup storage redundancy in Geo, Zone or Local. 
Continuous (7 days) – Provides backup window of 7 days / 168 hours and you can restore to any point of time within the window. This mode is available for free. 
Continuous (30 days) – Provides a backup window of 30 days / 720 hours and you can restore to any point of time within the window. This mode has cost impact. 

Data Encryption – I will let Microsoft encrypt my account using service-managed keys. Feel free to use your customer-managed key if you have any. 

I don’t need to create a tag for now, just review and create. 

Let’s Create Event Database Using the Scenario below 

For our scenario, we need to store data from sports events (e.g., marathon, triathlon, cycling, etc.). Users should be able to select an event and view a leaderboard. The amount of data that will be stored is estimated at 100 GB. 

The schema of the data is different for various events and likely to change. As a result, this requires the database to be schema-agnostic and therefore we decided to use Azure Cosmos DB  as our database. 

Identify access patterns 

To design an efficient data model it is important to understand how the client application will interact with Azure Cosmos DB. The most important questions are: 

Is the access pattern more read-heavy or write-heavy? 
What are the main queries? 
What is the expected document size? 

If the access pattern is read-heavy you want to choose a partition key that appears frequently as a filter in your queries. Queries can be efficiently routed to only the relevant physical partitions by including the partition key in the filter predicate. 

When the access pattern is write-heavy you might want to choose item ID as the partition key. Item ID does a great job with evenly balancing partitioned throughput (RUs) and data storage since it’s a unique value. For more information, see Partitioning and horizontal scaling in Azure Cosmos DB | Microsoft Docs 

Finally, we need to understand the document size. 1 kb documents are very efficient in Azure Cosmos DB. To understand the impact of large documents on RU utilization see the capacity calculator and change the item size to a larger value. As a starting point you should start with only one container and embed all values of an entity in a single JSON document. This provides the best reading performance. However, if your document size is unpredictable and can grow to hundreds of kilobytes you might want to split these in different documents within the same container. For more information, see Modeling data in Azure Cosmos DB – Azure Cosmos DB | Microsoft Docs. 

Sample document structure 

{

“eventId”: “unique_event_id”,

“eventName”: “Marathon”,

“eventDate”: “2024-05-20”,

“participants”: [

{

“participantId”: “participant1”,

“name”: “Alice”,

“score”: 1200

},

{

“participantId”: “participant2”,

“name”: “Bob”,

“score”: 1100

}

// … more participants

]

}

The eventId serves as the unique identifier for each event. 

Create Container 

Create a new container 
Give it a unique database id 
Select autoscale – for automatic throughput else select manual which can be useful for use for a single container with a predictable throughput for a container. The importance of autoscale is that it doesn’t cause any downtime. For more information, see How to choose between manual and autoscale on Azure Cosmos DB. 
At the container level the partition key is specified, which in our case is /eventId 

Add a document 

Click data explorer 
Click on Events 
Expand Events2024 then items 
Click New item 
Let’s replace the default Json object with our data 

Save a single document 

Add the document 
save 

Save a many document 

Let’s say you have you have your data saved on a JSON file, like the one below, follow below steps to insert that data. 

[
{
“eventId”: “event_1”,
“eventName”: “Coding Competition”,
“eventDate”: “2024-05-21”,
“participants”: [
{
“participantId”: “p1”,
“name”: “John”,
“score”: 980
},
{
“participantId”: “p2”,
“name”: “Jane”,
“score”: 890
},
{
“participantId”: “p3”,
“name”: “Mike”,
“score”: 1020
}
]
},
{
“eventId”: “event_2”,
“eventName”: “CodeFest”,
“eventDate”: “2024-06-15”,
“participants”: [
{
“participantId”: “p4”,
“name”: “Lily”,
“score”: 950
},
{
“participantId”: “p5”,
“name”: “Alex”,
“score”: 1120
}
]
},
{
“eventId”: “event_3”,
“eventName”: “Hackathon Challenge”,
“eventDate”: “2024-07-10”,
“participants”: [
{
“participantId”: “p6”,
“name”: “Sarah”,
“score”: 1180
},
{
“participantId”: “p7”,
“name”: “Kevin”,
“score”: 1035
}
]
},
{
“eventId”: “event_4”,
“eventName”: “Byte Battle”,
“eventDate”: “2024-08-05”,
“participants”: [
{
“participantId”: “p8”,
“name”: “Olivia”,
“score”: 1005
},
{
“participantId”: “p9”,
“name”: “Ethan”,
“score”: 1150
}
]
},
{
“eventId”: “event_5”,
“eventName”: “Code Warriors Championship”,
“eventDate”: “2024-09-20”,
“participants”: [
{
“participantId”: “p10”,
“name”: “Ava”,
“score”: 1085
},
{
“participantId”: “p11”,
“name”: “Noah”,
“score”: 1070
}
]
}
]

Click Upload item 
Locate the file you want to upload from the file explorer then click upload. 

A successful upload will show you the number of records uploaded. 

Let’s Query our Database 

Click on New SQL Query 
Write your SQL query 
Run the query 
View our results – as you can see our object has some meta data appended to it. 

More Queries 

Query 1: View Top Ranked Participants for a Selected Event: 

Query 2: View All Events for a Selected Year a Person Has Participated In: 

Query 3: View All Registered Participants per Event: 

Query 4: View Total Score for a Single Participant per Event: 

You can also check the cost of the query operation consumed 2.9 RUs 

Read More 

Databases, containers, and items in Azure Cosmos DB 
Queries in Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL 
How to model and partition data on Azure Cosmos DB using a real-world example 
Implement a data modeling and partitioning strategy for Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL 
Data modeling in Azure Cosmos DB 
Server-side programing 
Migrate data to Azure Cosmos DB using the desktop data migration tool 

​Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More 

Hi all, I am configuring the new multitenant collaboration now that it’s out of preview.

When I last was testing it in preview, when I clicked “Share users” I was able to select an Entra ID group of users to share. Now the behaviour is different, it’s only allowing me to select users’, not groups. Am I missing something obvious here? 

Thanks!

​Hi all, I am configuring the new multitenant collaboration now that it’s out of preview.When I last was testing it in preview, when I clicked “Share users” I was able to select an Entra ID group of users to share. Now the behaviour is different, it’s only allowing me to select users’, not groups. Am I missing something obvious here?   Thanks!  Read More

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