Microsoft 365 offers the cloud-backed apps, security, and storage that customers worldwide rely on to achieve more in a connected world – and lays a foundation for leveraging generative AI to go even further. However, we know that some customers have niche yet important scenarios that require a truly long-term servicing channel: regulated devices that cannot accept feature updates for years at a time, process control devices on the manufacturing floor that are not connected to the internet, and specialty systems like medical testing equipment that run embedded apps that must stay locked in time. For these special cases, Microsoft continues to offer and support the Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC). Today we are pleased to announce that the commercial preview of the next Office LTSC release – Office LTSC 2024 – will begin next month, with general availability to follow later this year.  

About this release

Like earlier perpetual versions of Office, Office LTSC 2024 will include only a subset of the value found in Microsoft 365 Apps, building on the features included in past releases. New features for Office LTSC 2024 include: new meeting creation options and search enhancements in Outlook, dozens of new Excel features and functions including Dynamic Charts and Arrays; and improved performance, security, and accessibility.  Office LTSC 2024 will not ship with Microsoft Publisher, which is being retired, or with the Microsoft Teams app, which is available to download separately.

While Office LTSC 2024 offers many significant improvements over the previous Office LTSC release, as an on-premises product it will not offer the cloud-based capabilities of Microsoft 365 Apps, like real-time collaboration; AI-driven automation in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; or cloud-backed security and compliance capabilities that give added confidence in a hybrid world. And with device-based licensing and extended offline access, Microsoft 365 offers deployment options for scenarios like computer labs and submarines that require something other than a user-based, always-online solution. Microsoft 365 (or Office 365) is also required to subscribe to Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365; as a disconnected product, Office LTSC does not qualify.

As with previous releases, Office LTSC 2024 will still be a device-based “perpetual” license, supported for five years under the Fixed Lifecycle Policy, in parallel with Windows 11 LTSC, which will also launch later this year. And because we know that many customers deploy Office LTSC on only a subset of their devices, we will continue to support the deployment of both Office LTSC and Microsoft 365 Apps to different machines within the same organization using a common set of deployment tools.

Office LTSC is a specialty product that Microsoft has committed to maintaining for use in exceptional circumstances, and the 2024 release provides substantial new feature value for those scenarios. To support continued innovation in this niche space, Microsoft will increase the price of Office LTSC Professional Plus, Office LTSC Standard, Office LTSC Embedded, and the individual apps by up to 10% at the time of general availability. And, because we are asked at the time of release if there will be another one, I can confirm our commitment to another release in the future.

We will provide additional information about the next version of on-premises Visio and Project in the coming months.

Office 2024 for consumers

We are also planning to release a new version of on-premises Office for consumers later this year: Office 2024. Office 2024 will also be supported for five years with the traditional “one-time purchase” model. We do not plan to change the price for these products at the time of the release. We will announce more details about new features included in Office 2024 closer to general availability.  

Embracing the future of work

The future of work in an AI-powered world is on the cloud. In most customer scenarios, Microsoft 365 offers the most secure, productive, and cost-effective solution, and positions customers to unlock the transformative power of AI with Microsoft Copilot. Especially as we approach the end of support for Office 2016 and Office 2019 in October 2025, we encourage customers still using these solutions to transition to a cloud subscription that suits their needs as a small business or a larger organization. And for scenarios where that is not possible – where a disconnected, locked-in-time solution is required – this new release reflects our commitment to supporting that need.

FAQ

Q: Will the next version of Office have a Mac version?

A: Yes, the next version of Office will have both Windows and Mac versions for both commercial and consumer.

Q: Will the next version of Office be supported on Windows 10?

A: Yes, Office LTSC 2024 will be supported on Windows 10 and Windows 10 LTSC devices (with the exception of Arm devices, which will require Windows 11).

Q: Will the next version support both 32- and 64-bit?

A: Yes, the next version of Office will ship both 32-and 64-bit versions.

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We recently identified an issue where users with iOS/iPadOS devices enrolling with Automated Device Enrollment (ADE) are unable to sign in to the Intune Company Portal app for iOS/iPadOS. Instead, they’re incorrectly prompted to navigate to the Intune Company Portal website to enroll their device, and they are unable to complete enrollment. This issue occurs for newly enrolled ADE users that are targeted with an “Account driven user enrollment” or “Web based device enrollment” enrollment profile and just in time (JIT) registration has not been set up.

While we’re actively working on resolving this issue, we always recommend organizations using iOS/iPadOS ADE to have JIT registration set up for their devices for the best and most secure user experience. For more information review: Set up just in time registration.

Stay tuned to this blog for updates on the fix! If you have any questions, leave a comment below or reach out to us on X @IntuneSuppTeam.

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This is your chance to be recognized as part of the Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards! Nominate before the April 3 deadline.

Celebrated annually, these awards recognize the incredible impact that Microsoft partners are delivering to customers and celebrate the outstanding successes and innovations across Solution Areas, industries, and key areas of impact, with a focus on strategic initiatives and technologies. Partners of all types, sizes, and geographies are encouraged to self-nominate. This is an opportunity for partners to be recognized on a global scale for their innovative solutions built using Microsoft technologies.

In addition to recognizing partners for the impact in our award categories, we also recognize partners from over 100 countries/regions around the world as part of the Country/Region Partner of the Year Awards. In 2024, we’re excited to offer additional opportunities to recognize partner impact through new awards – read our blog to learn more and download the official guidelines for specific eligibility requirements.

Find resources on how to write a great entry, FAQs and more on our the Partner of the Year Awards website.

Nominate here!

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By Julie Sanford, Vice President, Partner GTM, Programs & Experiences

As malicious actors continue to intensify their use of AI, security professionals must also incorporate AI into their solutions to counter the increasing threat. To support our partners and customers in securing their businesses, we are excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft Copilot for Security in all commerce channels, including CSP, on April 1, 2024. This new Copilot provides Microsoft partners with a powerful resource to safeguard their organizations, while improving the security services and solutions they offer. 

Copilot for Security is the first generative AI security product designed to defend organizations at the speed and scale of AI. This announcement continues our AI momentum following the recent general availability of Copilot for Microsoft 365, Copilot for Finance, Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and Copilot for the education market. 

We have also added new resources for Copilot for Microsoft 365 ready to help you deliver more value, adoption, and seat growth with customers. Read our blog for these updates. 

Copilot for Security is designed to complement, rather than replace human skills. Our partners bring their experience, skills, and established methods for dealing with vulnerabilities. This new tool enables them to apply their expertise to services and offerings that AI solutions without human insights cannot match.  

Continue reading here

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What’s new in Defender: How Copilot for Security can transform your SOC

Today at Secure, we announced that Microsoft Copilot for Security will be generally available on April 1.  Copilot equips security teams with purpose-built capabilities at every stage of the security lifecycle, embedded right into the unified security operations platform in the Defender portal. Early users of Copilot for Security have already seen significant measurable results when integrated in their SOC, transforming their operations and boosting their defense and posture against both ongoing and emerging threats. Read on to learn about the capabilities to GA on 4/1 embedded in the Defender portal for Defender XDR and Microsoft Sentinel data and how early access customers are already enjoying its value.

Prevent breaches with dynamic threat insight

Copilot for Security leverages the rich portfolio of Microsoft Security products to produce enriched insights for security analysts in the context of their workflow. At GA, you will be able to use Copilot for Security with Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence and Threat Analytics in the Defender portal to tap into high-fidelity threat intelligence on threat actors, tooling and infrastructure and easily discover and summarize recommendations specific to your environment’s risk profile, all using natural language. These insights can help security teams improve their security posture by prioritizing threats and managing exposures proactively against adversaries, keeping their organizations protected from potential breaches.

Identify and prioritize with built-in context

“Copilot for Security is allowing us to re-envision security operations. It will be critical in helping us close the talent gap.” Greg Petersen Sr. Director – Security Technology & Operations, Avanade 

Automation of common manual tasks with Copilot frees up analyst time and allows them to focus on more complex and urgent demands. For example, analysts need to understand the attack story and impact to determine next steps, and this often requires time and effort to collect and understand all of the relevant details. To make this task faster and easier, Copilot’s incident summaries, with AI-powered data processing and contextualization, provides this content readily available, saving significant triage time. Complimenting Microsoft Defender XDR’s unique ability to correlate incidents from a variety of workloads, Copilot’s incident summary provides the attack story and potential impact directly in the incident page. At GA, asset summaries become available for use in investigation. The first of these is a device summary, where Copilot provides highlights about the device based on all cross-workload information available in Defender XDR, as well as other device data integrated in from Intune. This further improves efficiency during triage and enables analysts to more quickly assess and prioritize incidents, leading to faster response.

As part of incident investigation and response, analysts often reach out to employees to get more information about unusual activity on their devices or to communicate about an incident or a limitation in access. New at GA, Copilot now makes this faster by generating tailored messages with all the details an employee would need and enabling analysts to send those messages through Microsoft Teams or Outlook – directly from the portal. Copilot links directly to many tasks that would normally require going to another view or product – another example of added efficiency for security teams.

During Early access, 97%* of security professionals reported they would make consistent use of Copilot capabilities in their day-to-day workflows.

Accelerate full resolution for every incident

“Copilot for Security can democratize security to the end user. It is no longer just with the subject matter expert. The average analyst training time used to be a couple of months, and that can reduce drastically if you’re using Copilot.”  Chandan Pani, Chief Information Security Officer, LTIMindtree 

During an incident, every second counts. With additional Copilot capabilities, like guided response and automated incident reports, analysts of all levels can move an average of 22% faster* and accelerate time to resolution.

Guided response, provided by Copilot during incident investigation and report in the Defender portal, helps analysts determine what to do next, based on the specific incident at hand.

Example recommendations include:

Triaging an incident with a recommended classification and threat category
Steps to take to contain an incident, such as suspending a compromised account
Investigation actions, such as finding all emails that were part of a phishing campaign
How to remediate an incident, such as resetting a user’s password

Action recommendations are provided with links to the next steps, which can be taken directly in the Copilot window, reducing time spent switching views.

After successfully closing out an incident, analysts often spend time drafting reports for peers and leadership to provide a summary of the attack and remediation steps taken. Using Copilot, an incident report is easily generated with the click of a button, instantly delivering a high-quality summary ready to share or save for documentation. For GA, exporting the report to a detailed formatted PDF is now available, making for a great executive-shareable report.

Elevate analysts with intelligent assistance

“Copilot for Security allows us to quickly analyze Python and PowerShell scripts. This means that staff with less experience can quickly analyze scripts, saving valuable time in the cybersecurity area where time is so important.”  Mark Marshall, Assistant Chief Information Officer , Peel District School Board 

Security teams are made up of individuals with a variety of different skillsets and levels of experience, and as demands and requirements change, up-leveling becomes critical. It can take time and expertise to learn how to effectively manage hunting jobs or analyze malicious scripts, which many organizations simply don’t have. Copilot makes expert tasks significantly simpler, reducing the time spent onboarding new recruits and training analysts while driving faster results.

For example, Copilot assists less experienced analysts with hunting during an investigation in the Defender Portal. An analyst can now create KQL queries simply using natural language – for example just asking for “all devices that logged on in the last hour”.  The user can then choose to run the generated query or have Copilot execute them automatically. Copilot can also recommend the best filters to apply after results are surfaced or suggest common next steps. Security teams see significant benefits with this as more senior analysts are now able to delegate threat hunting projects to newer or less experienced employees.

Another task commonly reserved to more experienced analysts is reverse engineering PowerShell, Python or other scripts, often used in HumOR and other attacks, and not every team even has this  expertise. Copilot’s script analysis feature gives security teams the ability to examine these scripts easily, without needing any prior knowledge of how to do so. This feature is also into the investigation process with a button prompting a user to “analyze with Copilot” anytime an alert contains a script. The resulting analysis is a line-by-line explanation of what the script is trying to do, with excerpts from the script for each explained section. Wit this, an analyst can quickly tell if a script is potentially harmful or not. New at GA, these capabilities extend to suspicious file analysis as well (executable or other), delivering details about the file’s internal characteristics and behavior and an easy way to assess maliciousness.

Interested in getting started with Copilot for Security?

The pace of innovation in AI is moving at lightning speed and we expect many more security teams to see significant benefits of the technology with the general availability of Copilot for Security. To learn more about Microsoft Copilot for Security, click here  or contact your Microsoft sales representative.

Learn more about Copilot skills for Defender XDR announced at early access : Operationalizing Microsoft Security Copilot to Reinvent SOC Productivity

*Microsoft Copilot for Security randomized controlled trial (RCT) with experienced security analysts conducted by Microsoft Office of the Chief Economist, January 2024.

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General Availability (GA): Azure Container Apps Managed Certificates!

Managed Certificates on Azure Container Apps will allow you to create certificates free of charge for custom domains added to your container app. The service will also manage the life cycle of these certificates and auto-renew them when they’re close to expiring.

To learn more, see Azure Container Apps managed certificate documentation.

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Sync Up Episode 9 is now available on all your favorite podcast apps! This month, Arvind Mishra and I are talking with Liz Scoble and Libby McCormick about the power of Create.Microsoft.com and how we’re bringing that power into the OneDrive experience! Along the way, we learn a little more about ourselves, about TPS reports, and much more!

Show: https://aka.ms/SyncUp | Apple Podcasts: https://aka.ms/SyncUp/Apple | Spotify: https://aka.ms/SyncUp/Spotify | RSS: https://aka.ms/SyncUp/RSS

As always, we hope you enjoyed this episode! Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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​AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon (using the same email server) are now requiring that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC be enabled for emails sent to those addresses. I saw a report that Google will soon require this too. My problem is that to enable DKIM, I have to create 2 CNAME records. I have created these records on 4 accounts on 4 different providers. I have another account that actually works, but DKIM was enabled even without the CNAMES. I also passed the DMARC check on that account, so I know that I have managed to put in the correct entries in the CNAME records. But, I still get the error message about needing the CNAME records before enabling DKIM. Another curiosity is that on none of my accounts can I detect CNAME records, even CNAMEs that were already there? What do I have to do to enable DKIM on these accounts (a total of 6 accounts on 4 different hosts)?  Read More

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Hello, 

We have been trying for many months now to publish our PowerApps canvas apps as a SaaS offer, thereby allowing us to have transactable, licensed customers. 

Through a lot of effort, we managed to get some support where we were told quite vaguely how to achieve this, but without any meaningful guidance we are struggling as we are a small ISV with expertise in our actual business, and Power Platform. We are not, however, experts in SQL (that’s being generous) or in creating APIs which seem to be a requirement to keep track of user licenses and feeding the data to our canvas app. 

If anyone here has any info on this, or how they might have achieved it themselves it would be massively appreciated, as we can’t seem to get there by ourselves and MS support is very difficult to find. 

It does feel as though the app development part is so much simpler than getting it onto the marketplace, which is surely the wrong way round. 

Thank you,

Craig 

​Hello, We have been trying for many months now to publish our PowerApps canvas apps as a SaaS offer, thereby allowing us to have transactable, licensed customers.  Through a lot of effort, we managed to get some support where we were told quite vaguely how to achieve this, but without any meaningful guidance we are struggling as we are a small ISV with expertise in our actual business, and Power Platform. We are not, however, experts in SQL (that’s being generous) or in creating APIs which seem to be a requirement to keep track of user licenses and feeding the data to our canvas app.  If anyone here has any info on this, or how they might have achieved it themselves it would be massively appreciated, as we can’t seem to get there by ourselves and MS support is very difficult to find.  It does feel as though the app development part is so much simpler than getting it onto the marketplace, which is surely the wrong way round.  Thank you,Craig   Read More

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Hello everyone!

I just won a PRO ticket for the Paris RAISE Summit 2024.
The ticket price on the official website is €799, and I want to sell it for half price.
Can you please help me with where I can sell it, or maybe someone from here wants to buy it?

​Hello everyone!I just won a PRO ticket for the Paris RAISE Summit 2024.The ticket price on the official website is €799, and I want to sell it for half price.Can you please help me with where I can sell it, or maybe someone from here wants to buy it?  Read More

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