Microsoft Support & Discussions

Azure API Meets Language Learning: The Story of “TalkwithMe” Inspiration The genesis of our AI language learning product is quite a story — It all started during a discussion about the lack of customizable learning tools for reading practice. My friend Fan (Benjamin) Wang, who is an Online Course Designer & Technical Writer at Shanbay China, then shared his ideas of how to create one with Azure API, and we thought it would be worthwhile to turn the prototype into a product. So I formed the team with Yanxin (Jeff) Luo(Embedded Software Engineer), Yankun (Alex) Meng(Duke CS & ECE), and Vivian Yang(Duke Fuqua Quantitative Management) in Duke Generativ…

We’re thrilled to share that the unified APIs that are part of the Microsoft Graph are now generally available! These APIs come with a single endpoint, permissions, auth model, and access token. The Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence (Defender TI) API for Incidents, Alerts, and Hunting allows organizations to query Defender TI data to operationalize intelligence gleaned from threat actors, tools, and vulnerabilities. Security teams can enrich their understanding of entities inside security incidents, automate triage efforts, and integrate with a broad ecosystem of security tools, including Microsoft Sentinel. Visit the official documentation> Use Case…

[ATTACH=full]56131[/ATTACH] Microsoft Security Copilot and NIST 800-171 It is with bated breath that we await the publication of a Proposed Rule and final draft of Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) 2.0. Simultaneously, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) just released the final draft of NIST Special Publication 800-171 Revision 3 (NIST 800-171r3) and initial draft of NIST 800-171Ar3, the assessment requirements for NIST 800-171r3. These publications are important because one of the primary requirements for CMMC is that organizations will need to implement most, if not all, of NIST 800-171r3’s controls for Level 2 certificati…

Microsoft Intune ended support for the on-premises Intune Exchange connector in July 2020, except for customers that were actively using it at the time. We’ll be ending support for all customers and turning it off on January 15, 2024. If you’re using the on-premises Intune Exchange connector, you’ll have received a notice in the Message center (MC673699) and you'll need to use a different method to enable Conditional Access for Exchange. We recommend taking one of the following actions: Migrate your Exchange mailboxes to Exchange Online as described in Move mailboxes between on-premises and Exchange Online organizations in hybrid deployments Set up hybrid mode…

You will soon be able to automatically deploy optional Windows updates and/or enable users in your organization to get them on Windows 10 just like on Windows 11! This policy will be available for Windows Update for Business customers as part of the November 2023 optional update. Optional updates are part of regular device maintenance, including non-security updates (see Windows monthly updates explained). With the “Enable optional updates” policy, you can control the timing and the specifics of different types of optional updates. If you enable this policy, you can select how optional updates are made available to users within your organization. Options include: …

Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC) is a technology available to use with multiple modern management solutions on Windows 10 and Windows 11 platforms, as well as on Windows Server 2016 and later. Note: You’ll soon find it under its new name, App Control for Business. Our earlier Skilling snack: Windows application security gave you a taste for what’s out there, and today you get to try the house special. [ATTACH=full]56120[/ATTACH] Time to learn: 78 minutes [ATTACH=full]56121[/ATTACH]READ Application Control for Windows Explore the motivation for application control and the solutions available in Windows. What’s the difference between Windows D…

Microsoft Purview now provides an endpoint that supports collecting lineage from Apache Airflow via integration with OpenLineage, an open framework for data lineage collection and analysis. This capability is now in public preview. This endpoint accepts OpenLineage payloads (assets & lineage) in the Data Map. The capability is available via both UX and API. [ATTACH=full]56119[/ATTACH] Teams across Microsoft and OpenLineage community have partnered closely on this effort. The work has also laid the foundation to integrate asset and lineage information from more data sources that support OpenLineage (such as Spark, dbt etc.). We would like to thank the Op…

Previously in the blog post Bringing ML assets to the Microsoft Purview Data Map we announced the public preview of Azure Machine Learning assets in Microsoft Purview. With the integration, AI/ML and data professionals can benefit from data discovery, lineage tracking and responsible AI governance in the whole MLOps lifecycle. The integration is only available for the enterprise version of Microsoft Purview. Source registration You can find a new source type named “Azure Machine Learning” in Microsoft Purview Data Map to register your Azure Machine Learning workspace. After the registration, the metadata from Azure Machine Learning resources will be automaticall…

Microsoft Purview enables organizations to easily create a comprehensive, up-to-date map of their data landscape across on-premises, multi-cloud, and SaaS applications with automated data discovery. Purview keeps expanding the data system coverage to meet our customers’ diverse needs. We are glad to announce the latest integration with Amazon Redshift and Tableau. Amazon Redshift | Public Preview Microsoft Purview now supports scanning Amazon Redshift to extract metadata including server, databases, schemas, tables/views and their columns, stored procedures, and functions. To try it out, register an Amazon Redshift source under data map, and set up a scan. Learn…

Microsoft Purview keeps strengthening its Snowflake integration to help you enrich your data map with metadata from Snowflake. We are glad to share some new features available in Snowflake scan. When setting up a scan for Snowflake source, you can now: Choose different flavors of integration runtime to power the scan: Default Azure integration runtime: use this when both Snowflake and Microsoft Purview allow public access. You don’t need to set up anything to use this type of fully managed runtime. Managed Virtual Network integration runtime: applicable when your Snowflake allows public access while Microsoft Purview limits access via private endpoints. You c…

We are excited to announce the public preview of Kafka Input and Output with Azure Stream Analytics! A couple of months ago, we shared with the data community our initiative to build a low-code feature that allows customers to connect directly to their Kafka clusters. Our previous announcement is here: Private Preview of Kafka Input and Output with Azure Stream Analytics - Microsoft Community Hub. Since then, we have made a couple of updates to ensure we offer the best experience to our customers. Improved Debugging: A main pain point of using Kafka is the steep learning curve. We have updated the Kafka connector to offer customers a richer debugging experien…

Managed Virtual Network (VNet) in Microsoft Purview enables the scenario when your Microsoft Purview and/or data systems restrict network access, you can run the scan on the Managed VNet Integration Runtime (IR) – a fully managed service by Purview – to securely connect to them via private endpoints. We heard your growing demand and feedback for this solution, and we’re excited to announce that the new version of Managed Virtual Network support is now available. We have built on top of the existing architecture (diagram below). There are several advantages of using the new version of Managed Virtual Network: Generally available in all Microsoft Purview s…

Microsoft Ignite is our annual flagship event for IT developers and business decision makers. Held on November 15-17, the overarching theme for this year’s Ignite is how we are working to empower our customers, partners and developers to thrive in the era of AI. The Microsoft Ignite Book of News is your guide to key news items, executive insights and announcements from this event. The interactive Table of Contents allows you to select the items you are interested in and you can find links to watch keynotes and sessions on demand. Check out The Microsoft Book of News HERE Get more details about Ignite and discover how Microsoft partners are innovating and…

Announcing public preview of Windows Admin Center v2311 Today, we are releasing our latest version of Windows Admin Center to public preview – version 2311! Thank you to our customers, partners, and fans for helping us to continue to improve and make Windows Admin Center better! In this release, we’ve made improvements to some of our most used tools, added new experiences around Azure hybrid services like Azure Arc and Azure Migrate, and updated our platform. Platform updates Azure Arc onboarding at-scale Azure Arc-enabled servers lets you manage Windows physical servers and virtual machines hosted outside of Azure, using the Azure control plan…

Introduction When you create a Kubernetes cluster using the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), you can choose between three “outbound” types to suit your application’s specific needs. However, by default with each outbound type, you will end up with a single egress “device” and a single egress IP address for your whole cluster. Problem Statement In some situations, generally in multi-tenancy clusters, you may need more than one egress IP address for your applications. You might have downstream customers that your applications need to connect to, and those customers want to whitelist your IP address. Or maybe you need to connect to a database in anoth…

Kubernetes has emerged as the leading platform for deploying containerized applications, and many organizations are turning to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to enjoy a managed and efficient container orchestration experience. Thanks to the continuous innovations driven by the Kubernetes community, it has become easier to store state within Kubernetes clusters and even run mission-critical databases within these clusters. As more businesses adopt stateful AKS clusters, it is imperative for IT administrators to implement robust data protection measures to safeguard their applications against accidental deletion, malicious actors, and ransomware attacks. In response …

Are you tired of dealing with the hassles of managing your Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) applications? Do you want to enjoy the benefits of a modern, secure, and cloud-based identity platform? If so, we have some great news for you, a new tool feature - AD FS Application Migration - is here to help! We're thrilled to announce a game-changing feature, AD FS Application Migration, that will make your life as an IT administrator much easier. We understand the complexities and challenges that come with managing your organization's applications and ensuring the security of your data. This new feature is here to simplify your journey and enhance the overa…

The priority for Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell remains to provide our customers with the most complete, secure, and easy to use set of tools to manage Azure resources. At Microsoft Ignite 2023, we are announcing it. the following new capabilities delivering on our priorities: Extending our coverage and improving how we build commands. Improving the supportability of Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell Usability improvements Extending our coverage In the past 6 months, we have added or refreshed coverage for those new or existing Azure services within 30 days of their General Availability. Services with new commands Service Name …

This article was co-authored by @aimeelittleton and @brianlehr While there are multiple methods for obtaining explicit outbound connectivity to the internet from your virtual machines on Azure, there is also one method for implicit outbound connectivity – default outbound access. When virtual machines (VMs) are created in a virtual network without any explicit outbound connectivity, they are assigned a default outbound public IP address. These IP addresses may seem convenient, but they have a number of issues and therefore are only used as a “last resort”: These implicit IPs are subject to change which can result in issues later on if any dependency is taken o…

We continue to expand the Microsoft AppSource ecosystem. For this volume, 130 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below: [ATTACH=full]56036[/ATTACH] 1Page: Transform your sales process with 1Page, the all-in-one productivity tool designed to empower sales professionals within Microsoft Teams. Access real-time insights, consolidate key data, and connect authentically with prospects and customers. Supercharge your meetings with a 1Page summary and conversation starters, minutes before every meeting. [ATTACH=full]56037[/ATTACH] 3DL: 3DL is a visual and interactive teaching and learning platform suitable f…

Easily access other Microsoft admin portals We are excited to introduce a new feature in Microsoft 365 Lighthouse that lets you quickly and securely access other Microsoft admin portals for each of your customers. Lighthouse users will benefit from our set of multi-tenant management tools and views - and can now deep dive into a particular customer with only a few clicks. One of the challenges of managing multiple customers is that Managed Service Providers (MSPs) often need to use different admin portals, such as the Microsoft 365 admin center, the Azure portal, Microsoft Intune, or Exchange, to name a few. To make this process easier, we added a new way to ac…

Announcing Azure AI Document Intelligence preview Azure AI Document Intelligence, formerly known as Form Recognizer, is an AI service for all your document understanding needs. With the latest update Azure AI Document Intelligence is previewing new features such as markdown output for semantic chunking in the RAG pattern with large language models, language expansion, field expansion and new prebuilt models. We are also happy to announce structure analysis updates, quality improvements to tables, reading order and section headings. [ATTACH=full]56024[/ATTACH] Azure AI Document Intelligence has three categories of models, general extraction models wh…

Are you interested in learning how to apply AI to solve real-world problems? In this Learn Live series you’ll get to see e-2-e projects that address different domains and scenarios with Azure AI, GitHub and other Microsoft tools. You will also get to interact with experts and ask questions along the way. Don't miss this opportunity to learn, create, and have fun with AI! What is AI Kick-off Challenge Projects? AI kick-off projects is a collection of AI-focused projects available on the Microsoft Learn platform challenging the learner to build innovative solutions with cutting-edge AI technologies for a real-world scenario, starting from the project specificati…

We’re excited to announce that System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) enabled by Azure Arc is now generally available to manage SCVMM resources in Azure. With SCVMM enabled by Azure Arc, you can: Enable Azure services at scale to govern, protect, configure, and monitor your SCVMM VMs Procure Extended Security Updates (ESUs) for your Windows Server 2012 and 2012R2 machines running on SCVMM managed estate Discover and onboard existing SCVMM managed VMs to Azure. Browse your SCVMM resources (VMs, templates, VM networks, and storage) in Azure, providing you with a single pane view for your infrastructure across both environments. Empower developers and …

The SaaS Opportunity SaaS model is taking cloud application business by the storm and, as of 2023, the SaaS industry is worth approximately $195 billions and growing (Gartner). Companies are less and less developing in-house solutions and are instead more relying on 3rd party SaaS solutions for larger chunks of their application portfolios, from HR to Finance to Production and procurement. It’s expected that by 2025, 85% of business apps will be SaaS-based (BetterCloud), and SaaS business it is expected to grow dramatically over the next years driven by both large established players and new growing startups. The multi-tenancy challenge Multi-tena…