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[ATTACH=full]55883[/ATTACH] Happy Ignite '23, everyone! This feed will be your home for all things Microsoft Ignite 2023! We will be continuously updating this page throughout the day and the rest of the week with the latest Ignite announcements and blogs from across the MTC. Articles will be added to the feed below in alphabetical order by product line, so you can easily find the topics that are most relevant to your interests. There will also be a '(CP)' indicator that lets you know if an announcement contains updates related to Microsoft Copilot. We hope you have an amazing Ignite, and we can't wait to show you what's next for Microsoft! …

Renee Noble and Cynthia Zanoni are going LIVE as part of Microsoft Ignite 2023 at 4pm PT on Thursday, November 16th. Here’s everything you need during or after their session - Learn Live: Build a minigame console app with GitHub Copilot! In this Learn Live session, they’ll be going through Microsoft Learn’s Challenge project - Build a minigame with GitHub Copilot and Python. This session is about using the power of GitHub Copilot to help you quickly create a well-known game, “Scissors, Paper, Rock!” (or whatever order you list them in your region!). We’ll be looking at how GitHub Copilot can quickly fill out our coding logic, autocomplete our code ideas, and l…

Data scientists and AI engineers love to work with Jupyter Notebooks because they make so much easier to look at the result of each and every data exploration step or data modeling experiment and make decisions accordingly. However, Jupyter notebooks are not immune to errors, and sometimes understanding error messages - in particular if you aren’t a native English speaker or you are a beginner - and troubleshooting code might be painful and time-consuming. In this video below I share some tips and tricks on how to leverage VSCode and GitHub Copilot to increase your productivity, making it easier to analyze and fix the most common Python errors in Jupyter notebooks. …

Introduction This article introduces an approach to connect IPv6 devices to Azure IoT Hub. Azure IoT Hub Azure IoT Hub is a crucial component in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, designed to facilitate seamless communication between IoT devices and the cloud. It plays an indispensable role in connecting, monitoring, and managing large networks of IoT devices, making it a cornerstone for businesses across various industries. Azure IoT Hub not only ensures secure and reliable device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device communication but also provides features like device provisioning, scalability, and integration with Azure services, making it a fundament…

[ATTACH=full]55870[/ATTACH] Background With the recent announcement at GitHub Universe of the ability to interact with Copilot on public repositories this got me thinking how this capability could be used with how we interact with Azure documentation. Azure docs are hosted in a public repository. This means that in theory we should be able to scope our Copilot interactions with Azure Docs. Prerequisites In order to use Copilot in the browser you need to have an active Copilot license or be part of an organization where it is enabled. If you aren't sure you can confirm by clicking your profile picture in the top right and select Copilot. If you…

Sales Copilot recently introduced the ability for Microsoft partners building applications for sales teams to extend Sales Copilot. We are thrilled to announce the preview of Sales Copilot’s integration of DocuSign, a Microsoft partner and an established leader in the eSignature and agreement lifecycle management space. With the integration of Sales Copilot and DocuSign, sales teams can be more effective in customer engagements using the additional visibility they get on all agreement and agreement related activities in DocuSign presented contextually by Sales Copilot when engaging with customers on emails in Outlook. [ATTACH=full]55862[/ATTACH] Screenshot…

Microsoft Sales Copilot is reimagining sales. Integrated seamlessly into your daily tools across Microsoft 365 and Teams, Sales Copilot harnesses the power of generative AI and customer data to keep sellers in their flow of work so that they can spend more time with customers. This month, we’re bringing a suite of new features and additions to open Sales Copilot up to a whole new world of possibilities, accelerate sales transformation, and help sellers be more productive: Extend Sales Copilot through Power Connectors We're thrilled to announce the extensibility of Sales Copilot through Power Connectors. Partner applications can now integrate their da…

You've come to the right place if you're looking for everything happening with Azure Governance at Microsoft Ignite, November 14-17, 2023. The Azure Governance team is super excited to share all the following new features across our product portfolio. For each of the features, you will find an accompanying announcement with scenario details. For some of these announcements, you will also find a demo video to follow along. Jump to: Ignite Session | Azure Policy | Machine Configuration | Azure Resource Notifications | Azure Resource Graph Ignite Session Securely operate and manage your estate with Azure Policy and more Thursday, November…

1. New M-series Mv3 and Mv2 8TB The third major generation of Azure M-series is now in Public Preview. The public preview is free of charge and available in West Europe, North Europe, East US 2, and East US. The Msv3 and Mdsv3 Medium Memory (MM) are the first in a series of VMs that will comprise the Mv3 family of VMs. The Mv3 family will offer VMs to cater to all SAP Hana customers ranging from medium size Hana databases up to the largest customer installations. Key features and requirements of the new Mv3 Medium Memory VMs: Powered by the 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor and DDR5 DRAM technology, the Mv3 medium memory (MM) virtual …

November 14th 2023 Status These functions are currently rolling out to users enrolled in the beta channel for Windows Excel and Mac Excel I’m excited to announce Excel's new GROUPBY and PIVOTBY functions. These functions allow you to perform data aggregations using a single formula. And while these functions are extremely powerful, they are also simple to get started with. In fact, you can do a data aggregation with just 3 arguments, the same number as a simple XLOOKUP. Note: These are preview functions, their signature and results may change substantially before final release based on user feedback. Until final, we do not recommend using them in importan…

This is a contributed article by Stéphane Téral, Chief Analyst at LightCounting and founder of TÉRAL RESEARCH Although the programmability of the novel Open RAN (O-RAN) architecture provides great flexibility and agility, its predefined telemetry and control features remain the last of the bottlenecks to tackle. The essence of Open RAN lies in the virtualization of RAN functions, open interfaces between decomposed RAN elements, and full access to telemetric data to foster much needed innovation by developers. But the fact is, in the existing 800 LTE networks - including the 265 of them recently upgraded to 5G - detailed telemetry is widespread across network node…

If you are a student developer or an entrepreneur who wants to build applications using Azure, you might be wondering how to choose the best Azure region for your needs. Azure regions are geographically distributed locations where Azure services are available. Choosing the right region can affect the performance, cost, and availability of your applications. One way to compare Azure regions is to use Azure Speed Test and Azure Latency Test. These are web-based tools that allow you to measure the network speed and latency between your browser and various Azure regions. You can use these tools to find out which regions have the fastest and most reliable connections fo…

We are committed to continually advancing the capabilities of Azure Synapse Analytics Spark, and are pleased to announce substantial improvements that could increase Spark performance by as much as 77%. Performance Metrics Our internal testing, utilizing the 1TB TPC-H industry standard benchmark, indicates performance gains of up to 77%. It's important to note that individual workloads may vary, but the enhancements are designed to benefit all Azure Synapse Analytics Spark users. Technological Foundations This performance uptick is attributable to our transition to the latest Azure v5 Virtual Machines. These VMs bring improved CPU performance, inc…

A System Topic in Event Grid represents one or more events published by Azure services. Azure Resource Notifications (ARN) service collects data from various publishers and makes them available via event grid system topics. What is Azure Resource Notifications (ARN)? ARN is a highly scalable, high-performance, and low-latency publisher-subscriber event streaming service designed for the entire Azure ecosystem. ARN enhances its system topics with the following features: Comprehensive payload that reduces the need for additional GET calls on Resource Providers (RPs), as the payloads are directly included in the notification. Advanced filtering capab…

Microsoft has released Security Updates (SUs) for vulnerabilities found in: Exchange Server 2019 Exchange Server 2016 SUs are available for the following specific versions of Exchange Server: Exchange Server 2019 CU12 and CU13 Exchange Server 2016 CU23 The November 2023 SUs address vulnerabilities responsibly reported to Microsoft by security partners and found through Microsoft’s internal processes. Although we are not aware of any active exploits in the wild, our recommendation is to immediately install these updates to protect your environment. These vulnerabilities affect Exchange Server. Exchange Online customers are already protected from the …

With the announcement of Security Copilot back in March, there has been a growing demand to understand and expand the role of machine learning (ML) in security. This demand is especially apparent in the US government space, where these advancements have a direct impact on national security. Security Copilot is the first generative AI security product to help defend organizations at machine speed and scale. It combines the most advanced GPT4 model from OpenAI with a Microsoft-developed, security-specific model, powered by Microsoft Security’s unique expertise, global threat intelligence and comprehensive security products. To bring the power of Azure OpenAI to gov…

Azure Well-Architected Review Assessment Updates Microsoft is excited to announce a significant update to the Azure Well-Architected Review assessment helps you build and optimize workloads. It walks you through a series of questions about your workload. Based on your responses, it generates tailored and prioritized recommendations to improve your workload design. The guidance is actionable and applicable to nearly every workload. It aligns with the latest best practices across the five key pillars of reliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence, and performance efficiency (see figure 1). [ATTACH=full]55836[/ATTACH] Figure 1. The lan…

We are thrilled to announce Azure Policy for Kubernetes Public Preview support for Mutation, available for Azure Kubernetes Service clusters! This release is brought to you in collaboration with Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Container Compute Upstream. Gatekeeper's mutation capability enables users to change Kubernetes resources at create/update time based on different criteria defined in mutation templates. By embedding mutation templates in your Azure Policy custom definitions, Azure Policy extends Gatekeeper’s mutation feature to programmatically modify components within your Kubernetes clusters at-scale across your subscriptions and management groups, with…

Today, at Ignite we are happy to announce the General availability of Syslog collection from AKS nodes using Container Insights. Since our private preview announcement in March, hundreds of customers have enabled syslog collection on thousands of AKS clusters. We thank you for trying out the preview and providing feedback. IMPORTANT NOTE: Due to slower rollouts towards the year end, the agent version with the GA changes will not be in all regions until January 2024. Agent versions 3.1.16 and above have Syslog GA changes. Please check agent version before enabling in production. Syslog enables customers to collect logs from Linux-based Kubernetes hosts. This…

We are excited to announce the General Availability of Azure Monitor SCOM managed instance (SCOM MI). We built this new capability with you, our SCOM users, in mind so that you can bring SCOM monitoring capabilities and configurable health models to Azure Monitor and the cloud. With this added capability Azure Monitor enables you to modernize the monitoring configuration for your applications and migrate them to Azure at your own pace. You can monitor workloads running everywhere with SCOM MI, as it is hosted in Azure and has the capability to monitor workloads running on Azure and off-Azure. Furthermore, all investments you have made in SCOM hitherto are preser…

We are excited to announce the General Availability of Azure Monitor SCOM managed instance (SCOM MI). We built this new capability with you, our SCOM users, in mind so that you can bring SCOM monitoring capabilities and configurable health models to Azure Monitor and the cloud. With this added capability Azure Monitor enables you to modernize the monitoring configuration for your applications and migrate them to Azure at your own pace. You can monitor workloads running everywhere with SCOM MI, as it is hosted in Azure and has the capability to monitor workloads running on Azure and off-Azure. Furthermore, all investments you have made in SCOM hitherto are preser…

[ATTACH=full]55831[/ATTACH] We're excited to be a part of Microsoft Ignite 2023, inviting you to learn more about leveraging AI across your business operations. It's the fastest way to gain valuable insights and skills to realize the full value of the Microsoft technology ecosystem. Whether you want to witness the latest tech through live demos, dive deep into advanced technical sessions, or forge new connections for your career, Ignite is the place to be. Plus, the virtual event is free of charge. Microsoft Ignite 2023's hybrid event offers registered attendees the chance to join the live, worldwide show for the latest news and announcements—and to unlock a…

I am excited to announce a comprehensive refresh of the Well-Architected Framework for designing and running optimized workloads on Azure. Customers will not only get great, consistent guidance for making architectural trade-offs for their workloads, but they’ll also have much more precise instructions on how to implement this guidance within the context of their organization. Background Cloud services have become an essential part of the success of most companies today. The scale and flexibility of the cloud offer organizations the ability to optimize and innovate in ways not previously possible. As organizations continue to expand cloud services as part of t…

Continuing the series of this blog posts I would like to go more advanced on troubleshooting connectivity issues. I would like to thank also Salam Al Hasan (@Salamalhasan) that helped me with some real case scenarios from our customers. This is part 4 of a series related to Synapse Connectivity - check out the other blog articles: Synapse Connectivity Series Part #1 - Inbound SQL DW connections on Public Endpoints Synapse Connectivity Series Part #2 - Inbound Synapse Private Endpoints Synapse Connectivity Series Part #3 - Synapse Managed VNET and Managed Private Endpoints In this post I will speak about how to capture a network trace and how to do s…

Until now, creating a form/quiz required access to the Forms website. I’m happy to share that we've now streamlined the process with the new Forms app, so you can create surveys and forms with just a few clicks. Within the Forms app, you will enjoy the same experience as on the Forms website. You can create forms/quizzes, choose questions from AI suggestions and select from a variety of themes. Once you finish creating your form you can effortlessly distribute it from the app. Note: Currently, the Forms app requires an internet connection, so you can’t use it offline. [ATTACH=full]55794[/ATTACH]Same experience as on the Forms website How to get the app…