Microsoft Support & Discussions

Simplification & Alignment in Marketplace Rewards We know that there’s a lot to keep in mind when you’re running your business. Keeping track of your benefits shouldn’t be one of them. To help drive simplicity, make it easier for you to access benefits, and support co-selling through the marketplace, we’ve made several changes to Marketplace Rewards, as part of ISV Success, a pathway within the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. No partners will lose any benefits they have already unlocked because of these changes, they will only impact how benefits are unlocked starting in early December. Here’s a summary of changes and then we’ll dive into each updat…

Introduction Containers technologies are no longer something new in the industry. It all started focusing on how to deploy reproducible development environments but now you can find many other fields where applying containers, or some of the underlying technologies used to implement them, are quite common. I will not cover here Azure Container Instances nor Azure Kubernetes Services. For an example of the latter you can browse this article NDv4 in AKS. ACI will be explained in another article. Currently there are many options available when working with containers, Linux seasoned engineers quite likely have worked with LXC; later Docker revolutionized the depl…

Accelerating, scaling and optimizing a high volume motion: 8 week implementation program Join us for the upcoming FY24 High Volume Acceleration One to Few personalized program, provided by Microsoft and presented in partnership with Neural Impact. Over 200 partners have implemented the acceleration best practices they learned in this High Volume Program to gain greater success over the past three years. Hear an overview of the program here: During this 8 week program you will attend 6 live remote sessions and gain strategies to achieve the following: Position and differentiate your cloud offerings more effectively Win more deals and dr…

Securing container images is paramount, especially with the widespread adoption of containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes. Containers offer unparalleled flexibility and scalability for deploying applications, but their security challenges are equally significant. Vulnerabilities in container images can lead to serious security breaches and compromise an organization's data and infrastructure. Microsoft has recognized the need for robust image security solutions and has introduced Copa, an open-source tool designed to keep container images secure and address vulnerabilities swiftly. In this blog post, we will explore Copa, its features, and how it…

Microsoft & National Defense ISAC Collaboration: Microsoft Reference Identity Architectures for the US Defense Industrial Base Empowering the DIB Sector: ND-ISAC Cloud Security & Architecture and Microsoft Cloud Services Working Groups’ Whitepaper Tackles Multi-Tenant and External Collaboration Challenges During the National Defense Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ND-ISAC) annual executive summit, Chief Information and Security Officers (CIO/CISO) representing defense sector companies examined challenges with operating multi-tenant environments and external collaboration in Microsoft’s cloud service offerings. The executives made a call…

This blog post elucidates one of the architectural patterns that can be employed for efficiently monitoring the malware scan status while utilizing Microsoft Defender for storage malware scanning. Real-world Scenario: In a typical complex web application, file uploads are a common occurrence across various application scenarios (for instance an application responsible for handling employee payroll may have one module accepting proof of identity documents from employees for personal information updates and other module handling employee reimbursement requests based on the uploaded expense receipts). Let's consider a scenario that requires file upload use…

Thousands of customers have tested or deployed Microsoft Entra ID Governance since it launched on July 1, 2023, seeing the value in governing the identities of their workforce. Many of those customers have asked about extending this governance to the identities of their business guests—contractors, partners, and external collaborators—to more fully follow least privilege access principles while still enabling seamless collaboration. I'm pleased to announce that we're helping organizations to more easily manage this situation by creating a new ID Governance license for business guests. This license will operate on a monthly active usage (MAU) model. Customers will …

We are happy to announce the general availability of the User Interface (UI) for the Azure Virtual Desktop Web Client. The new UI offers a cleaner, more modern look and feel. With this update, you can Switch between Light and Dark Mode View your resources in a grid or list format Reset web client settings to their defaults How to access it The new client is toggled on by default on the web client, and the “preview” caption has now been removed from the toggle. For additional information on the new UI, see What's new in the Remote Desktop Web client for Azure Virtual Desktop | Microsoft Learn and New User Interface. Note: We recomme…

Overview Managed Applications are a powerful way to deploy your custom software into the customer’s tenant. Until now, there was one deployment model for Managed Applications that allowed a publisher to administer the solution within the application within the Managed Resource Group (MRG). New capabilities have been added enabling different deployment and management models for Managed Applications. This article explains the different deployment architectures and gives you the information you need to choose one based on your needs and those of your customers. Traditional deployment architecture Until recently, the deployment and maintenance model fo…

It's time for a new blog on how Ansible can simplify SQL Server deployment, configuration, and availability. If you've read my previous blogs on Ansible for SQL Server installation and configuration, and the pacemaker-based Always On availability group, you know how powerful Ansible can be. Now, let's talk about HPE Serviceguard for Linux (SGLX), a high availability/disaster recovery solution that provides business continuity for critical applications like SQL Server. Deploying SQL Server Always On availability groups on HPE SGLX is a fully supported solution for production workloads. Today, let's look at how you can configure Always On availability group ba…

In this blog series dedicated to Microsoft's technical articles, we'll highlight our MVPs' favorite article along with their personal insights. Elie Karkafy, Security, Enterprise Mobility MVP in United States [ATTACH=full]55244[/ATTACH] Blogs - Microsoft Community Hub “In the blogs section in the Microsoft tech community, Microsoft product team will post the latest features announced across all the products along with some blog post that shows the admins a step-by-step process in implementing some capabilities.” *Relevant Posts on Tech Community by Elie: - What's new and What's learning period in Microsoft Defender for Identity. - Microsoft Community…

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 140 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below: Get it now in our marketplace [ATTACH=full]55206[/ATTACH] AudioCodes Live Hub for Teams (Self-Service Direct Routing): AudioCodes Live Hub for Microsoft Teams simplifies the process of connecting existing communication systems to Teams, eliminating the need for complex configuration and integration with your Teams tenant. It offers support for multiple SIP providers, a self-service connection wizard, advanced call routing and handling capabilities, and around-the-clock support. [A…

Settings Recommended for MCT Azure Resources Microsoft Community Training is an online learning environment powered by Azure. Microsoft Community Training platform is installed and deployed on your Azure subscription. Please check my previous post on MCT: MCT Installation, MCT troubleshoot Guide, Content management in MCT. Customers can optimize their use of Azure resources by following a few security settings that Microsoft Community Training suggests. Recommended settings for MCT Azure Resources after MCT Installation: Azure Storage Public access for blob should be disabled. Go to the storage account of your MCT instance by searching for …

By Gang Wang, Xi Wang, Lihui Wang, Qinying Liao, Garfield He, Lei He, Binggong Ding, and Sheng Zhao Now, in human-bot conversational interactions, AI can produce more natural, fluent, and high-quality responses than ever before, thanks to the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Azure OpenAI GPT. Consequently, when engaging in verbal conversations, the demand for naturalness and expressiveness in Text-to-Speech (TTS) voices is higher than ever. We are introducing these new voices specifically designed for conversational scenarios. Whether you are creating a speech-based chatbot, a voice assistant, or a conversational agent, these new voices will ensure you…

Technology is advancing at a rapid pace, bringing new innovations that are transforming our workplaces. One role that is being especially disrupted by these advancements is that of the data scientist. Data science is already an exciting field, but new tools are taking it to the next level in terms of productivity and capabilities. With the help of these new technologies, data scientists can work faster and more efficiently than ever before. In this post, we will show you these advancements in action. A data science project with Python, VS Code and GitHub Tools Let’s dive deep into some innovative GitHub tools and features that can improve the productivity of you…

Azure API Management is a service that helps developers to expose their APIs to different consumers in a secure and scalable way. It allows developers to create, publish, and manage APIs, as well as to apply policies, transformations, and analytics to them. With the hosted APIs becoming super critical to the daily operations of any organization, it is important to ensure the availability of the infrastructure for continued operations. Though the service provides inbuilt resiliency features like Availability Zones and Locations, it is required to be prepared to create a replica of your API Management instance for various reasons, such as disaster recovery, testing, or migr…

In the cloud computing world, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) refers to the practice of managing and provisioning infrastructure through code. As someone with a development background, this is my preferred alternative to manually provisioning the resources using the Azure portal or Azure CLI. My language of choice these days is Bicep, a domain-specific language (DSL) that uses declarative syntax to define and deploy Azure resources. There are others options available, of course, Terraform being a popular one. Using a combination of input parameters, configuration files etc, it is possible to develop highly reusable and customizable templates that can be used to deploy resour…

Introduction Server migrations to Azure Virtual Machines either through Azure Migrate or via a redeploy approach can benefit from Azure policies to accelerate adoption of Azure first party services across BCDR, Security, Monitoring and Management. Our Cloud Adoption Framework’s guidance for Azure Landing Zones already provides a good baseline of recommended Azure policies. However, a variation to this baseline is described in this article with a focus on newly migrated Azure Virtual Machine resources. BCDR: To enable Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery for Virtual Machines, a recovery services vault is needed. For Azure Backup, the recove…

Virtual network integration in App Service requires one subnet per App Service plan integration today. If you are working with many App Service plans, managing the subnets can be an unnecessary administrative task. Therefore, I am happy to announce that we are introducing Multi-plan subnet join (MPSJ) in limited public preview at Ignite 2023. MPSJ reduces subnet sprawl when dealing with many apps across many plans and simplifies management of networking control such as Network Security Groups and Route tables across App Service plans. With MPSJ you can join a virtual network/subnet in a different subscription, but all App Service plan joining a specific subnet must…

[ATTACH=full]55183[/ATTACH] Hey, everyone! This article is part of the "Tips and Tricks to Bring Your AI Idea to Life" series, a 30-minute weekly series as we board on an exciting exploration of the robust tools and innovative technologies offered by Microsoft. These tools will serve as you trusted companions in the development of your AI projects. Don't forget the episodes, REGISTER NOW! What will be covered in the episode? Are you ready to explore the amazing world of language models and how they can help you create smart search experiences? In this episode, we’ll show you how the “Retrieval Augmented Generation” pattern works—a breakt…

Microsoft Viva Glint is consistently improving the customer experience. Our platform maintains an agile production cycle with fixes, enhancements, and new features. Monthly “release notes” are sent via email to all customers and provide details coming to the Viva Glint platform. Our releases include scheduled down time for the platform. Planned release dates are provided in the table below. The release schedule is subject to change and is updated, as appropriate. IMPORTANT! Be mindful of scheduled dates when your Glint platform will be down for maintenance and feature enhancements. Any time a person logs into a Glint and a scheduled maintenance instance i…

Every month you’ll find an edition of our monthly newsletter in the Viva Glint Community. This communication is full of information that will help you get the most from your Viva Glint programs. As this is the first time you are hearing from us in this forum, I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Judy Weiner, and I am the Viva Glint content manager. I’m excited to share with you all the great Viva Glint resources that will help you deploy, adopt, and use our product to its fullest. Also in this newsletter, we let you know about Viva Glint’s next “release date” and subsequently, when you should plan for a short platform shutdown when our technical team …

As of SQL Server 2022 Cumulative Update (CU) 6, configuring replication using authentication with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) is currently in public preview. Previously, Windows authentication and SQL authentication were the only supported methods to validate identities when configuring replication in SQL server. The introduction of Microsoft Entra authentication as a security option for replication leverages existing Microsoft Entra integration with SQL Server powered by Azure Arc to enable cloud-based identity management for on-premises SQL Server instances. Nothing has changed with replication functionality as the configuration simply ad…

Close sales deals quickly and efficiently with the new generative AI powered Sales Copilot. It provides an intelligent natural language interface to all of your sales data, in CRM systems like Salesforce or Dynamics 365, and connected external data sources. See how Sales Copilot generates insights and content in the flow of work with skills that help you with everyday tasks in Microsoft 365 or embedded within your Dynamics 365 Sales experience. [ATTACH=full]55175[/ATTACH] Eric Boocock, Principal Program Manager for Dynamics 365 Sales, shares how Sales Copilot works safely with your data and the key admin steps to set it up. Optimize your sales proce…

We continue to expand the Microsoft AppSource ecosystem. For this volume, 182 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below: [ATTACH=full]55117[/ATTACH] F.A.M.E - Financial Assets Management Engine: The F.A.M.E platform consolidates account data from multiple banks, allowing for configuration of companies and schemes. This software as a service fetches account information using secure APIs and provides extensive reporting and summary capabilities. [ATTACH=full]55118[/ATTACH] Intapp Walls: Intapp Walls simplifies information security and policy management by centrally enforcing confidentiality of sensitive …