Microsoft Support & Discussions
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84,928 topics in this forum
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Always Encrypted Token-based authorization with PowerShell
by Guest PieterVanhove- 0 replies
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Some Always Encrypted cmdlets in the SqlServer PowerShell module need to communicate with key stores holding SQL Server column master keys. When a key store is an Azure service, e.g., Azure Key Vault, the cmdlet needs to present an Azure AD-issued authorization token when connecting to the service. Currently, the SqlServer PowerShell module provides its own cmdlet for authenticating to Azure AD - Add-SqlAzureAuthenticationContext, which stores the acquired tokens in a token cache internal to the SqlServer module. The cmdlet suffers from problems like limited authentication methods and currently it supports only Azure Key Vault, etc. Until now! The release …
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Using Azure Policy to onboard multiple SQL Servers at scale to Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server - Part 1
by Guest Ganapathivarma- 0 replies
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The demand for deploying agents in bulk on on-premise SQL servers is increasing, and manual deployment of the agent in bulk is a highly time-consuming task. Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server extends Azure services to SQL Server instances hosted outside of Azure: in your data center, in edge site locations like retail stores, or any public cloud or hosting provider. It's worth noting that the SQL Server instance that you intend to enable with Azure Arc can be installed on a virtual or physical machine running either Windows or Linux. To onboard a Azure Arc-enabled SQL server, If your SQL Server instance is not yet connected to Azure, you can initiate the connectio…
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Adding your Microsoft Store for Business and Education apps to the Microsoft Store in Intune
by Guest Intune_Support_Team- 0 replies
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We’ve been hard at work improving the Microsoft Store experience in Intune in preparation for the Microsoft Store for Business and Education retirement. In November 2022, we released a new and improved Microsoft Store app management experience in Intune, leveraging Windows Package Manager, along with other improvements. You can learn more by reading Update to Endpoint Manager integration with the Microsoft Store on Windows or watching . Additionally, we discussed the new Store experience and answered customer questions in this video: Unpacking Endpoint Management: The future of app management in Intune. While the new Microsoft Store integration and app type in Int…
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Today, Azure Communications Services announces the general availability of Email service, expanding its comprehensive suite of multichannel communication APIs. Businesses can embed email in their customer engagement applications to enhance their customer’s communication experience. This new Email service is powered by Exchange Online and meets the security and privacy requirements of enterprises. In addition, Azure Communication Services Email provides low code /no code capabilities through Power Platform and Azure Logic Apps. With in-depth analytics and engagement tracking capabilities, Azure Communication Services Email helps businesses improve their customer engagemen…
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Microsoft's Viva Sales in Dynamics
by Guest ShabnamMohammadi- 0 replies
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This article is brought to you by the Nonprofit Tech Acceleration (NTA) for Black and African American Communities Program Technical Team. For information on how to take advantage of the granted offerings or free technical consultation, please visit: Supporting Black Community Nonprofits | Microsoft Nonprofits Microsoft Viva Sales is a new app that works with Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Sales CRM and works with other non-Microsoft CRM solutions like Salesforce. Microsoft didn't want to brand Viva Sales as "Dynamics" because it also can work with other non-Microsoft-developed CRM platforms. Viva Sales will be available for no additional charge to Dynamics 365 custo…
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Azure Function | Service Bus Queue Trigger | Session Enabled
by Guest Saurabh_7ar- 0 replies
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Scenario Sequence number in a service bus message only guarantees the extractor order of messages, but not the processing order. In the diagram below to make sure M1, M2 & M3 are processed also in order, it requires sessions to be enabled on the service bus queue. [attachment=36752:name] In the diagram, there are three messages in the service bus queue M1, M2 & M3. And there are two competing consumers (Consumer1 & Consumer2) listening to the message broker. Consumer1 picks up M1.Consumer2 picks up M2. Consumer 2 finishes processing M2 andConsumer2 picks up M3 At this point, Consumer1 has not completed processing M1 yet. Consum…
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OneNote: Your Digital Notebook, Reimagined with Copilot
by Guest GregMace- 0 replies
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We are thrilled to announce that the Microsoft 365 Copilot is coming to OneNote. This powerful tool combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data from the Microsoft Graph—notes, calendars, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more—and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into a powerful productivity tool. All of this is done within our existing commitments to data security and privacy in the enterprise. We know that too much time is spent on the mundane tasks of work and not enough time is spent on the work that brings us joy and ignites our creativity. That's why Copilot is being integrated directly into OneNote. It works with you, embe…
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Query Performance Insight - Start monitoring in minutes
by Guest varun-dhawan- 0 replies
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As more and more businesses move their data and applications to the cloud, the need for powerful and reliable database solutions has never been greater. Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server is a fully managed service that provides users with a highly scalable, available, and performant PostgreSQL database. Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of our new query performance insight feature for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server, designed to help users better understand and optimize the performance of their database queries. Why query performance monitoring matters? Database queries are the backbone of any application and quer…
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Microsoft Information Protection SDK 1.13: Now Available!
by Guest Tom Moser- 0 replies
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We're pleased to announce that the Microsoft Information Protection SDK version 1.13 is now generally available via NuGet and Download Center. In this release of the Microsoft Information Protection SDK, we've focused on adding preview support for offline publishing and have made changes in how MIP SDK consumes Office documents and emails protected with AES in cipher block chaining (CBC) mode. Offline Publishing Until now, applying protection to a file required an online call to fetch a publishing license from the rights management service. In MIP SDK 1.13, we've added public preview support to enable offline publishing. Now, after making an initial co…
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Launch your application to space: Join an exciting on-orbit contest with Azure Orbital Space SDK
by Guest ChristineBatchelor- 0 replies
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Last November we announced the private preview of the Azure Orbital Space SDK, a product that makes application development for space as easy as developing on the ground. Today we are announcing an exciting new opportunity to work with the European Space Agency (ESA) Microsoft and Thales Alenia Space using the Azure Space SDK to fly your application in space. ESA’s vision for edge computing in space is to foster an ecosystem of Earth observation applications. This challenge is designed to align with this goal and is open to a global audience of space, EO, and AI enthusiasts. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the global community to explore the potential of …
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Pipeline Logic 3: Error Handling and Try Catch
by Guest ChenyeCharlieZhu- 0 replies
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Series Overview Orchestration allows conditional logic and enables users to take different paths based upon outcomes of a previous activity. Building upon the concepts of conditional paths, ADF and Synapse Pipelines allow users to build versatile and resilient workflows that can handle unexpected errors that work smoothly in auto-pilot mode. This is an ongoing series that gradually levels up and helps you build even more complicated logic to handle more scenarios. We will walk through examples for some common use cases, and help you to build functional and useful workflows. Please review the first installment in the series: Part 1: Error Handling and Be…
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Accelerate Language Cognitive Services customization with Azure OpenAI
by Guest HazemElHammamy- 0 replies
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A few weeks ago, we announced the ability to quickly label your Custom NER and Custom text classification projects with generative models. Today, we’re adding more features powered by Azure OpenAI, and introducing utterance suggestions for Conversational Language Understanding. This continues our journey of enhancing Language services with GPT to improve and accelerate our customization experiences. Conversational Language Understanding allows you to create custom models to detect a user’s intent and extract relevant information from their queries. A significant part of that process is providing data to train machine learning models in the form of utterances that r…
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Universal Print or unlimited print?
by Guest Harjit_Dhaliwal- 0 replies
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Printing is still essential. We often hear that “print is dead”—but printing is still an essential daily activity for many people working to support their customers and partners. Universal Print makes printing easier than ever, and does away with the need for print servers, enabling a more sustainable print management infrastructure in the cloud. As the number of organizations, people, and active printers registered with Universal Print continues to grow, we are working hard to add features that will make printing simpler and more efficient. Listening to your needs Microsoft 365 for Enterprise combines Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise (Office 365), Window…
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Getting ready for your first Microsoft Certification
by Guest GeorgiaKalyva- 0 replies
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Everyone’s learning journey is unique and the process of acquiring new technical skills can be overwhelming. It's not always clear which resources will be the most beneficial for you and your learning path. The Microsoft Learn Community and our Learn experts are here to help you build expertise, answer your questions, and help you achieve career goals. One of the best ways to validate your skills is with world-class, industry recognized Microsoft certifications. Benefits of getting certified The process of getting a Microsoft certification will take time and focus, but the proven benefits are worth the effort. Microsoft Certification continues to be the indust…
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The challenge of Cloud PC performance testing
by Guest Ron Martinsen- 0 replies
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Let's dive into why relative performance data for Windows 365 helps you compare different configurations and choose the one that suits your workload best. Many years ago, I built the first large scale performance lab for the series of products that would become Office 97 for Windows and Office 98 Macintosh Edition. This process taught me a lifetime of lessons about the challenges of collecting performance data. I would continue to acquire new learnings during my experiences in SQL Server, Internet Explorer, Windows, and more. After 28+ years at Microsoft, my key takeaway after being involved in countless performance studies—internally and externally with our partner…
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HDInsight 5.0 with Spark 3.x – Part 1
by Guest asethia- 0 replies
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Author(s): Arun Sethia is a Program Manager in Azure HDInsight Customer Success Engineering (CSE) team. Introduction On February 27, 2023, HDInsight has released Spark 3.1 (containing stability fixes from Spark 3.0.0), part of HDI 5.0. The HDInsight Team is working on upgrading other open-source components in the upcoming release. In Spark 3.1, the community has added 1700+ improvements, 1680+ fixes, and 130+ new features. In addition, we also added some performance improvements in 3.x, which will benefit customers significantly. Some of the exciting new features and improvements are: Performance enhancement - AQE, Dynamic Partition Pruning, etc.) …
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Securing Terraform State in Azure
by Guest Chris_Ayers- 0 replies
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Terraform, a widely-used Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, streamlines provisioning and management of cloud resources through declarative configuration files. A core component of Terraform is its state file—a JSON file that preserves your infrastructure's current state—essential for updates, rollbacks, and modifications. However, improper handling of the Terraform state may lead to security vulnerabilities. This article highlights the significance of protecting Terraform state in Azure and offers best practices to ensure its security. The Need for Terraform State Security Securing Terraform state is crucial for several reasons: Prevent unauthorized acces…
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Essential tips for exporting and cleaning data with Spark
by Guest Liliam_Leme- 0 replies
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I often receive various requests from customers while working on FastTrack projects, and I have compiled some examples to help you build your solution on top of a data lake using useful tips. Most of the examples in this post use pandas, and I hope they will be helpful for you as they were for me. Please note that all examples in this post use pyspark. In my scenario, I exported multiple tables from SQLDB to a folder using a notebook and ran the requests in parallel. In this post, we will discuss the logic of reusing the same session mentioned here at MSSparkUtils is the Swiss Army knife inside Synapse Spark. I will show comments made by my colleague mart…
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What’s new in MSIX: April 2023
by Guest Naveen_Nooka- 0 replies
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The latest build of MSIX Packaging Tool (v1.2023.319.0) and the latest version of MSIXMGR are now available. With MSIX app attach as a growing phenomenon in the enterprise, this release fixes the “paper cuts” in the app attach enablement process. Here is a rundown of the major improvements in the latest release. Simplifying MSIX image creation MSIXMGR support for MSIX bundles Productivity improvements during MSIX image creation Accessibility enhancements in MSIX Packaging Tool Improved first launch experience for MSIX Packaging Tool MSIXMGR support for MSIX bundles MSIX app attach is an efficient way for application streaming in the enterprise. MSIXMGR too…
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Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms: A more inclusive and collaborative vision for hybrid meeting rooms
by Guest Matt-Taylor- 0 replies
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Flexible work has replaced hybrid work in our lexicon here at Microsoft. Rather than a simple equation of X days in office + Y days working remotely = 1 hybrid week, we have now adopted a model that is fluid and flexible, and customized for each individual’s and team’s productivity. Most meetings, however, meet the traditional definition of hybrid work, with a mix of attendees in person and remote. The opportunity to improve hybrid meeting experiences so that they better meet the needs of our flexible workforce started as a collaboration between the Microsoft Teams product group and Microsoft’s internal IT organization. Through prototypes, experimentation, and a focu…
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Fuzzy hashing logs to find malicious activity
by Guest Steve_Versteeg- 0 replies
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Introduction During a forensic investigation, malicious activity may be discovered in logs. An incident responder may want to identify related malicious activity across a range of related log files. Typically, responders would extract and search for indicators of compromise (IOCs) or write well-crafted queries to search logs for similar activity. One way we can help responders find this similar activity is using “fuzzy hashing”, a term that encompasses a range of different hashing techniques designed to broadly group together “similar” things (in this case, similar malicious activity.) While there are a variety of fuzzy hash algorithms, most focus on identify…
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There is a New Style of maps across Microsoft
by Guest cschotte- 0 replies
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We are pleased to announce that we have developed a new and improved style for our maps across Microsoft. Azure Maps now uses the very same vector tiles and satellite imagery directly as our other Microsoft mapping platforms, which includes our Bing Maps consumer site and more. This updated style introduces a new cartographic identity across Microsoft that focuses on improving usability, information clarity, and aesthetic appeal. As before, Azure Maps lets you and your customers choose from several styles, such as Road, Night, Hybrid, Grayscale (dark and light), Terra, and High Contrast (dark and light). We have taken the feedback on our previous styles, an…
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Monitor and troubleshoot Azure & hybrid networks with Azure Network Monitoring
by Guest Medha_1507- 0 replies
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As customers bring sophisticated, high-performance workloads into Azure, there is a critical need for increased visibility and control over the operational state of complex networks running these workloads. Multi-cloud and hybrid network environments power new demands of remote work, 5G/Edge connectivity, microservices based workloads and increased cloud adoption. Although the advent of cloud has added agility, cost benefits, and made managing the infrastructure easier, the increasing complexity of IT with innumerable endpoints, devices and hybrid setup has drastically reduced cloud visibility. Management and monitoring of the network underlying these complex applications…
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The Virtual Ninja Show: Season 3 Recap!
by Guest Heike Ritter- 0 replies
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Season 3 of the Ninja Show has come to a close! Spanning the month of March, we were incredibly grateful to have such talented experts on with us to share their knowledge about many of the products, key features, and impressive capabilities within Microsoft 365 Defender. This season covered content extensively - across nearly our entire repertoire of Microsoft 365 Defender products. Featured highlights consist of our very first , a , and numerous deep dives into the best practices and newly released features to implement in your organization so you can confidently protect your assets from all angles. Season 3 content ranged from product walkthroughs &…
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How to Detect Files of the Same Size on your Computer via PowerShell
by Guest Anthony Bartolo- 0 replies
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File management might be tedious, but it is sometimes required, especially when storage space is limited. PowerShell is an excellent tool for automating most activities including identifying files of the same size on your computer. The script below will detect and report (rather than delete) all files in the directory and subdirectories, group them by size, filter out groups with only one file, and report on the files of the same size with their full path and creation time. NOTE: Please make sure you further investigate the duplicate files this script finds before any other action is taken. # Get all files in a directory and subdirecto…