Microsoft Support & Discussions

In Part 2 of our series, @DarrenKomprise, reviewed the options and alternatives to drive down file storage costs. In this final post in the series, we focus on how Komprise's solution, optimized for Azure customers, can help lower file storage costs on-premises and in-Azure. Part 1 - The True Cost of File Storage: Why is File Data Expensive? Part 2 - Leverage the Cloud to Cut File Data Costs: Comparison of Alternatives Komprise Intelligent Tiering for Azure offers a great solution that you will learn more about in our this post. Disclaimer: This post includes content from a Microsoft Partner and links to external content. How to Save 70% on…

Microsoft has recently introduced a range of new security tools and features for their Entra product family, aimed at helping organizations to improve their security posture. With the ever-increasing sophistication of cyber-attacks and the increasing use of cloud-based services and the proliferation of mobile devices, it is essential that organizations have effective tools in place to manage their scope of security. These recent updates have been organized into capability areas or themes, making it easy to quickly find and access the latest updates. With these new features, Microsoft is aiming to provide their customers with a comprehensive security solution that …

Microsoft 365 Defender is a unified enterprise defense suite that provides integrated protection against sophisticated attacks by coordinating detection, prevention, investigation, and response across endpoints, identities, email, and applications. It provides advanced protection against spam, malware, phishing, spoofing, and other malicious attacks. Did you know that as Exchange Online admin, you have access to the Microsoft 365 Defender portal? With Microsoft Defender for Office 365, you can help protect your organization from email threats, manage quarantined messages and files, create and modify security policies, submit suspicious items for analysis, and monitor t…

By Mark Hosking, Head of Delivery at Datometry The cloud migration story is not new. Years ago, many organizations issued a cloud mandate and have been diligently deploying and shifting technology ever since. For most large organizations, the cloud migration story is not over, as tough challenges with on-premises systems remain to be addressed. Migrating an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) poses one such substantial challenge. An EDW cannot simply be lifted and shifted to the cloud. Part of a complex data ecosystem, an EDW includes ingesting, cleansing, and curating data for consumption across an organization, weaving patterns of dependencies. Migrating an ED…

To paraphrase Annie, Deadlocks ARE JUST AWFUL! When they occur, it means one transaction was the victim and rolled back, the other succeeded. You have a couple different ways to monitor them in Azure SQL Managed Instance. Let's review those together. What is a deadlock? To quote our MS Learn Documentation, "Deadlocks occur when two or more processes or transactions block each other from continuing because each has locked a database resource that the other transaction needs". In layman's terms a deadlock occurs when two queries are blocking one another and neither could ever complete its transaction. Pretend two people need to use the same door. They can…

If you have ever taken any training modules or learned something new by going through the official documentation, the material you used was probably written or co-authored by one or many contributors. These individuals often are volunteers who offer their time and expertise to cover knowledge gaps in our portfolio or to keep the existing content current. In this series, we’ll be interviewing repeat contributors to the Microsoft Learn platform to get to know them better and to learn what motivates them to keep contributing. Today, we're thrilled to introduce you to Brandon Cowen, a Senior Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) at Microsoft, who brings a wealth of experie…

Introduction Zero Trust architecture has become increasingly important for cloud database deployments due to the evolving cyber threat landscape and the growing reliance on cloud services. This security model operates on the principle of "never trust, always verify," effectively eliminating the traditional assumption that internal networks are inherently secure. By requiring continuous authentication and authorization, Zero Trust architectures can mitigate risks associated with unauthorized access, data breaches, and compromised credentials. In cloud database deployments, the shared responsibility model and the distributed nature of cloud service…

April showers once again brought May Features. April 2022 brought some great new offerings: Project integration in Viva Goals, Viva Connections: Mobile SharePoint site navigation, improved Graph Connector content results, eDiscovery document version shared, Microsoft Lists: Applied filters, Microsoft Loop: .fluid > .loop, an updated files experience in Teams, Create pages and news in the SharePoint app bar, and more. Details and screenshots below, including our audible companion: The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: April 2023 podcast episode – all to help answer, "What's rolling out now for SharePoint and related technologies into Microsoft 365?" …

Secure your organization’s access to manage customers with recommendations built for Managed Service Providers We know that Managed Service Providers (MSPs) take on large responsibilities in managing multiple customers at once. Having the right permissions at the right time enables MSPs to minimize security risks and exposure. To help right-size your delegated access, we recommend that you use Granular Delegated Admin Privileges (GDAP) and adopt additional security measures like just-in-time (JIT) access. We also understand the challenges of setting up permissions to provide IT services for managed customers. Delegated Admin Privileges (DAP) grant broad access ac…

Welcome to the new Data Mapper Patterns series where we will walk you through some quick scenarios that help you take advantage of the capabilities found in the new Data Mapper Preview. Note: As of this writing the Data Mapper is currently in Public Preview. The scenario that we are going to explore in this post is conditional mapping. There are built-in functions that can help us achieve our desired outcome. To demonstrate these capabilities, we will walk through two scenarios: 1. If Condition In this example, we want to apply the following business rule: If Plant (source) == "71000" Then Plant (destination) = "71000-A" We can achieve thi…

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Monthly news May 2023 Edition [attachment=38873:name] This is our monthly "What's new" blog post, summarizing product updates and various new assets we released over the past month. In this edition, we are looking at all the goodness from April 2023. Legend: [attachment=38874:name] Product videos [attachment=38875:name] Webcasts (recordings) [attachment=38876:name] Docs on Microsoft [attachment=38877:name] Blogs on Microsoft [attachment=38878:name] GitHub [attachment=38879:name] External content [attachment=38880:name] Product improvements [attachment=38881:name] Announcements Microso…

Introduction After deploying an application and its services into a Kubernetes cluster, a question rises on the surface, how to access it with a custom domain name ? A simple solution would be to create an A record that points the domain name into the service IP address. This could be done manually, so it will be too hard to scale as you add many services. And this could be fully automated by using External DNS! This tutorial describes how to manage custom domain names in Azure DNS using External DNS in AKS. External DNS is a Kubernetes controller that watches for new Ingresses and Services with specific annotations, then creates corresponding DNS records in Azu…

ChatGPT- What? Why? and How? Recap: In the preceding section, the discourse delved into the technicalities and intricacies of ChatGPT's modus operandi and its architecture. In this segment, we shall shift our focus towards the practical applications and functionalities of ChatGPT, as well as its potential limitations. Familiarizing oneself with these aspects would be beneficial before utilizing this technology for varying purposes. How ChatGPT is used in the industry: Industry How ChatGPT is being used 1 Customer Service Chatbots for customer queries 2 Healthcare Analyze medical data and r…

Integrating OpenAI with Streamlit: With Example Source Code Explainer Abstract: This blog explores the integration of OpenAI with Streamlit, demonstrating an example of how the interaction works. The blog will cover the topic of the source code explainer, which converts source code to simple text ( explains in simple text) using OpenAI's GPT-3.5 . The blog will also discuss the importance of integrating artificial intelligence technologies like OpenAI with user interfaces like Streamlit to provide users with seamless and powerful tools to work with. Integrating OpenAI with Streamlit is a powerful combination that allows developers to build sophisticated and inte…

Overview Terraform is an open source infrastructure as code tool to create, change, and improve infrastructures. You can use Terraform to easily deploy Azure resources such as resource group, app service, storage account etc. This blog provides sample code and detailed instructions on the deployment of the standard Logic App infrastructure on Azure using Terraform in an Azure DevOps pipeline. Terraform You can clone this repo LogicApp-Terraform-Deploy from Github. Find the Terraform/LAstandard.tf and check the terraform code. In this code you can see that we will be creating the following resources on Azure: 1. The resource group which your Logic…

Chapter 3 << Chapter 1 << Chater 2 Traps and Avoidance 1. Pitfalls of dependency and update sequence Example: With Hub&Spoke vNET/Subnet in place, we need to create an Azure Firewall and Route table and associate the Route table with the Subnet. Approach to Solution - Write in one Bicep file It is true that referencing existing resources and passing variables becomes easier and less complicated. However, in large-scale development, we want to utilize modules as much as possible. - Override and rebuild existing resources When referencing a resource using "existing", there is a limitation that the resource ca…

Chapter 2 << Chapter 1 Chater 3 >> Bicep Development Environment Bicep is a language. You will need an editor to write the language and an environment to run it. Required Visual Studio Code reference: Deploy Bicep files from Visual Studio Code Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell reference: How to deploy resources with Bicep and Azure CLI Deploy resources with Bicep and Azure PowerShell !! The bicep file can be run from Visual Studio Code, so if you have VS Code installed, you do not need a command line. Recommend Visual Studio Code Extension A feature called IntelliSense is useful. While you are …

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 >> Chapter 3 >> How about Bicep ? Bicep is an IaC language for automating Azure infrastructure construction. -- IaC means Infrastructure as Code. Bicep simplify Azure Resource Manager templates as a wrapper. Bicep files are converted to JSON format internally, then the files communicate via Azure REST API This is a language provided by Microsoft that is wrapped in Bicep to make it simple to write. JSON is a structural definition that is difficult to handle and requires a level of craftsmanship to describe. Azure Resource Manager Templates are also abbreviated as ARM templates, which is named for the power that …

This session is part of Build AI Powered Solutions with Azure OpenAI Service series, learn more and register for the events here: Build AI powered apps with Azure OpenAI Service. Make sure to complete the Cloud Skills Challenge we have for this series: Challenge Our Use case Project - Content Manager Mobile App (Register Here) What is this session about? When the marketing submits the content, they want to use as part of the marketing strategy they are normally using a traditional system of sending emails back and forth with documents of the content. We want to automate this process to make it easier for the Marketing Manager to have a summary of the c…

As you may have heard; Windows LAPS feature is released to Public Preview in the last week of April. It has support for two main scenarios for backing up local administrator password such as storing passwords in Azure AD and Windows Server AD. It also has interoperability with legacy LAPS solution. This article on the other hand; will focus on native cloud deployment for Windows 10/11 clients that does not have legacy LAPS client installed, managed through Intune and either Hybrid Azure AD Joined or Azure AD Joined. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through basic policy configuration and core Windows LAPS functionalities such as accessing local administrator passwor…

After a month of UUP update release, sharing best practices based on our field and feedback through multiple channels. 1. Will UUP patch work for CB 2111 and below? Our pre-req is 2203 and above as per our release documents. For CB 2111 and lesser version to patch windows 11 22H2 seamlessly enable delta download setting using client settings. If Delta Download enabled, all updates will go with delta download code path regardless of if express or not, unless the only DP available is cloud DP. 2. If ADR has feature update enable in your setup, please remove for windows 11 or change process. If you have ADRs configured to downloa…

We are excited to represent Azure Communication Services and lead a session at the Microsoft 365 Conference on Wednesday, May 3rd in Las Vegas, Nevada. We invite you to join us for our in-person session to discuss Azure Communication Services interoperability with Microsoft Teams at 1:30 p.m. PST. Get registered here. Azure Communication Services is a cloud-based communication platform that provides developers with tools to enable chat, voice, video, email, and SMS within their applications. With Azure Communication Services, developers can easily create and customize communication experiences for their users. Azure Communication Services interoper…

Chapter 3 << Chapter 1 << Chater 2 Traps and Avoidance 1. Pitfalls of dependency and update sequence Example: With Hub&Spoke vNET/Subnet in place, we need to create an Azure Firewall and Route table and associate the Route table with the Subnet. Approach to Solution - Write in one Bicep file It is true that referencing existing resources and passing variables becomes easier and less complicated. However, in large-scale development, we want to utilize modules as much as possible. - Override and rebuild existing resources When referencing a resource using "existing", there is a limitation that the resource ca…

Chapter 2 << Chapter 1 Chater 3 >> Bicep Development Environment Bicep is a language. You will need an editor to write the language and an environment to run it. Required Visual Studio Code reference: Deploy Bicep files from Visual Studio Code Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell reference: How to deploy resources with Bicep and Azure CLI Deploy resources with Bicep and Azure PowerShell !! The bicep file can be run from Visual Studio Code, so if you have VS Code installed, you do not need a command line. Recommend Visual Studio Code Extension A feature called IntelliSense is useful. While you are …