Microsoft Support & Discussions

Authors: Amirreza Rastegari, Nihit Pokhrel, Nathan Baker, Jon Shelley Introduction: Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics (NAMD) is a molecular dynamics program designed for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems. The program scales well over many processors and nodes, making it an excellent fit for Azure High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. Azure HB Series virtual machines (VMs) enable customers who run NAMD to accelerate their innovation by using the latest AMD CPU and NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand offerings. These VMs, as shown in table 1, are designed to deliver leadership-class performance, scalability, and cost efficiency for various real…

Join us for PyDay Are you interested in learning more about web development using Python? Join us for an exciting online event led by experienced developer and educator Pamela Fox, where you'll learn how to build, test, and deploy HTTP APIs and web applications using three of the most popular Python frameworks: FastAPI, Django, and Flask. This event is perfect for anyone looking to expand their knowledge and skills in backend web development using Python. No web application experience is required, but some previous Python experience is encouraged. If you're completely new to Python, head over to Challenge to kickstart your learning! PyDay Schedule: …

Traditional performance metrics for machine learning models focus on calculations based on correct vs incorrect predictions. The aggregated accuracy scores or average error loss show how good the model is, but do not reveal conditions causing model errors. While the overall performance metrics such as classification accuracy, precision, recall or MAE scores are good proxies to help you build trust with your model, they are insufficient in locating where in data the model has inaccuracies. Often, model errors are not distributed uniformly in your underlying dataset. For instance, if your model is 89% accurate, does that mean it is 89% fair as well? Model fairnes…

We are wrapping up our blog series on Windows app confidence by diving into Endpoint analytics in Intune as a solution to help you during deployment and beyond. And we'll outline how App Assure engineers are here to support you in the 0.3% chance that you encounter an issue at any point in your process. Windows deployment rings and monitoring Whatever update management solution you use, you likely update your devices through deployment rings. It's the safest approach that supports your organization's productivity, provides essential monitoring insights to your organization, and prevents compatibility issues along the way. For example, you can Configure schedules t…

If you've followed Part 1 and Part 2 of the azdev-ify or azd-ify series and are wondering whether you need to completely rework your Bicep files to `azd up` your app, you're in luck! The solution may be simpler than you think. In this post, I'll walk you through the steps involved, which include: creating an "azure.yaml" file via `azd init` adding a "main.parameters.json" file properly tagging your resource group and resources with `azd-env-name` for deployment targets, add the corresponding `azd-service-name` tag as defined in "azure.yaml" To demonstrate the process, I collaborated with my colleague Farhat Saleem in the Customer Success Team to azd-ify…

Companies across the tech industry made significant layoffs in the first few months of 2023. According to recent reports, more than 100,000 individuals lost their jobs at leading technology companies, including Microsoft, AWS, Dell, IBM, Salesforce, and Meta. But the news is not all negative. According to data from LinkedIn, in the broader economy, the overall layoff rate remains at a record low. And while tech has seen outsized declines in hiring, according to LinkedIn’s latest Workforce Report, experts say that’s likely because the sector underwent a hiring spree in the wake of the pandemic. “This sector now appears to be undergoing a rebalancing,” says Kory Kant…

Data loss prevention (DLP) is a layer of an organization's data security strategy. It helps protect sensitive data by preventing users from inappropriately sharing it with people who shouldn't have it. Forward-thinking organizations are seeking to future-proof their DLP strategy with a comprehensive solution that scales across all applications, services, endpoints, and platforms. In this month’s episode of Uncovering Hidden Risks, we discuss some recent DLP research and what's coming up in this space. Microsoft spoke to more than 300 data and compliance professionals to create the whitepaper “Data Loss Prevention: From on-premises to cloud.” Joining us as a gue…

How is Teleperformance adopting Viva Sales with agility to empower their sales teams? As a product manager focusing on bringing new products to market, I love working with customers like Teleperformance, who trial, adopt, and extend Microsoft's innovations. When Microsoft announced its vision to supercharge seller productivity with Viva Sales in June 2022, the Teleperformance Sales strategy team was already trying out Viva Sales private preview and pushing us to bring additional features like Salesforce® CRM connectivity into our next preview release. Viva Sales is an AI-powered sales productivity application that allows sellers to work faster with greate…

A Denial of service (DoS) attack attempts to exhaust an application's resources, making the application unavailable to legitimate users and can be targeted at any endpoint that is publicly reachable through the internet. DoS attacks are reduced by a SQL Database gateway service called DoSGuard. If there are multiple applications connecting to an Azure SQL Database from the same source IP and one of them is misconfigured and causing multiple connections failures due to wrong credentials, DoSGuard will be triggered and block connections from the IP for a pre-defined time period and this will cause the connections from that IP to fail with error 18456 state 113…

An image of the Microsoft Loop app on a desktop device. As organizations continue to evolve in these dynamic times, they need modern tools that can embrace ambiguity and enable people to work where and how they want to in order to be effective. Microsoft Loop is the perfect solution for your teams to think, plan, and create together, like never before, even when they’re not in the same place. It’s a transformative co-creation experience that brings together teams, content and tasks across your tools and devices. It is a new app that combines a powerful and flexible canvas with portable components that stay in sync and move freely across Microsoft 365 apps. Learn more h…

Microsoft Loop is the latest app from Microsoft to help teams think, plan, and create together like never before. We have been listening to many customers in our early feedback sessions, and in these sessions a pattern emerged. Every person we spoke to valued collaboration. And they continued to struggle even with the latest iteration of tools. To get past the blank page. To communicate clearly. To stay aware of the work of others. And to keep track of knowledge and resources. We hear you; this is why we're leveraging AI to reinvent collaboration. So, you can focus on the parts you love. We are finally ready to share what we’ve been working on. And we’re excited fo…

Are you a high school student who loves tennis and wants to share your passion with others? Well, designing a registration form for your tennis club has never been easier with Microsoft Forms! To get started, go to template collections and choose one template that is suitable for your scenario. With thousands of AI-generated themes and cover pages, you can make your registration form stand out and attract more potential new members. Simply choose a cover page that suits your style and add key information about your tennis club to make it more informative. Don't forget to add a fun and exciting question about the gift you'll be giving to new members. Will…

We are excited to announce that Multi-Column Distribution (MCD) for Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL pools is now Generally Available in the latest DW release! MCD is highly desirable for easing migrations, promotes faster query performance and reduces data skew. To get the latest DW release, pause and resume your instance or wait for your maintenance window to start using MCD. What is a hash distributed table? Dedicated SQL pools in Azure Synapse Analytics distribute table rows across 60 distributions. Data from these distributions is abstracted to be viewed as a single table. Hash-distribution of one of the algorithms to distribute data impro…

We are launching a new way to pay for Azure Spring Apps -- the consumption pricing plan. This plan is now in public preview so you can start creating and deploying apps today. This new plan is super-efficient because you can start from zero and scale to zero vCPU. You get more straightforward pricing across your containerized applications since it costs the same as Azure Container Apps, but with added value for Spring apps. How does this work? With the new plan, you can deploy apps that don’t need to run all the time or apps that have bursts of traffic and only pay for the resources used. This is a “serverless plan”, which means your apps can scale out and in auto…

Today marks the start of the Microsoft Loop app journey. The Loop app is now available in public preview! Loop is about people - people who want to create together with ease, no matter where they are or what tools they use. It’s a transformative co-creation experience that brings together teams, content, and tasks across your tools and devices. Loop helps you organize everything you need for your project into a single workspace and even does the searching for you to kick it off. SharePoint provides the underlying storage and collaboration technology for Loop. We want to take a moment and share more about what happens under the hood and how we work with partner tea…

Recently Microsoft announced the new Bing Image Creator capability which compliments the new Bing Generative AI Capabilities. Bing Image Creator is another transformational capability for individuals and organizations (see below). In this HLS Show Me How video I demonstrate how to get, and leverage, Bing Image Creator. Additionally, I show you how to add to the Microsoft Edge sidebar for “at your fingertips” inline usage. Resources: Image Creator from Microsoft Bing Create images with your words - Bing Image Creator comes to the new Bing - The Official Microsoft Blog Use Bing Generative AI inline in Microsoft Edge Browser Today! Using Inline Bing Gene…

Voices of Healthcare Cloud is a webinar & podcast series hosted by myself, @Vasu Sharma, @Joshua Thompson & Aaron Porzondek. My name is Shelly Avery, I am currently a Dir, Healthcare Specialist for Health and Life Sciences focusing on the largest Payor and Provider customers in the US. Vasu is a Sr Customer Success Manager for Microsoft 365 for Health and Life Sciences, Aaron is a Dir, Customer Success Manager for Health and Life Sciences & Josh is a Sr Account Executive for Healthcare. The goal of this webinar series is to highlight how Healthcare is seeing positive business and clinical outcomes with cloud technology. We will be bringing new a…

Microsoft Viva Sales is reimagining sales. By weaving customer relationship management (CRM) context and artificial intelligence (AI) seamlessly into every salesperson’s flow of work, Viva Sales helps sellers focus time on what matters most: making meaningful connections, building trust, and moving deals forward. This month, we’re excited to share the next generation of AI product updates in Viva Sales, empowering sellers to achieve new levels of productivity. AI-generated email replies is now generally available (GA) Last month, we announced how sellers can communicate more effectively with AI-generated email replies and improve the quality and timelines…

Welcome to the final post in the series about building a Viva Connections card to display stock prices! After building the backend in the first post and the card in the second post, now it's time to deploy our solution and to take a deeper look at the security of our API. Let's start with the deployment of the backend! Deploying the backend Our backend is made by an Azure Function and an Azure Cache for Redis instance. The easiest way to deploy these components is to use a template, so that we don't have to manually create all the services and configure them. On the GitHub repository of the project, you can find a Bicep template. Bicep is a powerful languag…

This article describes how to use built-in and custom Azure Policy definitions to implement governance for Azure Container Apps. Any contribution is more than welcome. You can find the policy definitions in this GitHub repository. Feel free to submit a pull request to add or update custom policy definitions. Azure Governance Azure Governance is a set of mechanisms, services, and processes that allow users to maintain control over their applications and resources in Microsoft Azure. For more information, see What are the Azure Management areas?. Azure Governance is designed to help organizations plan their initiatives, set strategic priorities, and manage their…

Azure offers a preferred platform for PyTorch, a popular machine learning framework used for deep learning models. Specifically, the Azure Machine Learning (AzureML) service offers the Azure Container for PyTorch (ACPT), a carefully curated environment that includes the latest PyTorch version and optimization software designed for efficient training and inference, including DeepSpeed and ONNX Runtime. ACPT is thoroughly tested and optimized to ensure seamless integration with the Azure AI infrastructure, making it an excellent choice for running PyTorch-based projects. The ACPT curated environment in AzureML provides a ready-to-use distributed training environment for use…

Are you looking for a powerful and cost-effective (or possibly even free...) way to analyze large volumes of near real-time streaming data? Azure Data Explorer (ADX) could be the solution you're looking for. ADX is a fast and highly scalable data analytics service that enables you to ingest, analyze, and visualize large amounts of data in near real-time. And the best part? ADX has a free tier that you can leverage! And starting today, the free tier of ADX enables you to ingest data from Azure Event Hubs. Event hubs is a big data streaming platform, which can process millions of events per second in near real-time. Connecting your Event Hub data to Azure Data…

Azure Container Apps is a powerful tool for running containerized applications in the cloud. However, if you need to transfer files (custom log files, network captures, etc.) from your container app to another destination such as your local machine or Azure Blob Storage, you might find that the process is not as straightforward as you'd like. In this post, we'll walk you through the steps to transfer files from your Azure Container App to Azure Blob Storage using the `curl` command. Once the file is present on your Blob Storage, you can easily download it to your local machine from the Azure Portal itself in case you need to analyze the logs or network traces with a lo…

Semantic Kernel (SK) is an innovative and lightweight Software Development Kit (SDK) designed to integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) Large Language Models (LLMs) with conventional programming languages. With SK, developers can easily infuse their applications with complex skills such as prompt chaining, summarization, recursive reasoning, embeddings-based memory, zero/few-shot learning, and more. SK supports prompt templating, function chaining, vectorized memory, and intelligent planning capabilities out of the box. Join the SK community and build AI-first apps faster with a front-row seat on the future of computing. The SK extensible programming model comb…

Hello! My name is Herbert Fuchs and together with other members of the Customer Success Unit and the Customer Service & Support Organization we want to help our Customers with This Blog-Series. We gathered information and put our field and support experience into this. Special thanks to our contributors, reviewers and content-writers, Wilhelm Kocher, Anthony Fontanez, Emilian Bucur, Pavel Yurenev, Anderson Cassimiro and Madalina Zamfir. In this Blog we want to explain what is necessary to change the Operating System of a Server which hosts the Configuration Manager through an In-place Upgrade. Since the early Versions of Configuration Manager Curre…