Microsoft Support & Discussions

It is common that IT personnel tasked with monitoring the health and performance of database systems be given very high privileges such as SQL sysadmin. This enables them to do their job but comes with significant risks. Those privileges enable them to read or modify the data that other users in the organization store in those databases. That data is commonly referred to as “user data”. Sometimes user data can be very sensitive, for example, the consolidated financial information of a public company prior to being disclosed in an earnings report, a technological achievement that gives the company a competitive edge, and customer or employee information that must be protec…

In today's digital age, where Software as a Service (SaaS) has become ubiquitous, it is critical to have a line of sight into the SaaS applications being used in your organization. The challenge is managing the growing number of apps and knowing which apps may be misconfigured or unused. This leaves an open attack vector that can be easily taken advantage of by adversaries. In our recent announcement, we shared that Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is shifting to a comprehensive SaaS Security solution and how critical it is to implement holistic SaaS Security strategy. Strengthening app posture and maintaining app hygiene are two critical capabilities that can help drast…

Today, we will talk about OpenAI and the Microsoft Power Platform and how to build next-gen application with it. Over the past few weeks, social-media feeds and newsletters have been filled with stories and conversations about artificial intelligence (AI). ChatGPT and OpenAI were often center of these conversations and today we will take a look at an exciting OpenAI and Power Platform scenario. We will discuss how developers can leverage OpenAI's APIs to build next-gen application using Microsoft Power Apps. For our scenario, we will use DALL·E 2 (a new AI system model) to create realistic images and art from a text description in natural language. What is OpenAI …

When it comes to managing IoT devices, security is of the utmost importance. But, you’d also rest easier if devices are secure without concern about manual certificate management. In this post, we'll show you a solution that streamlines IoT Edge certificate management using GlobalSign's IoT Edge Enroll EST service. An analogy Think of each IoT Edge device as a new driver, ready to hit the road and communicate with the IoT Hub. And like a new driver, each device needs its own set of credentials that need renewal. Here's how GlobalSign's EST service makes it a breeze: Birth Certificate: During manufacturing, each device is given a unique Initial Device I…

Version 19.3 of the Microsoft OLE DB Driver for SQL Server has been released. Version 19.3 adds Windows ARM64 and a couple of bug fixes. Features Support for Windows ARM64 Bug Fixes Fixed a potential crash when invalid metadata is received from the server. Fixed an installer issue where a 64-bit version of adal.dll was packaged instead of the 32-bit one. For details, see Known issues. Changes The driver now requires Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2022 (version 14.34 at minimum). For more details, see the release notes. The updated driver can be downloaded directly from Microsoft. David Engel Continue …

Today, we’re introducing Playlists - a new and simple way to curate and share video or audio collections within Microsoft 365. Until now, you had to build a SharePoint page with web parts and load in the content to create a video collection. With playlists in Microsoft 365, you add content using the new 'Playlist' template in Microsoft Lists. Once you have the right collection of audio or video files, it's instantly ready to playback and share. This combines Lists ease of use with the trusted value of Stream (on SharePoint) powering the playback experience. A published Playlist makes it easy to view and share a collection of audio and video files. The example abov…

Version 18.2 of the Microsoft ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server has been released. Version 18.2 brings Windows ARM64 support and several fixes to the driver. Features Support for Windows ARM64 Fixes Fix VBS-NONE enclave attestation protocol Fix error when retrieving numeric column with Regional=Yes Fix intermittent lack of error when server is stopped during bcp out operation Fix error when stored procedure call contains unquoted string parameter Fix a memory leak upon reconnect Fix a crash when receiving invalid data from server Correct error message when Dedicated Administrative Connections (DAC) fail Next steps For Windows installation…

Greetings to our lovely NTA non-profits. Recently many organizations have inquired about Microsoft Bookings and how they can utilize it within their organization. In this blog, I will help you understand what Microsoft Bookings is and how your clients can use it to schedule appointments with you or your organization. What is Microsoft Bookings? Microsoft Bookings is an online tool that is used to schedule appointments with you or members of your organization. You can create booking calendars designed for a specific purpose or designated to a certain department where clients can schedule book an appointment for a listed service that is provided. Once a calend…

To support your efforts to deliver and deploy updates to the Windows devices being used by remote, onsite, and hybrid workers across your organization, and manage those devices effectively, we are continuing our series of weekly "office hours" for IT professionals here on Tech Community. Next event: Thursday, February 16th - 8:00-9:00 a.m. Pacific Time - ADD TO CALENDAR How do Office Hours work? During Office Hours, we bring in a broad group of product experts, servicing experts, and engineers representing Windows, Windows 365, Microsoft Intune, Configuration Manager, security, public sector, FastTrack, and more to provide guidance, discuss strategies and…

Welcome to our monthly update for Teams for Education and thank you so much for being part of our growing community! We’ve been working on some great new updates that we’re excited to share with you, so here’s what’s new this month. Enjoy! February Topics: Introducing Classwork for Microsoft Teams Updates to Grading Search Coach in Teams Reading Progress – Addition of Comprehension Questions Reading Coach in Immersive Reader for Teams Assignments Automatic lowering of hand in a meeting (preview) New Teams Webinar Experience “@ Mention” everyone in the chat Education Templates for Teams Meetings Loop component support in Microsoft Whiteboard Save and S…

To support your efforts to deliver and deploy updates to the Windows devices being used by remote, onsite, and hybrid workers across your organization, and manage those devices effectively, we are continuing our series of weekly "office hours" for IT professionals here on Tech Community. Next event: Thursday, February 16th - 8:00-9:00 a.m. Pacific Time - ADD TO CALENDAR How do Office Hours work? During Office Hours, we bring in a broad group of product experts, servicing experts, and engineers representing Windows, Windows 365, Microsoft Intune, Configuration Manager, security, public sector, FastTrack, and more to provide guidance, discuss strategies and…

Hi community,   Introduction Hello everyone, my name is Dave Guenthner, and I am a Senior FastTrack Architect (FTA) at Microsoft.  The purpose of this blog is to share a recent customer problem and provide suggestions for resolution. Working in Fast Track, I speak with customers every day about their “Modern Endpoint” aspirations. A key concept is embracing Azure AD Join as the Microsoft recommended path for most new or repurposed devices. This is superbly outlined in blog posting Understanding hybrid Azure AD join and co-management. My customer was evaluating Microsoft’s Windows 365 (W365) solution and provisioned them as Azure AD Join only (substantial chang…

The future is here! With loads of jobs in tech, you must be looking forward to getting your first job. Is it possible? Yes, it is, but you would need to be prepared. In this article, I wanted to highlight 4 ways you can prepare to land your first job in tech. “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” - Seneca Pick a path that interests you: The tech ecosystem keeps growing with lots of new paths, tools and technologies popping up each year. It can be confusing sometimes to pick a specific path. Here’s what you can do: Make some research. Take some time to check out the different career paths in technology. You need to look out for skills r…

So, you are ready to use Defender Threat Intelligence to uncover threat actors at scale and enhance your security operations. Defender Threat Intelligence can help identify and eliminate modern threats and their infrastructure with dynamic threat intelligence by applying the following capabilities: Identify attackers and their tools. Accelerate detection, incident response, investigations, and remediation. Enhance your security tools and workflows. To effectively determine the benefits of adopting Defender Threat Intelligence, you should perform a Proof of Concept (PoC). Before enabling Defender Threat Intelligence, you and your team should go through a…

Optimizing resource allocation to achieve performance goals while controlling costs can be a challenging balance to strike especially for database workloads with complex usage patterns. Azure SQL Database serverless provides a solution to help address these challenges, but until now serverless has only been available in the General Purpose tier. However, many workloads that can benefit from serverless may require greater performance and scale along with other capabilities unique to the Hyperscale tier. We are pleased to announce the preview of serverless for Hyperscale in Azure SQL Database. The benefits of serverless and Hyperscale now come together into a sing…

This video series discusses how to use Power BI to analyze data. The first video discusses how to use Azure SQL data sources with Power BI. The last video discusses how to use data governance to ensure that data is properly analyzed. Before we delve into each series, there is a Microsoft Learn content that helps you understand the data platform, I suggest you read and practice it as it will give you a lot of contexts to what different Microsoft technologies offers, click here for our Microsoft Learn interactive learning collection. 1. The Azure SQL and Power BI: This video series discusses how Power BI and SQL Server work better together, starting with ho…

Databricks announced today their official extension for VS Code. Developers love using VS Code and Databricks is committed to providing a first-class experience for developers using Azure Databricks in their IDE. To read the full announcement, you can read the original post here. With this extension, Databricks brings all of the core capabilities of Azure Databricks to VS Code including securely connecting to workspaces, clusters, and data. Developers can utilize all their familiar features in VS Code like extensions, access to git tools, local unit testing, and debugging. Databricks will continue to improve and expand this extension to add more capabilitie…

Previously we announced our first major step in reducing the size of the Windows Server Container images by ~40%. Today, we are pleased to announce our next step in this direction by making our delta layers 60-80% smaller while reducing total image size by about 40% as part of the February 2023 release. These images are now available in MCR (Server Core, Windows, Server). One of the primary techniques we use to reduce the size of Windows container image is to split our images into two layers (except Nano Server). Rather than shipping the entire image each month, we ship a baseline image occasionally (like we did in January 2023) and a monthly delta, which contains …

When moving to Azure DevOps, or when working offline away from your existing Azure DevOps project, you need a way to bring your newly created requirements into Azure DevOps. Many teams face the issue of getting the requirements they have created in Word, Excel, and elsewhere into Azure DevOps. Luckily there are a few simple ways to do this without having to worry about adding a lengthy copy/paste session to your process! In this article, I will cover a few different ways to import requirements. So lets continue with the different approaches to import work items successfully in Azure DevOps. Importing Business Requirements from Microsoft Excel Impor…

Building beautiful sites with purpose: Part 2 In this Part 2 of our “Building Beautiful sites with purpose” series we are going to focus on the practical build out of the Bonnie’s Community Garden site in both communication site and team site formats. We will cover our remaining 3 sections of focused content: 4. Images and Content 5. Layouts and web parts 6. The Extras 4. Images and content As you are building out your site one of the ways that you can add visual interest to your site is through your choice of images. You have multiple options when it comes to picking images for your site including stock photography if allowed …

Microsoft has released Security Updates (SUs) for vulnerabilities found in: Exchange Server 2013 Exchange Server 2016 Exchange Server 2019 SUs are available in a self-extracting auto-elevating .exe package, as well as the original update packages (.msp files), which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Update Catalog. SUs are available for the following specific versions of Exchange Server: Exchange Server 2013 CU23 (note that support and availability of SUs end on April 11, 2023) Exchange Server 2016 CU23 Exchange Server 2019 CU11 and CU12 The February 2023 SUs address vulnerabilities responsibly reported to Microsoft by security partners and fo…

We are excited to announce two new features that will greatly improve the .NET Framework update experience for users on Windows 11, version 22H2. Your device will experience fewer reboots, and you will have more control over optional .NET Framework updates. Experience fewer reboots when moving to Windows 11, version 22H2 We've integrated .NET Framework updates into the Unified Update Platform or UUP-based feature update. Moving to Windows 11, version 22H2 via Windows Update will now automatically help secure your device with the latest .NET Framework updates. You'll now experience one less reboot! Moreover, enable Dynamic Update and experience this improvement of …

Last month, we announced Formula by Example starting to roll out to Excel web users. Formula by Example looks for patterns as the user enters data in the worksheet. When it recognizes a pattern, Formula by Example offers a formula to fill the rest of the column with the recognized pattern. The example below shows Formula by Example helping to reverse the first & last name order. Using Formula by Example to reverse the first & last name order How to make Formula by Example work Currently, Formula by Example supports Excel tables. Support for ranges is coming in a future release - stay tuned for more! If you wanted to try Formula by Example on a range…

Introducing the New Post-delivery Activities Report in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Attackers are always evolving to adapt to the newest protections enacted by security teams and the products they rely on. Today, attackers frequently attempt to bypass security tools by sending messages that only become malicious after they have been delivered. This requires a robust post-delivery detection and response mechanism. In this blog, we will explore the evolution of an attack, how Defender for Office 365 provides out of the box post-delivery protection, and how you can see this value for your organization. Today we’re announcing a new report in Microsoft Defender fo…