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Watch this announcement in ASL above. Today we are pleased to announce sign language view, a new meeting experience in Microsoft Teams that helps signers – people who are Deaf/hard of hearing, interpreters, and others who use sign language – keep one another prioritized on center stage, in a consistent location, throughout every meeting. As a Deaf person who uses Teams for several meetings a day, I am all too familiar with the challenges that virtual meetings pose to Deaf and hard of hearing (D/HH) users. I face them too. About a year ago, I took on the role of Accessibility Architect for Microsoft Teams Calling, Meeting and Devices, and one of my prim…

In this episode of Data Exposed with Anna Hoffman, Logan Carrington, and Perry Skountrianos, we discuss the end of support for SQL Server 2012 of July 12, 2022 and what your options are as you migrate and modernize your existing workloads for your business environment.   Resources: SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 end of support - Microsoft Lifecycle SQL Server 2012 reaches end of support and Microsoft is here to help Move end-of-support SQL Server 2012 to Azure Virtual Machines and save What are Extended Security Updates? Know your options for SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 End of Support View/share our lat…

Disclaimer This document is not meant to replace any official documentation, including those found at docs.microsoft.com. Those documents are continually updated and maintained by Microsoft Corporation. If there is a discrepancy between this document and what you find in the Compliance User Interface (UI) or inside of a reference in docs.microsoft.com, you should always defer to that official documentation and contact your Microsoft Account team as needed. Links to the docs.microsoft.com data will be referenced both in the document steps as well as in the appendix. All the following steps should be done with test data, and where possible, testing should be …

Why should you choose Microsoft Defender for Office 365 to protect your healthcare business? Consider the amount of sensitive information healthcare organizations like yours have in their care. Attackers are doubling down on efforts to steal or use valuable healthcare data in a ransomware attack. Keeping things like patient data safe, while allowing your staff to provide care to your patients uninterrupted, requires a comprehensive, reliable security solution tailored for your needs. Introducing Microsoft Defender for Office 365, the right choice for security conscious healthcare organizations. Protect your business and employees from adv…

Special thanks to @BenjiSec for creating the Automation Health workbook and @Yechiel_Levin who contributed to this article. These days, when organizations are looking to do more with less resources, automation capabilities are a critical asset for organizations. Microsoft Sentinel automation rules and playbooks allow customers to turn repetitive manual processes to automatic flows. They save time and resources and allow security teams to focus on their main goal: protecting the organization from threats and investigating the important incidents that require their attention. While Microsoft Sentinel automation features rely on the robust and powerful Azure en…

Correlating Logs in Azure In this post we'll look at a common scenario; you have a backend application or API which is covered by Application Insights, so you already get plenty of great insight into the application and dependencies, on a per request basis - but what if there's an upstream reverse proxy? Wouldn't it be great to correlate activity in Application insights for a given operation/transaction with the logs for the same request in the upstream reverse proxy? Three commonly used reverse proxies in Azure are: Azure API Management Azure Application Gateway Azure Front Door Azure API management (APIM) is the easiest in this scenario, this servic…

“Tell me, and I will forget,” runs the old adage sometimes attributed to Confucius. “Show me,” it continues, “and I may remember. But involve me, and I will understand.” Everyone learns differently, of course, but this ancient saying neatly captures wisdom that’s as relevant as ever in our age of digital transformation: it’s the doing that really cements your abilities to recall information or perform a task better. That idea is taking on fresh urgency today as organizations of all kinds find themselves seeking to ensure that their teams keep up with technology’s accelerating demands. But new research confirms that experiential approaches to training …

Unlike standalone workspace chat and video conference platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams packs a lot of features that empower users and fuels their everyday productivity. Since it comes as a default app in all Microsoft 365 business plans, companies do not have to spend extra to maximize their users’ productivity gains. Here are five primary ways how Microsoft Teams helps improve user productivity: 1. Seamless Integration with Microsoft 365 Apps With Microsoft Teams, users and their teams can tap into the industry-leading app integration of the Microsoft 365 cloud suite. Microsoft has designed Teams to sync seamlessly with all Microsoft 365 apps such…

Author: Abid Nazir Guroo is a Program Manager in Azure Synapse Customer Success Engineering (CSE) team. Introduction Azure Synapse Analytics Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs are secure HTTP service endpoints that support creating and managing Azure Synapse resources using Azure Resource Manager and Azure Synapse web endpoints. This article provides instructions on how to setup and use Synapse REST endpoints and describe the Apache Spark Pool operations supported by REST APIs. Authentication In order to perform any operation using Azure REST APIs you need to authenticate the request using an azure active directory authentication token. …

Today we announce the public preview of organizational messages for Windows 11, enabling you to communicate with your employees natively on their Windows 11 devices. A new way to communicate with users As many organizations embrace the hybrid work environment there's an increased need to connect with employees. With organizational messages, you can leverage Microsoft Intune to configure and send branded messages to help people learn about their organization or ramp up for new roles. You can also notify users about organizational updates and trainings. Messages can be delivered just above the taskbar or in the Windows notifications area to keep users informed of im…

Navigate changing markets and accelerate growth with Azure Over the last couple of years, new patterns have emerged as drivers for businesses considering moving their infrastructures, workloads, and applications to the cloud. A central theme is that organizations have realized the importance of being more agile, capable of anticipating disruptions and pivoting to address rapidly changing macroeconomic conditions. It's more important than ever for businesses to be prepared for economic events on a global scale that could potentially affect long-term growth. Whether an organization has increasing cyber-security concerns or wants to save on IT infrastructure costs,…

The Azure Data Studio team is pleased to announce the General Availability of both Table Designer and Query Plan Viewer in release 1.40. Both features were initially available in preview earlier this year, and the team has endeavored to collect and implement user feedback to shape the final vision for each feature. We will continue to leverage user suggestions to drive improvements not just for these two newly available features, but for new functionality within Azure Data Studio. Table Designer General Availability The goal of Table Designer is to provide a visual editor experience for creating and managing table structures in SQL Server databases using …

Rules Engine - A common design pattern for flexible, advanced workflow solutions Do you have an advanced automation scenario that you fear will take a great deal of effort to build out every scenario only to then have the end users have changes to the requirements? Do you think the phrase "rules engine" sounds interesting? Are you convinced Power Platform won't be able to handle your legacy implementation due to complexity? Join seasoned MTC Architect, Brendon Colburn, as he speaks to and demonstrates the experience he's had implementing rules engines along with the advice he's giving agencies on the use of rules engines for their application modernization efforts. …

The auto-failover groups feature allows you to manage the replication and failover of all user databases in a managed instance to another Azure region. The secondaries are currently used both as a disaster recovery solution for failover, and as for read scale-out by sending read workloads to these secondaries. Still, many customers today use GeoDR as a disaster recovery solution only. These customers not using secondaries for read workloads still need to pay the full SQL license cost for their secondary – well, the Failover rights benefit is the solution for them. What does the Failover Rights benefit offer? The idea behind Failover Rights GeoDR is to remove…

Historically, field workers supporting cases for Medicaid members of their health plan used manual processes to track Home Modifications (ramp needed, pets present, support bars needed in the bathroom, etc.). With the Home Adaptations Power Apps, customers can replace those manual systems with modern applications for case managers and field inspectors that include automatic email communication between contractors for case, bid, and project management. Problem Statement Typical home modification support is manual, disjointed, and wrought with human error: Manual data entry errors Typical processes do not scale or allow for growth Poor visibility into open …

As a result of the October 27th order from the Fijian government, Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the Republic of Fiji will not be observed in 2022. Hence, clocks were not advanced by an hour at 02:00 on November 13, 2022. The November 2022 Cumulative Update preview release for Windows includes the following time zone update for Fiji: Clocks will not be advanced by an hour at 2:00 a.m. on November 13, 2022, for the Fiji time zone. This change is for customers running the following Windows versions: Windows 10, version 20H2 Windows 10, version 21H1 Windows 10, version 21H2 Windows Server 2022 Windows 11, version 21H2 Windows 11, version 22H2…

This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest status level attainable, and have recently graduated from university. Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they’re up to now. Today we meet Aanchal Mishra, who is from India and recently graduated from Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey Women's University with a bachelor’s degree in electronics. Responses have been edited for clarity and length.  When you joined the Student Ambassador com…

This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest status level attainable, and have recently graduated from university. Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they’re up to now. Today we meet Abir Pal, who is from India and recently graduated from Chandigarh University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering. Responses have been edited for clarity and length.  When you joined the Student Ambassador community in 2020, did you ha…

Today Data Exposed goes live at 9AM PT on LearnTV. Every 4 weeks, we’ll do a News Update. We’ll include product updates, videos, blogs, etc. as well as upcoming events and things to look out for. If you missed the episode, you can find them all at https://aka.ms/AzureSQLYT. This month we’ll recap all the updates and announcements in the database space since late September. You can read this blog to get all the updates and references mentioned in the show. Here’s the November 2022 update. By the way, this was a special episode, because it also was a session at the PASS Data Community Summit. If you missed the live stream, you won’t want to miss the recording:…

This is the next segment of our blog series highlighting Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone, the highest status level attainable, and have recently graduated from university. Each blog in the series features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassador community, and what they’re up to now.   Today we meet Aman Kesarwani, who is from India and recently graduated from the United College of Engineering & Research with a bachelor's degree in information technology. Responses have been edited for clarity and length.  When you joined the Student Ambassa…

Knowing how to position yourself in an enticing way to existing and potential employers is a must amidst the constant social media, content, and video posting that bombards digital audiences every day. That’s why this month, Microsoft Learn is celebrating YOU and your personal and professional accomplishments. With Microsoft Learn’s new sharing feature, it is now easier to share certifications and module completions directly onto Twitter and LinkedIn. Differentiating yourself as a job candidate with the validation of highly sought-after skills and standing out from the crowd with a little self-marketing can bring you one step closer to landing that dream job or b…

Overview Our learnings from talking to several enterprise customers is that businesses are leveraging hybrid and multi-cloud approaches to achieve digital transformation and stay competitive. While we expect this pattern to continue to rise, it also offers a unique set of challenges, especially with its strategic asset “Data” management. Let’s look at some of those challenges and learn how Microsoft's “Hybrid and multi-cloud data solutions” help to maximize the cost-effectiveness, security, performance, and reliability of the data with less. How to optimize costs and get predictable billing for all the data services running across on-premises, and cloud? H…

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 126 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below: Get it now in our marketplace [attachment=26533:name] AlmaLinux 8 Gen2 VM: This generation 2 virtual machine from ProComputers provides a minimal, ready-to-use image of AlmaLinux 8, a community-supported enterprise operating system that is binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. [attachment=26534:name] AreYouSafe? Bot Premium: The premium version of the AreYouSafe? bot from Avista integrates with Microsoft Teams to enable simple, fast employee safety checks a…

We are excited to announce SQL Server IoT 2022. SQL Server IoT, a binary equivalent of SQL Server, that is designed for fixed function use cases. Get more out of data with the Azure-enabled capabilities of SQL Server and SQL Server IoT 2022. SQL Server IoT 2022 Highlights Microsoft continues to enable customers to drive deeper insights, predictions, and governance from their data at scale. Let’s look at some highlights of SQL Server IoT 2022: Business continuity through Azure Seamless analytics over on-prem operational data Visibility over your entire data estate Most secure over the last 10 years Industry-leading performance and availability. …

Earlier this year, we introduced Microsoft Purview DevOps policies, a simple cloud-based experience to provision access at-scale for IT operations and security auditing personnel. Today, we are announcing the General Availability (GA) of this capability. Data is at the core of any modern process. To continue to operate, organizations must ensure the integrity and high availability of their databases. At the same time, critical IP, customer, and employee information must be protected by ensuring appropriate visibility and to preserve user privacy. As requirements become more challenging, new solutions are necessary. Microsoft Purview DevOps policies struc…