Microsoft Support & Discussions

Version 18.1.2 of the Microsoft ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server has been released. Version 18.1.2 brings a few fixes to the driver. 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 Next steps For Windows installations, you can directly download the Microsoft ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server. Linux and macOS packages are also available. For installation details see the online instructions for Linux or macOS. Roadmap We are committed to …

Recently, we got a request from a customer to let them know what are the server certificates that are sent by Azure SQL DB and SQL MI when a connection is created either with SQL or Azure Active Directory (AAD) authentication. At the time of writing, SQL DB and SQL MI have the below root certificates Baltimore CyberTrust Root DigiCert Global Root G2 Please check this article to see if there are any SQL root certificate changes in the future. When you attempt to connect to SQL DB or SQL MI using AAD authentication, SQL is no longer responsible for validating the identity of the client/application that is trying to sign in. So, when the client…

Hi everyone! Brandon Wilson here once again with this month’s “Check This Out!” (CTO!) guide. These posts are only intended to be your guide, to lead you to some content of interest, and are just a way we are trying to help our readers a bit more, whether that is learning, troubleshooting, or just finding new content sources! We will give you a bit of a taste of the blog content itself, provide you a way to get to the source content directly, and help to introduce you to some other blogs you may not be aware of that you might find helpful. If you have been a long-time reader, then you will find this series to be very similar to our prior series “Infrastructure + Securi…

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is pleased to announce a partnership with SANS Institute to deliver a new series of computer-based training (CBT) modules in the Attack Simulation Training service. The modules will focus on IT systems and network administrators. Microsoft is excited to collaborate with a recognized market leader in cyber security training to bring our customers training that can help our customers address a critical challenge in the modern threat landscape: educating and upskilling security professionals. “We salute Microsoft for recognizing the requirement to direct security awareness training towards IT System and Network Administrators since ou…

ProcDump v11.0 This update to ProcDump, a command-line utility for generating memory dumps from running processes, adds ModuleLoad/Unload and Thread Create/Exit triggers, removes Internet Explorer JavaScript support, and improves descriptive text messages. ProcDump 1.3 for Linux This update to ProcDump for Linux changes the CLI interface to match ProcDump for Windows, and adds a new process group trigger (-pgid) to allow monitoring all processes running in the same process group. Process Explorer v17.01 This update to Process Explorer fixes a crash when right-clicking an empty area of the lower pane threads tab and improves menu rendering. Continue r…

In this episode of Data Exposed: SQL Insider Series with Anna Hoffman and Sergey Khimchenko, learn about the value of Microsoft Well-Architected Framework for your Data Estate. Replacing traditional “architecture reviews” with a different approach – making sure that we architect Data Estate with modern capabilities for performance efficiency, reliability, security, cost efficiency and operational excellence. Any innovative and modern solution must have these pillars as foundation for any Data Estate architecture and design. Resources: Is your Data Estate Well-Architected? Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework Well-Architected Assessments …

Attestation: Another tool for Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures Ensuring that a platform is healthy and trustworthy is a fundamental vertical in today’s zero trust approach, and this has become one of the key focus areas of recent times. Pre-OS boot continues to remain a prime target for adversaries, which we have seen attacks due to supply chain trust brittleness. Firmware remains critical to any platform provider and often with minimal view and control. These programs control the flow of execution before the operating system takes control and can be used to bypass Anti-virus, monitoring, Host intrusion prevention systems, etc. In the recent Microsoft-commissi…

In this episode of Data Exposed: SQL Insider Series with Anna Hoffman and Sergey Khimchenko, learn about the value of Microsoft Well-Architected Framework for your Data Estate. Replacing traditional “architecture reviews” with a different approach – making sure that we architect Data Estate with modern capabilities for performance efficiency, reliability, security, cost efficiency and operational excellence. Any innovative and modern solution must have these pillars as foundation for any Data Estate architecture and design. Resources: Is your Data Estate Well-Architected? Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework Well-Architected Assessments Well-Ar…

When Microsoft 365 Groups were launched as a collaboration tool, we introduced a feature in the Exchange admin center and PowerShell to migrate existing distribution lists (DLs) to Groups. This feature was designed to provide continuity for DL users and to enable continued collaboration without having to make new groups from scratch. As Microsoft 365 Groups is now a mature feature, we are deprecating the feature for migrating DLs to Groups. The deprecation will happen on February 1, 2023. Post the deprecation, you can use the following process, to convert eligible DL to a Group. In the Exchange admin center, create a new Group with the following properties: Group…

Author(s): Amanjeet Singh is a Program Manager in Azure Synapse Customer Success Engineering (CSE) team. Introduction: Data mesh and challenges it addresses As organisations grow, the volume of data and the number of systems generating data also grows. The size and number of disparate systems introduces procedural, operational and technology challenges which impact (in a negative way) agility, scale, and governance associated with analytics. This is the problem space which data mesh is targeted at. It’s an approach to data architecture which aims at addressing these challenges through decentralization of technology platforms and processes; establishing domain…

Health & Life Sciences Power BI User Group presents: Intro to Low-Code/No-Code Custom Visuals Hosted by Power BI Product Team Live Webinar Thursday, November 10 1:00–2:00 PM ET REGISTER ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Join the Health & Life Sciences Power BI User Group To enable collaboration, several Power BI specialists at Microsoft have created a Power BI Community user group dedicated to customers in the provider, payor, pharma, health solutions, and life sciences industries. Members will have acces…

Our goal is to improve performance with every Teams update for our customers. The latest version of the Microsoft Teams desktop client now demonstrates further improvements in latency for key scenarios. The performance gain is mainly attributed to the upgrade of the framework, which we introduced this month. The upgrade brings performance benefit to both Windows and Mac desktop users when they are interacting with the application. The upgraded Teams framework provides technical benefits including rendering the HTML tree faster, running JavaScript and serializing arrays more efficiently. We went through a comprehensive analysis of our key user scenarios from work…

MCT (Microsoft Community Training) Installation Microsoft Community Training is an online learning environment powered by Azure. This is a perfect fit for organizations to train their learners and this enables our Non-Profits to achieve their mission to train the underserved population. Microsoft Community Training aims to transform volunteers and the workforce with a cost-effective training solution. These benefits include cost saving, ease of setup, user friendly interface and ability to learn anywhere. In addition, MCT adds to its advantages to drive large-scale programs and building training courses, getting insights from assessment, learners’ performance, and c…

Today, we are thrilled to announce that Multivariate Anomaly Detection is Generally Available! Multivariate Anomaly Detection is a new GA feature in Anomaly Detector service, which is a AI service under Cognitive Services that have helped Microsoft partners and customers build metrics monitoring solutions in scenarios like business KPI monitoring, utilization metrics monitoring, predictive maintenance and more. To leverage this new feature, you do not need to know much about machine learning, and you do not need to prepare labels at all for the underlying model is unsupervised. You could easily leverage a set of APIs to build an awesome model on your multiple varia…

Summary Microsoft is aware and actively addressing the impact associated with the recent OpenSSL vulnerabilities announced on October 25th 2022, fixed in version 3.0.7. As part of our standard processes, we are rolling out fixes for impacted services. Any customer action that is required will be highlighted in this blog and our associated Security Update … Awareness and guidance related to OpenSSL 3.0 – 3.0.6 risk (CVE-2022-3786 and CVE-2202-3602) Read More » Continue reading...

Introduction Over the past several years, neural networks have proven to be an incredibly effective tool in the field of Artificial Intelligence. As the problems/tasks become more complex and creative, the training of the neural network model inevitably involves a massive amount of data and computational resources. These require large clusters of multi-GPUs to process, which brings significantly more inter-node communications. NCCL library provides inter-GPU communication primitives that are topology-aware and can be easily integrated into applications. To deliver optimal inter-GPU performance, GPUDirect RDMA technology has been commonly utilized. It pro…

Thoughtfully designed with premium craftsmanship and high-quality hardware, the latest Surface devices are easier to repair and maintain, with more replaceable components and flexible choices in service. 1 Microsoft continues to innovate its serviceable designs to get the most out of Surface devices. Commercial customers can choose how to service their devices to solve issues quickly and minimize device downtime, whether through customer self-repair, 2 trusted Microsoft in-region repair, or a growing Authorized Service Provider (ASP) network. For documentation about service options and replaceable components across all Surface devices, see Surface for Busin…

On November 1, 2022 the OpenSSL team published two high severity vulnerabilities: CVE-2022-3602 and CVE-2022-3786. Any OpenSSL versions between 3.0.0 and 3.0.6 are affected and the guidance is OpenSSL 3.0 users should expedite upgrade to OpenSSL v 3.0.7 to reduce the impact of this threat. Microsoft customers can use Defender Vulnerability Management to identify devices that have these vulnerabilities in their organizations and track their patching process to minimize risks. Defender Vulnerability Management is a risk-based vulnerability management platform within Microsoft 365 Defender portal to help organizations reduce cyber risk with continuous vulnerability di…

Here is our Driver Release Calendar for 2022! The Driver Shiproom Calendar serves as a predictable way to understand our release windows when delivering drivers through Windows Update. For a full breakdown on the process, please visit our complete overview. Continue reading...

To the echoes of ghostly gasps and looming, deadly fog - the spirit of Halloween cast an eerie shadow this past month. Thus, I’ve transformed into Mark “The Count” Kashman, here to guide you through all things that go bump in the night for SharePoint in Microsoft 365. The Outlook is grim, and exciting, as I merely require only a SharePint of your blood so long as you don’t OneDrive a stake into my cold, vampirish heart :). So, rid of your garlic and return your wooden stake to its sheath. No need to fear. October 2022 brought some great new, welcome offerings: Viva Engage GA, Viva Insights: Focus mode in Teams, Stream (on SharePoint) GA, Excel Live in Teams, OneDri…

The first version of Logic Apps Designer was released almost 7 years ago. Over that period, the designer grew with the product, picking up new features that enabled new use cases. A little over a year ago, alongside Logic Apps Standard, we gave the designer its first facelift, which has been generally well received. As we built that facelift on top of the bones of the same designer that’s been around for the past 7 years, we learned that we needed to go farther if we wanted a designer that we could build on for the next 7 years. The Logic App Standard designer is much easier to use and parse visually use but came with some major performance and usability limitations, …

Welcome to Part 2 of our series! To sum up, in today’s article we’ll approach how to see, analyze & compare some of the label data we might find to troubleshoot sensitivity labels on the clients. Most of what will be described in the current article can be summarized into collecting a Problem Step Recorder (PSR), while running a fiddler trace, or using graph to check replication, performing a client reset whenever possible and compare the results to what we have configured on the server. So please never forget to check & use Get-Label and Get-LabelPolicy Cmd-lets to compare. Now, why did we bore ourselves with knowing all these label actions and policy cust…

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 130 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below: Get it now in our marketplace [attachment=25762:name] 1E DEX Platform: This digital experience (DEX) monitoring platform from 1E can help your team improve the end user experience while enhancing security and reducing cost with visibility, control and compliance, digital experience observability, and service desk automation solutions. [attachment=25763:name] AffableBPM SaaS Solution for Enterprise: AffableBPM streamlines and automates end-to-end business processes for…

You’ve wanted to know how well search works for your organization. Microsoft Search usage reports have the data! Enterprise users spend time every day searching for information. As a Search administrator for your organization, it’s very important for you to understand who your users are, what they search for, how they engage with search results, and their preferred search application so you can increase your users’ productivity by helping them easily find the information they are looking for. We’re excited to announce that we’ve completed the roll out of an improved and enhanced Search usage reports to all WW tenants! You can access these reports in the Microsof…

On October 24 we released new technical guidance to help customers and partners achieve their sustainability goals using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) – guidance to help you improve efficiency of your AKS workloads and create new business value while reducing your operational footprint. Sustainability guidance for AKS As part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to promote sustainable development and low-carbon business practices globally, we’ve released sustainability guidance within the Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF) designed to help you optimize your Azure workloads for greener IT. In alignment with this WAF guidance, our new sustainability guidan…