Microsoft Support & Discussions

Working in technology today means working securely. This is especially true with B2B apps, where cyberthreats can mean costly fixes or loss of reputation. To help your commitment to security, Microsoft has redoubled efforts on integrating security features at every step. This will help your team design securely, sell with confidence, and delight your customers. Recently, at Microsoft Build in May, several sessions focused on the newest features for integrating security and increasing customer trust. Additional resources to learn more about security Watch some of the security sessions from Microsoft Build 2024. This targeted group of sessions wi…

We are announcing the deprecation of the feature of Virtual Network Injection for Azure Data Explorer. This feature allows customers to inject their Azure Data Explorer cluster into their own virtual network and control the inbound and outbound network traffic. However, this feature has limitations and challenges, such as: Customers face a lot of maintenance work, because of things like updating firewall lists of FQDNs or using public IP addresses in a restricted and secured environment. Customers are responsible for ensuring that the intra-cluster communication is working. It requires a dedicated subnet for each cluster, which can lead to subnet exhaustion and incr…

If you are an administrator who uses SharePoint and OneDrive DLP rules to protect your organization's sensitive files, you may have noticed that the policy tips informing users about the policies applied to their files are not always reliable in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Windows. We’ve heard your feedback and are happy to announce that we’re rolling out a new update to Office apps on Windows that will significantly improve the reliability of DLP policy tips for files stored in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. This update will change how Office determines whether a policy tip should be shown for a file. Instead of trying to evaluate the policy rules on its…

In the previous blog, SAP connectivity from the Copilot Studio and Power Platform were explored, let’s now look at an enhanced version of the scenario explained in the previous blog in the newer video below: Scenario description: Let’s say, the salesperson realizes that material in the sales order placed by the customer is not available and wants to help replace the unavailable item for the customer in the sales order. The salesperson does the following: The salesperson asks the Copilot to help her look through all the materials in the SAP system to find the best replacement. The salesperson gets a suitable replacement suggestion from Copilot a…

[HEADING=1]The Problem of Cardinality Estimation[/HEADING] There is a single main query processing "engine" that powers SQL Server and Azure SQL Database. Within that engine is the part of a program that optimizes and executes queries. We call the process of optimizing and executing a query “Query Processing” or QP for short. Optimization is a step in which the query is, or can be, rewritten or reorganized to semantically equivalent but faster/more efficient operators. A critical part of that process is determining the approximate sizes of different sub-parts of a query. Think answers to questions like: “How many rows will this join return?” or “How many rows will…

On July 18, the Viva People Science team held the fourth webinar in its AI Empowerment series. During this webinar, I was joined by Carolyn Kalafut (Principal People Scientist at Microsoft Viva), Megan Benzing (Viva People Science Researcher) and Craig Ramsay (Viva People Science Researcher) who have been leading a research study into what it means to be ready for AI transformation as an organization. We talked about the key insights that emerged from the research including: AI and the employee experience being complementary to one another, and how a positive employee experience can help to drive successful AI transformation How leaders and individual contribu…

In this guest blog post, Erika Sperekas, Sr. Partner Marketing Manager at Docusign, examines the consequences of patchwork agreement workflows and explains how system integrations can streamline processes and create better experiences for businesses. No matter which line of business you work in, you will probably have to deal with agreements at some point. Agreements are everywhere throughout an organization: sales contracts, offer letters, account openings, invoices, and a lot more. They contain details about dollars that change hands, products and services that are delivered, and relationships your business has with important parties. However, the process …

In the ever-evolving landscape of AI, LLM + RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) is a typical use scenario. Retrieving accurate related chunked data from complicated docs and then improving LLM response quality becomes challenge. There is no a silver bullet RAG can address all requirements so far. Developers need to verify different advanced RAG techs to find out which is a proper one for their scenarios considering accuracy, response speed, costs, etc. In order to solve this, with Azure Intelligent Document, Azure OpenAI, LlamaIndex, LangChain, Gradio..., I developed this AdvancedRAG service. This service is encapsulated in a Docker container, offers a streamlined way t…

This blog is co-authored by Devika Nair Syama, Director of Product Management, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. At Microsoft and Oracle, we are focused on prioritizing customer needs for security, reliability, and superior cloud services while helping you to meet regulatory and compliance requirements with Oracle Database@Azure. Underscoring our unwavering commitment to providing you with greater flexibility, we launched Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle Database@Azure along with plans to roll out to 15 regions around the world by the end of this year. Today, Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle Database@Azure is generally available in five distinct region…

Ciao Readers, Just a week no writing [ATTACH=full]61101[/ATTACH]. The moment of another blog post arrived [ATTACH=full]61102[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]61103[/ATTACH]. In this post, I am going to show you how to set up alerts for disconnected Arc agents using Azure Monitor. If you are not familiar with Azure Arc, it is a service that lets you manage and govern your hybrid cloud resources from a single pane of glass. More about it in the Azure Arc overview public documentation page. One of the benefits of using Arc is that it allows you to collect data from your hybrid resources, so you monitor the health and performance of them. It is ‘a prerequisite’ for enabl…

[HEADING=1]Introduction[/HEADING] Large language models (LLMs) can perform many different tasks with text, audio, images, and even videos, allowing them to be multimodal. With these many capabilities, there is a fear that LLMs might not always follow the goal that you created them for, which might be to do a specific task related to your business. For example, respond to customers' inquiries or assist the company's employees in finding answers to their questions. Modifying the system message (meta prompt) with prompt engineering to achieve these specific tasks will still leave you with nondeterministic responses generated randomly. To mitigate this, you can use retriev…

[JUSTIFY][ATTACH=full]61087[/ATTACH] Ok. So you want to supplement your LLM chat application with your own knowledge base but you could not be bothered about the cumbersome code development that might be involved. Or you are more visual-oriented and would like to make sense of your application workflow.[/JUSTIFY] [JUSTIFY]LangFlow is a drag-and-drop framework that helps you build fully customizable GenAI applications. You can assemble several components with a few clicks to create the exact Retrieval Augmented Generation application you envision, powered by your data source. This means you can access a more reliable, easy-to-build, GenAI model built to addre…

TOC Why we use it Architecture How to use it References Why we use it This tutorial will introduce how to integrate Microsoft Entra with Azure SQL Server to avoid using fixed usernames and passwords. By utilizing user-assigned managed identities as a programmatic bridge, it becomes easier for Azure-related PaaS services (such as Function App or App Services) to communicate with the database without storing connection information in plain text. Architecture [ATTACH=full]61063[/ATTACH] I will introduce each service or component and their configurations in subsequent chapters according to the order of A-D: A: The company's account admini…

Hi, We are experiencing a service outage due to ongoing maintenance since around July 21st, 4 pm PDT. The service is currently not available in any region. We will provide the next update as soon as we have additional progress to share. Cheers, Fawad Continue reading...

As a follow-up to the CrowdStrike Falcon agent issue impacting Windows clients and servers, we have released a USB tool to help IT Admins expedite the repair process. The signed Microsoft Recovery Tool can be found in the Microsoft Download Center: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2280386. The steps to use the tool are detailed below. Prerequisites A Windows 64-bit client with at least 8GB of free space from which the tool can be run to create the bootable USB drive. Administrative privileges on the Windows client from prerequisite #1. USB drive with (1GB). All existing data on this USB will be wiped. BitLocker recovery key for each BitLocker-enabled …

We are aware of an issue that started on 19 July 2024 at 04:09UTC, which resulted in customers experiencing unresponsiveness and startup failures on Windows machines using the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, affecting both on-premises and various cloud platforms. CrowdStrike has released a public statement on Windows Sensor Update - crowdstrike.com addressing the matter, and it includes recommended steps for a workaround. For environments specific to Azure, further instructions are provided below: Recovery Option: We have noticed that some Azure VMs are successfully updating via the CrowdStrike Falcon agent after multiple manual Virtual Machine restarts. Custome…

[HEADING=1]Introduction [/HEADING] Advanced Network Observability is the inaugural feature of the Advanced Container Networking Services (ACNS) suite bringing the power of Hubble’s control plane to both Cilium and Non-Cilium Linux data planes. It unlocks Hubble metrics, Hubble’s command line interface (CLI) and the Hubble user interface (UI) on your AKS clusters providing deep insights into your containerized workloads. Advanced Network Observability empowers customers to precisely detect and root-cause network related issues in a Kubernetes cluster. [ATTACH=full]61050[/ATTACH] [HEADING=1]Prerequisites [/HEADING] This blog will focus on ACNS enabled on A…

[ATTACH=full]61049[/ATTACH] Marketplace Minis, a video series now available on Microsoft Azure's YouTube channel, covers common marketplace publishing concepts in two-minutes or less. These live-action videos can help you get started with multiple topics in the marketplace and lead to deeper learning in full on-demand courses that are available through Mastering the Marketplace. Samples of Marketplace Minis: : To publish software solutions in the marketplace, one initial step is choosing the right offer type to create. This short video provides an overview of the four deployment architectures available on the marketplace and when you should consider each one …

[ATTACH=full]61047[/ATTACH] FSLogix is a complex tool that is used in a wide range of environments. Testing and validating these environments is extremely challenging as an engineering team and we rely on customers like you to help us test, validate and ensure our product is meeting the needs of all our customers. FSLogix is partnering with the Microsoft Management Customer Connection Program (MM CCP) to provide customers and professionals with a forum to join exclusive conversations, feedback and access to future versions of the product. FSLogix is part of the Windows Cloud Experience (WCX) organization where you can find AVD, Windows 365, and the new 'FSLo…

Based on our extensive experience with customers using SQL on Linux, we have compiled a guide outlining fundamental troubleshooting steps and available tools to assist in resolving SQL on Linux issues. This guide aims to make it easier for SQL DBAs who have primarily worked on Windows operating systems over the years. In this article, we will normalize three checks in Linux that we typically perform in Windows to start troubleshooting issues with SQL Server: System logs SQL Server logs Task Manager Note: The screenshots in the below examples are taken from RHEL and Ubuntu machines, and while the Linux flavors are different, the commands are similar in b…

[ATTACH=full]61028[/ATTACH] FSLogix is a complex tool that is used in a wide range of environments. Testing and validating these environments is extremely challenging as an engineering team and we rely on customers like you to help us test, validate and ensure our product is meeting the needs of all our customers. FSLogix is partnering with the Microsoft Customer Connection Program (MCCP) to provide customers and professionals with a forum to join exclusive conversations, feedback and access to future versions of the product. FSLogix is part of the Windows Cloud Experience (WCX) organization where you can find AVD, Windows 365, and the new 'FSLogix and user …

[ATTACH=full]61022[/ATTACH] Welcome to Grow Your Business with Copilot for Microsoft 365, a monthly series designed to empower small and midsized businesses to harness the power of AI at work. My team works with a wide range of small and midsized businesses. And while each is unique in their own way, we’ve found that regardless of size, industry, or market, they basically want the same thing: to grow . To attract more customers. To boost revenue. To scale efficiently. But in many businesses today, people struggle to get the day-to-day work done. They don’t have the time and creative space to explore innovative ideas that unlock growth opportu…

[HEADING=1]Pre-Job Health Checks on AKS: A Guide to Stable AI Workloads[/HEADING] [HEADING=1]Introduction[/HEADING] In the realm of AI workloads, ensuring the health and stability of compute nodes is critical. Training large AI models often spans months and relies on advanced AI supercomputers equipped with high-end GPUs like NVIDIA A100 or H100, interconnected via InfiniBand for efficient communication. These models' training workloads are complex and interdependent, with frequent updates and communications facilitated by NCCL collective communication. However, the inherent complexity also brings challenges, as any failure in GPUs or InfiniBand links—such a…

[HEADING=3]Introduction[/HEADING] This Microsoft Defender for Cloud PoC Series provides guidelines on how to perform a proof of concept for specific Microsoft Defender plans. For a more holistic approach where you need to validate Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Defender plans, please read How to Effectively Perform an Microsoft Defender for Cloud PoC article.  Defender for APIs provides full lifecycle protection, detection, and response coverage of your APIs published within Azure API Management Platform. Defender for APIs includes unified visibility across your Azure API Management services within your Azure subscriptions, security insights with…

We continue to expand the Microsoft AppSource ecosystem. For this volume, 12 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below: [TABLE width=95%] [TR] [th width=100%] [HEADING=2]Get it now in our marketplace[/HEADING][/th] [/TR] [TR] [td width=15%][ATTACH=full]61002[/ATTACH][/td] [td width=85%] Consultancy for Marketing and Customer Insights (Ignite Plus): Imperium Dynamics offers a guided methodology for training, basic journeys, configuring brand templates, and quick deployment of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights. The app features AI-generated insights, automated workflows, and persona…