Microsoft Support & Discussions

Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork, enabling effortless communication and collaboration. By using devices certified for Microsoft Teams, you can elevate your meeting and calling experience. These devices are carefully tested and certified to ensure they complement the Teams environment and make every interaction more engaging and productive. [HEADING=1] Why use devices certified for Teams?[/HEADING] Devices certified for Teams are specifically designed to enhance your Teams experience. Let’s explore some the benefits below: Quality and Compatibility: These devices undergo thorough testing and certification to ensure they meet the highest standards of quali…

Change Analysis Identifying who made a change to your Azure resources and how the change was made just became easier! With Change Analysis, you can now see who initiated the change and with which client that change was made, for changes across all your tenants and subscriptions.    Audit, troubleshoot, and govern at scale   Changes should be available in under five minutes and are queryable for fourteen days. In addition, this support includes the ability to craft charts and pin results to Azure dashboards based on specific change queries.     What’s new: Actor Functionality   Who made the change  This can be either ‘AppId’ (client or Azure s…

Have you ever gone toe to toe with the threat actor known as Octo Tempest? This increasingly aggressive threat actor group has evolved their targeting, outcomes, and monetization over the past two years to become a dominant force in the world of cybercrime. But what exactly defines this entity, and why should we proceed with caution when encountering them? Octo Tempest (formerly DEV-0875) is a group known for employing social engineering, intimidation, and other human-centric tactics to gain initial access into an environment, granting themselves privilege to cloud and on-premises resources before exfiltrating data and unleashing ransomware across an environment. T…

[HEADING=1]Data Retention with Chat threads[/HEADING] Developers can now create chat threads with a retention policy between 30 and 90 days. This feature is in public preview. This policy is optional – a developer can choose to create a chat thread with infinite retention (as always) or set a retention policy between 30 and 90 days. If the thread needs to be kept for longer than 90 days, you can extend the time using the update chat thread property API. The policy is geared for data management in organizations that have a need to move data into their archives for historical purposes or delete the data within a given period. Existing chat threads …

Working with applications teams and partners developing cloud native apps on Azure, you quickly learn developer time is valuable, enthusiasm & flow state is critically important. Whenever an application team has to wait for an environment, wait for a access, a service now ticket, a support case, admin access to install tooling, productivity is dramatically effected, projects can be 2x longer and of lower quality. Equally, it's important to have a designed, governed secure environment when using the public cloud, so your workload teams start right, and stay right! This covers all the normal design pillars of a well architected solution, reliability, secur…

We are pleased to announce the GA release of Advance Notifications for Azure SQL Managed Instance. [HEADING=1]What are advance notifications?[/HEADING] Advance notifications allow you to prepare for planned maintenance events on your SQL Managed Instance resources. They alert you 24 hours before a planned maintenance event. Advance notifications work hand-in-hand with SQL Maintenance Windows – with the two combined, you gain control over when your managed instances receive updates and receive a notification ahead of time. [HEADING=1]Why should I configure advance notifications?[/HEADING] Getting advance notification can help you to efficiently prepare your sys…

Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork, enabling effortless communication and collaboration. With Microsoft Teams certified devices, you can elevate your meeting and calling experience. These devices are carefully tested and certified to ensure they complement the Teams environment and make every interaction more engaging and productive. [HEADING=1] Why use Teams certified devices?[/HEADING] Teams certified devices are specifically designed to enhance your Teams experience. Let’s explore some the benefits below: Quality and Compatibility: These devices undergo thorough testing and certification to ensure they meet the highest standards of quality and reliabili…

[HEADING=1]Azure Functions triggers and bindings for building intelligent apps with Azure OpenAI[/HEADING] Over the last year, we have seen a large interest from customers to bring intelligence to their existing and new applications based on the innovation that has recently occurred in artificial intelligence and particularly Azure OpenAI. After working with customers, a few common challenges have shown up when building these intelligent applications. Developers often feel that they need to become AI engineers to integrate the capabilities into their application. Most of the samples are in languages like Python and this is often not the expertise of the…

We continue to expand the Microsoft AppSource ecosystem. For this volume, 120 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below: [HEADING=2]Get it now in our marketplace[/HEADING] [attachment=54950:name] AIPictoNarrator System: This software-as-a solution offer from GNS Technology uses AI to create videos from text descriptions. It generates images, transforms them into a video, and offers editing tools. The AIPictoNarrator System helps educators, marketing, and social media professionals reduce production time and costs while enhancing their ability to tell compelling stories. [attachment=54951:name] B…

[HEADING=1]Quarterly Community Call[/HEADING] This month we held our first community call. Thank you to everyone that attended & contributed. It was amazing to see both the positive and constructive feedback from within the community. Don’t forget, if you have feedback, open a GitHub Issue to start the discussion with our core team! If you missed the event, you can see the recording below, but here’s what we covered: Who are the AVM Core Team? What is AVM? How are we aligned to the Well-Architected Framework? Q&A With our toolset owners (PSRule & TFLint) Q&A With our External Contributors (John Lokerse & Stu Mace) Open Q&A with the…

Hello, I am Anas Abuelhaag, a Microsoft Student Ambassador from Egypt, currently pursuing a degree in Software Engineering. Imagine you've written a code that prints "hello world." Next, you decide to upload it onto GitHub, To showcase your work, but hold on a sec, before you commit, Markdown is here to make writing. Markdown makes writing you documentation a joy, a breeze. [HEADING=1] Why is Markdown Important in Programming? [/HEADING] Readability and Simplicity: Easy to see, Markdown's syntax is simple as can be. Documentation: For docs, it's the king, Helping you write almost anything. Version Control: In Git, it's a must, For messages and logs, …

[HEADING=1]Generally Available: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics dedicated clusters now supported in Azure portal [/HEADING] Status: Now Available You can now create and manage dedicated clusters in Azure portal including cluster create, delete, link and unlink workspaces, change commitment tier and view clusters’ configuration. Up until now, clusters could be provisioned and managed programmatically using CLI, PowerShell, and REST – We’ve received your asks to support it in Azure portal for simpler configuration and view, and easily answer questions like: how many workspaces are linked, or what is the commitment tier? Additional experiences such as Cus…

At the Integrate 2024 event, we announced a new Hybrid Deployment Model for Azure Logic Apps (Standard) that allows you to run Logic Apps workloads on customer managed infrastructure. This new capability is currently in an early access preview and interested parties should fill out the following nomination form: https://aka.ms/HybridLAOnboarding. The new hybrid deployment model is ideal for customers who want more control over where and how their integration workloads are hosted. This includes on-premises, private clouds or public clouds. This offering focuses on semi-connected scenarios that offer local processing, local storage and local network access. Using thi…

How to build a Copilot for Security API Plugin – Part II Copilot for Security (Copilot) is a large language model (LLM) based Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) system for cybersecurity, compliance, identity and management use cases. Copilot is not a monolithic system but is an ecosystem running on a platform that allows data requests from multiple sources using a unique plugin mechanism. Plugins allow Copilot to not only reason on data from Microsoft products but also from third-parties. In part-1 of this series, we discussed building an API plugin using a single GET call. In this article, we expand on Part-I and look at building API plugins that make mo…

Create multiple prefixes for a subnet enables customers to easily scale their virtual machines and Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets without the risk of exhausting their subnet address space. This feature eliminates the need to remove resources from a subnet as a prerequisite for modifying its address prefixes. This feature is available in all public cloud regions during public preview. Learn more. Continue reading...

By Monilee Keller, Vice President, Product Management Welcome to the June edition of Partner Center Technical Corner. This month, we review Solutions Partner designations and securing the channel as our spotlight topics, followed by a summary of recent releases. For quick reference, you can find the most up-to-date technical roadmap and essential Partner Center resources at the end of the blog. [HEADING=2]Spotlight: Solutions Partner with certified software designations[/HEADING] Within the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, we offer distinct pathways for partners to differentiate themselves and stand out to customers according to their unique business …

The "Chat with Your Data" reference architecture is a modern, transformative solution designed for businesses that need to streamline their knowledge retrieval and synthesis. It empowers users to engage with their data repositories in an intuitive conversational manner, leveraging the latest in AI-driven insights. This architecture is ideal for companies looking to enhance their customer service, decision-making, and overall data accessibility. With a system built on the Microsoft Azure platform, organizations can confidently offer a sophisticated, AI-enhanced experience that allows end-users to ask questions and receive information as if they were chatting with a knowled…

Now in preview, Microsoft Intune Mobile Application Management (MAM) can provide numerous benefits for iOS/iPad OS and Android clients. Have you ever wondered if you could allow users to access Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows 365 on their personal iOS/iPadOS and Android devices? Do you want to do this with more restrictive redirection policies than on managed devices and only allow a connection if some security criteria are met? Well, now you can—and you don’t even have to manage the device. [HEADING=1]Configure and apply redirection settings with Intune MAM[/HEADING] End users can now configure different redirections when they connect to Azure Virtual Desktop and …

Azure Updates website is undergoing maintenance. During this time, you may notice limited functionality affecting RSS feeds and search features. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thank you for your patience and understanding. We are committed to bringing you weekly updates for Azure Updates, and will be posting them here, in the Tech Community every Thursday for the near term. Critical updates and retirements will also be communicated via emails and service health alerts. Continue reading...

Today, we are providing an update on our product roadmap for Microsoft Skype for Business Server. Here’s what’s ahead: We will release a Cumulative Update (CU)—CU8—for Skype for Business Server 2019 in H2 of 2024. We will release Skype for Business Server Subscription Edition (SE) early in the third quarter of calendar year 2025. Skype for Business Server SE, the next release of Microsoft Skype for Business Server, will be available for download from the Microsoft 365 admin center (previously the Microsoft Volume License Service Center) in early Q3 of 2025. The licensing model for Skype for Business Server SE is the same as SharePoint Server Subscription …

Today we are announcing the public preview of upgrade policies for Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration. Upgrade policies allow for more granular control over the upgrade process, ensuring that your services remain available and responsive during updates. Automatic upgrade policy With an automatic upgrade policy, the scale set makes no guarantees about the order of virtual machines being brought down. The scale set might take down all virtual machines at the same time to perform upgrades. Automatic upgrade policy is best suited for DevTest scenarios where you aren't concerned about the uptime of your instances while making change…

[HEADING=2]Powerful training experiences with Uptale immersive learning on Microsoft Azure[/HEADING] Uptale is a software-as-a-service company providing an immersive learning platform for large and distributed enterprises in Europe, North America, and Asia. Uptale’s mission is to educate the workforce at scale by enabling anyone to create VR training. Uptale’s immersive learning platform on Azure makes situation-handling skills easy to digitize, distribute, and track. The Uptale solution features an intuitive virtual reality authoring tool to create simulated workplace environments plus distribution options to deliver consistent training content to any device, at any l…

In the world of AI-powered collaboration, Copilot has emerged as a valuable tool for achieving desired outcomes. Whether you’re a seasoned user or just getting started, understanding the key ingredients for a successful interaction with Copilot is essential. In the first two blogs in this series on prompt engineering, Prompt engineering 101: Create content in 3 simple steps with ASK AI and Prompt engineering 101 for images: Crafting detailed visual descriptions, we shared some quick tips to get started with effective prompting to get the best results from Copilot. Now we’ll share how to use Copilot prompts within Microsoft 365 to seamlessly pull content and insight…

Seattle—June 18, 2024—Today, we are happy to announce new releases and enhancements to Azure AI Translator Service. We are introducing a new endpoint which unifies document translation async batch and sync operation and the SDKs are updated. Now, you can use and deploy document translation features in your organization to translate documents through Azure AI Studio and SharePoint without writing any code. Azure AI Translator container is now enhanced to translate both text and documents. Overview Document translation offers two operations: asynchronous batch and synchronous. Depending on the scenario, customers may use either operations or a combination of both.…

Join us for a 45-minute session on June 19, 2024 on how to use the recently launched Partner-led Copilot Immersion Experience, providing partners the ability to demo and help customers with hands-on experiences. In this session, we will walk you through each of the assets to drive adoption of Copilot for Microsoft 365 by role/persona and provide you guidance on the best way to utilize and demo with your customers--showcasing how Copilot can help businesses solve common problems and achieve more. What is included? Simulated click-thru demos for Sales, Marketing, HR, and Exec personas for each of the M365 apps. Finance, Legal, and Consulting personas are comin…