Microsoft Support & Discussions

We are thrilled to announce a new set of capabilities for multicloud customers, making it easier than ever to manage cloud resources from a centralized platform. With the adaptive cloud approach enabled by Azure Arc, customers can quickly and easily access and manage their workloads across Azure and AWS through the multicloud connector, which is free to use! Microsoft understands and supports customers who run workloads in multiple public clouds. Our goal is to make it easier for you to gain visibility and insights into all your workloads and to have a common set of management tools that you can leverage, saving you time and operational costs. Some customers are alre…

The Microsoft 365 Commercial Support Team resolves customer support cases and provides support to help you be successful and realize the full potential and value of your purchase. Our support services extend across the entire lifecycle and include pre-sales, onboarding and deployment, usage and management, accounts and billing, and break-fix support. We also spend a considerable amount of time working to improve the supportability of Microsoft 365 services to reduce the number of issues you experience as well as minimize the effort and time it takes to resolve your issues if they do occur.  Today, we’re excited to share more about some of our supportability work w…

Introduction In today’s dynamic and ever-evolving cloud environment, ensuring strong security measures is essential. This involves not only implementing the right tools, but also having effective processes in place to oversee and maintain these security measures. With Azure Firewall Manager, Microsoft offers a comprehensive and centralized platform to simplify the management of multiple firewalls at scale, addressing the challenges of managing security in a dynamic cloud landscape. Illumio for Microsoft Azure Firewall helps Azure Firewall customers enforce Zero Trust Segmentation and go beyond network and application filtering. It helps the firewall operations t…

We are pleased to announce that local data residency support in Switzerland is now generally available for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Defender for Identity. This announcement demonstrates our commitment to providing customers with the highest levels of security and compliance by offering services that are aligned to local data sovereignty requirements. Swiss customers can now confidently onboard to Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Identity in Switzerland, knowing that their data at rest will remain within Swiss boundaries, which ensures that customers in Switzerland can meet their regulatory obligations and maintain control over their data. …

In today's dynamic business environment, the resilience of cloud infrastructure is not just a preference but a necessity. We are thrilled to announce the latest enhancements in Azure Landing Zones with the rollout of the first phase of zone redundancy and multi-region support, designed to meet the high demands for availability and resilience in your cloud deployments. We also are announcing our plans and subsequent roadmap to make our ALZ Bicep and ALZ Terraform implementation options zone-redundant by the end of the calendar year (2024). [HEADING=1]Zone Redundancy: A New Layer of Resilience[/HEADING] The addition of zone redundancy to Azure Landing Zones brings a si…

The generative AI landscape moves at a fast pace, and it can be challenging to keep up with the latest developments, even for seasoned developers. There are in particular two questions that often come up when starting a new AI project: How can I quickly validate an AI app idea, without investing too much time and resources? If I have a working prototype, how fast can I scale it to production? You don't want to be outpaced by competitors or newer technologies, and you want to be able to quickly iterate on your ideas or pivot to new ones. This is where LangChain.js comes in. It's a framework that allows you to build AI applications very little adherence to the und…

Microsoft Teams Phone is a cloud-based phone system that enables smart communication and effortless collaboration for Teams users. To enable Teams Phone features such as auto attendants and call queues, resource accounts are required. Resource Accounts These specific accounts are associated with these features and are not intended for actual users. We are committed to providing secure and compliant services to our customers and users. As part of this commitment, we continuously identify areas of improvement for our security privileges for administrative roles in Microsoft 365. Currently, Teams administrators can create and manage resource accounts without re…

Knowing how technology works eases your mind, minimizes confusion, and deepens your understanding as you incorporate it into your daily work routine. Copilot for Microsoft 365 leverages large language models (LLMs) that interact with your data using the Microsoft Graph and optionally the Internet to generate personalized experiences with related context as you work. Copilot for Microsoft 365 provides a powerful orchestration engine and combines the power of Large Language Models, your universe of data via Microsoft Graph, the Internet, and your Microsoft 365 apps. Importantly, Copilot for Microsoft 365 only uses information that you explicitly have access to. It on…

In January, we announced the general availability of Mesh in Teams. We launched with the promise of unlocking deeper engagement for hybrid and remote teams across the world. Today, we're thrilled to unveil our latest advancements designed to optimize the avatar creation process with the help of AI and enrich your virtual collaboration. [HEADING=1] AI-Enabled Avatar Creation[/HEADING] [HEADING=1][/HEADING] Our journey of reimagining virtual interactions began with digital avatars. Since the private preview of avatars in October 2022, we’ve added more lifelike skin, increased options for facial and body customization, and expanded hair style and skin tone option…

Welcome to our monthly update for Teams for Education and thank you so much for being part of our growing community! We’re thrilled to share over 20 updates and resources and show them in action next week at ISTELive 24 in Denver, Colorado, US. Join us at the show to learn more and hear about the latest from Microsoft Education at our booth and in dozens of sessions. Enjoy, and see you there! ISTE Topics Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Educator Features Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Learner Features Learning Accelerators Updates including two new progress applications Learning Management System Integration Teams Updates Clipchamp Updates Visual Studio Co…

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 95 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=54768:name] AIPictoNarrator System: This solution from GNS Technology uses AI to create videos from text descriptions. It generates images, transforms them into a video, and offers editing tools. It's efficient for education, marketing, and social media, reducing production time and costs while enhancing storytelling impact. [attachment=54769:name] Akuity Platform: Akuity Platform is a managed continuous delivery solutio…

At Surface, building our own UEFI is central to our goal of making Surface devices the most secure on the market. It's an ongoing journey built on our key investments in services and features. But what does that look like exactly? Read on to learn more about the enabling technologies that support UEFI development. [HEADING=1]Built on Project Mu[/HEADING] Our adoption of Project Mu is driven by the goal of providing the best-in-class UEFI implementation on Surface devices and to showcase how to build devices that fully realize the Microsoft vision for what a personal computing device should be. Plus, our UEFI enhancements and goodness born in Surface are avai…

MCAPS Start for Partners -webinaarit 10.7.2024 alkaen klo 22 tai 11.7. klo 17:30 Rekisteröidy osoitteessa: MCAPS Start for Partners - Home - MCAPS Start for Partners home page. Aloitamme uuden tilikauden FY25 kutsumalla kumppanimme kanssamme digitaaliseen tapahtumaan nimeltä MCAPS Start for Partners, joka alkaa 10. heinäkuuta 2024. Tänä vuonna laajennamme vuosittaista sisäistä kokoustamme Microsoftin sisältämään kumppanikeskeisen digitaalisen tapahtuman, jonka kutsumme MCAPS Start for Partnersiksi. Osallistamalla kumppanimme go-to-market -strategiaamme tilikauden alusta alkaen voimme luoda synergiaa ja ajaa kollektiivista menestystä. Kutsumme…

A few days ago, our customer encountered connectivity issues while using HikariCP in their Java application. To troubleshoot the problem, we enabled detailed logging for the Microsoft JDBC Driver for SQL Server. This logging gave me a lot of information and details, following I would like to share my lessons learned here. To capture detailed logs, we configured the Java logging framework to record the operations of the JDBC driver at a fine-grained level. To enable the logging I included these instrucctions in the code: import java.util.logging.*; public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{ Logger globalLogger1 = Logger.g…

The Modern Workplace Conference Paris 2024, primarily aimed at French-speaking users, has been held. In its sixth edition, the conference featured various speakers, including Microsoft MVPs, Regional Directors, industry technology experts, and Microsoft employees. They delivered more than 75 sessions over two days, providing attendees with the latest technical information on Microsoft 365, Power Platform, including Microsoft AI and Copilot. In this blog, we introduce the insights and future community activities of two MVPs who contributed significantly to the success of this conference. Microsoft MVP, Chloé Moreau, describes her own role at the conference as…

[HEADING=1]Project Overview[/HEADING] Developed in partnership with UCL, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) and Intel, the WakeUp System provides reassurance and support to patients with disabilities in long-term care and the elderly. As mentioned previously, one of the system's main objectives is to enable them to autonomously control their environment, and it is designed for use in both hospital and home settings. Moreover, the project encompasses a research study in Intel's new OpenVINO project. The system architecture is divided into three parts: triggers, targets and the WakeUp system. The WakeUp system acts as a message broker, connecting a patient's commands…

The platform engineering journey requires abundant information to make informed decisions. Understanding how developers use the platform—how frequently and for how long—is invaluable. Since the internal developer portal (IDP) serves as the central hub for developers’ regular tasks, it becomes the ideal location for monitoring these activities and collecting essential data. Backstage, a common IDP implementation, provides an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how to integrate monitoring. In this article, we’ll explore how to add monitoring to the Backstage portal using Azure Monitor, specifically Application Insights. Upon reviewing the Backstage documentatio…

Co-authors: Priya Kedia, Michael Tremeer Contributors: Ranjani Mani Phi-3 Vision, a lightweight and state-of-the-art open multimodal model, is a significant advancement in Microsoft's AI offerings. Developed with a focus on producing a high-quality, reasoning focused model, Phi-3 Vision utilizes synthetic data and curated publicly available web data to ensure its robustness and versatility. At only 4.2 billion parameters, it strikes an impressive balance between performance and efficiency, making it an attractive option for a wide range of applications. As the first multimodal model in the Phi-3 family, Phi-3 Vision extends beyond the capabilities of its pred…

The Azure AI Vision Face team updated the public preview of Liveness Detection at //build in May. You can read more about it here You Are Real: More Secure Identity Verification - Microsoft Community Hub. We are now happy to announce the availability of client library for building an app server for Liveness Detection in the four core Azure languages. .NET (C#): https://www.nuget.org/packages/Azure.AI.Vision.Face/ Java: https://central.sonatype.com/artifact/com.azure/azure-ai-vision-face Python: https://pypi.org/project/azure-ai-vision-face/ Javascript: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@azure-rest/ai-vision-face The liveness solution integration con…

1- Introduction PTUs are reserved processing capacity, ensuring stable performance for uniform LLM workloads. The reserved capacity of PTUs makes KV caching more effective compared to Pay-As-You-Go (PayGo). This blog post delves into the role of Key-Value (KV) caching in enhancing PTU throughput, and practical strategies to create cache-friendly prompts that maximize efficiency. 2- What are Provisioned Throughput Units (PTUs)? Provisioned Throughput Units (PTUs) in Azure represent a dedicated model processing capacity that can be reserved and deployed for handling prompts and generating completions. The key benefits of PTUs include: Predictable Pe…

We recently identified a Windows known issue with custom Jump Lists that shipped in Windows 10 22H2. New Teams is one of several apps known to be impacted. When you right click on the New Teams icon in the taskbar on Win10 you might see an "Open With" dialogue instead of the expected Teams custom options (Status, Quit, etc). Looks like: Instead of: You can work around this issue by setting Status via your Profile in the main Teams client window: The good news is that the necessary fix has already been identified and prepared and will ship in a future update for Windows 10 22H2 soon. To follow along monitor the Windows 10 update hist…

Kusto databases, either in Fabric (KQL Database) or in Azure (Azure Data Explorer), are optimized for append ingestion. In recent years, we've introduced the .delete command, allowing you to selectively delete records. In February, we introduced the .update command in public preview. This command allows you to update records by deleting existing records and appending new ones in a single transaction. Today, the .update is Generally Available (GA)! During the public preview, we introduced two syntaxes: the simplified and expanded syntax. We only GA the expanded syntax (the most powerful) and are deprecating the simplified syntax. This is due…

Taking Azure Functions from 0 to 32,000 RPS in 7 seconds Consider a connected car platform that processes data from millions of cars. Or a national retailer running pop-up campaign that processes pre-orders. Or a healthcare provider calculating big data analytics. All of these can have variable load requirements — from zero to tens of thousands of requests per second (RPS). The serverless model has grown rapidly as developers increasingly run event-triggered code as a service, pushing platform limits, and Azure Functions customers now want to orchestrate complex serverless solutions and expect high throughput. This feedback led us to revamp the Azure Functi…

In the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center you can monitor your Microsoft 365 Apps health as well as leverage update validation during your monthly patching rollout. Both of these powerful tools are available in the Apps Admin Center. The prerequisite for seeing this data is enabling Office Diagnostic Data (ODD) to allow us to collect your usage and patching signals and then return them to you in a way that allows you to really see what is happening in your environment from an Apps health perspective. Additionally, sending diagnostic data to Microsoft allows us to better track the quality of the builds we release, identify potential issues faster and deliver a better product …

Join us as we celebrate Pride and the spirit of radical joy! “Radical joy” is an anthem to those who thrive against all odds. The joy that radiates and inspires. The joy that is not dependent on outside forces but is within us and within our control, and when expressed, can help make change for all and inspire others to do the same. Discover everything Pride at unlocked.microsoft.com/pride. Take action: Embrace the Stories of joy and explore them in this Excel template Show your Pride with this special theme for Mac and iOS Show Your Pride in the Preferences dialog box Radical joy is more than just a feeling. It’s an ant…