Microsoft Support & Discussions

Initiating the Minimum Viable Product Phase: Proof of Concept (PoC)/ Proof of Value (PoV) / Proof of Technology (PoT) allows customers to validate and demonstrate the suitability and adaptability of GenAI use cases for their business. However, transitioning from an initial experiment i.e. building custom co-pilot (either low code or code first approach) as PoC to the go-to-market phase involves building a Minimal Viable Product (MVP). The MVP serves as the foundation and then incorporating core functionalities from the PoC along with additional layers enabled by Microsoft community build accelerators. Microsoft offers a variety of accelerators that aid in the deve…

Building Custom Co-Pilot (PoC) Azure OpenAI is a cloud service that allows developers to access the powerful capabilities of OpenAI, while enjoying the benefits of security, governance, and more of Azure. When moving from the first initial ideation phase, and starting to move towards a Proof of Concept(PoC)/ Proof of Value(PoV)/ Proof of Technology(PoT), there are a number of considerations that need to be made to ensure this phase is of success. One of the most common applications of a PoC on Azure OpenAI is to build a custom co-pilot, a tool that can assist both internal employee’s and external users with a wide range of activities, such as summarization, content …

Cybersecurity has become a critical concern for businesses of all sizes, 82% of ransomware attacks are targeted at small and medium-sized businesses [1]. In today's digital landscape, businesses face an array of security threats that can compromise sensitive data, disrupt operations, and diminish customer trust. Small businesses seek effective, scalable, and user-friendly solutions to operate securely. Microsoft 365 for Business offers a suite of solutions tailored to meet productivity and security needs, with three distinct plans - Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Business Basic includes key Microso…

We continue to expand the Microsoft AppSource ecosystem. For this volume, 303 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=53871:name] ActiveControl: ActiveControl from Basis Technologies simplifies change management in complex SAP landscapes. Get real-time insights to identify bottlenecks and optimize workflows, preventing costly mistakes during deployment. Backout functionality safeguards critical systems by allowing reversion to a previous state. [attachment=53872:name] Aurachain Platform as a Service: Aurachain is a low-code platform …

A very common task for Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Factory and Synapse Analytics Pipelines is to receive unstructured files, land them in an Azure Data Lake (ADLS Gen2) and load them into structured tables. This often leads to a very common issue with unstructured files when “SOMETHING HAS CHANGED” and the unstructured file does not meet the defined table format. If issues are not handled properly within the pipeline, the data workloads will fail and users will be asking "WHERE'S MY DATA???" You then need to communicate with the owner of the file, have them fix the issues, then rerun the pipeline after the issues have been fixed. Along with unhappy users, rerunning faile…

I'm concerned by the number of times I've heard, "oh, we can do RAG with retriever X, here's the vector search query." Yes, your retriever for a RAG flow should definitely support vector search, since that will let you find documents with similar semantics to a user's query, but vector search is not enough. Your retriever should support a full hybrid search, meaning that it can perform both a vector search and full text search, then merge and re-rank the results. That will allow your RAG flow to find both semantically similar concepts, but also find exact matches like proper names, IDs, and numbers. [HEADING=1] [/HEADING] [HEADING=1]Hybrid search steps[/HEADING] Az…

[HEADING=1]Introduction[/HEADING] Encryption is a vital technique for protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access or modification. SQL Server and Azure SQL Database offer two encryption technologies that allow you to encrypt data in use: Always Encrypted and Always Encrypted with secure enclaves. In this blog post, we will compare these two technologies and highlight their benefits and limitations. [HEADING=1]What is Always Encrypted?[/HEADING] We began our journey towards the confidential computing vision in 2015 and we introduced the first version of Always Encrypted in SQL Server 2016 and Azure SQL Database. Always Encrypted is a client-side encrypt…

Database Mail (DBMail) in SQL Server is a feature that allows you to send emails directly from SQL Server, but it has limitations when sending a large volume of emails. The issues you’re experiencing with DBMail not being able to send massive emails could be due to several factors. DBMail relies on the .NET Framework’s [iCODE]SmtpClient[/iCODE] class, and any issues with this underlying component could affect DBMail’s functionality. The SmtpClient class implementation pools SMTP connections so that it can avoid the overhead of re-establishing a connection for every message to the same server. An application may re-use the same SmtpClient object to send many…

The past year has seen explosive growth for Azure OpenAI and large language models in general. With models reliant on a token-based approach for processing requests, ensuring prompt engineering is being done correctly, tracking what models and api’s are being used, load balancing across multiple instances, and creating chargeback models has become increasingly important. The use of Azure API Management (APIM) is key to solving these challenges. There have been several announcements specific to the integration of Azure Open AI and APIM during Microsoft Build 2024 to make them easier to use together. As the importance of evaluating analytics and performing data scien…

Introduction. Fabric Notebooks, an integral component of the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, offer a powerful platform for interactive data exploration, analysis, and collaboration. Designed to enhance productivity and streamline workflows, Fabric Notebooks provide users with a versatile environment to write, execute, and share code and visualizations alongside workspaces. Fabric Notebooks empower users to engage in interactive data analysis using programming languages such as Python and R. By seamlessly integrating code execution with explanatory text and visualizations, Fabric Notebooks streamline the workflow for data exploration and interpretation. Moreover, noteb…

[HEADING=1]About Azure API Center extension for Visual Studio Code [/HEADING] The Azure API Center extension for Visual Studio Code enables developers to build, discover, try, and consume APIs in your API center: Build APIs - Make APIs you're building discoverable to others by registering them in your API center. Shift-left API design conformance checks into Visual Studio Code with integrated linting support. Ensure that new API versions don't break API consumers with breaking change detection. Discover APIs - Browse the APIs in your API center, and view their details and documentation. Try APIs - Use Swagger UI or REST client to explore API requests and respon…

This month’s partner showcase is with our partner Isovalent which is now a part of Cisco. We are highlighting how Cilium, Azure Linux and Azure Kubernetes Service bring value to our mutual customers. The Azure Linux team is excited to have Isovalent as a partner! From Isovalent: “Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) uses Cilium natively, wherein AKS combines the robust control plane of Azure CNI with Cilium’s data plane to provide high-performance networking and security. Isovalent Cilium Enterprise is an enterprise-grade, hardened distribution of open-source projects Cilium, Hubble, and Tetragon, built and supported by the Cilium creators.” The already expansi…

A very common task for Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Factory and Synapse Analytics Pipelines is to receive unstructured files, land them in an Azure Data Lake (ADLS Gen2) and load them into structured tables. This often leads to a very common issue with unstructured files when “SOMETHING HAS CHANGED” and the unstructured file does not meet the defined table format. If issues are not handled properly within the pipeline, the data workloads will fail and users will be asking "WHERE'S MY DATA???" You then need to communicate with the owner of the file, have them fix the issues, then rerun the pipeline after the issues have been fixed. Along with unhappy users, rerunning faile…

Logic Apps require an Azure Storage Account file share to host their files. Even though the Logic App site will work without a storage account, it will not be scalable across multiple instances. Unfortunately, if the storage is inaccessible due to DNS or other network issues, both the main site and the Kudu site will not work, resulting in the following error: [iCODE]System.Private.CoreLib: The network path was not found. : 'C:\\home\\data\\Functions\\secrets\\Sentinels'[/iCODE] Usually, to resolve network issues, we need the Kudu console working, but in this case, it is not because the site is broken. The option below should only be used when the site is…

The motivation - Is it possible to solve multi step tasks? The short answer is Yes. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in a variety of applications, such as language generation, understanding, and reasoning, they struggle to provide accurate answers when faced with complicated tasks. According to this research (More agents is all you need), the performance of large language models (LLMs) scales with the number of agents instantiated. This method is orthogonal to existing complicated methods to further enhance LLMs, while the degree of enhancement is correlated to the task difficulty. [HEADING=1]The Application[/HEADIN…

By: Maggie Dakeva – Sr. Product Manager & Juanita Baptiste – Sr. Product Manager | Microsoft Intune Organizations are increasingly adopting a hybrid workplace and Windows Autopilot provides flexibility to deliver devices to users anywhere with internet connectivity. With more and more adoption of Windows Autopilot, Microsoft Intune is enhancing this solution to support a greater variety of scenarios and use cases. Today, Intune is releasing a new Autopilot profile experience, Windows Autopilot device preparation, which enables IT admins to deploy configurations efficiently and consistently and removes the complexity of troubleshooting for both commercial…

Announcing: Public Preview of Resubmit from an Action in Logic Apps Consumption Workflows Introduction We are happy to introduce Resubmit Action in the Consumption SKU. This is a feature that customers have been asking for a long time, and we are glad to finally deliver it to Consumption SKU. Resubmit action has been part of Standard SKU for a while, and we have gotten positive feedback from customers. Standard SKU announcement. Background Resubmit from trigger has been a feature available for many years, however customers are looking for more flexibility around being able to resubmit from any action within the workflow. This will give customers more …

This article is about optimizations when integrating the “When messages are available in a queue (peek-lock)” Logic App trigger with an Azure Service bus queue. Under high load scenarios or business flows takes from 1 to 5 minutes, stateful logic apps which are triggered by “When messages are available in a queue (peek-lock)” trigger, may need some adjustments for optimizing performance and avoiding degradation issues like the below mentioned: { "code": "ServiceProviderActionFailed", "message": "The service provider action failed with error code 'BadRequest' and error message 'The lock supplied is invalid. Either the lock expired, or the messag…

The introduction of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) enhancement as a component of the GPT-4 Turbo Vision Preview was aimed at generating higher-quality responses for dense texts, transformed images, and number-heavy financial documents. Although, the recent announcement regarding the GPT-4 Turbo 2024-04-09 General Availability (GA) model indicated that the OCR enhancement is not included in this GA version. This blog post delves into the details of how OCR enhancement functions, the additional system prompts used for OCR enhancement, and provides a code snippet that demonstrates how to replicate the OCR enhancement behavior in the GPT-4 Turbo 2024-04-09 GA model by mo…

Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate are two comprehensive offerings built to work together and enable simpler adoption of Azure—the foundation of the Microsoft Cloud. These offerings provide software and services partners the critical opportunity to support customer organizations from cloud migration to innovation, with Microsoft guidance, enablement, and funding to deliver expert value and win more business. What’s new as of April 1, 2024: Expanded eligibility for partners who build software: Azure Innovate has expanded eligibility for ISVs meeting specific performance criteria (details here). Use Azure Innovate to infuse AI into solutions, a…

There’s no question about it: People are the make-or-break element of a high-performing IT organization. To stay competitive, organizations must ensure that they have the right people with the right skills in the right positions. But with accelerating tech advancements, doing so has never been tougher. IDC data reveals that IT skills shortages are widening in both scope and severity. According to 811 IT leaders responding to the IDC 2024 IT Skills Survey (January 2024), organizations are experiencing a wide range of negative impacts relating to a dearth of enterprise skills. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of IT leaders tell IDC that a lack of skills has resulted in missed…

Earlier posts in this series: Part 1: Is my Chatbot Ready for Production? – A 10,000 foot overview to LLMOps Part 2: How do I Evaluate my LLM Chatbot? - A guide to different LLM chatbot evaluation techniques and how to implement them Part 3: How do I Monitor my LLM Chatbot? - A guide to monitoring LLM chatbot security and performance Feedback is a critical, often overlooked, component of the LLMOps lifecycle. User feedback is a great way to gauge application success and guide new features or enhancements on the roadmap. Although feedback can be captured in many ways, the ultimate goal is application improvement. In the age of LLMs, feedback is more…

We are excited to announce that the UNISTR intrinsic function and ANSI SQL concatenation operator (||) are now available in public preview in Azure SQL Database. The UNISTR function allows you to escape Unicode characters, making it easier to work with international text. The ANSI SQL concatenation operator (||) provides a simple and intuitive way to combine characters or binary strings. These new features will enhance your ability to manipulate and work with text data. [HEADING=1]What is UNISTR function?[/HEADING] The UNISTR function takes a text literal or an expression of characters and Unicode values, that resolves to character data and returns it as a UTF-…

This blog post will give you an overview of benefits and best practices you will get harnessing APIs and an API Manager solution when integrating AI into your application landscape. Adding Artificial intelligence (AI) to existing applications is becoming an important part in application development. The correct integration of AI is vital to meet business goals, functional and non-functional requirements and build applications that are efficient to maintain and enhance. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) play a key part in this integration and an API Manager is fundamental to keep control of the usage, performance, and versioning of APIs – especially …

Behind the scenes at Surface, a dedicated team of engineers ensures the hardware and software components of our devices function seamlessly. A crucial part of this integration is the embedded firmware — the software that operates on the microcontrollers and other low-level components of Surface devices. Have you ever wondered what happens after you press the power button and see the spinning circle that shows your system is booting up? That's when the embedded firmware kicks in, managing power, thermal conditions, security, connectivity and other critical features—ensuring your device “just works.” In this post, we'll explore the history of embedded firmware in Sur…