This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Is a well-defined knowledge base valuable for delivering exceptional service? No matter the business, the answer is a resounding “yes.” In a recent survey, 91 percent of customers would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs, and in another published report, respondents preferred knowledge bases over all other self-service channels. It’s clear that a well-structured, well-written, and easily consumable knowledge base empowers customers to obtain self-service support anywhere, anytime. Allowing flexibility and accessibility for customers may positively influence customer satisfaction.
A knowledge base isn’t just a helpful self-service tool for customersit’s also an indispensable tool for customer service staff. It can serve as a learning tool for support staff to deepen their service or product knowledge. It’s also a valued commodity in the transfer of information from support agent to the customer by bridging the knowledge gap that prevents the customer from achieving a specific goal, thereby creating a positive customer experience and increasing customer loyalty.
In this post, we will cover how self-service tools within Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help your customer service team deliver personalized customer care, fill knowledge gaps, and streamline productivity.
A thought-provoking tool
A modern knowledge base is a collection or library of digital articles containing relevant content, videos, images, and other useful information about your service or product. Typically, it contains published documentation such as frequently asked questions, quick-start and how-to guides, and troubleshooting instructions. It acts as the source of truth for the service or product for its stakeholders such as customers, employees, and partners, and should be easy to use for finding and locating solutions to problems without requiring additional company support.
A well-fed, well-maintained, and easily accessible knowledge base can become the cornerstone of your customer service team’s self-service strategy. A knowledge base can be a cost-effective component of a company’s self-service portal or part of a website as it reduces the time and effort the customer spends on getting an issue resolved. It’s a tool that is immediately valued by both support agents and customers alike. Support agents can refer to a knowledge base article or share the actual article with a customer, answering a query quickly rather than spending time asking a colleague for guidance or taking the time trying multiple solutions until finding the right one. Customers can quickly and easily search the knowledge base for articles that answer their questions, eliminating the need to interact with another layer of company support and keeping live agents’ time free to focus on more complex issues.
Deliver enhanced customer care
A well-maintained knowledge base is the backbone of any organization to deliver world-class customer care, but how do you keep your knowledge base current?
Understanding what agents are searching for to resolve customer issues can help improve knowledge base content, which in turn improves the agent’s ability to support customers more efficiently. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, knowledge search analytics can be used to gain visibility into the effectiveness of the knowledge base for your support agents. Managers need visibility into issues support agents face and whether the knowledge content effectively addresses the issues customers raise. Managers can easily run reports such as “top search terms with no matching knowledge articles” or “top search terms with poor engagement rate” to quickly identify and fill gaps in content. By identifying searches that have low success or return no results, the knowledge search analytics dashboard can help identify knowledge gaps, improve search results, and surface the most relevant articles.
Figure 1: The knowledge search analytics dashboard within Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps managers quickly surface metrics concerning content effectiveness.
Fill gaps between fragmented knowledge
Once content gaps are identified, how do you fill them? The challenge for most companies is that knowledge is typically fragmented across an organization and stored in different formats, such as documents, images, videos, blogs, wikis, structured knowledge, and the list goes on. The engagement points for surfacing knowledge have also increased with the advent of digital messaging (such as SMS and WhatsApp), chatbots, and social apps. These disparate formats and source points make it difficult to curate and surface the right content.
This month, we are releasing our preview of federated knowledge search within Dynamics 365 Customer Service. As knowledge is typically held in a wide variety of formats, spread across multiple sources like SharePoint sites, OneDrive, and third-party knowledge management systems, federated knowledge search provides the ability to find and share knowledge from as many sources as possible to help agents be more productive and resolve customer issues quickly.
Making federated knowledge search work for you is easy: simply plug a connector from an external search provider (such as SharePoint search, Microsoft search, or cross-Dynamics 365 search) into the knowledge search experience.
Figure 2: Federated knowledge search helps keep your knowledge base fresh by curating content across various formats and sources.
Federated knowledge search is an essential tool in providing knowledge base content, pivotal to maintaining a rich and current knowledge base to help resolve customer issues fast and accurately.
At Microsoft, we know that effective knowledge management is an essential element to delivering high quality customer service across all engagement modalitiesself-service, assisted service, and onsite service. We are continuing to innovate by extending the capabilities of our knowledge management offering within Dynamics 365 Customer Service so you, your support agents, and your customers always receive the right content at the right time, no matter the format or source.
2021 release wave 1 features
Federated knowledge search and knowledge analytics are just the start. A few of the 2021 release wave 1 knowledge management features being released April 1, include the ability to customize article search filters, personalize language settings for article authors, and a new form designer. We are continually extending the reach of Dynamics 365 Customer Service to deliver the features you want along with the features you need.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
A new security concept is emerging and consolidating more and more in recent years: the so-called zero-trust security model.
In particular, in the IoT market, security is a crucial element to be considered. This is generally addressed by having your cloud gateway service trusting your devices. Still, when you have something too precious to be sent into the cloud, you also need to think about how your devices trust your cloud gateway, as you would not like having your data transmitted to a malicious endpoint.
Trusting Device vs. Trusting the Cloud Gateway
As mentioned above, frequently, addressing the challenge of trusting a device is handled by merely choosing the best attestation mechanism available (according to your hardware specs) to confirm your device’s identities when connecting to a platform service like Azure IoT Hub.
This allows your cloud endpoint to verify that your device is what it states it is.
Ok, this is fine; the cloud portion now can trust the Devices, but what about if a malicious entity performs a DNS Spoofing (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_spoofing) attack and allows your devices to point to a forged alternative cloud gateway?
To provide a quick refresh: a DNS Spoofing happens when an attacker manages to let your DNS query results in a different IP address for the target host. In this case, let’s assume that instead of obtaining the IP address of your IoT Hub, you got an IP address of a forged malicious endpoint pretending to be your cloud gateway!
It means that when your device attempts a connection to it, IoT Hub presents server certificates to connecting clients.
Those certificates are part of a chain-of-trust, and clients could check against those certificates to ensure that the Cloud Gateway is what it states it is.
In particular, in the context of TLS, your endpoint certificate is typically signed by another certificate that could be a root certificate or an intermediate certificate.
Root certificates are “self-signed,” and you usually trust them because they are emitted by “Certification Authorities” (those are well-known entities wisely recognized in the business of security); they are your “root of trust”.
Typically OSs have those “well-known CAs” in a certificate store, and you do not have to do anything special to accept and recognize them.
So, as a super high-level summary: you got a Root Certificate that signs an Intermediate Certificate that signs your endpoint Certificate.
That’s what happens for IoT Hub Certificates: a well-known CA signs Microsoft-owned Intermediate Certificate with a Root Certificate (Baltimore Cybertrust Root CA); then IoT Hub Server Certificates are signed by one of those Microsoft Intermediate Certificates.
Another critical point to remember is that certificates expire, or better, they have a specific validity period (start/end).
Let me elaborate a bit further on this later.
IoT Hub SDKs
Ok, how does IoT Hub SDKs deals with that?
In a nutshell: it’s a trade-off between operational complexity and ensuring protection against all the possible attack vectors.
Most IoT Hub SDKs only validate that the Root Certificates match the expected one (as mentioned before: Baltimore Cybertrust Root CA) while not enforcing Intermediate Certificates.
Checking against Server Certificate chain-of-trust is a practice known as “Certificates pinning”.
Certificates Pinning
What’s Certificate Pinning?
Could it mitigate DNS Spoofing?
Does it add operational complexity?
Let’s tackle these three questions one by one.
1) Certificate pinning is the practice to restrict what certificates are considered valid for a particular endpoint.
If you don’t do that explicitly, you are usually trusting any certificate presented by your endpoint backed by any well-known Root Certificate trusted by your system.
You can “pin” the Root Certificate, Intermediates, or even your specific endpoint certificate.
2) Well, it could help to mitigate it, yes.
If you “pin” Certificates, you are just restricting the range of acceptable certificate chains. This means that a potential attacker needs to generate a certificate signed by that specific chain to make its rouge endpoint accepted.
While IoT Hub Root Certificate is a well-known public CA, the intermediate certificates are privately-owned by Microsoft.
An attacker couldn’t forge a certificate for its malicious endpoint pretending to be an IoT Hub Gateway as it could get access to the private key of Microsoft intermediate certificates.
3) Yes, this could add complexity. Remember, before I’ve mentioned before that certificates have a life span. It means they expire over time. Root Certificates typically have “some years” of life span while intermediates rotate more frequently (around 6 months or so far, but they might as well have a longer validity period). This is the extra operational complexity to which I refer.
If you build an IoT client which “pins intermediates”, you need to ensure that whenever those intermediates refresh, you can update your client upfront before it cuts itself out because it didn’t recognize your cloud gateway certificates chain anymore.
How to check Intermediates
An approach would be using OpenSSL to decode the IoT Hub cert:
openssl x509 -in "Wildcard IoT.cer" -text -noout
Once you find the Intermediates cert you can just verify that the IoT Hub Certificate was signed by that specific Intermediate:
While the practice of certificate pinning is generally not encouraged, there are still some valid reasons to adopt it, especially when the rewards of being protected from man-in-the-middle attack are worth the extra effort.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Anyone keeping up with business news these days knows that IT security is paramount. They also know that traditional IT security practices aren’t enough to defend against today’s cyberattacks. And with more security vulnerabilities identified every day, it’s increasingly more difficult to triage, prioritize, and manage responses. Azure provides security from the ground up—from identity and access control, security posture management, threat protection, and much more. And Azure security engineers are on the front lines, helping to keep their organizations’ infrastructure, apps, and data safe in the cloud.
The Azure Security Engineer Associate certification validates that you have subject matter expertise implementing security controls and threat protection, managing identity and access, and protecting data, applications, and networks in cloud and hybrid environments as part of an end-to-end infrastructure. You earn this certification by passing Exam AZ-500: Microsoft Azure Security Technologies.
If your responsibilities as part of a larger team include maintaining the security posture, identifying and remediating vulnerabilities by using a variety of security tools, implementing threat protection, and responding to security incident escalations, this could be the certification for you.
What kind of knowledge and experience should you have?
In addition to Azure administrator skills, you should have solid scripting and automation skills. Plus, you need a deep understanding of networking, virtualization, and cloud N-tier architecture. And it’s important to be thoroughly familiar with cloud capabilities, along with Azure technologies and other Microsoft products and services.
To map out your journey, follow the sequence in the infographic. First, decide whether this is the right certification for you, and be sure your Azure administrative skills are up to date.
Next, to understand what you’ll be measured on when taking Exam AZ-500, review the skills outline guide on the exam page.
Sign up for training that fits your learning style and experience:
After you pass the exam and earn your certification, check out the many other training and certification opportunities. Want to add to your Azure knowledge? Explore the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework. For related training, check out Microsoft Learn.
Note: Remember that Microsoft Certifications assess how well you apply what you know to solve real business challenges. Our training resources are useful for reinforcing your knowledge, but you’ll always need experience in the role and with the platform.
Celebrate your Azure talents with the world
When you earn a certification or learn a new skill, it’s an accomplishment worth celebrating with your network. It often takes less than a minute to update your LinkedIn profile and share your achievements, highlight your skills, and help boost your career potential. Here’s how:
If you’ve earned a certification already, follow the instructions in the congratulations email you received. Or find your badge on your Certification Dashboard, and follow the instructions there to share it. (You’ll be transferred to the Acclaim website.)
To add specific skills, visit your LinkedIn profile and update the Skills and endorsements section. Tip: We recommend that you choose skills listed in the skills outline guide for your certification.
Keep your certification up to date
If you’ve already earned your Azure Security Engineer Associate certification, but it’s expiring in the near future, we’ve got good news. You’ll soon be able to renew your current certifications by passing a free renewal assessment on Microsoft Learn—anytime within six months before your certification expires. For more details, please read our blog post, Stay current with in-demand skills through free certification renewals.
It’s time to level up!
Your Microsoft Certification can help validate that you have the skills to stay ahead with today’s technology. It can also help empower you with a boost in confidence and job satisfaction—and maybe even a salary increase. Want to know more? In our blog post, Need another reason to earn a Microsoft Certification?, we offer 10 good reasons to earn your certification.
Although cloud security may be a relatively new field in many industries, it’s definitely here to stay—and it’s foundational to Azure, with multiple layers across infrastructure and operations. And implementation is key. As an Azure security engineer, validate that you have the skills and experience you need to assess your current IT environment and assets and to identify and address potential security issues. Help keep your organization’s data, devices, and apps safe every day—smarter and faster—with your proven Azure skills.
This article was originally posted by the FTC. See the original article here.
Valentine’s Day is this weekend, so over the next three days, we’re talking about romance scams. Lots of people have profiles on dating apps to meet someone — maybe even more so in these virtual times. And many people have built successful relationships from an online start. But what if, instead of finding a potential partner, you find a scam?
Romance scams reached a record $304 million in losses reported to the FTC in 2020. That’s up about 50% from 2019.
So how can you spot a romance scam? Check out this video, and watch this space for more tips and tools in the next couple of days. And share the video, and what you learn. You might not need the info yourself, but you probably know someone who does.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Initial Update: Wednesday, 10 February 2021 13:57 UTC
We are aware of issues within Log Analytics and are actively investigating. Some customers may experience data access issues and issues with missed or delayed Log Search Alerts in Central US region.
Work Around: NA
Next Update: Before 02/10 17:00 UTC
We are working hard to resolve this issue and apologize for any inconvenience. -Deepika
Recent Comments