The Microsoft Intune Suite fuels cyber safety and IT efficiency

The Microsoft Intune Suite fuels cyber safety and IT efficiency

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Today marks a significant shift in endpoint management and security. We are launching the Microsoft Intune Suite, which unifies mission-critical advanced endpoint management and security solutions into one simple bundle.

The post The Microsoft Intune Suite fuels cyber safety and IT efficiency appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Microsoft to showcase purpose-built AI infrastructure at NVIDIA GTC

Microsoft to showcase purpose-built AI infrastructure at NVIDIA GTC

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Join Microsoft at GTC, a global technology conference running March 20 – 23, 2023, to learn how organizations of any size can power AI innovation with purpose-built cloud infrastructure from Microsoft. 


 


Microsoft’s Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure is uniquely designed for AI workloads and helps build and train some of the industry’s most advanced AI solutions. From data preparation to model and infrastructure performance management, Azure’s comprehensive portfolio of powerful and massively scalable GPU-accelerated virtual machines (VMs) and seamless integration with services like Azure Batch and open-source solutions helps streamline management and automation of large AI models and infrastructure. 


 


Attend GTC to discover how Azure AI infrastructure optimized for AI performance can deliver speed and scale in the cloud and help you reduce the complexity of building, training, and bringing AI models into production. Register today! GTC Developer Conference is a free online event.  


 


Microsoft sessions at NVIDIA GTC 


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Add the below Microsoft sessions at GTC to your conference schedule to learn about the latest Azure AI infrastructure and dive deep into a variety of use cases and technologies.  


 


Featured sessions 


Accelerate AI Innovation with Unmatched Cloud Scale and Performance 


Thursday, Mar 23 | 7:00 AM – 7:50 AM MST  


Nidhi Chappell, General Manager, Azure HPC, AI, SAP and Confidential Computing 


Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President, Azure Marketing, Microsoft 


Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing, NVIDIA


Azure’s purpose-built AI infrastructure is enabling leading organizations in AI to build a new era of innovative applications and services. The convergence of cloud flexibility and economics, with advances in cloud performance, is paving the way to accelerate AI initiatives across simulations, science, and industry. Whether you need to scale to 80,000 cores for MPI workloads, or you’re looking for AI supercomputing capabilities, Azure can support your needs. Learn more about Azures AI platform, our latest updates, and hear about customer experiences. 


 


Azure’s Purpose-Built AI Infrastructure Using the Latest NVIDIA GPU Accelerators 


On-demand 


Matt Vegas, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft 


Microsoft offers some of the most powerful and massively scalable Virtual Machines, optimized for AI workloads. Join us for an in-depth look at the latest updates for Azure’s ND series based on NVIDIA GPUs, engineered to deliver a combination of high-performance, interconnected GPUs, working in parallel, that can help you reduce complexity, minimize operational bottlenecks operations, and can deliver reliability at scale. 


 


Talks and panel sessions 




















































































Session ID



Session Title



Speakers



Primary Topic



S51226



Accelerating Large Language Models via Low-Bit Quantization



Young Jin Kim, Principal Researcher, Microsoft


Rawn Henry, Senior AI Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA



Deep Learning – Inference



S51204



Transforming Clouds to Cloud-Native Supercomputing: Best Practices with Microsoft Azure



Jithin Jose, Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft Azure


Gilad Shainer, SVP Networking, NVIDIA



HPC – Supercomputing



S51756



Accelerating AI in Federal Cloud Environments



Bill Chappel, Vice President of Mission Systems in Strategic Missions and Technology, Microsoft


Steven H. Walker, Chief Technology Officer, Lockheed Martin


Matthew Benigni, Chief Data Officer, Army Futures Command


Christi DeCuir, Director, Cloud Go-to-Market, NVIDIA



Data Center / Cloud – Business Strategy



S51703



Accelerating Disentangled Attention Mechanism in Language Models



Pengcheng He, Principal Researcher, Microsoft


Haohang Huang, Senior AI Engineer, NVIDIA



Conversational AI / NLP



S51422



SwinTransformer and its Training Acceleration



Han Hu, Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research Asia


Li Tao, Tech Software Engineer, NVIDIA



Deep Learning – Training+



S51260



Multimodal Deep Learning for Protein Engineering



Kevin Yang, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research New England



Healthcare – Drug Discovery



S51945



Improving Dense Text Retrieval Accuracy with Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search



Menghao Li, Software Engineer, Microsoft


Akira Naruse, Senior Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA



Data Science



S51709



Hopper Confidential Computing: How it Works under the Hood



Antoine Delignat-Lavaud, Principal Researcher Microsoft Research, Microsoft


Phil Rogers, VP of System Software, NVIDIA



Data Center / Cloud Infrastructure – Technical



S51447



Data-Driven Approaches to Language Diversity



Kalika Bali, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research India


Caroline Gottlieb, Product Manager, Data Strategy, NVIDIA


Damian Blasi, Harvard Data Science Fellow, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University


Bonaventure Dossou, Ph.D. Student, McGill University and Mila Quebec AI Institute


EM Lewis-Jong, Common Voice – Product Lead, Mozilla Foundation



Conversational AI / NLP



S51756a



Accelerating AI in Federal Cloud Environments, with Q&A from EMEA Region



Bill Chappel, Vice President of Mission Systems in Strategic Missions and Technology, Microsoft


Steven H. Walker, Chief Technology Officer, Lockheed Martin


Larry Brown, SA Manager, NVIDIA


Christi DeCuir, Director, Cloud Go-to-Market, NVIDIA



Data Center / Cloud – Business Strategy



S51589



Accelerating Wind Energy Forecasts with AceCast



Amirreza Rastegari, Senior Program Manager, Azure Specialized Compute, Microsoft


Gene Pache, TempoQuest



HPC – Climate / Weather / Ocean Modeling



S51278



Next-Generation AI for Improving Building Security and Safety



Adina Trufinescu, Senior Program Manager, Azure Specialized Compute, Microsoft



Computer Vision – AI Video Analytics



 


Deep Learning Institute Workshops and Labs 


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We are proud to host NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute (DLI) training at NVIDIA GTC. Attend full-day, hands-on, instructor-led workshops or two-hour free training labs to get up to speed on the latest technology and breakthroughs. Hosted on Microsoft Azure, these sessions enable and empower you to leverage NVIDIA GPUs on the Azure platform to solve the world’s most interesting and relevant problems.  


Register for a Deep Learning Institute workshop or lab today! 


 


Learn more about Azure AI infrastructure 



Whether your project is big or small, local or global, Microsoft Azure is empowering companies worldwide to push the boundaries of AI innovation. Learn how you can make AI your reality.  


Azure AI Infrastructure 


Azure AI Platform 


Accelerating AI and HPC in the Cloud 


AI-first Infrastructure and Toolchain at Any Scale 


The case for AI in the Azure Cloud 


AI Infrastructure for Smart Manufacturing 


AI Infrastructure for Smart Retail 

The Microsoft Intune Suite fuels cyber safety and IT efficiency

From AI in Teams Premium to updates for Viva—here’s what’s new in Microsoft 365

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This month, we’re bringing new AI-powered capabilities to Microsoft Teams Premium, helping keep everyone aligned with Microsoft Viva Engage, and sharing new Loop components in Whiteboard to help your team collaborate in sync.

The post From AI in Teams Premium to updates for Viva—here’s what’s new in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

[Data Virtualization] May need to update Java (JRE7 only uses TLS 1.0)

[Data Virtualization] May need to update Java (JRE7 only uses TLS 1.0)

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

At end of October 2022 we saw an issue where a customer using PolyBase external query to Azure Storage started seeing queries fail with the following error:


 


Msg 7320, Level 16, State 110, Line 2


Cannot execute the query “Remote Query” against OLE DB provider “SQLNCLI11” for linked server “(null)”. EXTERNAL TABLE access failed due to internal error: ‘Java exception raised on call to HdfsBridge_IsDirExist: Error [com.microsoft.azure.storage.StorageException: The server encountered an unknown failure: ]occurred while accessing external file.’


 


Prior to this, everything was working fine; the customer made no changes to SQL Server or Azure Storage.


 


The server encountered an unknown failure” – not the most descriptive of errors. We checked the PolyBase logs for more information:


 



10/30/2022 1:12:23 PM [Thread:13000] [EngineInstrumentation:EngineQueryErrorEvent] (Error, High):


EXTERNAL TABLE access failed due to internal error: ‘Java exception raised on call to HdfsBridge_IsDirExist: Error [com.microsoft.azure.storage.StorageException: The server encountered an unknown failure: ] occurred while accessing external file.’


Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Common.ErrorHandling.MppSqlException: EXTERNAL TABLE access failed due to internal error: ‘Java exception raised on call to HdfsBridge_IsDirExist: Error [com.microsoft.azure.storage.StorageException: The server encountered an unknown failure: ] occurred while accessing external file.’ —> Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.DataMovement.Common.ExternalAccess.HdfsAccessException: Java exception raised on call to HdfsBridge_IsDirExist: Error [com.microsoft.azure.storage.StorageException: The server encountered an unknown failure: ] occurred while accessing external file.


   at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.DataMovement.Common.ExternalAccess.HdfsBridgeFileAccess.GetFileMetadata(String filePath)


   at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Sql.Statements.HadoopFile.ValidateFile(ExternalFileState fileState, Boolean createIfNotFound)


   — End of inner exception stack trace —


 


We got a little bit more information. PolyBase Engine is checking for file metadata, but still failing with “unknown failure”.


 


The engineer working on this case did a network trace and found out that the TLS version used for encrypting the packets sent to Azure Storage was TLS 1.0. The following screenshot demonstrates the analysis (note lower left corner where “Version: TLS 1.0” is clearly visible


 


 


NathanMSFT_0-1675119087917.jpeg


 


 


He compared this to a successful PolyBase query to Azure Storage account and found it was using TLS 1.2.


 


Azure Storage accounts can be configured to only allow a minimum TLS version. Our intrepid engineer checked the storage account and it was so old that it predated the time when this option was configurable for the storage account. But, in an effort to resolve the customer’s issue, he researched further. The customer was using a Version 7 Java Runtime Environment. Our engineer reproduced the error by downgrading his JRE to Version 7 and then querying a PolyBase external table pointing to his Azure storage account. Network tracing confirmed that JRE v7 will use TLS 1.0. He tried changing the TLS version in the Java configuration but it did not resolve the issue. He then switched back to JRE v8 and the issue was resolved in his environment. He asked the customer to upgrade to Version 8 and found the issue was resolved.


 


Further research showed that there were Azure TLS Certificate Changes requirements for some Azure endpoints and this old storage account was affected by these changes. TLS 1.0 was no longer sufficient and TLS 1.2 was now required. Switching to Java Runtime Environment Version 8 made PolyBase utilize TLS 1.2 when sending packets to Azure Storage Account and the problem was resolved.


 


Nathan Schoenack


Sr. Escalation Engineer

Microsoft is named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation

Microsoft is named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

We are excited and honored that Gartner has recognized Microsoft as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation.*

Today’s buyers value authentic engagements and expect the companies they buy from to know them and to provide one-of-a-kind experiences. This past year, we continued to invest in solutions that help our customers meet these demands by delivering personalization at scale.

Customers can automate buyer-centric experiences and processes using trigger-based journeys to respond to actions and signals in real time and easily optimize customer journeys with insights from across digital and physical channels. With configurable key performance indicators (KPIs), customers can use out-of-box machine learning templates or bring their own AI/machine learning modelsboth options supporting rapid innovation that expands the discovery of insights.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 equips organizations with holistic views of their customers so they can discover what buyers need with insights that power individualized experiences and the delivery of deeply personalized content in customer journeys. Going forward, we will continue to expand this functionality for our customers.

chart, scatter chart
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation**

Data at the center of everything

Gartner recognizes “B2B marketing automation platforms as technologies that serve as an essential tool for customer journey orchestration in support of B2B customer acquisition, retention and growth objectives.”

Dynamics 365 supports the practice of demand generation, helping our customers to capture, qualify, and nurture leads and accounts across multiple channels.

Data is at the center of all these functions, and it is the power behind the insights that drive what businesses need to do now and what they should do tomorrow. Microsoft helps businesses thrive and grow by capturing, analyzing, predicting, and reporting on their data.

One of the ways we are helping customers like Eika use one, coherent data platform to optimize their business-to-business (B2B) customer engagement with a high level of agility is the common data platform, Microsoft Dataverse. Dataverse lets you securely store and manage data used by business applications.

By using one single vendor that unifies and simplifies support processes for all solutions, customers benefit from products built to talk and complement each other. For instance, solutions like Dynamics 365 can work closely with other Microsoft technologies, such as Microsoft 365, Azure, Power BI, and LinkedIn to enhance and extend Dynamics 365 capabilities. This native integration also simplifies user adoptionusers are more comfortable when working with a familiar set of applications, and this ease of use can help lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and IT costs.

Additionally, customers that want to extend their investments in Microsoft technologies with applications to support their unique business needs have a huge range of options. Independent software vendors (ISVs) across the globe have created hundreds of software as a service (SaaS) applications that use Dynamics 365 and the underlying Microsoft Power Platform to deliver business value on top of Microsoft’s B2B automation platform.

Helping to ensure our customers’ success

Microsoft customers can participate in two customer success programs that deliver support for their implementations and can help them drive continuous adoption. FastTrack for Dynamics 365 is an engineering-led implementation guidance service that has been shown to speed deployments, drive higher usage, and reduce customer support needs. The second program, the Subscription Support for Microsoft Dynamics 365, is a support option delivered by a dedicated customer success unit within Microsoft.

Together, these programs have driven proven and lasting customer success. FastTrack for Dynamics 365 guides customers through successful implementations, bringing the best practices from thousands of deployments. The Subscription Support for Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps them drive continuous adoption, ensuring customers are realizing ongoing business value from the solutions they deploy.

Reimaging your B2B marketing automation

As today’s digital-first buyers become more informed, meeting their expectations is becoming a more difficult challenge. They’re more likely than ever to ignore anything that doesn’t feel authenticforcing businesses to connect customer insights and data across the organization to meet customers where they are and to capitalize on every opportunity.

B2B marketing automation platforms serve as an essential tool for customer journey orchestration in support of B2B customer acquisition, retention, and growth objectives. As Gartner mentioned in their report, “while B2B marketing automation platforms are designed to primarily support B2B use cases, they can also provide much needed functionality to B2C organizations selling high-consideration products and/or B2B2C models with more complex, indirect sales processes.”

We are excited to be positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to helping both our B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) customers meet the changing expectations of their customers. We invite you to learn more about how Microsoft is helping marketers around the world reimagine customer experience.

Man sitting at a table, looking at a mobile phone in his hand.

2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms

Microsoft is excited to be recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.


Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, Rick LaFond, Julian Poulter, Jeffrey L. Cohen, Matt Wakeman, Jeff Goldberg , 19 September 2022

*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

The post Microsoft is named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.