Welcome to Microsoft 365 Defender!

by Contributed | Jun 10, 2021 | Technology

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

Last month, we announced the general availability of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 capabilities in Microsoft 365 Defender. Security teams can now manage all endpoint, email and collaboration, cross-product investigation, configuration, and remediation activities within a single unified XDR dashboard. Our efforts to bring these solutions together are part of our commitment to deliver world class SecOps capabilities that empower security teams to respond to threats more rapidly and effectively.

We are excited by the reception you have given us on Microsoft 365 Defender and many customers have already made the transition to the new experience. Starting July 6, 2021, the default experience for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint will shift to Microsoft 365 Defender. This change will take some time to roll out across all geographies and will be completed automatically by Microsoft. Once transitioned, you can continue to use your existing portal URL and it will redirect to the new experience.

For Microsoft Defender for Endpoint customers, all existing capabilities are already available in Microsoft 365 Defender. To learn more about the integrated experience and features, please refer to our recent blog and instructional video.

Figure 1: Endpoint features integrated into Microsoft 365 Defender. 

For those who have not yet tried out the unified experience in Microsoft 365 Defender, we recommend that you navigate to security.microsoft.com today and explore it.  To help you get up to speed quickly please refer to this quick reference to guide you through the changes you can expect in the new portal.

Moving forward, we are focusing our engineering efforts on the unified experience in Microsoft 365 Defender. We recognize that some customers need more time to transition. The legacy portal will still be available and if you need more time to transition you can opt-out of the automatic redirection in your portal settings.

We’d like to hear your feedback as you move to the new experience, and we are here to help you with a smooth transition. Send us feedback directly through the portal. If you wish to opt-out of the preview migration you can contact us at unifiedportal@microsoft.com.

Updated data flows monitoring UI in ADF & Synapse

by Contributed | Jun 10, 2021 | Technology

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

Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Analytics have a new update for the monitoring UI to make it easier to view your data flow ETL job executions and quickly identify areas for performance tuning.

Large data flows are now much easier to visualize and traverse inside the monitoring view in ADF and Synapse. The visual indicators of data flow streams from source to sink is now easily viewable by selecting the related sink in either the graph or the details pane at the bottom.

To switch back into large icon mode with visible labels, increase your zoom in ratio with the right-hand zoom slider:

Note that every data point collected from your data flow ETL job execution can be sorted in that results table. This feature makes it easy to find transformations that had partitioning issues via skew or kurtosis as well as quickly identifying which stages of your transformation had the longest execution times by sorting processing time. Sort by rows written to find which stages wrote the most data.

At any zoom level, you can always search for your transformations using the search icon and search bar:

Detailed rows and lineage analysis of each stage of your transformations is available from the Stages and Lineage links on the “Sinks” detail pane.

Selecting a transformation icon from the graph will present details about partitions and timings:

We’ve also added more details in the sink transformation monitoring. When you select the sink transformation in your monitoring graph, you can view properties that now include pre-processing and post-processing times for SQL sinks as well as the temp table name utilized during staging and the time taken for each SQL operation. This will provide more details around the amount of time each data flow ETL job takes to complete.

Workplace Analytics June 2021 feature updates

by Contributed | Jun 10, 2021 | Technology

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

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for June 2021. (You can see past blog articles here). This month’s update describes the following features:

• Expanded support for plans
• Updated wpa R package
• Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) updates
• Organization data uploads for licensed employees
• Expanded support for mailboxes in datacenters globally

Expanded support for plans

In response to customer feedback, the Workplace Analytics team has made it possible for users with the Insights by MyAnalytics (basic) service plan to enroll in Workplace Analytics plans.

Previously, the Workplace Analytics plan enrollment page displayed an error when an analyst or PM tried to enroll a user who did not have the MyAnalytics (Full) service plan (made available through the E5 plan). Now, employees can  have either MyAnalytics service plan, but note that users must still be assigned valid Workplace Analytics licenses. (See Prerequisites for plans for the updated requirements for enrolling users in Workplace Analytics plans.)

Updated wpa R package is released

We are pleased to announce two release updates to the wpa R library. We have (1) gone live with our release on CRAN, which enables a faster and easier installation process for users, and we have (2) released our first Microsoft Learn module on analysing Workplace Analytics with the wpa R library.

The wpa R package CRAN release

In April 2021, the wpa R library was accepted to CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network), which is the official repository for peer-reviewed R packages. Here is our official entry on CRAN:

CRAN – Package wpa (r-project.org)

For users of the package, this means that it will be easier to install or update the package. Instead of installing through GitHub, you can install wpa like most other R packages, with install.packages(“wpa”). If you’ve had issues installing from GitHub, this release should resolve them.

Being available on CRAN also means that the wpa package has been reviewed and accepted as an R package of publication quality, as the package must pass a series of stringent checks and tests before it can be published on CRAN.

Your usage of the package will not be affected by this release, as the CRAN version is always a stable version of the package that’s available on GitHub. We highly recommend updating your local version by following these update instructions. Details of our version release history can be found on the package website. 

A new Microsoft Learn module

We are also offering a new Microsoft Learn module for the wpa R library:

Analyze Microsoft Workplace Analytics data using the wpa R package – Learn | Microsoft Docs

This module is designed for those who have little or no experience with the wpa R package and want to learn how to use it to extend the capabilities of Workplace Analytics. The module provides a step-by-step walkthrough on:

• what the wpa R package is and how it can be useful when analyzing Workplace Analytics data


• how to install R and set up the wpa R package


• how to validate and explore Workplace Analytics data with the wpa R package


• how to use the functions in the wpa R package to create your own analysis

Like all Learn modules, this one is free, interactive, and available to everyone; that is, you do not need a Workplace Analytics role to use it.

Microsoft Learn

Microsoft Learn is a hands-on training platform that helps people develop in-demand technical skills. To see a full list of Workplace Analytics Learn modules, including the wpa R package module, go to aka.ms/learn OR docs.microsoft.com/learn and search for “Workplace Analytics”. If you took and enjoyed the module, please leave it a rating so we can keep developing more useful, engaging content on how to get more out of Workplace Analytics.

Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) updates

To help customers more easily measure team and manager connectivity, we have released a set of ONA updates. These updates include new visual insights for leaders, query updates that make it easier to consume ONA metrics, and metric enhancements. Now, leaders can more easily get answers to questions like, “Are my teams cohesive?” and “Are managers well-connected across the company for better cross-group engagements?”

This release includes these metric enhancements:

• All ONA metrics are now accessible through one query interface to make it easy to consume in assets such as the Power BI templates.


• More targeted analyses such as evaluating local influencers are now possible.


• Metric enhancements such as Influence rank are now available.

The new visual insights show up in both the Viva insights Teams app as well as in the Workplace Analytics Web app under the Home menu:

All ONA metrics now appear under one query in the Network: Person query, which enables easy use in assets such as Power BI templates:

All ONA metrics can also be analyzed for a specific population or type of collaboration, which lets customers perform more targeted influencer or connectivity analyses. This function is available in Workplace Analytics in the Network: Person and Network: Person-to-person queries:

Finally, additional metric enhancements such as Influence rank and overlapping and unique ties for managers are available in Workplace Analytics in the Network: Person query:

For more information, see the product documentation: Workplace Analytics insights, ONA person queries, ONA person-to-person queries, ONA metrics

Organization data uploads for licensed employees

The Workplace Analytics team has added notifications to alert Workplace Analytics admins of missing data and a straightforward means to upload that data.

Admins upload organizational data when setting up the product and afterward, as needed, to maintain that data. Part of this task is to upload HR data for all licensed employees in the organization.

If Workplace Analytics detects that data is missing for one or more licensed employees, it alerts admins with a bell-icon notification and with a banner on the Upload > Organizational data page. Admins can then download a .csv file that contains the names of the employees whose data is missing, after which they can append the missing data and upload the file to Workplace Analytics. For complete information about this new capability, see Include all licensed employees.

Expanded support for mailboxes in datacenters globally

Microsoft now offers full Workplace Analytics functionality for organizations whose mailboxes are in all Microsoft 365 datacenter geo locations. (See Environment requirements for more information about Workplace Analytics availability and licensing.) Previously, analysts in organizations in various regions worldwide could not conduct employee analyses through Workplace Analytics. Now, those analyses are possible.