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Quite a bit of Azure news to cover this week. Items covered include Microsoft 365 apps to retire support for Internet Explorer 11, Azure IoT Central updates including a command line-interface (CLI) IoT extension update and a Mobile app gateway sample, Assigning groups to Azure AD roles is now in public preview and Video Analytics is now available as a new Azure IoT Central App Template.

 

 

Microsoft 365 apps to retire support for Internet Explorer 11 and Windows 10 sunsets Microsoft Edge Legacy

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The Microsoft Teams web app will no longer support IE 11 as of November 30, 2020 and the remaining Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support IE 11 as of August 17, 2021.   After the above dates, customers will have a degraded experience or will be unable to connect to Microsoft 365 apps and services on IE 11. For degraded experiences, new Microsoft 365 features will not be available or certain features may cease to work when accessing the app or service via IE 11.
 
After March 9, 2021, the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app within Windows 10 will not receive new security updates. The new Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer mode uses the Trident MSHTML engine from Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) for legacy sites and can be specifically configure via policy.
 

Azure IoT Central UI new and updated features

A plethora of new Azure IoT Central features updates this week including:

 

  • Azure command line-interface (CLI) IoT extension update
    • Enables the ability to troubleshoot and diagnose common issues when connecting a device to IoT Central. For example, you can use the Azure CLI to compare and validate the device property payload against the device model and run a device command and view the response.
       
  • Mobile app gateway sample
    • Most medical wearable devices are Bluetooth Low Energy devices that need a gateway to send data to IoT Central. This phone app acts as that gateway and can be used by a patient who has no access to, or knowledge of, IoT Central. You can customize the IoT Central Continuous Patient Monitoring sample mobile app for other use cases and industries.
       

  • Device builder documentation improvements
    • A new article for device developers describes message payloads. It describes the JSON that devices send and receive for telemetry, properties, and commands defined in a device template. The article includes snippets from the device capability model and provides examples that show how the device should interact with the application.
       

  • User management support with the IoT Central APIs
    • You can now use the IoT Central APIs to manage your application users. This makes it easier to add, remove, and modify users and roles programmatically. You can add and manage service principal (SPNs) as part of your application to make it easier to deploy IoT Central in your existing release pipeline.
       

Assigning groups to Azure AD roles is now in public preview

Currently available for Azure AD groups and Azure AD built-in roles, and Microsoft will be extending this in the future to on-premises groups as well as Azure AD custom roles. You’ll need to create an Azure AD group and enable it to have roles assigned which can be done by anyone who is either a Privileged Role Administrator or a Global Administrator.  To use this feature, you’ll need to create an Azure AD group and enable it to have roles assigned. This can be done by anyone who is either a Privileged Role Administrator or a Global Administrator.  After that, any of the Azure AD built-in roles, such as Teams Administrator or SharePoint Administrator, can have groups assigned to them.

 

New Azure IoT Central Video Analytics App Template now available

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The new IoT Central video analytics template simplifies the setup of an Azure IoT Edge device to act as the gateway between cameras and Azure cloud services. The template installs the IoT Edge modules such as an IoT Central Gateway, Live Video Analytics on IoT Edge, OpenVINO Model server, and an ONVIF module on the Edge device. These modules help the IoT Central application configure and manage the devices, ingest the live video streams from the cameras, and easily apply AI models such as vehicle or person detection. Simultaneously in the cloud, Azure Media Services and Azure Storage record and stream relevant portions of the live video feed.

 

MS Learn Module of the Week

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Develop IoT solutions with Azure IoT Central

Interested in rapidly building enterprise-grade IoT applications on a secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure? This path is the place to start to learn how to build IoT solutions with Azure IoT Central. IoT Central is an IoT application platform that reduces the burden and cost of developing, managing, and maintaining enterprise-grade IoT solutions.

 

Let us know in the comments below if there are any news items you would like to see covered in next week show.  Az Update streams live every Friday so be sure to catch the next episode and join us in the live chat.

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