This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Viva Connections is the gateway for the employee experience and provides an extensible platform through the dashboard, where employees can see a targeted list of actionable cards that can connect to Microsoft Teams apps, Viva apps and services, partner apps, and custom solutions using the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) framework, internal links, and external links.
A Viva Connections dashboard showing some examples of third party cards.
This blog will explore a few of our diverse third-party card integrations available from can extend the capabilities of Viva Connections, allowing organizations to incorporate third party external tools, services, and data directly into their flow of work and ensure business critical investments that they have made in other services can be added directly into employee dashboards. There are countless ways to customize or build your own dashboard cards to meet the needs of employees at virtually any organization, but this blog will highlight a few pre-packaged cards from Microsoft partners that can easily be added to your app.
With the ServiceNow card, enable employees to get support, find answers, and act on tasks across HR, IT, and other departments. Once deployed, the card offers a quick view of their task list by selecting View My Tasks. The ServiceNow Adaptive Card extension also provides a quick entry point into the app by simply selecting Visit Employee Center.
With the UKG card employees can view their respective pay information and review their work schedules, shifts, and PTO, to see a clearer picture of upcoming priorities.
Achievers for Viva Connections extends the Achievers Employee Experience platform into employees’ daily workflows. Members can enjoy some of their favorite activities found on their Achievers program: view upcoming celebrations, recognitions received, the latest trending recognitions, and perform quick actions, all on one dashboard within Viva Connections.
The Qualtrics card brings experience management into Viva Connections seamlessly. It enables quick access to surveys and feedback tools, allowing organizations to gather valuable insights and act on employee, customer, and product experiences right from the dashboard. The Qualtrics card can link directly to surveys and let employees know when feedback is due, eliminating common barriers to organization-wide feedback.
With the Workday card, Viva Connections brings Workday data and actions to employees’ fingertips right in the dashboard. With this integration, users can access Workday tasks such as inbox items, time off balances, and more, simplifying HR processes and saving employees time on administrative tasks.
Features:
Customizable Workday® Web part in SharePoint & Adaptive Card extension for Viva Connections dashboard
Seamless Microsoft 365 integration: Get instant access to your Workday® data right within SharePoint using our Web part integration.
Developer-friendly: Easily customize the integration to fit your organization’s unique needs.
Streamlined workflows: Enjoy a seamless connection between Workday® and your Microsoft 365 apps for smooth data sharing and collaboration.
The Zendesk card for Viva Connections allows users to access and manage their Zendesk tickets directly, facilitating a more efficient customer support workflow.
Features:
Display your Zendesk data right within SharePoint with a custom web part
Enjoy a seamless experience within your Microsoft 365 environment
Redefine productivity by viewing and creating tickets from a single place
This seamless connection allows for the direct embedding of Asana tasks into your Viva Connections dashboard, creating a unified workspace where you can manage tasks without switching between applications.
Features:
Integrate Asana tasks directly into SharePoint, providing a centralized view of your projects
Utilize advanced search capabilities within Asana’s data to generate dynamic views for your SharePoint web part
Ensure a cohesive workflow across the Microsoft 365 suite, enhancing productivity and collaboration
Turn Viva Connections into a project management superhub by adding Asana cards
Many of the third-party cards highlighted in this blog are available through the Microsoft partner Adenin. Check out more about their Viva Connections cards in our recent partner showcase blog.
How to access and install third-party cards
There are a few simple steps to . Anyone can look up the available applications but only IT administrators can install them.
All users can find applications via Microsoft AppSource or the SharePoint store. Installation requires administration permissions in SharePoint.
Select “Get it Now” to request the application is added to the App Catalogue site in your SharePoint environment.
Work with the IT Admin to Deploy the app and add it to your Viva Connections dashboard.
Once Viva Connections is deployed for the organization, all employee users can access the app on their Viva Connections .
With dozens of third-party partner apps and M365 Viva apps to choose from, the opportunities for customization and enhanced productivity are vast. To start leveraging these powerful integrations, visit the SharePoint store and Microsoft AppSource today.
To learn more about the extensibility capabilities within the Viva Connections dashboard. View this course on Microsoft Learn.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
If you work in smartcard federated authentication environments, here’s a much-anticipated security feature for you. Starting with the September 10, 2024 Windows security update, you can use strong name-based mapping on Windows Server 2019 and newer. This feature helps you with the hardening changes for certificate-based authentication on Windows domain controllers.
What are weak and strong mappings in Active Directory?
All certificate names must be correctly mapped onto the intended user account in Active Directory (AD). If there’s a likelihood that they aren’t, we call these mappings weak. Weak mappings give rise to security vulnerabilities and demand hardening measures such as Certificate-based authentication changes on Windows domain controllers.
Following up on our May 2022 round of updates to address these vulnerabilities, we’re introducing a new feature called strong name-based mapping. You can now distinguish between “strong” and “weak” mappings within existing Alternative Security Identities (AltSecIDs) based on likelihood. With the new feature, you can allow some weak name-based mappings to be treated as strong name-based mappings. You just need to properly configure both the public key infrastructure (PKI) and the AD deployment.
Key features and benefits of strong name-based mapping
Strong name-based mapping has two main benefits:
Compliance with strong certificate mapping enforcement. Strong name-based mapping allows certain weak certificate mappings, such as Issuer/Subject AltSecID and User Principal Names (UPN) mappings, to be treated as strong mappings. This type of strong mapping is compatible with the enforcement mode of certificate-based authentication changes on Windows domain controllers.
Compatibility with government PKI deployments. Strong name-based mappings work by asking PKI deployments to attest certain security guarantees of certificates via object identifiers (OIDs) stamped on the certificate. It’s a common practice among government PKI and AD deployments.
Security requirements for PKI deployments for strong name-based mapping
Warning
Unless you have a strong need for this type of deployment AND have a deep knowledge of how PKI deployments and AD authentication interact together, we DO NOT recommend deploying strong name-based mapping. We instead recommend that you following the guidance in KB5014754: Certificate-based authentication changes on Windows domain controllers.
Fundamentally, strong name-based mapping deployment is your promise to Microsoft that your PKI is not susceptible to the attacks addressed by May 2022 and later updates. Namely, you take responsibility for the vulnerabilities that can arise from any unintentional mapping of the names in a certificate to multiple AD accounts.
To prevent unintentional and unsafe mappings, we recommend that you take steps to strengthen your PKI and AD deployments. Some of these steps include:
Names used in either the Subject Name and/or the Subject Alternative Name of certificates MUST NOT contain names that are queried and/or built from AD.
Names used in either the Subject Name and/or the Subject Alternative Name of certificates MUST be both immutable and globally unique to the entire PKI deployment.
AD and PKI administrators must ensure that certificate issuance for logons is not automatic. Instead, ensure that strong manual checks are in place to prevent a certificate with an incorrect or clashing name from being issued.
Failing to secure your PKI and AD deployments can degrade the security of your environment.
If your PKI meets or exceeds these security requirements, you MUST add an OID in the Issuance Policy of the certificate to denote this compliance. This OID (or multiple OIDs) will be used further below in the strong name-based mapping configuration.
Setup instructions
To enable strong name-based mapping on Windows Server 2019 and later, you need to take the following steps:
Enable the Group Policy (GPO) Setting on the Domain Controllers: Computer Configuration > Administrative Template > System > KDC > “Allow name-based strong mappings for certificates”.
Configure the GPO with the necessary tuples (more details below).
This configuration relies on adding tuples to the GPO when strong name-based mapping is enabled. These tuples tell the Domain Controller which certificates meet the above security requirements by specifying both the Issuer certificate authority (CA) thumbprint and the OID(s) that denote that the PKI deployment is secured against the May 2022 vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the tuples also configure which “weak” name-based mappings can be upgraded to “strong” name-based mappings.
The tuple is in the following format: ;;
Issuer CA Certificate Thumbprint: This is the certificate thumbprint of the Issuing CA. There can only be one Issuer CA Thumbprint in this field. If multiple Issuer CA Thumbprints are placed, it can prevent proper processing of the GPO policy.
OID(s): This is a comma-separated list of OIDs that the PKI deployment has stamped on the certificate to attest that the security requirements against name collisions have been met. There can be multiple OIDs denoted in this field.
IssuerSubject/UpnSuffix: This is a comma-separated list to denote what type of weak mapping should be treated as strong:
IssuerSubject: This string behaves as a tag to denote that the Issuer/SubjectName AltSecID can be upgraded from “weak” to “strong.” There can only be one IssuerSubject tag in this field.
UPNSuffix: This string denotes that certificate mappings can be upgraded form “weak” to “strong” wherever the UPN suffix of the SubjectName (that is, everything that comes after the @ symbol) matches the suffix in the tuple exactly. There can be multiple UPN suffixes in this field.
The logic of the tuple is the following. For certificates whose Issuer is X that has any of the OID(s) Y, upgrade any of the weak mappings C to “strong.” This logic is summarized in the diagram.
Flow chart illustrating the logic of strong name-based mapping configuration. The chart starts with a decision diamond asking if the certificate’s Issuer Certificate Thumbprint matches the specified thumbprint. If yes, it proceeds to check if the certificate has any of the specified OIDs. If both conditions are met, it allows a strong mapping for the certificate based on either Issuer/SubjectName AltSecID or UPNSuffix, depending on the configuration.
Two important configuration details are required for UPN Suffix mapping to work:
Certificates must have the UPN of the user in the SAN.
For certificates whose Issuer Certificate Thumbprint is fe40a3146d935dc248504d2dcd960d15c4542e6e, and
The certificate has the OID 2.16.840.1.101.3.2.1.3.45,
Allow a strong mapping if the certificate is mapped via Issuer/SubjectName AltSecID.
This tuple would allow a certificate logon which passes checks (1) and (2) issued to the user Bob, if the AD object for Bob has the Issuer/SubjectName AltSecID correctly configured for the certificate.
Policy tuple example 2
Use this policy tuple to allow a strong mapping via a specified UPNSuffix.
For certificates whose Issuer Certificate Thumbprint is fe40a3146d935dc248504d2dcd960d15c4542e6e, and
The certificate has the OID 2.16.840.1.101.3.2.1.3.45,
Allow a strong mapping if the certificate is mapped via UPNSuffix, which should be “corp.contoso.com.”
This tuple would allow a certificate logon which passes checks (1) and (2) issued to the user Bob, if the AD object for Bob has the Issuer/SubjectName AltSecID correctly configured for the certificate.
Policy tuple example 3
Use this policy tuple to allow a strong mapping via any of the approved specifications.
For certificates whose Issuer Certificate Thumbprint is fe40a3146d935dc248504d2dcd960d15c4542e6e, and
The certificate has ANY of the following OIDs:
2.16.840.1.101.3.2.1.3.45
2.16.840.1.101.3.2.1.3.44
Allow a strong name-based mapping if the certificate is mapped via either of the following:
The user account in AD has a valid Issuer/SubjectName AltSecID mapping
UPNSuffix, where the suffix is “corp.contoso.com”
UPNSuffix, where the suffix is “my.corp.contoso.com”
Event Log changes
Two Event Log updates are here to help you as an AD administrator better troubleshoot strong name-based mapping scenarios. These are available to you with the September 10, 2024 and later updates.
Updates to current event logs
The current event logs now include policy OIDs found on the certificate used for authentication. This modifies the Key Distribution Center (KDC) events introduced by the May 10, 2022 and later updates.
New event logs
Additionally, a new event is available to log when the strong name-based mapping GPO encounters an issue processing the policy tuples. Track these events through Event ID 311.
The Key Distribution Center (KDC) encountered invalid certificate strong name match policy.
Faulting line:
Ready to improve Windows Server security?
We’re excited to bring this feature to your government scenario. Consider strong name-based mappings on Active Directory and PKI deployments in Windows Server 2019 or later if you meet the security requirements and recommendations. If you have any questions or need assistance, our support team is here to help.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The new semester is just beginning, and over the past few months, we’ve enhanced Copilot with exciting new features to support your quiz creation. With the capabilities like generating detailed answer explanations for each question, rewriting questions, and smart suggestions for fine tuning the quiz. Copilot is now more powerful than ever. Let’s explore how these updates can help you create quizzes more effectively and efficiently this semester.
Please note that a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license is required to access the following features.
Generate quiz draft based on prompt/pasted content
You can specify your intentions, such as the quiz subject, audience, types of questions, and more to generate a quiz. Besides, Copilot can also generate a quiz from pasted content, such as a paragraph in textbook. For example, as a middle school teacher, you could instruct Copilot to create a physics quiz for 9th grade students or simply copy and paste content from a textbook to generate the quiz.
Generate quiz draft based on prompt
Quiz draft with answer explanations
After the quiz draft is generated, if you select “Including answer explanations,” each question will come with detailed explanations to clarify the reasoning behind the correct answers. You can review the solutions for each question and keep the draft to use. As shown below, when we are generating a math quiz for grade 9 students, Copilot shows us the step-by-step solutions to calculate the correct answer.
Step-by-step answer explanation
Further instructions to refine the draft
You have the flexibility to add/remove questions and refine the draft further by providing additional details to Copilot. For instance, if you forgot to include trigonometric questions in a math quiz, you could keep asking to add two questions on that topic.
Further instructions to refine the draft
Rewrite questions and answer explanations
Once you keep the draft to use, if you need to do further modifications on questions, options or the answer explanation, you can easily rewrite it with Copilot’s assistance. For example, you can make the question easier or add more details to the answer explanation for better clarity. You can also manually customize the answer explanations as needed.
Rewrite answer explanations
Generate answer explanation for newly created questions
After adjusting the generated questions, if you still need to add new ones, Copilot can help by generating answer explanations based on the correct answers you mark, saving you time on manual input.
Generate answer explanation for newly created questions
Copilot smart suggestions Before sending out the quiz, Copilot will offer suggestions to enhance its quality. You can add a fun theme to boost students’ motivation and enthusiasm, adjust settings such as time duration and practice mode, and choose appropriate distribution channels like sharing via URL or presenting live. With just one click, you can apply these suggestions to create a more engaging and effective quiz.
Copilot smart suggestions
Immediate results and answer explanation for responders
When respondents submit the quiz, they can view the results immediately and review the answer explanations to understand which areas they already mastered or where they could improve.
Check result with answer explanations after submitting
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Question Description: A customer has designed a database schema for a Terabyte-level Azure SQL database, but the original design lacks a unique key. As the data volume increases, performance issues become more pronounced.
To address these performance issues, Azure SQL uses a hidden index with uniqueifier identifiers, which have a maximum limit of 2,147,483,648.
When the number of data rows in a table exceeds 2.1 billion, any insert or update operations will result in the following error:
Msg 666, Level 16, State 2, Line 25
This error can lead to partial or complete database outages, severely impacting business operations.
It isn’t a good idea to create a clustered index on a uniqueidentifier column and generate your GUIDs with NEWID(). The reason for this is that NEWID()generates GUIDs in non-sequential order and SQL Server orders a clustered index sequentially. It will work – SQL Server will let you build a clustered index around a uniqueidentifier column, however it will cause the SQL Server to do unnecessary work and cause performance slowdowns. The reason for this is that to insert data into the middle of a clustered index (out of sequential order) causes SQL Server to make room for the data by rearranging the cluster.
Mitigation Strategies:
1. Quick Workaround:
Make index creation online and resumable by specifying ONLINE=ON and RESUMABLE=ON. This allows the operation to use smaller transactions, making it possible to resume from the failure point if it fails for any reason.
2. Permanent Fix:
Rebuild the clustered index with a unique key by adding a new column. The steps are as followed:
I: Create the index with the new definition offline.
II: Use the DROP_EXISTING option for online index creation. This keeps both indexes up-to-date, and once the new index is built, it will replace the existing one.
III: Use the resumable option to break the creation into smaller transactions, reducing transaction log bloat. Note that there is some performance impact.
IV: Manually create a new copy of the table, copying all cold data, then rename the table. This involves scanning the source table, adding a small additional load to the system. Use a shorter outage and a merge statement for the new data.
V: Create a partitioned view that is a union of the old and new tables with different index schemes. Ensure that insert statements supply values for every field in the table. This method can be complex and may require taking the database offline, with the rebuilding process taking anywhere from a few hours to several days.
Best Practice: Planning early and carefully designing the clustered index is crucial to avoid these issues.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As you may be aware, Azure Automation Agent-based User Hybrid Runbook Worker (Windows and Linux) was retired on 31 August 2024, and support has been discontinued.
Nonetheless, users might want to verify whether their runbooks and jobs are utilizing the extension or agent-based system when they transition. It’s worth noting that versions V1 and V2 of the same hybrid worker machine can be registered simultaneously with Azure Automation but will have different names.
If the V1 agent wasn’t uninstalled before the V2 extension was installed, this would lead Azure to detect both versions on the same machine.
The “last seen time” suggests V1 and V2 are communicating with Azure Automation if both exist.
It’s also worth noting that some automation tasks are still being performed by the V1 worker, which accounts for its continued activity. Runbook jobs can be executed on any machine within the Hybrid Worker Group. Currently, this group includes both V1 and V2 versions, so the tasks are distributed between them.
The installation of V2 does not mean that the Hybrid Worker Group will disregard V1 and exclusively use V2.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In my previous blog posts of containerising .NET apps and Function apps, I discussed how to containerise .NET apps and Azure Functions apps with and without Dockerfile. However, deploying these containerised apps to Azure Container Apps (ACA) is a different story.
Since its release in May 2023, Azure Developer CLI (azd) has evolved significantly. azd nowadays even automatically generates Bicep files for us to immediately provision and deploy applications to Azure. With this feature, you only need the azd up command for provisioning and deployment.
Throughout this post, I’m going to discuss how to provision and deploy .NET apps including Azure Functions to ACA through just one command, azd up.
Let’s make sure those apps running properly on your local machine. In order to run those apps locally, open three terminal windows and run the following commands on each terminal:
# Terminal 1 – ASP.NET Core Web API
dotnet run –project ./ApiApp
# Terminal 3 – Blazor app
dotnet run –project ./WebApp
Open your web browser and navigate to https://localhost:5001 to see the Blazor app running. Then navigate to https://localhost:5001/weather to see the weather data fetched from the ApiApp and the greetings populated from the FuncApp.
Now, let’s start using azd to provision and deploy these apps to ACA. Make sure that you’ve already logged in to Azure with the azd auth login command.
azd init – Initialisation
In order to provision and deploy the apps to ACA, you need to initialise the azd configuration. Run the following command:
azd init
You’ll be prompted to initialise the app. Choose the Use code in the current directory option.
azd automatically detects your three apps as shown below. In addition to that, it says it will use Azure Container Apps. Choose the Confirm and continue initializing my app option.
The function app asks the target port number. Enter 80.
And finally, it asks the environment name. Enter any name you want. I just entered aca0906 for now.
Now, you’ve got two directories and two files generated:
.azure directory
infra directory
next-steps.md file
azure.yaml file
Under the infra directory, there are bunch of Bicep files automatically generated through azd init.
As a result of running the command, azd init, you don’t have to write all necessary Bicep files. Instead, it generates them for you, which significantly reduces the time for infrastructure provisioning. Now, you’re ready to provision and deploy your apps to ACA. Let’s move on.
azd up – Provision and deployment
All you need to run at this stage is:
azd up
Then, it asks you to confirm the subscription and location to provision the resources. Choose the appropriate options and continue.
All apps are containerised and deployed to ACA. Once the deployment is done, you can see the output as shown below:
Click the web app URL and navigate to the /weather page. But you will see the error as shown below:
This is because each app doesn’t know where each other is. Therefore, you should update the Bicep files to let the web app know where the other apps are.
Update Bicep files – Service discovery
Open the infra/main.bicep file and update the webApp resource:
Then, open the infra/app/WebApp.bicep file and add both apiAppEndpoint and funcAppEndpoint parameters:
…
@secure()
param appDefinition object
// Add these two lines
param apiAppEndpoint string
param funcAppEndpoint string
…
In the same file, change the env variable:
// Before
var env = map(filter(appSettingsArray, i => i.?secret == null), i => {
name: i.name
value: i.value
})
// After
var env = union(map(filter(appSettingsArray, i => i.?secret == null), i => {
name: i.name
value: i.value
}), [
{
name: ‘API_ENDPOINT_URL’
value: apiAppEndpoint
}
{
name: ‘FUNC_ENDPOINT_URL’
value: funcAppEndpoint
}
])
This change passes the API and Function app endpoints to the web app as environment variables, so that the web app knows where the other apps are.
Once you’ve made the changes, run the azd up command again. It will update the resources in ACA. After that, go to the web app URL and navigate to the /weather page. You will see the weather data and greetings fetched from the API and Function apps.
So far, I’ve discussed how to provision and deploy .NET apps including Azure Functions to ACA with just one command, azd up. This is a very convenient way to deploy apps to Azure. However, to let the apps know each other, you should slightly tweak the auto-generated Bicep files. With this little tweak, all your .NET apps will be seamlessly provisioned and deployed to ACA.
One more thing I’d like to mention here, though, is that, if you use .NET Aspire, this sort of service discovery is automatically handled.
More about deploying .NET apps to ACA?
If you want to learn more options about deploying .NET apps to ACA, the following links might be helpful.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s digital era, where data breaches and cyber threats are increasingly sophisticated and pervasive, the need for robust data security measures has never been more critical. Traditional security approaches are proving insufficient against the complex and evolving nature of modern cyber threats. This has led to a growing consensus among security experts and industry leaders on the imperative to incorporate Generative AI (GenAI) into data security frameworks. GenAI’s ability to analyze vast amounts of data in real-time, identify patterns, and predict potential threats offers a transformative approach to safeguarding sensitive information. According to a recent report by Gartner, the use of AI in cybersecurity is expected to reduce the number of data breaches by up to 20% by 2025, underscoring the industry’s recognition of AI’s vital role in enhancing data security (Gartner, 2022). This blog explores how Microsoft is leveraging GenAI to revolutionize data security, providing organizations with the tools they need to protect their digital assets effectively.
Leverage the power of Copilot to secure your organization
Human ingenuity and expertise will always be an irreplaceable component of defense, so we need technology that can augment these unique capabilities with skill sets, processing speeds, and rapid learning of AI. Technology that can work alongside us, detect hidden patterns and behaviors, and inform response at machine speed with the latest and most advanced security practices.
In this scenario, Microsoft Copilot for Security helps professionals across the many cybersecurity disciplines to be more effective and efficient at all the roles they play. It helps you enhance and grow your capabilities and skills, while also supporting the workflows and teams you collaborate with to solve security challenges. Since Copilot for Security uses GenAI to analyze data from many sources, including other Microsoft Security solutions, it can also help analysts catch what they might have otherwise missed. Copilot for Security synthesizes data and detects those important signals better than ever before, all in a single pane of glass, without having to jump between different solutions to get additional context.
Boost your data protection efficiency with Copilot for Security embedded in Purview
An important application of Copilot for Security is to empower and strengthen data security and data compliance teams in securing data with more efficiency and agility. Data security admins are often challenged by the high volume and complexity of alerts, and the integration between Microsoft Purview and Copilot for Security enables these tools to work together to protect your data at machine speed.
The speed at which data security investigations are conducted is crucial to preventing data loss. However, the task of analyzing a vast array of sources can pose a significant challenge for analysts at any experience level. With Copilot-powered comprehensive summaries of Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) alerts, data security admins can identify, act on alerts and prevent data risks much faster and effectively. When an alert is summarized, it includes details such as policy rules, the source, and the files involved, as well as user risk level context pulled from Insider Risk Management (IRM).
Figure 1: embedded Copilot summarization into Data Loss Prevention
Your team can also leverage summaries in Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management alerts, which enables faster understanding of potentially risky activity, user context, behavior sequences. and intent present in an alert. Moreover, we’re excited to announce the public preview of the Copilot for Security-powered enhanced hunting in IRM, where admins will be able to use GenAI-driven analytics to deepen investigations and double-click into a user’s risk profile and activities, beyond the alert summary.
Figure 2: embedded Copilot summarization into Insider Risk Management
Compliance admins, forensic investigators, legal, and other teams can also strongly benefit from GenAI being incorporated into their workflows. Not only do they spend most of their time reviewing lengthy content and evidence; but admins need to invest time to learn complex technical capabilities like keyword query language to conduct a search, with 60% of admin time spent reviewing evidence collected in review sets.
Compliance teams are subject to regulatory obligations, like industry regulations or corporate policies related to business communications. This requires teams to review communication violations that contain lengthy content like meeting transcripts, group chats, long email threads and attachments. With concise and comprehensive contextual summaries on Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance, content can be evaluated against relevant compliance polices and investigators are able to get a summary of the policy match and better identify risky communication.
Figure 3: embedded Copilot summarization into Communication Compliance
These contextualized summaries are also invaluable in Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, where they help simplify the exploration of large about of evidence data, which can take hours, days, even weeks to do. This process often requires costly resources like an outside council to manually go through each document to determine relevancy to the case, and this embedded Copilot for Security capability enables reducing days of legal investigations into seconds, by allowing an investigator to use Copilot to summarize items in a review set.
Figure 4: embedded Copilot summarization into eDiscovery
Search is one of the most difficult and time-intensive workflows in an eDiscovery investigation. Now, you can simplify investigation by leveraging Copilot for Security to translate inquiries from natural to keywork query language. This feature allows organizations to take Natural Language and convert that into assertive evidence queries, in doing so this can correct possible errors, boost team expertise, and enable analysts at all levels to carry out advanced investigations.
Figure 5: embedded Copilot search with Natural Language on eDiscovery
All these recent developments are just the beginning of the Copilot for Security journey into Microsoft Purview, and we’ll continue to share new advancements and GenAI-powered capabilities that will take your data security program to the next level.
Learn more about Copilot for Security in Purview with Microsoft Documentation.
If you are a security partner interested in using Microsoft Security Copilot with your solutions, please sign up to join the Security Copilot Partner Ecosystem.
Learn more about these solutions in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal. Visit your Microsoft Purview compliance portal to activate your free trial and begin using our new features. An active Microsoft 365 E3 subscription is required as a prerequisite to activate the free trial.
Download Microsoft Data Security Index report to learn more about the trends and best practices for effective data security .
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
With the new semester just around the corner, we’re excited to introduce some fantastic new features in Forms to enhance your teaching and learning experience. Now, you can enjoy an improved data sync function to stay up to date, set rules to collect more accurate responses, pre-fill forms and quizzes, and easily manage response notifications. Let’s dive in and check more details. You can also try out from this template.
Let’s create a science club registration together to explore how we can make the most of these new features. Imagine you are a high school science teacher and trying to establish a science club where students from all grades can dive into fascinating topics beyond the curriculum and participate in fun, hands-on activities.
Improved Excel data sync function
You can start with Excel for the web to create the registration form, no need to visit Forms. This process will automatically generate a new form in Forms where you can add your questions. All the questions you add and responses you receive will seamlessly sync with Excel. (check more details: Forms data sync to Excel is now fully available with more functionality – Microsoft Community Hub)
Create forms from Excel for the web
Prefill answers for forms/quizzes
In this science club registration, you can use prefilled answers for fields like grade and class, creating unique links for each grade and class. This allows you to easily track and differentiate student distribution across different groups in the club. (check more details: Pre-fill Responses in Your Microsoft Forms – Microsoft Community Hub)
Set prefilled answer
Validation for open text question
To make sure students provide correct contact information and receive timely updates, you can set restriction for open text questions to only accept email formats. (Other types of restriction are also supported in Forms, check more details here: Validate open text responses in Microsoft Forms – Microsoft Community Hub)
Set validation on email address
Manage recipients of new response notification
You can set multiple key individuals to receive the notification when a new registration comes in, such as the club coordinator and an assistant. This allows them to quickly review and confirm new members, update the membership list, and prepare welcome materials. (check more details: Add or remove people from your form response notification emails – Microsoft Community Hub)
Add recipients for new response notification
Hope you find these new features useful for the new semester. If you’re interested in trying them out, simply start with this template.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
All in on AI is a series featuring interviews from Microsoft executives across the company about what transforming work with AI means to their teams. Through these conversations, we’ll highlight the challenges each industry faces and the lessons we learned that our customers can use in their own AI journeys. In this episode, Colette Stallbaumer, General Manager, Microsoft 365 and Future of Work sits down with Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft to explore the integration of AI in customer service.
According to the 2024 Work Trend Index, a study exploring into the global trends affecting employee work and wellness, employees are struggling to keep up with the pace and volume of work. Many employees report feeling burned out and as a result, staff turnover is on the rise.
These trends have profound implications, underscoring a crucial shift: employees are now prioritizing their health and well-being over work. This is a pressing concern for all business leaders, particularly in customer service.
At Microsoft, we recognize the vital role our customer service agents play in delivering world-class care. As the front line between our business and our customers, the quality of our customer care directly impacts customer satisfaction.
Recently, Colette Stallbaumer, General Manager, Microsoft 365 and Future of Work joined Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft to discuss how our customer service teams are using AI solutions like Microsoft Copilot to ensure our customer service employees are empowered to focus on the most meaningful parts of their jobs. Here’s what she had to say:
Adapting to the customer service surge with the power of AI
Since 2019, Microsoft’s customer service teams, like many in the industry, have been managing a rising surge in calls from customers with complex needs.
As a service industry veteran and leader of our customer service organization, Mala and her team realized that just adding more call-handling capacity wouldn’t suffice. Their goal was to help teams at scale—to empower them to manage more inquiries, address more complex customer needs, and to more rapidly onboard new employees to help with the surge. They also saw an opportunity to reduce case volumes by introducing self-service options for customers.
The team began exploring the use of generative AI to enable a more consistent and seamless experience. Already one of the world’s largest support organizations using Dynamics 365 Customer Service, harnessing new AI capabilities could help the organization to automate and augment common support scenarios. As customer zero for our products, turning to Microsoft Copilot and Dynamics 365 Customer Service would enable us to quickly adopt the transformative power of generative AI, and share those learnings with business leaders to implement and improve their own customer support experience at scale.
Reimagining the customer experience with the power of AI
Transforming the employee experience with generative AI
As Mala explains in the interview, adopting Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Copilot Studio created an opportunity to transform work across four key areas of Microsoft’s customer service landscape.
First, the Customer Service and Success team needed to speed up how quickly new hires could start helping existing customer service agents. Second, they wanted all support teams to access accurate information quickly and spend less time working across tools and data sources to collect customer and incident details. Third, they aimed to cut down on mundane tasks like data entry and paperwork so that customer service agents could focus more on complex issues that require empathy and judgment. Lastly, they aimed to improve self-help options for customers to handle their own questions, reducing the need for support requests.
AI has the potential to drive operational excellence, nurture customer loyalty, and grow value through the entire customer journey—making it one of the most valuable tools for enterprises to create a consistent, differentiated experience, build meaningful relationships, and deliver better customer care.
Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft
1. Supporting new hires with better onboarding
The Microsoft Customer Service team introduced Copilot’s case summarization feature to break down complex information into simple summaries, helping new hires understand customer issues more quickly. By surfacing relevant information from diverse sources such as internal documentation, knowledge bases, and websites, Copilot accelerates the learning curve, enabling agents to resolve customer queries faster and deliver superior service.
What’s more, Copilot supports new hires with ongoing learning and skill development by providing real-time assistance and insights. By using AI capabilities integrated into platforms like Dynamics 365 Customer Service, agents can more easily access tools and diagnostics and recommend optimal solutions. This empowers agents to deliver highly personalized customer experiences across all customer support needs, at a global scale.
2. Helping employees find the right information faster
With Copilot, agents can now find important information quickly, even if it was spread across different systems. Dynamics 365 Knowledge Assist helps agents zero in on the relevant information and articles faster than traditional search. It not only can suggest relevant information but provides context about the specific relevance of content and cites the source.
Having a more comprehensive and streamlined method to seek information not only helps agents solve issues more quickly—it gives them a more complete understanding of information relevant to the issue they’re trying to solve. Agents can now use this context, with Copilot, to craft a more thorough and accurate response to customers.
Before Copilot, creating detailed case summaries could take up to 30 to 40 minutes. Now, with Copilot, it’s done in 15 minutes or less. This not only speeds up how quickly customer service agents can handle customer requests but also lets them manage more cases without sacrificing quality.
Automating summaries and common email and communication tasks allows agents to spend much less time on repetitive tasks, giving them more time to focus on the more meaningful and often more rewarding aspects of their job.
Prioritizing self-service by integrating Copilot Studio into our customer-facing experiences is starting to make a big difference in how Microsoft handles customer service. Now, customers can use the power of generative AI in Copilot Studio to access self-help resources.
This change has reduced the amount of work customer service teams have to do and lets agents concentrate on more complex issues where customers require assistance. As a result, they’re getting things done more efficiently, working together better, and feeling more satisfied with their jobs.
Improved collaboration:Collaboration required among customer support agents decreased by 13%, making case resolution smoother and operations more efficient.
Enhancing efficiency: With Copilot, average chat case handling time reduced by up to 16%, giving agents better access to knowledge and improving overall efficiency.
Increasing productivity: Agents using Copilot became more productive, handling up to 12% more cases, which allowed them to serve more customers effectively.
And that’s just the start. Mala sees a future for Copilot that will revolutionize the customer services industry, making it more efficient, responsive, and customer-centric.
These include things like automatically connecting customers with appropriate experts, helping customers solve complex problems on their own, predicting issues before they happen, and personalizing interactions based on customer information and preferences.
Copilot learning hub
Learn how to use Microsoft Copilot based on your role
By automating routine tasks and helping teams find information faster, Copilot helps our employees focus on what really matters to them, allowing them to dive deeper into the parts of their jobs they love.
The speed at which AI is transforming business today is unprecedented, reimagining the way we work. We envision a future where AI alongside human expertise reduces and eliminates the seams in the support experience.
Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft
Today, the power of AI is revolutionizing how companies innovate and create large-scale impact in all areas. Leveraging generative AI throughout the customer journey enables businesses to foster enduring customer loyalty by improving the overall experience, adding value at each interaction.
This interview is part of our All in on AI series that explores how Microsoft is adopting AI across different areas of our business. Next, Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft Chief People Officer, sits down with Jared Spataro to share how AI is helping human resource teams do more with less and to share the transformative best practices she used to drive some of the highest, fastest AI adoption rates Microsoft has ever seen.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s digital landscape, the success of customer service on social media hinges on the quality of care provided to customers. It’s essential for communications from agents to be timely, accurate, sensitive, brief, and friendly to enhance customer satisfaction and foster brand loyalty. To support this, we are excited to introduce the first-party WhatsApp channel seamlessly integrated with Azure Communication Services, now available in public preview for Dynamics Contact Center.
Why WhatsApp?
WhatsApp is a leading choice for contact centers worldwide, celebrated for its ease of use and extensive global reach. With billions of users, WhatsApp provides businesses with an unparalleled opportunity to connect with customers in a medium they trust and prefer. Now, with our first-party solution, integrating WhatsApp into your contact center has never been easier.
Seamless integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem
One of the key advantages of this new integration is its direct tie-in with Microsoft’s ecosystem. By leveraging Azure Communication Services, our solution eliminates the need for third-party connectors. This results in a simplified IT footprint, enhanced reliability, and more secure communication for your business. No more juggling multiple vendors or worrying about potential integration issues. Our solution is designed to work seamlessly within your existing Microsoft infrastructure.
Key capabilities
With the first-party WhatsApp channel, your contact center can benefit from a range of powerful features:
Easy Configuration: Administrators can easily configure the WhatsApp channel powered by Azure Communication Services, making setup straightforward.
Customer Engagement: Customers can reach out to your business through WhatsApp, engaging in an asynchronous manner that respects their time and preferences. Whether it’s a quick question or a detailed inquiry, your customers can connect with you when it’s convenient for them.
Unified Interface for Agents: Agents will have access to a unified, contextual, and productive interface. Subsequently, they can engage with customers and resolve issues more efficiently. This streamlined workflow reduces the time to resolution and enhances overall customer satisfaction.
Rich Reporting for Supervisors: Supervisors and managers can access detailed reports to monitor and optimize contact center performance. This data-driven approach ensures that your team is operating at peak efficiency, with insights that drive continuous improvement.
Enhancing customer engagement
The integration of WhatsApp with Azure Communication Services is more than just a new channel—it’s a step toward more meaningful and contextual customer interactions. By leveraging WhatsApp, businesses can provide a seamless and personalized experience that resonates with customers, ultimately driving satisfaction and loyalty.
Get started today
To sign up to use this feature, fill out this form. We invite you to explore the new first-party WhatsApp integration in Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Whether you’re addressing product inquiries or managing customer service scenarios, this integration empowers your agents to deliver exceptional customer care.
Join us in this exciting journey of enhancing customer communication. With this new channel, experience the benefits of a simplified, reliable, and powerful customer service tool.
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to expand the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Also, don’t hesitate to provide feedback during this public preview period. We’re here to support your success.
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