This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introduction
As a startup or an new customer exploring Microsoft Azure, you may find the terminology around identity and access management a bit perplexing. Terms like Tenant, Subscription, and Microsoft Entra ID, are crucial to understanding how to effectively manage and secure your Azure environment. This blog post aims to demystify these concepts and provide a clear, concise understanding of how they interrelate.
What is Microsoft Entra ID (Former Azure Active Directory)?
Microsoft Entra ID is the new name for Azure Active Directory (AAD), Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service. It plays a crucial role in managing user, group, and application access to Azure services. Here’s a breakdown:
Identity Management: Entra ID handles both authentication (verifying identity) and authorization (granting access) for Azure resources.
Cloud-Based: Unlike traditional Active Directory, which is designed for on-premises environments, Entra ID operates entirely in the cloud, making it ideal for modern, cloud-first organizations.
Key Features:
User and Group Management: You can create users and groups within your Entra ID tenant. These identities can be synchronized with your existing on-premises Active Directory using Entra Connect.
Single Sign-On (SSO): Provides a seamless sign-on experience across multiple applications and services.
What is an Azure Tenant?
An Azure Tenant represents a dedicated instance of Microsoft Entra ID for your organization. It is essentially your organization’s space in the Azure cloud where you manage your identities and access.
Key Points:
Created Automatically: When you sign up for Azure or any Microsoft cloud service, a tenant is automatically created.
An Azure Subscription is a logical container used to provision and manage Azure resources. It is closely tied to billing and acts as a boundary for resource management and deployment.
Key Characteristics:
Resource Management: All Azure resources (e.g., virtual machines, databases) are associated with a subscription.
Billing: Each subscription has its own billing cycle and payment terms, allowing you to manage costs effectively.
Scalability: Best practice is to have separate subscriptions for production and non-production environments to manage permissions and scalability efficiently.
When you create an Azure subscription, an Entra ID tenant is automatically provisioned. This tenant manages identities and access within your subscription.
Authentication and Authorization:
Azure subscriptions rely on Entra ID to authenticate and authorize users, services, and devices, ensuring that only authenticated identities can access Azure resources.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC):
Azure Roles: Used for managing access to Azure resources within a subscription. Examples include Owner, Contributor, and Reader. Custom roles can also be created for more granular control. See here some best practices for Azure RBAC
A single Entra ID tenant can manage multiple subscriptions, enabling the same set of users and groups to access different environments. However, each subscription is associated with only one tenant.
Practical Tips for Startups
Benefit from the Azure setup Guide:
Before you start building and deploying solutions by using Azure services, you need to prepare your environment. In this guide, we introduce features that help you organize resources, control costs, and secure and manage your organization. You can access it directly from the Azure Portal too.
Start with a Clear Structure:
Separate Subscriptions: Use separate subscriptions for production and non-production environments to ensure better management and segregation of resources.
Define Roles: Clearly define and assign Azure Roles and Entra ID Roles to manage permissions effectively.
Synchronize Identities:
If you have an existing on-premises AD, use Entra Connect to synchronize identities with Entra ID, ensuring seamless access management.
Plan for Scalability:
Design your subscription architecture to accommodate growth. Consider factors like billing, resource limits, and administrative boundaries.
Use Enterprise Scale Landing Zones:
Implement recommended modular design to ensure your Azure environment can scale efficiently with your business needs.
Follow the links below if you are familiar with AWS and would like to understand how to map AWS concepts to Azure:
Understanding Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Subscriptions, and Tenants is essential for effective Azure governance. These concepts form the backbone of identity and access management in Azure, ensuring secure, scalable, and efficient management of your cloud resources. As your startup grows, mastering these basics will help you optimize your Azure environment, supporting your journey towards innovation and success.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Zero Trust has become the industry standard for safeguarding your entire digital estate. Central to Zero Trust is securing identity and access, which is essential for protecting resources, enforcing security policies, and ensuring compliance in today’s dynamic digital landscape.
With Microsoft Entra, we help our customers create a trust fabric that securely connects any trustworthy identity with anything, anywhere. Driven by the adoption of multicloud strategies in the era of AI, customers are encountering more challenges in securing access, not just across multiple public and private clouds, but also for business apps and on-premises resources. Unlike securing access for humans or within a single environment, where customers have established methods to address challenges, securing access anywhere is more complicated due to the dynamic nature of today’s digital estate and tools to address emerging challenges need further development. To support our customers, we unveiled our vision for securing access in any cloud at this year’s RSA conference. Today, we’re excited to dive deeper into our future investment aimed at securing access to cloud resources from any identity across diverse cloud environments.
Managing multicloud complexity in a rapidly evolving digital environment
Organizations are grappling with substantial challenges in navigating cloud access complexities, often citing issues like fragmented role-based access control (RBAC) systems, and compliance violations. These challenges are compounded by the growing use of cloud services from various cloud service providers. There have been links to several notable breaches attributed to over-permissioned identities. Our customer engagements reveal that organizations are currently using 7 to 8 products, including privileged access management (PAM) and identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions to tackle multicloud access challenges. Despite their efforts, such as toggling across multiple solutions and increasing their workforce, many organizations still struggle to achieve full visibility into their cloud access.
Over 51,000 permissions that can be granted to identities – 50% of which are identified as high-risk permissions.
Only 2% of those 51,000 permissions were used.
Of the 209M identities discovered, more than 50% are identified as super identities that have all permissions to access all resources.
Figure 1: 2024 State of Multicloud Security Risk key findings
Introducing our vision for cloud access management: Building a converged platform
Today, I’m excited to expand on our vision for cloud access management.
As businesses expand, organizations inevitably face challenges of overprovisioning at various levels. Initially, this manifests as granting more access to accommodate growing teams and workloads and can lead to overlapping access privileges. To address these issues, organizations must proactively identify vulnerabilities in identities and permissions and respond swiftly and, eventually, automatically. There’s a pressing need for a new solution that empowers all identities to access resources in any cloud securely while adhering to least-privileged permissions.
To address this critical need, we’re developing a converged platform that encompasses a comprehensive set of capabilities. This upcoming platform is designed to streamline the journey from risk discovery to remediation for secure access to any cloud resource whenever deviations occur, offering:
Visibility: Gain insights into all identities and permissions assigned and used and detect risky permissions.
Risk remediation: Remediate risky permissions with recommendations.
Granular controls: Grant the right privileges for role-specific durations.
Automated governance: Implement continuous compliance through automated policies.
Figure 2: How to secure access from any identity across multiple clouds
Our journey to secure access to resources in any cloud is advancing by building upon our industry-leading Microsoft Entra products:
Permissions Management (CIEM) for delivering visibility into identities, permissions, and usage.
ID Governance (IGA) for automating identity lifecycle and access workflows regardless of origin or usage.
Workload ID (IAM for workloads) for offering customized authorization policies for workload identities.
Figure 3: Convergence of four critical areas
Additionally, as part of our continuous Copilot journey, we’re leveraging AI/ML to enhance all the technologies within the cloud access management platform. This enables organizations to uncover risks that are otherwise challenging to detect manually, identify the most significant risks, propose impactful remediations, and recommend usage-based custom roles and policies for any identity as the platform adoption grows. It will help simplify cloud access management and provide more effective ways to secure cloud environments for organizations.
Our commitment
At Microsoft, we’re committed to bringing this vision to life for our customers through the advancement and innovation of our newly converged platform, designed to secure access to resources in any cloud. Additionally, this vision extends to securing access to resources anywhere, including on-premises and business apps. Our goal is to help our customers enhance their security for any access to any resource in the era of AI and robust workload identities.
We look forward to collaborating with the community to realize this vision, empowering every organization to implement least-privileged access and permissions across all identities in multicloud and hybrid environments. We’ll keep you posted on our progress towards this vision. Until our next update, we invite you to explore our products that form the foundation of our cloud access management vision. Learn more about Microsoft Entra ID Governance and Permissions Management.
Prevent identity attacks, ensure least privilege access, unify access controls, and improve the experience for users with comprehensive identity and network access solutions across on-premises and clouds.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In this post, I’ll cover some exciting news on Microsoft Graph Data Connect for SharePoint as of May 2024. This feature delivers rich data assets to SharePoint and OneDrive tenants. If you’re new to MGDC for SharePoint, start by reviewing this post: https://aka.ms/SharePointData.
TL;DR
We have been busy updating our existing SharePoint datasets in MGDC and adding new ones. You can see the full list at https://aka.ms/SharePointDatasets.
We have updated our 3 publicly available datasets, just published 1 new dataset and will deliver 3 new datasets in the next few months. Here are some details…
New and Upcoming Datasets
The new SharePointFile Actions dataset was released in May 2024. This dataset delivers one object for each file accessed, deleted, downloaded, modified, moved, renamed, or uploaded. This helps you understand how documents are being used in detail. This dataset is now publicly available, billed through Azure at the regular MGDC rate.
The new OneDrive Sync Health datasets include information on devices running OneDrive for Business. This includes a dataset with one object for every Sync-enabled device in the tenant and a dataset with details on errors faced by these devices. They were announced by the Sync team at the Microsoft 365 Conference. Sync Health and Sync Errors are in private preview. They will be publicly available by the end of June. This was a joint project between SharePoint, OneDrive Sync and MGDC.
The SharePoint Files dataset includes information about files in SharePoint and OneDrive. This delivers one object for every file in the tenant stored in a SharePoint document library, including OneDrives. The Files dataset is in private preview, with Public ETA expected in a few months.
Updated datasets
Archimedes also added columns to the existing Sites, Groups and Permissions datasets.
For SharePoint Sites, our most popular dataset, we added several new properties. Here’s the list:
ArchiveState: The archive state of the site: None, Archiving, Archived, or Reactivating
RootWeb.Configuration: Root web template configuration id
RecycleBinItemCount: Number of items in the recycle bin
RecycleBinItemSize: Size of the items in the recycle bin
SecondStageRecycleBinStorageUsage: Size of the items in the second stage recycle bin
IsCommunicationSite: Indicates that the site is a communication site
IsOneDrive: Indicates that the site is a OneDrive
IsExternalSharingEnabled: Indicates if the site is configured to enable external sharing
SiteConnectedToPrivateGroup: Indicates if a site is connected to Private Group
Privacy: Privacy of the site: Private or Public. Applies only to team sites
Owner.UPN: User Principal Name for the owner of the site
SecondaryContact.UPN: User Principal Name for the secondary contact for the site
LastUserAccessDate: Last access by a real user for the site (in UTC)
That last column is very useful to identify sites that have been inactive for a long time.
For Groups, we introduced a new TypeV2 property for owners and members, to specify the type of user. The old Type property can contain User, SecurityGroup or SharePointGroup, while the new TypeV2 can be InternalUser, ExternalUser, B2BUser, SecurityGroup and SharePointGroup.
For the SharePoint Permissions dataset, we added the following columns:
SharedWith.TypeV2: Expands User types to InternalUser, ExternalUser and B2Buser, as described in the Groups section above
SharedWith.UPN: User Principal Name of sharing recipient
SharedWith.AadObjectId: AAD Object Id of sharing recipient. Blank if this is not an AAD object.
SharedWith.UserCount: Unique user count for this sharing recipient. For groups, this is the number of users in the group, including nested groups. For users, this is always 1. It will be blank if the group is empty or if the count is unavailable
TotalUserCount: Unique user count for this entire permission. This will be blank if the count is zero or unavailable
ShareCreatedBy.UPN: User Principal Name of user who created the sharing link
ShareLastModifiedBy.UPN: User Principal Name of user who modified the sharing link
The two new user count columns are a major improvement here. They do group expansion, so you can have the total number of users impacted by the permissions, including nested groups, without having to pull the SharePoint Groups and AAD Groups datasets. You can now detect oversharing using only the Permissions dataset.
General improvements
MGDC for SharePoint also improved the overall infrastructure for analytics, including:
Improved messages: Better error messages, including when dates are out of range, or when a region has no SharePoint data.
Guidance: Improved documentation, including updated step-by-step guides and schema docs. We also have a new Official MGDC for SharePoint blog in Tech Community with information like useful links and frequently asked questions. Since you’re reading this on the blog, I imagine you already knew about that one :-).
Conclusion
These are the main improvements to Microsoft Graph Data Connect for SharePoint in the last few months. I hope these changes will improve the feature for your analytics scenarios. We are busy cooking up more improvements and will share them here in the blog as they become available.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Since its launch in 2022, Outlook Lite has provided a way to enjoy the key features of Outlook in a small download size for low-resource phones. We are continuously looking for ways to meet the communication needs of our core users. Now, we are excited to bring SMS on Outlook Lite to users worldwide. With SMS on Outlook Lite, you can enjoy the convenience and security of sending and receiving SMS messages from your Outlook Lite app. SMS is integrated with your email, calendar, and contacts, so you can stay in touch with your contacts in one app.
SMS on Outlook Lite is now available in the latest version of the app, which you can download from the Google Play Store
How to get started with SMS on Outlook Lite?
Getting started with SMS on Outlook Lite is easy and fast. Just follow these steps:
1. Download Outlook Lite from the Google Play Store (here). If you already have Outlook Lite, make sure you update to the latest version.
2. Open Outlook Lite and click on the bottom tab icon named “SMS”
3. Give required permissions to activate SMS.
4. That’s it! You can now send and receive SMS messages from Outlook Lite.
What’s next for SMS on Outlook Lite?
We are working on adding more features and improvements to SMS on Outlook Lite, such as:
Tighter integration with Email, Calendar and Contacts
Cloud backup of messages
Enhanced Security features.
We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on SMS on Outlook Lite. You can contact us through the app, or by leaving a comment on this blog post.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Recently, I had worked on a case where customer`s ask was to upload a file larger than 2gb into the IIS hosted web application.
In my case, customer had a normal Asp.net Framework 4.6 application and when they were trying to perform the upload operation of more than 2gb zip file(the extension did not matter…we tested it with .7z and .zip both and it had failed) and somehow on the browser page, we got a Bad request and when I checked the HAR file, i could see a 400 status code.
Next, I checked the application configurations…like:
Also, we checked the App Pool Managed Pipeline Mode, and the interesting part was that we got different error for both the modes.
I was able to recreate this scenario in my lab machine for a sample asp.net framework web application and I had captured FREB logs (Failed request tracing logs) for the site for both the scenarios these were the differences I noticed:
In both the cases, I was able to upload only 2gb file size.
In Integrated Mode, when I tried to upload a 4gb file, I could see this error under the FREB log: ”
400 Bad request-Asp.net detected invalid characters in the Url”. So, I tried to increase the value of “maxAllowedContentLength” to the maximum supported value, which is 4gb but still it failed, and it seems that webengine code (webengine4!MgdGetRequestBasics) doesn’t support more than 2 GB content-length.
Next, in Classic Mode, when I tried to upload a 4gb file, i got this error under FREB log : “413.1 -request entity too large error”. So, in this case also, I increased the value of “maxAllowedContentLength” to 4gb, but it failed. We did not see any error under FREB log…it was also 200 status code but the file did not upload.
So, the conclusion is that either you keep the application pipeline mode as Integrated or Classic, you would only be able to upload a 2gb file for your web application hosted on IIS.
If you would like to perform a larger file upload operation, HTTP protocol isn’t the right one. You need to switch to webDav feature, or use FTP protocol that is meant to perform the file upload/download operation without any size limit or you can keep using Http protocol but you need to send the data packets as small chunks from client to the server side and then on the server side code, you need to bundle all the chunked packets together for the file upload operation.
Also, note that even if you think moving to latest windows server would fix it…that’s not going to help here. This behavior will be same for all the supported IIS across all the versions of supported windows server.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
I’m really excited to share a new module that I developed by working with the Microsoft Learn Team: “Introduction to Azure for students.” As students, we often encounter numerous tech challenges, from managing projects and assignments to exploring new fields like AI and data science. This module is designed to help you tackle these challenges head-on by diving into the fascinating world of cloud computing with Azure.
Why Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing might sound complex, but it’s simpler than you think. Imagine it as a giant library where you can borrow books whenever you need them, without the hassle of buying or storing them. Similarly, cloud computing lets you use computing resources whenever you need them, without owning or maintaining the hardware and software. It’s flexible, easy, and often more affordable.
What You’ll Learn
In this module, you’ll discover:
Core Concepts of Cloud Computing: Learn the basics and understand what cloud computing is all about.
Azure in Action: Explore real-world scenarios to see how Azure is used in various fields, from student projects to professional healthcare.
Getting Started with Azure: Find out about the tools and services that will help you begin your Azure journey.
Why Azure Cloud?
Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform, offering over 200 products and services. Whether you’re into AI, app development, data science, or machine learning, Azure has it all. Here’s how Azure can help you as a student:
Access Powerful Tools: Utilize advanced tools and services without the need for expensive hardware.
Scalability: Easily scale your resources up or down based on your project needs.
Cost-Effective: Pay only for the resources you use and take advantage of free services and a $100 Azure credit with the Azure for Students offer.
How Azure Can Help with College Projects?
Imagine you’re working on a complex college project that involves data analysis and collaboration with classmates. With Azure, you can set up a virtual environment where everyone can work together seamlessly, share resources, and analyze data in real-time. Need to develop a mobile app for your project? Azure provides all the necessary tools and platforms to build, test, and deploy your app efficiently.
Special Offer for Students!
Being a student usually means living on a budget. Good news—Microsoft’s got your back with Azure for Students! Get a $100 Azure credit and access a sea of free services. Learning has never been so cost-effective and fun! Learn more about the Azure for Students offer.
What are you waiting for? Start learning cloud today by going through the module with hands-on experience by claiming the Azure for Students offer. Whether you’re working on a school project, developing an app, or just curious about the cloud, this module will provide you with the foundation to succeed.
Ready to get started? Sign up on Microsoft Learn to save your progress and take the first step towards an exciting career in cloud computing!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Workloads deployed on an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster often need to access Azure backing resources, such as Azure Key Vault, databases, or AI services like Azure OpenAI Service. Users are required to manually configure Microsoft Entra Workload ID or Managed Identities so their AKS workloads can securely access these protected resources.
The Service Connector integration greatly simplifies the connection configuration experience for AKS workloads and Azure backing services. Service Connector takes care of authentication and network configurations securely and follows Azure best practices, so you can focus on your application code without worrying about your infrastructure connectivity.
Now, Service Connector performs steps 2 to 5 automatically. Additionally, for Azure services without public access, Service Connector creates private connection components such as private link, private endpoint, DNS record,
You can create a connection in the Service Connection blade within AKS.
Click create and select the target service, authentication method, and networking rule. The connection will then be automatically set up. Here are a few helpful links to for you to learn more about Service Connector.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In the dynamic world of service management, every action counts. From frontline workers in the field to back-office functions, the complexity of service delivery impacts the bottom line. Whether it’s a physical product consumed from inventory, or a service provided, both have financial implications, especially when external customers are involved, pricing and profitability come into play.
When a field service organization’s frontline operations run in isolation, consequences can be far-reaching: inaccurate costing, delayed invoicing, dissatisfied customers, and supply chain bottlenecks. To succeed in this complicated environment, organizations must integrate their systems to coordinate their services, finances, and supply chain processes.
Recognizing this critical need, we recently announced the integration between Dynamics 365 Field Service and Business Central, and today we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of the integration between Dynamics 365 Field Service and Dynamics 365 Finance as well as Supply Chain Management. This powerful integration ensures that the work of frontline workers, service managers, and dispatchers are seamlessly synced with the financial and supply chain heart of your business. Let’s explore some of the details of this native integration.
Bridging the gap: Dynamics 365 integration
The challenges
Even with robust systems like Dynamics 365 Field Service and a strong ERP system like Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, gaps can emerge when these systems aren’t fully integrated:
Limited financial insight: Without smooth integration, determining job costs and profitability requires switching between windows and consuming or updated data in multiple systems, which obscures their financial status.
Supply-driven delays: Separate fieldwork and supply chain processes lead to inventory shortages and service delays.
Invoicing bottlenecks: Disparate systems and manual processes cause invoicing and payment delays, disrupting cash flow.
Inconsistent data: Discrepancies across systems create confusion, affecting accuracy of inventory, decision-making, pricing, and costing data.
The solution
Our native integration addresses these challenges head-on:
Operational visibility: Real-time insights into finances and inventory empower informed decision-making across your organization.
Field-informed supply chain: Field Service work orders can drive estimated inventory demand, ensuring seamless supply chain coordination.
Interconnected financial operations: Automated and powerful billing and invoicing capabilities of Finance informed directly by the services provided speed up payment cycles, improve cash flow, minimize errors, boost profitability, and turn every work order into a growth opportunity.
Cost-effective integration: Our pre-built solution reduces implementation expenses and accelerates value realization.
Reduced risk, faster implementation: The native integration minimizes risk while improving implementation timelines.
Essential features
Organizations can create new opportunities to improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, and growth by integrating their Dynamics 365 Field Service and finance and operations applications. Key features of this native integration include:
Data alignment: Dual-write and virtual entities ensure all applications operate from a cohesive set of primary tables.
Primary tables alignment: Basic concepts such as currency, units of measure, products and their attributes (like styles, configurations, colors) are synced between applications to ensure a consistent source of truth.
Legal entity alignment: The company concept, native to Finance and Supply Chain, is used to filter critical lookups to put guard-rails in the system, helping drive transactions along company lines.
Projects and accounts: Work orders are seamlessly synced with projects and customer accounts from the finance and operations applications, allowing for precise project tracking and customer billing.
Inventory: Virtual tables expose inventory from Supply Chain directly in Field Service while work order inventory transactions align with item journals, directly impacting inventory levels in the system of record.
Resources: Using dual-write, resources can be aligned directly with workers ensuring field service work order transactions are automatically associated with the right workers and recorded in their respective hours journal and expense journal lines.
Automated and precise invoicing: The integration automates the syncing of transactions, reducing manual work and mistakes. Organizations can decide when to sync the information and post project journals either as they use them or automatically when they finish the work order.
Full insight and management: No financial system can afford to lose transactional data. Our integration gives organizations complete insight and management of data moving between the systems, making sure they can fix issues that stop data from flowing between applications and re-sync the transaction.
Get started now
Dynamics 365 Field Service and the Dynamics 365 finance and operations applications work together to unlock efficiencies. Organizations that use these solutions together can boost their productivity, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Grow your business with Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Finance, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain.
Be on the lookout for future post in June for more ways to take advantage of this powerful integration that make it work for any organization.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s rapidly evolving sales environment, staying ahead of the curve is more crucial than ever. The latest updates to Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, particularly its enhanced integration with Outlook, are transforming how sales professionals gear up for their meetings. Let’s dive into how these new functionalities not only streamline preparation but also enrich customer interactions.
Streamlined Outlook integration for comprehensive sales meeting preparation
Connect Outlook/Exchange accounts to fetch meetings and related emails
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales expands its integration capabilities with Outlook, specifically accommodating users who have not enabled server-side sync. This pivotal update accelerates adoption, providing a unified platform where sales professionals can access and prepare for their Outlook-scheduled sales appointments directly within Dynamics 365. This coherence not only simplifies the logistical aspects of sales preparation but also enhances the overall efficiency and effectiveness of sales operations.
Proactive meeting preparation
Copilot fetches meetings for today and the next seven days
Copilot now allows sales teams to fetch Outlook meetings for the upcoming week, enabling them to prepare proactively. The ability to view detailed agendas and prepare in advance transforms how sales teams interact with clients, paving the way for more successful outcomes.
Refined meeting summaries for enhanced client interactions
Enhanced summary helps the seller prepare for client interactions
The upgraded meeting preparation tool in Copilot for Dynamics 365 Sales now offers richer, more detailed summaries. This enhancement provides sales teams with critical insights and key talking points, tailored to each meeting’s context. Such targeted preparation boosts confidence and competence, enabling sales professionals to tailor their approaches to meet the specific needs and interests of each client, enhancing the effectiveness of their pitches.
Harnessing innovations for sales excellence
The recent updates to Copilot in D365 Sales are a testament to our commitment to enhance the user experience and functionality of our sales management tools. By leveraging these new features, sales teams can enhance their productivity, improve client interactions, and ultimately drive more successful outcomes. As the digital landscape evolves, tools like Copilot in D365 Sales are invaluable for staying competitive in the fast-paced world of sales.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today, we’re excited to introduce rich reporting and easy troubleshooting for the Microsoft Playwright Testing service!
Microsoft Playwright Testing is a managed service built for running Playwright tests easily at scale. Playwright is a fast-growing, open-source framework that enables reliable end-to-end testing and automation for modern web apps. You can read more about the service here.
Now, with this new Reporting feature users can publish test results and related artifacts and view them in the service portal for faster and easier troubleshooting.
Quickly Identify Failed and Flaky Tests
In the fast-paced world of web development, applications evolve rapidly, constantly reshaping user experiences. To keep up, testing needs to be just as swift. Playwright automates end-to-end tests and delivers essential reports for troubleshooting. The Reporting feature provides a streamlined dashboard that highlights failed and flaky tests, enabling you to identify and address issues quickly. This focused view helps maintain application quality while supporting rapid iteration.
Screenshot of test results filtered by failed and flaky tests
Troubleshoot Tests Easily using rich artifacts
As test suites grow and the frequency of test execution increases, managing generated artifacts becomes challenging. These artifacts are crucial for debugging failed tests and demonstrating quality signals for feature deployment, but they are often scattered across various sources.
The Reporting feature consolidates results and artifacts, such as screenshots, videos, and traces, into a unified web dashboard, simplifying the troubleshooting process. The Trace Viewer, a tool offered by Playwright, that helps you explore traces and allows you to navigate through each action of your test and visually observe what occurred during each step. It is hosted in the service portal with the test for which it is collected, eliminating the need to store and locate it separately for troubleshooting.
Screenshot of trace viewer hosted in the service portal
Seamless Integration with CI Pipelines
Continuous testing is essential for maintaining application quality, but collecting and maintaining execution reports and artifacts can be challenging. Microsoft Playwright Testing service can be easily configured to collect results and artifacts in CI pipelines. It also captures details about the CI agent running the tests and presents them in the service portal with the test run. This integration facilitates a smooth transition from the test results to the code repository where tests are written. Users can also access the history of test runs in the portal and gain valuable insights, leading to faster troubleshooting and reduced developer workload.
Screenshot of test result with CI information
Join the Private Preview
For current Playwright users, adding the Reporting feature with your existing setup is easy. It integrates with the Playwright test suite, requiring no changes to the existing test code. All you need to do is install a package that extends the Playwright open-source package, add it to your configuration, and you’re ready to go. This feature operates independently of the service’s cloud-hosted browsers, so you can use it without utilizing service-managed browsers.
We invite teams interested in enhancing their end-to-end testing to join the private preview of the Reporting feature. This feature is available at no additional charge during the private preview period. However, usage of the cloud-hosted browsers feature will be billed according to Azure pricing.
Your feedback is invaluable for refining and enhancing this feature. By joining the private preview, you gain early access and direct communication with the product team, allowing you to share your experiences and help shape the future of the product.
Interested in trying out the reporting feature and giving us feedback? Sign up here.
Check out Microsoft Playwright Testing service here. If you are new to Microsoft Playwright Testing service, learn more about it.
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