This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 69 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today marks the preview release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, a new application that enables organizations to consistently deliver on order promises by proactively overcoming disruptions. Now, your organization can intelligently orchestrate fulfillment and automate it with a rule-based system that leverages real-time inventory and AI.
In addition, you can adapt quickly to meet future order volumes and fulfillment complexities by supporting new order intake, fulfillment, and delivery partners with pre-built connectors. With support for the latest fulfillment methods, like curbside pickup and Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store (BOPIS), you can constantly evolve order fulfillment to meet shopper’s preferences.
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Digital commerce has fueled consumer expectations for true omnichannel experiences, with greater choice, speed, and flexibility in how people buy and receive purchases.
To help you adapt your operations to constantly deliver exceptional experiences, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management offers the flexibility to integrate with existing order infrastructures, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and external partner systems through microservice architecture and API integrations. More than 200 configurable, pre-built connectors seamlessly connect you to the solutions you need for omnichannel order intake, cross-channel order fulfillment and delivery, and rule-based order orchestration actions.
Intelligent Order Management is a standalone SaaS solution with no dependencies on other Dynamics 365 applications. It has an open, modular, and interoperable architecture, so your business can leverage an expansive ecosystem of order source systems such as online e-commerce marketplaces, mobile apps, and social commerce alongside traditional ordering channels such as electronic data interchange (EDI) or brick and mortar POS.
Many retailers, distributors, and manufacturers are working to overcome the challenges of adapting legacy order systems to new ways of operating. A significant benefit of Intelligent Order Management is that it enables business users to visually configure order intake from many of the most common sources by leveraging pre-built connectors in a low-code or no-code application, making rapid implementation and integration possible.
While Intelligent Order Management seamlessly integrates with other Dynamics 365 business applications, it also integrates with applications that you may already use or that you plan to adopt as you transform your business processes. Intelligent Order Management can easily pass through B2C order flows from third-party applications such as BigCommerce with minimal validation at order capture and B2B order flows from EDI intake applications such as Orderful using context-driven validation actions, such as requiring a credit check before passing an order on to fulfillment.
Let’s now look at some of the processes within order source and orchestration.
Payment integration is also possible, allowing you to take credit card payments at order intake, finalize payment later based on fulfillment status, or trigger an invoice to be sent to a business application when routing orders from on-account sales. These types of event-driven actions can be incorporated by using the built-in orchestration designer, which allows users to drag and compose order flows using an intuitive design interface.
Regardless of the source, once the order is accepted and received by Intelligent Order Management, additional rule-based validations can be orchestrated depending on your business’s specific needs. Utilizing pre-built connectors to leading applications such as Flintfox, advanced pricing, rebate, and commissions management can be accomplished quickly and efficiently.
“Intelligent Order Management is partnering with service providers like Flintfox to provide real-time, accurate, and dynamic pricing. Utilizing the Flintfox RMx Pricing solution, all orders, regardless of source, or fulfillment, will always receive the right price, thereby reducing disputes, credits, and administration pain caused by pricing mistakes. The combination of Flintfox RMx with its advanced but easy-to-use, Pricing and Promotion Management solution, and Intelligent Order Management will further enable centralized management of pricing across omni-channels, regardless of the ultimate order source system or device.”
Another critical part of order management is tax determination and compliance. Intelligent Order Management gives you the ability to connect to third-party tax engines to automate the calculation of tax rates and rules based on geolocation and product classification, file and remit tax payments to jurisdictions, automatically omit tax from exempt sales and manage exception documentation. Because you can select from several pre-built partner connectors, Intelligent Order Management provides your business with the means to quickly scale order tax compliance at a global level for sales tax, value-added tax, seller’s use tax, lodging and occupancy tax, and consumer use tax.
“Businesses today are facing intense competitive pressures to quickly evolve into omnichannel organizations, and driving efficiency in their order management processes is a key factor for maintaining smooth operations and ultimately achieving success with digital commerce,” said Sanjay Parthasarathy, Chief Product Officer at Avalara. “We’re excited to work with Microsoft in an enhanced partnership to co-develop solutions for their Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management application, providing our mutual customers with an industry-leading solution that solves for automated, friction-free order orchestration in the march to omnichannel success.”
Intelligent Order Management also helps you direct orders to the correct node in your supply chain by combining orchestrated order flows with inventory and fulfillment systems. Pre-built connectors allow you to quickly add a range of logistic strategies to employ when working to satisfy your customer’s demand. For example, if you don’t want to use the real-time inventory visibility capability within Intelligent Order Management, you can create order process flows that validate delivery dates through your own in-house inventory application or using a pre-built connector to check that items are available to promise before accepting any order.
If the item isn’t in stock, Intelligent Order Management allows you to incorporate sourcing rules as a means of providing a flexible framework to automate decision-making on how to fulfill an order using make or buy. Similarly, if stock is limited, you may also use allocation rules to automate decision-making on which orders will be filled or to ring-fence inventory for specific channels or business goals.
Another pre-built connector to consider is Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management solution. Though Intelligent Order Management is a stand-alone solution that requires no additional Microsoft Dynamics 365 modules, there are several benefits to connecting to our Supply Chain Management Solution. The connection allows for deeper integration with both manufacturing, in the form of real-time production planning that allows for better synchronization of supply with order demand, and with distribution planning that utilizes an integrated warehouse management system.
Orders coming in from many different locations at scale may have inconsistent data due to limited validation in the source system. The use of condition-based rules, such as a minimum order quantity check, ensures that you accept only orders that comply with your requirements. After validation, Intelligent Order Management’s fulfillment optimization engine can evaluate the order for rules such as the least distance or least cost to find the best fulfillment node in your connected network.
You can also use the platform’s extension capabilities to connect your existing freight rating systems into an order orchestration process. Additionally, Intelligent Order Management can handle reverse logistics so that you can incorporate decision logic into return order flows that will facilitate and automate return orders to stores, fulfillment nodes, or to a service center. And because Intelligent Order Management has no limits on the number of fulfillment nodes you can add, the application is suitable for organizations of all sizes.
Intelligent Order Management is designed to be independent of the business applications you are using while also allowing you to easily share data with other business applications. Our reference architecture will enable you to build the needed connection points from order source and orchestrations through to fulfillment and delivery. If we do not have a pre-built partner connector to an application you want to use, we have a reference API that can be used to connect to the system you require.
Learn more about how you can optimize fulfillment by watching the on-demand video, “Intelligent fulfillment orchestration for optimized delivery”, from our recent Microsoft Business Applications Summit event and sign up for a free trial of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management. Join the community to engage with our experts on Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, and feel free to contact us at D365OMS@microsoft.com with questions or to learn more.
The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management Preview now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today we are excited to announce the addition three new courses to the Microsoft Learn for Educators program:
Among the others, the addition of SC-900 – Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals to our portfolio of offerings in the higher education space reflects the growth of these skills in the marketplace and our ongoing commitment to supporting faculty in delivering cutting-edge technical instruction to students to prepare them for future jobs.
By all indicators, the cybersecurity field is one of the largest growth areas in today’s corporate landscape – and it should be. According to TechJury reporting on 2020 cyber-attack statistics, this is what a day in cybersecurity looked like in 2020:
The result? 64% of companies worldwide experienced at least one form of a cyber-attack in 2020 alone.
Companies need to protect themselves by having appropriately skilled employees to help them keep their businesses and their data secure. With explosive growth in demand, cybersecurity is a great area for companies to acquire new talent. As students prepare to enter the workforce in today’s environment, they’re searching for ways to stand out. By bringing SC-900 – Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals into your curriculum you will be supporting students in the acquisition of cybersecurity skills and industry-recognized certifications to do just that – stand out.
SC-900 is targeted to those looking to familiarize themselves with the fundamentals of security, compliance, and identity (SCI) across cloud-based and related Microsoft services. The breath of the topics covered in SC-900 reflects the complex nature of the cybersecurity discipline as it involves skills in areas like information or network security, cryptography, identity management, and information assurance.
In order to understand how a course like SC-900 might help college students in the job market, we used data from job postings in the United States to examine areas of technical skill growth, demand, and salary data. This analysis was conducted with Labor Insight, an industry data set from Burning Glass for understanding the job market. Figure 1 represents the top 15 skills listed for cybersecurity job postings in the US. It’s a mix of cybersecurity skills, common technical skills, and business skills.
Figure 1. Source: Analytics compiled through Labor Insight from Burning Glass.
Cybersecurity is evolving as its own discipline with security specific occupations; however, the discipline of cybersecurity is applicable to many more traditional titles in the marketplace. Again, relying on Labor Insight from Burning Glass, Figure 2 reflects the top occupations by % for cybersecurity job postings in the US in the past 12 months.
Figure 2. Source: Analytics compiled through Labor Insight from Burning Glass.
And, although there is a rich technical and business consulting industry around cybersecurity itself, every industry needs cybersecurity expertise. We are seeing demand for cybersecurity skills across all industries. From banking to healthcare to insurance to manufacturing, all industries are investing in talent to help them secure their systems, networks, and programs from digital attacks. Figure 3 depicts the top industries by % for cybersecurity job postings in the US the past 12 months.
Figure 3. Source: Analytics compiled through Labor Insight from Burning Glass. (Note: these industry classifications are based on the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) standards.)
The cybersecurity job market provides a broad opportunity for students and recent grads to find a job in a field and company that suits them.
Amid the overall demand in cybersecurity, when we look at the demand for people with a bachelor’s degree and zero to two years experience, we find that over 82,000 jobs or 19% of all jobs in the cybersecurity space in the US in the last 12 months are posted asking for 0-2 years of experience (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Source: Analytics compiled through Labor Insight from Burning Glass.
Additionally, over 75% of these jobs are looking for a bachelor’s degree or less (Figure 5). This suggests that for recent graduates there is a tremendous opportunity to not only find a job, but to truly find one in a field and at a company that is a great fit.
Figure 5. Source: Analytics compiled through Labor Insight from Burning Glass.
When we look at salaries in the cybersecurity space (Figure 6), a bachelor’s degree will put students at the mean salary level at just over $72,000/year. However, when compared to the Information Technology space in general, that’s $17,000/year higher than the mean salary. If you add cloud computing skills to that, for example by also teaching and certifying students in AZ-900 – Azure Fundamentals, the salary is even higher. The mean salary for a cybersecurity job requiring limited experience, a bachelor’s degree, and both cybersecurity and cloud skills is over $92,000/year. By bringing these Microsoft technical skills and certifications into your curriculum, program, or department, you will be playing a pivotal role in empowering your students for future success.
Figure 6. Source: Analytics compiled through Labor Insight from Burning Glass.
Not only do cybersecurity skills matter, but so do certifications. For years certifications have provided benefits to learners attaining them in job placement, job effectiveness, salary increases, and promotions. Right now, certifications in cybersecurity have the highest demand in the market. According to the Global Knowledge 2020 IT Skills and Salary Report, “over half of our survey respondents have at least one cybersecurity certification, making it by far the most popular category in 2020. Cisco is second (22%) and Microsoft is third (21%).” Furthermore, when looking at the most in-demand certifications for the upcoming year, there are four of the top ten are security certifications.
Certifications are also in demand by employers. Of the 82,000 job postings for limited experience cybersecurity professionals, 54% of those jobs are looking for at least one certification in their job postings. This may not sound significant on its own, but when compared to the Information Technology (IT) space, it is. For IT positions all-up, only 30% of them ask for a certification of any kind on the job posting. This differentiates the cybersecurity space tremendously not only in the demand for but also the value of certifications in this market. Certifications are a critical part of ensuring your students future success as they enter the job market.
Today we are adding SC-900 – Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals to the Microsoft Learn for Educators program because we recognize how critical these technical skills are for the future. By joining Microsoft Learn for Educators you will be building you students’ technical skills with curriculum and educational materials provided by Microsoft – a tried and true presence in the certification and cloud space for, according to Global Knowledge, “over half of global IT decision-makers say they expect their organization to invest in Microsoft technology this year. This is the second straight year Microsoft tops the list.” When you couple that type of customer demand for Microsoft technology together with the demand for cybersecurity skills and certifications, adding Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Fundamentals to your curriculum will ensure that you are preparing your students for future jobs.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Build 2021 is soon upon us (May 25–27). The prudent attendee will take the time to plan their virtual session schedule. To help with your plan, we are highlighting nine key sessions across the platform that you won’t want to miss. These sessions share all the great new features and announcements that demonstrate how we’re empowering developers to build the next generation of collaborative apps. Build is a great way to see the art of the possible – so if you haven’t already registered, do so today and create your session schedule online. And remember – almost all sessions can be seen on demand so you can enjoy them even after Build is over. Let’s walk through these important sessions.
KEYNOTES
These sessions bring a lot of news together in a way so you can understand what the future is for hybrid work. We hope you leave these sessions with an informed perspective that you can share with your colleagues when they ask you about Microsoft and its plans for developers.
Build the next generation of collaborative apps for hybrid work
It’s clear that Hybrid work is here to stay – organizations everywhere are working hard to provide better tools. These hybrid workers have unique needs that are centered around collaborating with colleagues. Reimaging business processes to support them requires a new class of collaborative apps to get work done. Join Jeff Teper, Archana Saseetharan, Yina Arenas, and Mary Anne Noskowski as they share the latest on Teams, Graph, and Windows. Learn how you can use these surfaces to build the next generation of collaborative apps for hybrid workers.
Microsoft: Into Focus with Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Rajesh Jha and Kevin Scott
Join our ‘Into Focus’ hosts Filisha Shah, Seth Juarez, and Scott Hanselman for a rapid-fire rundown of executive content, roundtable conversations, coding demos and more. Microsoft executives Scott Guthrie, Rajesh Jha, Kevin Scott, and an all-star lineup of special guests will be on hand to answer your audience questions and discuss the real-world impact of the developer news coming out of Microsoft Build.
These sessions are the “one level down” focus sessions for the keynotes. They drill deeper into the topics and features that are important to you — while hearing from the people who design and code these capabilities.
Learn how to build exciting apps across meetings, chats, and channels within or outside Teams
As work continues to evolve, Microsoft Teams will shape how the doing gets done. Please join Nikita Bokil, Ojasvi Choudhary, Loki Meyburg, and Manpratap Suri to learn all that’s new on the Teams platform. You’ll hear about expanded features, customizable communications, APIs for hybrid scenarios and making interactions as inclusive and fun as can be. Teams is the future of work.
Learn how the most successful apps in Teams plug into the platform to deliver customer value
Hybrid work is here. And Microsoft Teams is fueling the innovation that will determine how collaborative – and productive – the next generation of experiences are. Learn from Erin Bailie and Trent Hazy as they discuss how customers and partners are building solutions on Teams that demonstrate the art of the possible. Hear customer success stories to inspire your own.
Empowering developers with powerful tooling and enabling frictionless app adoption
Join Karthig Balendran, Brian Nguyen, and Emily Chen to learn about the new developer tools available that simplify building apps on Microsoft Teams and the new experiences designed for admins and end users to accelerate adoption. They will cover how these new tools allow you to easily build, test, host, publish and manage apps. Speak to how admins can help increase adoption of your app. And how we’ve now provided new experiences and mechanisms for users to discover and purchase your app.
What’s new for Windows desktop application development
Tap into the full power of a Windows PC with your desktop applications! See how we’re unifying the developer platform through Project Reunion, enabling you to modernize without rewriting. You’ll also learn about our work on WinUI (the native UI stack in Windows), Win32 and .NET apps and more. For enterprise developers and ISVs targeting Windows, this is the tech you need to know.
What’s new in Windows 10 for ALL developers
We appreciate that you create many different solutions on Windows – and not all of them are targeted to the Windows platform. Join Kayla Cinnamon, Deondre Davis, and Craig Loewen as they present the innovations with Terminal and WSL2, performance improvements and delighters like Power Toys, and the Windows Package Manager. If you develop for web, cloud, or other platforms including Windows, this is for you.
Microsoft Graph is a powerful way to bring your solution’s data into Microsoft’s enterprise-scale apps and experiences. In this session we’ll show you how Microsoft Graph Connectors have evolved to provide even richer access for your data to enterprise search, eDiscovery and more. Presenters Jermey Thake and Rabia Williams will go a step farther and demonstrate how you can use that same connector-fed data to create powerful cross-application workflows using Adaptive Cards.
Three new ways to enrich your productivity apps with Microsoft Graph tools and data
Microsoft is working hard to make it easy for you to enrich your apps with Microsoft Graph data. We are creating tools and services that make using Graph data simple, powerful, and efficient. Ayca Bas and Beth Pan will present a tour of the latest additions to the Microsoft Graph Toolkit. We will then introduce you to rich notifications for Exchange resources. Finally, we will share our new approach to web hooks with our new Event Hub.
And this is only just a portion of all the sessions and experiences we have planned for you at Build! Be sure to check out our interstitial programs, our on-demand sessions, our product roundtables, and we also have 1:1 app consults if you need to connect with a Microsoft subject-matter expert!
See you (virtually) at Build next week!
And if you want to download a deeper view of the content, grab our very convenient PDF with ALL of the sessions we think will be important to you.
https://cdn.techcommunity.microsoft.com/assets/MicrosoftTeams/Microsoft%20Build%202021%20Flyer.pdf
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Live Security and Compliance Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Microsoft Product Experts
Register Now: Tuesday, June 1, 2021, 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM CDT
Microsoft Security and Compliance thought leaders Matthew Littleton / @Matthew Littleton (CYBERSECURITY) (Microsoft Global Advanced Compliance Specialist, and Retired Navy Captain) and Matt Soseman / @Matt Soseman (Microsoft Senior Security Architect) will offer unique insights and a depth of knowledge around the Microsoft Security product suite during this 45 minute open forum Q&A.
These leaders will bring nearly 25 years at Microsoft to bear while answering questions pertaining to product capabilities and updates, feature availability, and applications for federal cybersecurity mandates such as the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) and DFARS 7012. Questions may cover the following and much more:
In this Ask Me Anything (AMA) style session, Matt and Matt will address audience members and their respective scenarios deploying in the Microsoft Government Cloud to better prepare teams looking to protect corporate and US Government Data.
The goal of this session is to address contractors questions in light of the recent Cloud Security and Compliance Series event where both Matt and Matt have addressed topics such as “CMMC Compliance in the Microsoft Sovereign Cloud” and “Meeting CMMC Level 3 with Microsoft Intune / Meeting CMMC with Microsoft Information Protection (MIP)”.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise offers three production update channels for you to choose from: Current Channel, Monthly Enterprise Channel and Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel. The channel(s) you choose to support in your environment will determine the update frequency, features, and support duration between versions. There are a number of ways for you to manage these updates, including our latest addition: Servicing Profiles.
Today, we are pleased to announce an update for Microsoft 365 Apps that will improve update manageability in Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager. Up until now the use of Automatic Deployment Rules (ADR) with Microsoft 365 Apps has been a challenge to manage, depending on the update channel(s) you support. Starting in late June, all future updates for Microsoft 365 Apps, including 2019 and 2021 volume license products, will receive an updated naming convention via the Title property. With this change you will be able to utilize the Title property within the search criteria of your ADR definition to easily target the necessary updates for your environment. This improvement should eliminate the need for IT admins to continually update their search criteria with each new release.
The updated Title property in the update catalog for Microsoft 365 Apps will include the following changes:
Adding release type to the Title property should help simplify update management with your ADRs. If we look at the update history for Microsoft 365 Apps, there are three different release types:
Refer to the following list of updates to illustrate what the upcoming changes look like on release:
Note that this list of updates is for demonstration purposes only and that the announced changes will apply starting in late June.
Before – Channel Name, Release Version, Architecture, Build.Version
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Current Channel Version 2101 for x64 based Edition (Build 13628.20274)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Current Channel Version 2101 for x64 based Edition (Build 13628.20380)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Monthly Enterprise Channel Version 2012 for x64 based Edition (Build 13530.20528)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Monthly Enterprise Channel Version 2011 for x64 based Edition (Build 13426.20658)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Version 2008 for x64 based Edition (Build 13127.21216)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Version 2002 for x64 based Edition (Build 12527.21594)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Version 1908 for x64 based Edition (Build 11929.21008)
After – Channel Name, Release Type, Architecture, Release Version, Build.Version
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Current Channel Feature Update for x64 based Edition Version 2101 (Build 13628.20274)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Current Channel Quality Update for x64 based Edition Version 2101 (Build 13628.20380)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Monthly Enterprise Channel Feature Update for x64 based Edition Version 2012 (Build 13530.20528)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Monthly Enterprise Channel Extended Quality Update for x64 based Edition Version 2011 (Build 13426.20658)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Feature Update for x64 based Edition Version 2008 (Build 13127.21216)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Quality Update for x64 based Edition Version 2002 (Build 12527.21594)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update – Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Extended Quality Update for x64 based Edition Version 1908 (Build 11929.21008)
With Configuration Manager, one of the best ways to automate update management for Microsoft 365 Apps is through the use of Automatic Deployment Rules (ADR). This feature helps reduce administrative overhead by automatically selecting, downloading and deploying updates based on the criteria you define. If you have implemented Monthly Enterprise Channel or Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel for Microsoft 365 Apps, an ADR can be challenging to manage due to the fact that both channels have a minimum of 2 versions available at any given time.
The following examples will illustrate how to use the updated Title property to simplify your ADR rules.
Monthly Enterprise Channel offers 2 releases: current and extended. You can leverage the release type value to select your desired update version. The screenshot below illustrates a set of search criteria that can be used to identify the current updates for Monthly Enterprise Channel by excluding the extended tag. If you require extended updates for this channel use the following value in the Title property: Monthly Enterprise Channel Extended.
The results from this search criteria will include the x86 and x64 non-extended updates for Monthly Enterprise Channel.
Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel offers 4 releases: preview, current, quality, and extended. You can leverage the release type value to select your desired update version. The screenshot below illustrates a set of search criteria that can be used to identify the current updates for Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel by excluding the preview, extended and quality tags.
The results from this search criteria will include the x86 and x64 non-extended updates for Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel.
Note: If you are on the current version of Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel and can maintain feature updates every 6 months, the search criteria outlined above will ensure devices update to the next version automatically without the need to update your ADR.
If you are on a version of Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel and need to remain on that version longer than 6 months, you will need to update your ADR search criteria between the months of January-February and July-August as the targeted version moves from Feature > Quality > Extended.
To select an alternate release type for Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel, update the Title property search criteria with a value from the following table:
Release | ADR Search Criteria – Title Property |
Preview | Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel (Preview) |
Quality | Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Quality |
Extended | Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Extended |
For more information on the different update channels available for Microsoft 365 Apps, refer to the following articles:
05.14.2021 Initial Release
This blog post is brought to you by Bob Clements, a Senior Customer Engineer and “Office Ranger” at Microsoft. Feel free to share your questions and feedback in the comments below.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Fujitsu Limited is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services company, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. They are a world-leading digital transformation partner. Using a wide portfolio of trusted technology services, solutions and products, they work with customers to co-create solutions that help them on their journey to enterprise-wide digitalization.
Fujitsu Limited operates on the global market and it provides services to companies all around the world. As such, the company realizes that communication barriers caused by different languages and disabilities can have a significant impact on the life of many people. With the impact of COVID-19, which severely reduced the ability to interact with people in-person, this problem has become more severe, due to the high volume of remote meetings and interactions.
Introducing LiveTalk
To overcome this challenge, Fujitsu Limited has developed an application called LiveTalk, which enables everyone to communicate without barriers. LiveTalk is able to instantly turn anyone’s conversation into text in real-time, no matter where they come from. LiveTalk, in fact, supports 43 languages, including Japanese and Chinese. It was designed with a real time voice recognition feature and real time subtitles for both in person meetings, as well as remote meetings and remote classrooms. It has been built to facilitate communication between deaf and hard of hearing people and hearing people, but its capabilities extend to real time language translation as well.
The application is targeting a very broad audience: from very young children to adults; from people who are learning Japanese as a second language to people with disabilities. The breadth of this project has introduced a few challenges:
Fujitsu Limited was able to address all these challenges by leveraging WinUI, MSIX and Xamarin as foundation to the application.
Building a first-class experience with WinUI
WinUI was the natural choice to build a first-class experience on Windows, which could tackle all the challenges that the development team needed to address.
WinUI provides a powerful and extensible UI system, which enables developers to tailor the user experience based on their needs. The flexibility of the XAML framework enabled Fujitsu Limited to customize the TextBlock control, by integrating their own custom algorithm to render Ruby characters.
The application is now able to recognize the speech of the user and convert it into text using the standard Japanese characters. WinUI will do all the heavy work to add the Ruby characters on top and take in account the different spacing.
Another WinUI feature the development team took advantage of is built-in accessibility support. All the controls included in WinUI provides first-in-class accessibility features, by recognizing and adapting to the accessibility options that are available in Windows 10. Thanks to this feature, Fujitsu Limited has been quickly able to make the application theme aware, so that it can properly adapt to users who are using a light, dark or high contrast theme in Windows 10.
In the end, due to the flexible nature of LiveTalk, WinUI was the perfect choice to provide a user experience that spans across all the different scenarios where the app is used: from a traditional PC controlled by mouse & keyboard to a touch-enabled device like a 2-in-1 or a tablet. Thanks to the built-in support for multiple input experiences, Fujitsu Limited was able to quickly introduce specific modes to better support mouse, keyboard and touch.
Deploy and update the application with confidence using MSIX
MSIX, the innovative deployment solution for desktop applications on Windows 10, has helped Fujitsu Limited to provide a seamless and simple solution for all their users: consumers, enterprises, schools, etc.
By packaging the application with MSIX, Fujitsu Limited has published LiveTalk on the Microsoft Store, which enables a one-click experience to acquire the application. Additionally, thanks to the built-in automatic updates feature, users won’t have to take any manual action to make sure they’re using the latest and greatest version of LiveTalk. Windows 10 will take care of updating it automatically every time the Fujitsu Limited development team publishes a new version.
Reaching all the users with Xamarin
What makes LiveTalk a very powerful solution is its flexibility: it can be used during a live conference; during a remote meeting; or even just during an informal in-person chat with a colleague. As such, Fujitsu Limited needed to go outside the desktop to reach users wherever they are. Xamarin was the natural choice to bring the Windows application also to other platforms. By sharing a similar UI framework and the same .NET ecosystem as WinUI, Fujitsu Limited was able to reuse most of the investments they made to bring the application also on Android and iOS, including support for Ruby characters.
Microsoft understood our intentions better than we could and provided appropriate and specific advice. As a result, we were able to outperform our expectations for Ruby, minimize the impact of increased Ruby processing time, and plan that we can provide to the market with confidence. Regarding WinUI, the current situation and future vision became clear, and we were able to align Microsoft’s WinUI roadmap with our product roadmap.
Conclusion
Fujitsu Limited has now planned to align the product roadmap of LiveTalk with the roadmaps of WinUI and .NET. This choice has enabled the development team to have a clear plan on the evolution of the app. It will help them to continue researching new technologies for their product and to be confident that they will be able to quickly integrate all the latest enhancements in the Windows ecosystem.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
If you peek inside your Microsoft Azure environment, you’ll see two different kinds of roles – Azure roles and Azure AD roles. Lets see how Tailwind Traders matches these roles to maintain their “least privilege” security principle.
When Tailwind Traders creates their first Microsoft Azure account, they receive an environment (also known as a tenant or tenancy) which contains:
From here, they will create other Azure users inside Azure Active Directory, as well as other types of identities such as service principals, and they’ll add their domain name to this directory. They might even use this directory to synchronize accounts from an existing on-premises Active Directory environment. And they’ll create Azure resources (virtual machines, storage and networking, functions, AI & machine learning applications etc.) inside their subscription.
They may also create other directories and other subscriptions, but for now we’ll keep it simple at just one of each.
Tailwind Traders always works on a “least privilege” principle – that is, all users have the lowest access rights needed to do their jobs. If someone works in a Helpdesk, they should be able to check that Azure resources are functioning and healthy, to help them troubleshoot problem calls, but they shouldn’t be able to create new resources inside Azure. In addition, some people in the Helpdesk are allowed to reset user passwords. Mapping these job functions to access requirements may be something that Tailwind Traders has already completed for their existing non-Cloud systems, that needs extending into Microsoft Azure.
Starting with access to their Azure resources, Tailwind Traders reviews which of the built-in roles will give their Helpdesk staff the appropriate level of access. A role is made up of a name and a set of permissions. Each resource contains an Access Control (Identity and Access Management) blade which lists who (user or group, service principal or managed identity) has been assigned to which role for that resource. Resources can also inherit these role-based access control settings from their parent resource group, subscription, management group, Azure policy or blueprint.
The four fundamental roles are:
Owner – Full rights to change the resource and to change the access control to grant permissions to other users.
Contributor – Full rights to change the resource, but not able to change the access control.
Reader – Read-only access to the resource
User Access Administrator – No access to the resource except the ability to change the access control.
There’s also an extensive range of other, more detailed built-in roles that Tailwind Traders can use for specific resource types and work tasks. For example, the Virtual Machine Contributor can only manage Azure virtual machine resources and cannot change storage accounts. Tailwind Traders can also create their own custom roles.
For our Helpdesk scenario, Tailwind Traders will assign the Helpdesk Staff group to the Reader role.
For a full list of the built-in roles and their permissions, visit Azure built-in roles.
Learn more about custom roles.
Note: Role-based access control applies when someone tries to action a task against a resource using a method that hits the Azure Resource Manager. This does not apply to settings inside a virtual machine operating system or to application access.
Azure Active Directory has its own, unique set of roles, specific to identity and billing management. This means that Tailwind Traders can control who has permission to make changes to these tenant-wide components, without needed to grant them access to other Azure resources. There’s also a cross-over here with Microsoft 365, which uses Azure Active Directory as its Identity directory. These roles will be familiar to users of the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
The Azure AD roles include:
Global administrator – the highest level of access, including the ability to grant administrator access to other users and to reset other administrator’s passwords.
User administrator – can create and manage users and groups, and can reset passwords for users, Helpdesk administrators and User administrators.
Helpdesk administrator – can change the password for users who don’t have an administrator role and they can invalidate refresh tokens, which forces users to sign back in again.
Billing Administrator – can make purchases and manage subscriptions.
For Tailwind Traders, the built-in Helpdesk administrator role is perfect. An advantage of using a built-in role is that it is maintained by Microsoft – if a detailed permission has a name change, for example, Microsoft will update all the built-in roles that have it listed, to match. In addition, users can have both Azure roles and Azure AD roles, giving them access to user administration and to Azure resources.
For a full list of Azure AD built-in roles visit Azure AD roles or learn how to create and assign a custom role in Azure Active Directory.
Azure roles and Azure AD roles mapped to Azure components
Late one night, the helpdesk gets a call that a system is unavailable. On checking, there are some monitoring alerts that point to an Azure virtual machine that is currently stopped. A quick phone call to the sleepy Level 3 support tech and “try starting it” is the suggested approach. It would be great if the Helpdesk person could start the VM but that would require access that’s greater than their current Reader role, but only for the time needed to try starting this virtual machine.
This is possible, if Tailwind Traders uses a feature of Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (or PIM) known as Just in time administrator access (JIT). Learn about the license requirements to use Azure AD Privileged Identity Management. This process looks like:
In this case, Tailwind Traders could protect the Virtual Machine Contributor role with PIM, enabling on-call Helpdesk staff to elevate their access so they can start the Virtual Machine. This needs to be configured in advanced, but can be activated when required by the Helpdesk staff entering a business reason to justify it (which could include an internal support ticket number, for example). Or, Tailwind Traders could create a custom role with a subset of the Virtual Machine Contributor permissions (for example, Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/start/action) and protect that role with PIM, further refining what the Helpdesk staff would have access to do in their elevated role.
To learn more about Privileged Identity Management, visit Examine Privileged Identity Management.
Regardless of how your organization is structured, take a look at Azure roles, Azure AD roles and Privileged Identity Management to remove widespread, high levels of access to your cloud resources and identities.
Classic subscription administrator roles, Azure roles and Azure AD roles
What is Azure role-based access control?
Overview of role-based access control in Azure Active Directory
Administrator roles by admin task in Azure Active Directory
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In this installment of the weekly discussion revolving around the latest news and topics on Microsoft 365, hosts – Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft) | @vesajuvonen, Waldek Mastykarz (Microsoft) | @waldekm are joined by Belgium-based, MVP, author, Microsoft Teams developer, and CTO with Advantive, Rick Van Rousselt | @RickVanRousselt. Topics discussed in this session can be summarized with one word. Change! The leap from Teams tab (iFrame) to Extension (Bot Framework) development, or transition from Skype to Teams, in the customer’s mind. Many customers are now circling back to Microsoft partners for guidance on optimizing Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, yet interestingly at differing rates Worldwide. Clearly in part, adoption is cultural. As well, the partner business has changed from having a development to a consultative focus, from selling and executing long term to short term projects, and the staff from specialists to generalists. The pace of change is fast, challenging and rewarding. Case in point on the pace of change – Microsoft and the PnP Community delivered a box busting 29 articles in this last week! This session was recorded on Monday, May 17, 2021.
Please remember to keep on providing us feedback on how we can help on this journey. We always welcome feedback on making the community more inclusive and diverse.
This episode was recorded on Monday, May 17, 2021.
These videos and podcasts are published each week and are intended to be roughly 45 – 60 minutes in length. Please do give us feedback on this video and podcast series and also do let us know if you have done something cool/useful so that we can cover that in the next weekly summary! The easiest way to let us know is to share your work on Twitter and add the hashtag #PnPWeekly. We are always on the lookout for refreshingly new content. “Sharing is caring!”
Here are all the links and people mentioned in this recording. Thanks, everyone for your contributions to the community!
Events:
Microsoft articles:
Community articles:
Additional resources:
If you’d like to hear from a specific community member in an upcoming recording and/or have specific questions for Microsoft 365 engineering or visitors – please let us know. We will do our best to address your requests or questions.
“Sharing is caring!”
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The HPC SKUs (HBv2 and HC) are now generally available in the Azure Government Virginia region. Customers can leverage this new capability for any unclassified workload including ITAR and FedRAMP High. These are designed to deliver cutting-edge performance for complex engineering and scientific workloads.
HBv2-series
HBv2-series VMs are optimized for applications driven by memory bandwidth, such as fluid dynamics, explicit finite element analysis, and weather modeling. HB VMs feature 120 AMD EPYC™ 7002-series CPU cores, 4 GB of RAM per CPU core, and no hyperthreading. HBv2-series VMs provide up to 350 GB/sec of memory bandwidth, which is 45-50 percent faster than x86 alternatives and 3x faster than what most HPC customers have in their data centers today. HBv2-series VMs also feature 200 Gb/sec HDR InfiniBand from our technology partners Mellanox.
Size | CPU cores | Memory: GB | Memory per CPU Core: GB | Local SSD: GiB | RDMA network | Azure network |
Standard_HB120rs | 120 | 480 GB | 4 GB | 1.6 TB | 200 Gbps | 40 Gbps |
‘r’ denotes support for RDMA. ‘s’ denotes support for Premium SSD disks.
HC-series
HC-series VMs are optimized for applications driven by dense computation, such as implicit finite element analysis, reservoir simulation, and computational chemistry. HC VMs feature 44 Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor cores, 8 GB of RAM per CPU core, and no hyperthreading. HC-series VMs support Intel’s rich ecosystem of software tools such as the Intel Math Kernel Library and feature an all-cores clock speed greater than 3 GHz for most workloads. HC-series VMs also feature 100 Gb/sec EDR InfiniBand with support for standard Mellanox OFED drivers and all MPI types and versions.
Size | CPU cores | Memory: GB | Memory per CPU Core: GB | Local SSD: GiB | RDMA network | Azure network |
Standard_HCrs | 44 | 352 GB | 8 GB | 700 GB | 100 Gbps | 40 Gbps |
‘r’ denotes support for RDMA. ‘s’ denotes support for Premium SSD disks.
Customers can accelerate their HC/HBv2 deployments with a variety of resources optimized and pre-configured by the Azure HPC team. Our pre-built HPC image for CentOS is tuned for optimal performance and bundles key HPC tools like various MPI libraries, compilers, and more. The AzureHPC Project helps customers deploy an end-to-end Azure HPC environment reliably and quickly, and includes deployment scripts for setting up building blocks for networking, compute, schedulers, and storage. Also included is a growing list of tutorials for running HPC applications themselves.
For customers familiar with HPC schedulers and who would like to use these with HBv2/HC Virtual Machines, Azure CycleCloud is the simplest way to orchestrate autoscaling clusters. Azure CycleCloud supports schedulers such as Slurm, PBSPro, LSF, GridEngine, and HTCondor, and enables hybrid deployments for customers wishing to pair HBv2/HC Virtual Machines with their existing on-premises clusters. The new H-series Virtual Machines will also be supported by Azure Batch for cloud-native batch processing. HBv2/HC Virtual Machines will be available to all Azure platform partners.
You can also use this learning module that can guide you on how to choose the right SKU for your HPC workload and optimize your tightly coupled jobs on Azure.
Azure is the only cloud platform that offers VM instances with InfiniBand-enabled hardware. This provides a significant performance advantage. Below you can find some of the published performance results using the HBv2/HC:
Azure HBv2 Virtual Machines eclipse 80,000 cores for MPI HPC
Azure HBv2 joins Graph500 Top 20 list
Run WRF v4 on Azure HBv2 Virtual Machines
Azure HC Virtual Machines crosses 20,000 cores for HPC workloads
If you’re a current customer interested in using our new VMs to run your HPC workloads, you can request a H-Series quota via the Azure Government portal.
To explore Azure Government, request your free 90-day trial today.
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