8 new productivity hacks for frontline workers, managers, and IT

by Contributed | Jan 13, 2021 | Technology

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

If there’s one thing we learned in 2020, it is that frontline workers are essential in today’s world. As companies realize how important they are, this time, they are bringing them along the digital transformation journey. There is no excuse for these workers to be left on the sidelines anymore.

Here are 8 new features that make frontline workers, managers, and IT’s jobs a little easier.

One tool to meet frontline worker needs

Whether working in back-to-back shifts where hand-offs cannot occur in person, connecting with corporate employees or consulting with remote company experts – Microsoft Teams has your frontline workers covered. In fact, Teams daily active usage more than doubled since March, primarily driven by chats/channels activity, which resembles frontline worker behavior.

1. Tasks Publishing – As the need for corporate offices to better communicate and work with their frontline workforce becomes top of mind, task publishing lets companies create tasks centrally at the corporate level and publish those tasks to different locations, specific store layouts or other customizable attributes of their frontline teams. For example, leadership for a nationwide retailer can create tasks for the reopening of their stores, attach relevant documents like a planogram, send that list to only the affected store locations, and then track progress against the assigned tasks. Managers can easily assign tasks to individual employees, while frontline workers can see a simple prioritized list of those tasks on their personal or company-issued mobile device. Task publishing is now generally available. Learn more about task publishing here. 

2. SMS sign-in – employees are able to sign in to their Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) account using one-time SMS codes—reducing the need to remember usernames and passwords. Once enrolled, the user is prompted to enter their phone number, which generates an SMS text with a one-time password. SMS sign-in is a single sign-on (SSO) experience, enabling frontline workers to seamlessly access all the apps they are authorized to use. This new sign-in method can be enabled for select groups and configured at the user level in the My Staff portal—helping to reduce the burden on IT. Click here to learn more.

3. @mention by shift group – Tagging by shift connects you to the right people faster. This new feature enables teams to take the guesswork out of knowing the names of on-shift employees and automatically assigns users with tags matching their schedule in the Shifts app in Teams, backed by major workforce management systems like AMiON, BlueYonder, and Kronos. Use this @mention tag to start a chat or call, or to just notify everyone on a channel.

Tagging by shift is rolling out now and will be fully available by Jan 31. Learn more about how to start using @mention by shift group here.

Supporting frontline managers

4. Delegated user management through My Staff portal – Frontline managers can approve password resets and enable employees to use their phone numbers for SMS sign-in, all via a single customizable portal enabled by IT. With this tool, managers can unblock staff issues—reducing the burden of identity management on IT, and keeping employees connected to the apps they need on the job. Click here to learn more.

5. Digitize manual processes with the Power Platform – Power Apps allow you to create custom low code apps for your frontline workers. The relative simplicity of building these apps allow you to be responsive to the needs of your business, including many firstline scenarios that don’t have technology solutions today. And when combined with automated workflows built with Power Automate, you can digitize and streamline entire processes. For example, Power Apps and Power Automate can totally transform a customer service recall process by alerting store members on Teams via an automate workflow of an item that needs to be pulled from shelves. The frontline workers can then monitor recall alerts and flag new issues with products using a custom app built with Power Apps. Click here to learn more!

Simplifying IT
Bring time to value benefits by streamlining the deployment process and tailoring a frontline team’s collaboration experience. See what Teams templates and policy packages can do for you.

6. Policy Packages – With frontline worker and frontline manager policy packages, IT administrators can easily assign pre-defined policies and policy settings tailored for their frontline workforce. Policy packages create a simple, centralized, and consistent way to manage your Frontline workforce, no matter how big. This month, we are launching group assignment for policy packages via PowerShell and coming soon, group assignment via Teams Admin center.

Availability: These new policy packages are available by default in the IT Admin Center and in PowerShell. Learn more about setting up and customizing the policy packages for Firstline Workforce here.

7. Team Templates – With Teams templates, you can create effective teams faster and more easily than ever. Users can choose from common business scenarios, such as Employee Onboarding and/or industry-specific templates, like Retail – manager collaboration and Organize a store. Each team template comes with pre-defined channels, tabs, and apps. Coming soon are team template policies which allow IT administrators to hide/show specific team templates for users in their organization. This allows admins to tailor the content for business needs. For example the IT administrator could only show retail templates or only show a set of retail + custom team templates, etc.

Custom team templates empower admins to create the right collaboration space for users in their organization. Learn more about creating a template from scratch, from an existing team, from an existing template, and team templates using Microsoft Graph. Teams templates policies will be rolling out soon.

8. Manage shared devices with Endpoint Manager – Microsoft Intune and Configuration Manager are now part of a unified management platform known as Microsoft Endpoint Manager. You can choose to enroll your Android Enterprise (AE) dedicated devices into Microsoft Intune with Azure AD shared mode automatically configured. For more information: Customize and configure shared devices for Firstline Workers at scale – Microsoft Tech Community

Looking ahead
We look forward to sharing the latest innovations as we approach Microsoft Ignite! This is just the beginning in our journey to empower every frontline worker in every organization to achieve more. We look forward to sharing more announcements in future blogs. Don’t forget to check out the newest Microsoft Mechanics video covering the latest frontline worker features in Teams!

Approvals in Microsoft Teams, Now Generally Available

by Contributed | Jan 13, 2021 | Technology

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

Approvals in Microsoft Teams enables everyone, from frontline workers to corporate headquarters employees, to easily create, manage, and share approvals directly from your hub for teamwork. Approvals in Teams is currently rolling out and should be generally available by mid-January. Once the Approvals apps is automatically installed, you can seamlessly:

Create an approval request
You can quickly start an approval flow in Microsoft Teams from a chat or a channel conversation. You can also create an approval from the Approvals app. Simply fill in the name of the request, who needs to approve it, any additional information, and add an attachment if needed. Additionally, you can create custom responses to tailor your request to the needs of your business.

Approve or reject a request
Once an approval is submitted, approvers are notified. They can quickly review the details of the request and any files included in the approval. If the request was submitted in a chat or a channel, an approvals card will be displayed with all the relevant actions you can take.

Track and manage your approvals
You can see and manage all your approvals from one place, the Approvals app in Teams. Each request is displayed along with key details such as the status, source, requestor, and approvers. You can also select a specific approval to see some more information and track progress.

Bring all your approvals in one place
Approvals in Teams is built on top of Power Platform so you can bring all your approval flows across the company together in one place using the simple workflow and extensibility capabilities of Power Automate.

1. From the Power Automate design studio, you can create a new flow and select a trigger such as a system driven event from one of our 350+ connectors including the Azure DevOps and ServiceNow connectors that were recently updated to easily be plugged into the Approvals App in Teams.


2. Add a workflow step to create a Start and Wait Approval by using the Approvals block as an action and fill in the relevant approval details like approvers, attachments, etc. By adding this step, you will automatically start seeing approval status updates and notifications directly in Teams via the Approvals hub.


3. Add a condition to monitor whether the request was approved or denied to complete the next step in your workflow.

Capture electronic signatures (Coming soon)
There may be times when you need something approved and recorded with more formal attestation, and adding signatures to the approval process is necessary. We’re working closely with key partners to allow you to create an electronic signature approval using Adobe Sign, DocuSign, and other 3rd party providers natively within the Approval app. Simply choose your electronic signature provider and add the details. Once submitted, signers are notified with an email and can easily review and sign. Approvals will keep track of the entire workflow right in context within Teams.

Resources
Get the most out of approvals in Microsoft Teams using these resources:

• Training videos


• Teams Approvals app availability


• Extending Approvals


• Installing the Approvals app manually


• Approvals Look Book

All-In-One: Assessing, Testing, and Migrating SSIS Packages with Azure-Enabled SQL Server Data Tools

by Contributed | Jan 13, 2021 | Technology

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

After releasing many features/enablers that unblock and accelerate the migration of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages into Azure Data Factory (ADF), see https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/sql-server-integration-services/blast-to-the-future-accelerating-legacy-ssis-migrations-into/ba-p/1792821, we’d like to show you how to use Azure-Enabled SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) as an all-in-one SSIS migration tool.

Azure-enabling SSDT has allowed us to preserve the skillsets of our customers who are familiar with it as they’ve been using it for a while to design, debug, and deploy their SSIS packages to run on premises.  Now, they can also use it to assess their existing packages for cloud compatibility, test their executions in Azure, and migrate/redeploy them to run in Azure.

This article illustrates how to perform cloud assessment, execution testing in Azure, and migration/redeployment to Azure of a typical ETL package, all using SSDT and without changing/modifying the original package.

Cloud Compatibility Assessment

Let’s start by opening my existing on-premises SSIS project using the latest SSDT with SSIS Projects extension for Visual Studio (VS).  The sample ETL package I use, OnPrem.dtsx, executes a Data Flow Task:

—  It first extracts data from a database table in my SQL Server on premises using an OLEDB Source component that connects with Windows authentication.

—  It then transforms the data using a Derived Column component that adds a new column filled by combining entries from other columns and a string user variable.

—  It finally loads the transformed data into another database table in my SQL Server on premises using an OLEDB Destination component that connects with Windows authentication.

To assess the cloud compatibility of my sample package and test its execution in Azure, I need to Azure-enable my project in a VS configuration.  I’ve already created five VS configurations to apply different package execution settings, one for executions on my local machine and four for executions on my SSIS Integration Runtime (SSIS IR) in Azure Data Factory (ADF).  You can create new VS configurations using Configuration Manager.

You can Azure-enable your project using Azure-Enabled Project Wizard, where you’ll be guided to select your VS configuration, SSIS IR, and Azure Storage.  In this way, when you execute your packages in Azure, SSDT will upload them to Azure Storage for your SSIS IR to fetch and run with the run-time settings from your selected VS configuration.

On Azure-Enabled Project Wizard, you can select your Azure subscription, under which you’ll then select your existing ADF and SSIS IR.  If you don’t have any under your selected subscription, you can create new ones using Integration Runtime Creation Wizard.

On Integration Runtime Creation Wizard, you can select your Azure subscription, under which a new Azure Resource Group, ADF, and SSIS IR will be created, select an Azure region, where they’ll be created, and enter a prefix that will be used in their names.

After selecting your ADF and SSIS IR, you can select your Azure subscription, under which you’ll then select your existing Azure Storage.  If you don’t have any under your selected subscription, you’ll be guided to create a new one.  After selecting your SSIS IR and Azure Storage, you can connect them to your Azure-enabled project and assess its cloud compatibility, all packages at once or one by one.

Let’s assess the cloud compatibility of my sample package that was run on SSIS on premises to perform on-premises-to-on-premises ETL.

On the Assessment Report, you can observe six potential issues if my sample package is run on SSIS IR in ADF without any modifications:

—  The first and second issues highlight the connection string property of source and destination connection managers that contains a host name.

—  If the source and or destination stay on premises, then the host name can be resolved if this package runs on Self-Hosted IR as a proxy for SSIS IR or if a Domain Name System (DNS) server is configured for SSIS IR that joins a virtual network (VNet) connected to the on-premises network.

—  If the source and or destination move to the cloud, for example to Azure SQL Database (DB)/Managed Instance (MI), then the connection string must be modified to use the appropriate data source, initial catalog, etc.

—  The third and fourth issues highlight the connection string property of source and destination connection managers that uses Windows authentication.

—  If the source and or destination stay on premises, then the Windows authentication feature of SSIS IR must be enabled.

—  If the source and or destination move to the cloud, for example to Azure SQL DB/MI that don’t support Windows authentication, then the connection string must be modified to use SQL authentication or Azure Active Directory (AAD) authentication.

—  The fifth and sixth issues highlight the connection string property of source and destination connection managers that uses a deprecated SQL Server Native Client (SQLNCLI) driver.

—  If the source and or destination move to the cloud, for example to Azure SQL DB/MI, and I want to connect using AAD authentication, then the connection string must be modified to use the latest MSOLEDBSQL driver.

In order to run my sample package on SSIS IR in ADF, we can mitigate the compatibility issues in many ways, for example:

—  We can mitigate the first, third, and fifth issues by keeping the source in SQL Server on premises and connecting to it using Windows authentication.  This requires us to do the following:

—  We need to configure Self-Hosted IR as a proxy for SSIS IR.  I’ve done this when provisioning my SSIS IR, see https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/data-factory/self-hosted-integration-runtime-proxy-ssis.

—  You can select your connected SSIS IR on SSDT to open its monitoring page in ADF portal, where you can see which Self-Hosted IR is configured as its proxy.

—  You can also download, install, and register Self-Hosted IR on a local machine connected to the on-premises SQL Server.  I’ve installed both Self-Hosted IR and SQL Server on my laptop.

—  We also need to enable Windows authentication feature of SSIS IR:

—  To do this in production, you can use Execute SSIS Package activities in ADF pipelines, SSIS catalog (SSISDB) stored procedures, or custom setups to run Windows cmdkey command, see https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/data-factory/ssis-azure-connect-with-windows-auth.

—  To do this in testing from SSDT, you can use Azure-enabled settings on VS configuration.

—  We finally need to enable the ConnectByProxy property of source connection manager:

—  To do this in production without redesigning your existing packages, you can assign the appropriate values to your SSIS parameters, connection manager properties, or property overrides at run-time.

—  To do this in testing from SSDT without redesigning your existing packages, you can use VS configurations with SSIS parameters/package configuration files on copies of your packages.

—  We can also mitigate the second, fourth, and sixth issues by changing the destination to Azure SQL DB and connecting to it using AAD authentication with ADF managed identity.  This requires us to do the following:

—  We need to create a contained database user for ADF managed identity.  You can do this on SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), see https://docs.microsoft.com/sql/integration-services/connection-manager/ole-db-connection-manager?view=sql-server-ver15#managed-identities-for-azure-resources-authentication.

—  We also need to modify the ConnectionString property of destination connection manager to use the appropriate data source, initial catalog, authentication method, and driver/provider, as well as to enable its ConnectUsingManagedIdentity property.

—  To do this in production without redesigning your existing packages, you can assign the appropriate values to your SSIS parameters, connection manager properties, or property overrides at run-time.

—  To do this in testing from SSDT without redesigning your existing packages, you can use VS configurations with SSIS parameters/package configuration files on copies of your packages.

Execution Testing in Azure

We can use VS configurations with SSIS parameters to mitigate the compatibility issues and test running my sample package on SSIS IR in ADF from SSDT.

—  To avoid making any changes to the existing OnPrem.dtsx package, I’ve copied it as TestOnPremParameters.dtsx for testing.

—  We can now parameterize the ConnectByProxy, ConnectionString, and ConnectUsingManagedIdentity properties of both source and destination connection managers.

—  We can add those parameters to VS configurations and assign different run-time values to them for each configuration.  I’ve already created five VS configurations:

—  I have a Local configuration to run this package locally on my laptop and perform on-premises-to on-premises ETL:

—  It will set the ConnectByProxy and ConnectUsingManagedIdentity properties of both source and destination connection managers to False.

—  It will set the ConnectionString property of both source and destination connection managers to connect to SQL Server on premises using Windows authentication.

—  I have an Azure configuration to run this package on SSIS IR in ADF and perform on-premises-to-cloud ETL:

—  It will set the ConnectByProxy and ConnectUsingManagedIdentity properties of source and destination connection managers to True, respectively.

—  It will set the ConnectionString property of source and destination connection managers to connect to SQL Server on premises using Windows authentication and to Azure SQL Database using AAD authentication with ADF managed identity, respectively.

—  I have an Azure2 configuration to run this package on SSIS IR in ADF and perform cloud-to-on-premises ETL:

—  It will set the ConnectUsingManagedIdentity and ConnectByProxy properties of source and destination connection managers to True, respectively.

—  It will set the ConnectionString property of source and destination connection managers to connect to Azure SQL Database using AAD authentication with ADF managed identity and to SQL Server on premises using Windows authentication, respectively.

—  I also have an Azure3 configuration to run this package on SSIS IR in ADF and perform on-premises-to-on-premises ETL:

—  It will set the ConnectByProxy property of both source and destination connection managers to True.

—  It will set the ConnectionString property of both source and destination connection managers to connect to SQL Server on premises using Windows authentication.

—  And finally, I have an Azure4 configuration to run this package on SSIS IR in ADF and perform cloud-to-cloud ETL:

—  It will set the ConnectUsingManagedIdentity property of both source and destination connection managers to True.

—  It will set the ConnectionString property of both source and destination connection managers to connect to Azure SQL Database using AAD authentication w/ ADF managed identity.

Alternatively, we can use VS configurations with package configuration (dtsconfig) files to mitigate the compatibility issues and test running my sample package on SSIS IR in ADF from SSDT.

—  To avoid making any changes to the existing OnPrem.dtsx package, I’ve copied it as TestOnPremConfiguration.dtsx for testing.

—  We can now select the Configurations property of its Control Flow to open Package Configurations Organizer.

—  On Package Configurations Organizer, you can open Package Configuration Wizard to create/edit a package configuration.

—  On Package Configuration Wizard, you can select XML configuration file as the configuration type and enter the full path of your dtsconfig file.

—  Next, you can select the package properties to be exported and configured in your dtsconfig file.  In this case, these are the ConnectByProxy, ConnectionString, and ConnectUsingManagedIdentity properties of both source and destination connection managers.

—  Finally, you can name, review, and generate your configuration.

Using XML editor app like XML Notepad, I’ve opened my dtsconfig file and enter the appropriate values for the selected package properties to perform on-premises-to-cloud ETL:

—  It will set the ConnectByProxy and ConnectUsingManagedIdentity properties of source and destination connection managers to True, respectively.

—  It will set the ConnectionString property of source and destination connection managers to connect to SQL Server on premises using Windows authentication and to Azure SQL Database using AAD authentication with ADF managed identity, respectively.

When I run TestOnPremParameters.dtsx/TestOnPremConfiguration.dtsx package on SSIS IR in ADF from SSDT using my Azure VS configuration with SSIS parameters/dtsconfig file, respectively, to perform on-premises-to-cloud ETL, the following happens:

—  SSDT will upload it into Azure Storage for SSIS IR to fetch.

—  SSIS IR will break it down into on-premises and cloud staging tasks.

—  Self-Hosted IR will then run the on-premises staging task to extract data from on-premises SQL Server and stage it in Azure Storage blob container.

—  SSIS IR will finally run the cloud staging task to move data from Azure Storage blob container, transform it, and load it into Azure SQL DB as the final destination.

Migration/Redeployment to Azure

After successfully assessing and testing all of your existing packages to run on SSIS IR in ADF from SSDT using VS configurations with SSIS parameters/package configuration files, you can migrate/redeploy them to Azure with no changes and run them in production by assigning the appropriate values to your SSIS parameters, connection manager properties, or property overrides at run-time.

Depending on your deployment model, you can use Integration Services Deployment Wizard on SSDT to deploy projects/packages into SSISDB hosted by Azure SQL DB/MI or dtutil command prompt utility to deploy packages into Azure Files or MSDB hosted by Azure SQL MI.

For more info, see the following docs:

https://docs.microsoft.com/sql/integration-services/packages/deploy-integration-services-ssis-projects-and-packages?view=sql-server-ver15

https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/data-factory/azure-ssis-integration-runtime-package-store#deploying-multiple-packages-with-dtutil

Alternatively, I can redeploy my existing OnPrem.dtsx package with no changes as an embedded package in ADF pipeline and assign the appropriate values to relevant connection manager properties at run-time to perform on-premises-to-cloud ETL.

For more info, see the following docs:

https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/data-factory/how-to-invoke-ssis-package-ssis-activity#package-location-embedded-package

https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/data-factory/how-to-invoke-ssis-package-ssis-activity#connection-managers-tab.

On ADF portal, I can select the Author hub to show my ADF pipeline with Execute SSIS Package activity, where on the Settings tab:

—  I‘ve configured Windows authentication feature to access my SQL Server on premises.

—  I‘ve configured Azure Key Vault (AKV) to store my password.

—  I‘ve configured Embedded package as my package location to copy & paste/drag & drop OnPrem.dtsx into the activity payload.

On the Connection Managers tab:

—  I‘ve configured ConnectByProxy, ConnectionString, and ConnectUsingManagedIdentity properties of both source and destination connection managers to assign the appropriate values to them at run-time to perform on-premises-to-cloud ETL.

On the Property Overrides tab:

—  I‘ve configured a property override to assign new value to my string user variable at run-time.

I can now drag & drop the unchanged OnPrem.dtsx package into the activity payload and publish my pipeline.

When I run my pipeline with the embedded OnPrem.dtsx package on SSIS IR in ADF, the following happens:

—  SSIS IR will break it down into on-premises and cloud staging tasks.

—  Self-Hosted IR will then run the on-premises staging task to extract data from on-premises SQL Server and stage it in Azure Storage blob container.

—  SSIS IR will finally run the cloud staging task to move data from Azure Storage blob container, transform it, and load it into Azure SQL DB as the final destination.

For more info on using Azure-enabled SSDT, see https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/data-factory/how-to-invoke-ssis-package-ssdt.

I hope you’ll find Azure-enabled SSDT useful for assessing the cloud compatibility of your existing packages, testing their executions in Azure, and migrating/redeploying them to run in Azure. 

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any feedbacks, questions, or issues, and we’ll follow up ASAP.  Thank you as always for your support.

Access Reviews for guests in all Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups is now in public preview

by Contributed | Jan 13, 2021 | Technology

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

Howdy folks!

Today we’re excited to share that you can now enable Azure AD access reviews for your guest users across all Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups in your organization. And as new Teams and Groups are created, access reviews will automatically be enabled for those that have guest users in them. Since we announced access reviews a few years ago, it has become a very popular identity governance feature with our customers.  Especially with an increase in external collaboration, many of you are using access reviews to ensure that access to sensitive resources that is no longer needed by your guest users is cleaned up regularly. Being able to do access reviews for guest users across all Teams and Groups as these resources are created is one of the most requested features in our feedback forum. This feature is now available in public preview for all of our customers who have an Azure AD Premium 2 subscription.

Getting started.

Setting up an access review for guest users across all Teams and Groups in your tenant simply requires you to create an access review with the setting of all Microsoft 365 groups with guest users.

You can then schedule the reviews to occur at a certain frequency such as quarterly. You can also choose to either have the guest users review their own access or task the review to the owner of the Team/Microsoft 365 group.

After the review is created, your reviewers will receive an email with a link to our friendly end-user portal, MyAccess, to complete their reviews. To make the job even simpler for reviewers, they will see recommendations to approve or deny users based on the last sign-in date of the user being reviewed.

To try this out in your own environment, sign in to the Azure portal and go to the Azure Active Directory > Identity governance section. If you don’t have Azure AD Premium 2, you can start a trial free for 30 days.

To learn more about Access Reviews, check out our documentation.

As always, we’d love to hear from you. Please let us know what you think in the comments below or on the Azure AD feedback forum.

Alex Simons

Learn more about Microsoft identity:

• Related Articles: Best practices to simplify governing employee access across your applications, groups and teams, Collaborate with anyone in any organization with any email address!


• Return to the Azure Active Directory Identity blog home


• Join the conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn


• Share product suggestions on the Azure Feedback Forum

What's New in Microsoft Forms | January 2021

by Contributed | Jan 13, 2021 | Technology

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

Entering 2021, Microsoft Forms’ new features aim to streamline your experience of accessing, creating, and distributing forms. From text formatting, specific user sharing, and creating polls for form creators, to response downloads and immersive reader for form respondents, read on to learn about our latest updates.

Text Formatting in Forms

Bold, Italicize, or Underline Form Title

Soon, you can bold, italicize, or underline words in Forms, allowing you to create forms that emphasize and differentiate content with hierarchy. When composing any text content in your form, you can format the text via the floating tool bar that appears when you highlight the text. Or, format your text using the known keyboard shortcuts: control/command + B/I/U.

With a quick click or shortcut, you can highlight or lowlight information without leaving the current interface. Starting rollout soon, this feature will be generally available by late January.

Bold, Italicize, or Underline Form Questions and Answer Choices

Specific User Sharing for Response Collection

With this feature, you can determine who within your organization is allowed to respond to a form or quiz you have created. Under the “Share” button, you can select “Specific people in my organization can respond” from the drop-down menu to activate this feature. Then, you can specify the particular individuals or groups by entering the individual or group email addresses.

Specific People Can Respond – Desktop

This experience is just as intuitive on mobile, whether you are using the Office app or your mobile web browser. After tapping the paper airplane icon to share your phone, you will find the option to limit your respondent pool with “Specific people in my organization can respond.”

Specific People Can Respond – Mobile

Download or Print Your Form Response

Soon, you can enable form respondents—both internal and external to your organization—to save or print a copy of their answers to your form or quiz. To enable this feature, head to “Settings” at the top right corner of your forms page, and select “Allow receipt of responses after submission.”

After completing the form, respondents will have the option to save or print a PDF of the form with their filled-in answers on the “Thank You” page. This feature is rolling out and will reach all users by the end of this month.

Option to Print or Download Answers on Thank You page

Please note that selecting this setting still allows form respondents who are internal to your organization to ask for an email receipt of their form. For more information on this specific functionality, which was available since last January, please see our previous blog post.

New Forms Start Page Experience

If you have used Forms recently on either your desktop or mobile browser, you may have noticed that you land on a newly designed start page on Office.com. Whether you already access Forms from your sidebar on Office.com already, or you always visited forms.microsoft.com directly, you will experience this new interface as someone with an Enterprise, Business, Education, or Personal account.

Office.com Forms Start Page

Right away, you can find your recently used forms. You can pin any of your forms for quick access under the “Pinned” tab. Under “Shared with me,” you’ll find all forms that have been shared with you as a collaborator. When you scroll to the bottom of the page, you can access group forms under the Microsoft 365 of which you are a part. Then, right above group forms, you can go to “All My Forms” to view a larger list of your forms. From there, you can find your deleted forms, as well as Copy, Move, and Delete any of your forms.

Move, Copy or Delete Forms under “All My Forms”

Immersive Reader in Forms for Anonymous Users

Last year, we enabled immersive reader for students who are logged in to their Microsoft accounts to improve the readability and accessibility of Microsoft Forms on both desktop and mobile. Recently, we made Immersive Reader available to any respondents filling out a form, whether you are logged in to your Microsoft account or not. Simply click the “…” near the top of the form to enable Immersive Reader.

Immersive Reader in Forms for All Respondents

Increased Capacity for Polls in Other Microsoft 365 Apps

With Polls in Teams Meetings becoming available in late November, we wanted to help you leverage polls not just in meetings, but across Outlook, PowerPoint Live Presentations, and Teams chat and channels too. Now, you have additional capacity to use polls in other apps: an additional 200 beyond the current 200-form limit. In other words, polls you create starting in January 2021 will count towards the new limit of 200; however, polls made before the end of December are still counted in the original 200-form limit.

We hope you explore and use these latest updates. If you have additional questions on Forms surveys, quizzes, or polls, please visit our Support page. To provide feedback, please visit our Forms UserVoice site. You can also join discussions in the Microsoft Forms Tech Community and follow the Forms Blog to stay updated in the future.

Microsoft 365 Resources for Architecture – Data Resiliency – Deletion and Retention – Data Restore

by Contributed | Jan 13, 2021 | Technology

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

I just had a short meeting with one of our customers and like many other customers they were looking for information about how their data in Microsoft 365 was safeguarded from a resiliency standpoint, retention standpoint, and the ability to recover the data. At the close of the session, I promised to supply the documentation links to content that addressed these three areas and since this is something frequently asked I am posting out those same resources for access by all.

Hope you find these resource links helpful!

• Architecture and Data Resiliency
  
  
  
  • Architecture overview   
  
  
  • Data resiliency in Microsoft 365   
  
  
  • High availability and business continuity   
  
  
  • Service incident mitigation strategies  
  
  
  • Data immutability in Microsoft 365   
  
  
  • Service health and continuity   
  
  
  
  


• Deletion and Data Retention 
  
  
  
  • SharePoint Online data deletion in Microsoft 365  
  
  
  • Get access to and back up a former user’s data   
  
  
  • Office 365 Data Subject Requests for the GDPR and CCPA   
  
  
  • OneDrive retention and deletion   
  
  
  • Learn about retention for SharePoint and OneDrive   
  
  
  
  


• Data Restoration
  
  
  
  • Restore deleted sites   
  
  
  • Admin Restore-SPODeletedSite   
  
  
  • Restore a deleted OneDrive   
  
  
  • End User Delete and Restore Files  
  
  
  • End User Restore deleted files or folders in OneDrive  
  
  
  • Admin Restore-PnPRecycleBinItem  
  
  
  
  


• Finally, a good post from a Microsoft MVP – Does Microsoft backup my data in Office 365? Do I need more or additional backup?

Thanks for visiting – Michael Gannotti   LinkedIn | Twitter

Michael Gannotti

New transactable offers from Wymsical, CadDo, and Artivatic Data Labs in Azure Marketplace

by Contributed | Jan 13, 2021 | Technology

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

Microsoft partners like Wymsical, CadDo, and Artivatic Data Labs deliver transact-capable offers, which allow you to purchase directly from Azure Marketplace. Learn about these offers below: Wault Platform: Wault from Wymsical is an immutable platform for storing and sharing verified documents that you don’t want changed, such as personal identification or legal material. With multi-factor authentication for onboarding and end-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest, Wault provides secure verifiable data exchange between users and companies involved in business transactions. CadDo Calculate: This rules-based modeling and calculation engine from CadDo gives corporations a single version of the truth when it comes to sustainability. CadDo Calculate collects data at the transactional level, which is augmented with master data, enabling a connected dataset of customer SKUs, business activities, carbon emissions, water usage, and more. Reports are then presented in a clear and easy-to-understand format.   CadDo ESG: The CadDo platform provides an investment-grade ESG (environmental, social, and governance) index score right out of the box, helping responsible investors adhere to sustainability measures. Everything from institutional holdings by portfolio through to individual investor positions can be dynamically managed and modeled by entity investment value on a real-time basis for ESG and financial performance. ALFRED – AI Health Claims Automation: ALFRED from Artivatic Data Labs is an AI-enabled solution for health insurance brokers and third-party administrators. ALFRED allows users to upload hospital bills, pharmacy bills, consulting reports, claims forms, diagnostic reports, and more, and ALFRED provides optical character recognition, health claim profiling, medical coding, and a claim payout estimate.   AUSIS – AI Underwriting Platform: AUSIS enables insurance businesses to assess policyholders in real time using internal, external, environmental, device, and document data. Its automated underwriting and risk-profiling engine reduces errors and improves turnaround time. AUSIS uses AI and machine learning to quickly assess individuals’ risks, which enables insurers to offer them better premiums, credit, and benefits.    CARSURE-Auto & Vehicle Damage Assessment & Claims: Designed for insurers, the CARSURE platform automates vehicle inspections and claims assessment using AI. Through photos, video, or guided mobile tools, CARSURE rapidly detects vehicle damage, eliminating the need for physical inspection. With machine learning, CARSURE provides loss estimation, taking into account information by vendor, part, vehicle, and level of damage.