This release wave introduces hundreds of new features across Microsoft Power Platform applications, including enhanced capabilities for governance, administration, and professional development. Updates for Dynamics 365 include innovation to help employees be more productive, create exceptional customer experiences and deepen relationships, and drive meaningful growth across the business. This release also features new AI capabilities in Copilot—which more than 130,000 organizations have now experienced—that help to improve insights, save time, and enhance creativity across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.
Tune in to the launch event, live or on-demand, for a concise overview of the release wave, as well as a firsthand look at how organizations like Nestlé, Kodak Alaris, Northern Trust, Centrica, Spark NZ, Domino’s Pizza UK and Ireland, and Suffolk are adopting these capabilities to drive transformative changes in their businesses.
A new era of AI-powered customer service and field service
Transforming enterprise resource planning (ERP) with AI
Enhancing customer experience through AI-driven transformation
Leading a new era of AI-generated low-code app development with Microsoft Power Platform
A new era of AI-powered customer service and field service
As a frontline for customer loyalty, service agents and field teams need access to information and insights to understand customer needs and respond appropriately. New Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service will help reduce time spent on common tasks, as well as introduce enhancements to the Customer Service workspace. Updates include improved inbox functionality, a redesigned voice experience, enhanced collaboration through Microsoft Teams, and integrated diagnostics for administrators—all aimed at boosting agent productivity and operational efficiency.
During the session led by Jeff Comstock, Corporate Vice President, Customer Service, we demonstrated how Copilot assists customer service and field service processes, including customer self-service, across various channels.
We also revealed how customers like Northern Trust Corporation, a leading wealth and asset management institution, can use Copilot to assist the client services team with tasks ranging from account reviews and case investigations to post-resolution wrap-ups. Northern Trust Corporation has not only gained recognition for its innovative financial services, but also for its unwavering commitment to customer service. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service as a steadfast component of its journey, the latest capabilities in release wave 2 can help the client service teams at Northern Trust be even more efficient, effective, and customer-focused, streamlining its workflow and enhancing its ability to provide timely and accurate support to clients.
The session also delved deeper into the field service domain, where Centrica, a global energy services company, effectively manages its sizable workforce of 12,000 field operatives on site by harnessing the new capabilities of Dynamics 365 Field Service, streamlining processes from task assignments to issue resolution.
To learn more about release wave 2 capabilities for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Field Service, visit the release planner.
Transforming ERP with AI
The new release wave harnesses AI, automation, and analytics to help organizations drive greater operational efficiency across finance, supply chain, and operations—capabilities that enhance visibility, automate processes, extend coverage, and deliver a more integrated experience across departments.
Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance include the general availability of extended planning and analysis, which brings together operational and financial planning to continuously plan, act, and analyze. In addition, the general availability of business performance analytics streamlines financial reporting by centralizing data from multiple business processes and in an easy-to-use interface.
Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management include improvements in demand planning, as well as procure-to-pay processes. Copilot will now suggest actions that can help purchasing agents make better decisions in response to new and updated information that affects open purchase orders.
At the launch event, Georg Glantschnig, Vice President, AI ERP, showcased how Domino’s Pizza UK and Ireland is improving its demand planning accuracy by using AI. These new features have greatly enhanced its capacity to serve more customers by precisely planning food requirements, thereby reducing food waste, and improving environmental sustainability through more efficient facility operations. Additionally, the process of fulfilling purchase orders has also seen a remarkable enhancement, thanks to Copilot.
We also demonstrated how New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services provider, Spark NZ, is transforming its finance and supply chain operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365. It can now automate many of its financial processes—including vendor invoice processing, automatic revaluation of foreign currency transactions, transaction reconciliation, billing, and complex tax calculations. Human resources can also streamline processes, from hiring to self-service vacation time requests and tracking.
Enhancing customer experience through AI-driven transformation
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Copilot you can use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration.
The new release wave introduces a variety of solutions to help marketers and sales professionals use Copilot to deepen their understanding of their target customer base, streamline engagement processes, and push the boundaries in crafting exceptional customer experiences.
In the closing keynote session, Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience, demonstrated how Kodak Alaris, a global technology company, effectively used Copilot within Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights. Taking advantage of the new AI capabilities, it tapped into previously hidden data to target its customer base, unlocking capabilities that were once out of reach. Using Copilot, it was able to create unique personalized content to keep customers informed about its services and effortlessly establish new levels of productivity and customer connection, attracting new businesses like never before.
Leading a new era of AI-generated low-code app development with Microsoft Power Platform
Copilot in Power Platform ushers in a new era of AI-assisted low-code development. Copilot features in release wave 2 make it even easier to quickly create solutions.
At the launch event, Sangya Singh, Vice President, Power Pages, showcased how Copilot plays a vital role in democratizing development, enabling a broader audience—both citizen and professional developers—to create innovative solutions using natural language.
Through the lens of Suffolk, one of America’s largest construction companies, we demonstrated how Microsoft Power Automate helped them streamline critical material request processes, enabling teams to use Copilot in Power Automate to build flows by describing what they need.
We also showcased how Microsoft Power Apps can help Suffolk facilitate efficient coordination of construction status updates, and how the generative answers capability in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents can search industry resources for answers, reducing manual research. We also demonstrated how Microsoft Power Pages improves collaboration with multiple partners on construction projects, and how Microsoft Power BI can help Suffolk visualize safety data at construction sites across the globe, highlighting the trends, causes, and outcomes of incidents and near misses so that preventative actions can be easily identified and implemented.
In addition to enhancing daily business operations, Copilot within Microsoft Power Platform has significantly improved the governance and administrative experience, expediting the development of these applications.
Watch the launch event on-demand for in-depth insights and demonstrations of the new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. You can also delve into several deep-dive presentations on topics including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, responsible AI practices, and a fireside chat that explores the latest features in this release wave.
Don’t forget to explore the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to stay informed about what’s new and on the horizon.
We also invite you to learn more about the latest AI innovation at Microsoft Ignite 2023, taking place in Seattle from November 14 through November 17, 2023, with online sessions available live and on-demand on November 15 and November 16. Register today.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
A much-awaited calendaring feature is finally coming to Outlook: the capability of keeping the events you decline on your calendar.
In Settings, once you turn on the feature, declined events will no longer disappear but remain on your calendar so you can easily recollect related info or docs, find associated chats, or even take actions like updating your previous response (RSVP) and forwarding it to someone else; all while keeping your agenda free at that time slot.
Worldwide release for the ability to preserve declined events is planned for the second half of November 2023. Once it is out, this is what you can do to take advantage of it:
Step 1: Enable the feature
The ability to preserve declined events will be disabled by default. You can enable it in Outlook on the web or in the new Outlook for Windows by manually checking “Show declined events in your calendar…” in Settings > Calendar > Events and invitations > Save declined events.
Step 2: Decline Events
Once it’s enabled, you can start declining events or meeting invites and they will automatically be preserved.
Please note that events declined from the classic Outlook for Windows will not be preserved, but events declined from all other Outlook clients (new Outlook for Windows, Outlook on the web, Outlook for Mac, Outlook for Android, Outlook for iOS) and Microsoft Teams will be preserved.
Step 3: View Declined Events
Once preserved, declined events will be viewable on any calendar surface, including the classic Outlook for Windows, Teams, and even third-party apps.
We hope this feature will improve your calendaring experience, making your time management easier.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
This post was co-authored by Caroline Dent, Senior Solutions Consultant, Velrada.
Due to fierce competition and increasing customer expectations, many organizations are looking to transform their field service operations to increase customer satisfaction, drive greater efficiency, and ensure higher service effectiveness. Digital transformation for field service operations is often focused on providing modern tools for service dispatchers who manage customer requests and create and dispatch work orders. But what about the people on the frontlines—the service technicians in the field?
Consider a utility provider with field service technicians who may work in remote areas with low network coverage or sometimes brave challenging weather conditions to support customers experiencing outages. Like any other organization, that provider needs a solution that enables it to streamline field service operations as much as possible, not only for controlling costs but also for providing the best possible experience for its customers. But when bad weather hits, it also needs a solution that ensures its field support can be productive even in extreme conditions and from the most remote locations.
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, organizations with service technicians on the frontlines can help maximize productivity with AI-driven assistance and remote expert support in the flow of work. And specifically for service technicians on the frontlines, Dynamics 365 Field Service offers a comprehensive Field Service mobile app for Windows, iOS, and Android devices that provides a set of digital capabilities that extend far beyond the traditional scheduling and dispatching of work orders.
As a long-term Microsoft global partner, Velrada has emerged as a pioneering force in implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service to empower frontline workers. With a rich history of innovation and a strong commitment to business transformation, Velrada has consistently demonstrated its expertise in implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service to help its customers optimize operations.
“The field service industry is undergoing a profound transformation, and at its forefront is the demand from our customers for innovative solutions that go beyond the scheduling and dispatching of jobs,”
David Conti, Product Director, Velrada
Let’s take a closer look at how organizations are empowering field service workers with more innovative solutions by deploying Dynamics 365 Field Service.
Empowering technicians with real-time information for better service
A primary benefit of Dynamics 365 Field Service is the Field Service mobile app, available on Windows, Android, and iOS devices. Service technicians can see their workdays at a glance in Microsoft Teams, including their latest work orders. They simply click on a work order to launch the Field Service mobile app, so they can view and update work orders, customer assets, accounts, and more, no matter where they are working—even in areas with limited connectivity. This means that even during the worst weather events, workers can get real-time dispatch updates from service agents that keep them informed about the latest outages and ready to tackle challenges regardless of the weather conditions.
Using the Field Service mobile app can also help organizations like the utility provider equip field technicians with digital workstations right on their mobile devices, so they can conduct digital inspections, manage forms, and complete service checklists—everything they were previously required to do on paper, often at the end of a long work day.
Enabling efficient on-site assessments
Using the Field Service mobile app, technicians can conduct on-site assessments with unmatched efficiency. They can capture photos, record notes, provide customers with immediate estimates, and even get their sign-off by capturing their digital signature in the app. This accelerates decision-making and facilitates faster service delivery, a crucial advantage in remote and challenging locations.
Ensuring seamless inventory management
Technicians can also easily access up-to-date inventory information on their devices. This eliminates the need for cumbersome manual inventory checks and reduces delays caused by missing parts because technicians can ensure they’re well-equipped for their service calls before they leave the service center.
Prioritizing safety and compliance
The Field Service mobile app incorporates safety checklists and real-time reporting, helping to ensure compliance with safety regulations. This not only upholds safety standards but also improves the well-being of service technicians who often work under hazardous conditions, such as near high-voltage transformers or natural gas compressors.
Revolutionizing service with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and mixed reality
For many organizations, enabling service technicians on the frontlines with digital tools that help eliminate inefficient paper-based processes and ensure workers can be productive even in the most remote locations or extreme conditions is just the beginning. Conti says, “Our customers are constantly looking at ways to innovate, and our next step is to help them give technicians access to more than just transactional information by incorporating mixed reality on top of Field Service solutions.” Organizations using Dynamics 365 Field Service can also be integrated with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens, HoloLens 2, Android, or iOS devices to enable technicians to collaborate more efficiently by working together from different locations. This means service technicians can find and connect with technical experts working at other locations to share what they’re seeing, receive remote assistance, and quickly resolve customer issues. This is especially critical during outages that affect a large number of customers, but it can also help substantially reduce the need for on-site visits even for routine maintenance or smaller issues, resulting in improved first-time fix rates and elevated customer satisfaction. Using mixed reality in this way helps service technicians make well-informed, real-time decisions. In addition, Remote Assist call data can be securely stored in Microsoft Dataverse and accessed for future analytics on service performance.
In addition to Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Field Service can also be integrated with Dynamics 365 Guides to attach mixed reality guides to Field Service tasks. This makes tasks like equipment maintenance more precise as service technicians can use mixed reality to overlay digital instructions onto physical machinery, which helps them perform field inspections and review the areas that require maintenance. ensuring efficient upkeep and field inspections are enhanced through annotated issue documentation, improving accuracy and record-keeping. In addition, technicians can benefit from immersive training experiences, reducing onboarding time and accelerating skill development.
Overall, the integration between Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Guides, and tools like HoloLens helps to elevate field service operations by enabling them to optimize processes and deliver unparalleled customer experiences in today’s dynamic business environment. They can empower technicians with immersive training experiences, precise equipment maintenance guidance, and real-time remote assistance. Field inspections become more accurate, data-driven decisions become the norm, and customer interactions reach new heights.
Next steps
Learn how Dynamics 365 Field Service can help you optimize your service operations and deliver exceptional service. And read how Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service can help you accelerate service delivery, boost technician productivity, and streamline work order management with next-generation AI.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Every contact center wants to maintain system health with minimal usability disruptions to offer a delightful and seamless customer experience. Now, contact center managers can use Application Insights to get details about customer conversations and solve problems more easily.
Application Insights, an extension of Azure Monitor, provides greater visibility into conversation-based operational telemetry in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This helps contact center managers keep track of the application’s health across the full conversation lifecycle. Metrics are available starting with initiation, virtual agent engagement, routing, and assignment, through to resolution. Application Insights tracks volumes, latency, scenario success, failures, and trends at scale. In addition to facilitating proactive system monitoring, it empowers developers and IT professionals to easily identify and diagnose problematic conversations. From there, they can self-remediate where applicable or get swift support.
Connect to Application Insights
This capability enables customers to establish connectivity between their Dynamics 365 Customer Service environment and Application Insights instance. Then they can subscribe to system telemetry for a core set of conversation lifecycle events across the channels they use. When these logs are available in Application Insights, users can combine them with additional data sets to build custom dashboards.
Enable Application Insights to get conversation lifecycle logs for your organization from Power Platform admin centerMonitor conversation telemetry with ease and track performance through Application InsightsCreate your own custom monitoring dashboards with Application Insights and other data sets
Application Insights in action
Contoso Clothing, a retail giant in apparel, has recently launched their online shopping experience. With the approaching holiday season, they anticipate high volumes. Their workforce is prepared to provide a satisfying customer service experience using Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Tim is a supervisor for Contoso Clothing’s customer service division. He is responsible for the management and optimum functioning of their live chat queues. On his monitoring dashboard, Tim notices a sharp increase in conversations in the backlog, leading to longer wait times. He can see that his customer service representatives are busy with ongoing conversations. This means they are unable to receive new chats, which is leading to long wait times and low customer satisfaction. The overall conversation volumes are well within Tim’s capability, and something doesn’t seem right to him.
He highlights this to Kaylee, an IT professional on his team. Kaylee has recently enabled App Insights for Contoso Clothing’s Dynamics 365 Customer Service environment to access conversation telemetry. This has been helping her monitor operational health as well as troubleshoot issues in real time. Based on Tim’s observation, she pulls up telemetry for all live chat conversations from the last few hours. Each conversation contains business events logged along with associated success or failure, duration, and associated metadata in Application Insights.
While looking through anomalies and failures, she notices a high number of ‘customer disconnected’ events being logged repeatedly. Tracing these conversations, Tim and Kaylee determine that multiple chat conversations being created for the same customer within a short span of time. They see that customers are having to reinitiate a chat every time they navigate away from their app and come back to continue the conversation.
Tim realizes the need to give customers the option to reconnect to a previous chat session. Being a business admin himself, can enable this through the Customer Service admin center in a few clicks. Using Application Insights data, Kaylee can set up auto-alerts for this scenario in case the problem happens again. Over the next few days, Tim and Kaylee see live chat wait times go down and customer satisfaction improve. They not only proactively detected the problem early but were also self-equipped to take the necessary steps to fix it and meet their customers’ needs.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Overview
Microsoft Azure services already operate in TLS 1.2-only mode. There are a limited number of services that still allow TLS 1.0 and 1.1 to support customers with legacy needs. For customers who use services that still support legacy protocol versions and must meet compliance requirements, we have provided instructions on how to ensure legacy protocols and cipher suites are not negotiated. For example, HDInsight provides the minSupportedTlsVersion property as part of the Resource Manager template. This property supports three values: “1.0”, “1.1” and “1.2”, which correspond to TLS 1.0+, TLS 1.1+ and TLS 1.2+ respectively. Customers can set the allowed minimum version for their HDInsight resource.
This document presents the latest information on TLS protocols and cipher suite support with links to relevant documentation for Azure Offerings. For offerings that still allow legacy protocols to support customers with legacy needs, TLS 1.2 is still preferred. The documentation links explain what needs to be done to ensure TLS 1.2 is preferred in all scenarios.
Legacy protocols are defined as anything lower than TLS 1.2.
What is meant by legacy cipher suites?
Cipher suites that were considered safe in the past but are no longer strong enough or they PFS. While these ciphers are considered legacy, they are still supported for some backward compatibility customer scenarios.
What is the Microsoft preferred cipher suite order?
For legacy purposes, Windows supports a large list of ciphers by default. For all Microsoft Windows Server versions (2016 and higher), the following ciphers are the preferred set of cipher suites. The preferred set of cipher suites is set by Microsoft’s security policy. It should be noted that Microsoft Windows uses the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) cipher suite notation. This link shows the IANA to OpenSSL mapping. It should be noted that Microsoft Windows uses the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) cipher suite notation. This link shows the IANA to OpenSSL mapping.
TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384
TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
Why is ChaCha20-Poly1305 not included in the list of approved ciphers?
ChaCha20-Poly1305 PolyChacha ciphers are supported by Windows and can be enabled in scenarios where customers control the OS.
Why are CBC ciphers included in the Microsoft preferred cipher suite order?
The default Windows image includes CBC ciphers. However, there are no known vulnerabilities related to the CBC mode cipher suites. We have mitigations for CBC side-channel attacks.
Microsoft’s preferred cipher suite order for Windows includes 128-bit ciphers. Is there an increased risk with using these ciphers?
AES-128 does not introduce any practical risk but different customers may have different preferences with regard to the minimum key lengths they are willing to negotiate. Our preferred order prioritizes AES-256 over AES-128. In addition, customers can adjust the order using the TLS Cmdlets. There is also a group policy option detailed in this article: Prioritizing Schannel Cipher Suites – Win32 apps | Microsoft Docs.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The year 2023 has ushered in dramatic innovations in AI, particularly regarding how businesses interact with customers. Every day, more organizations are discovering how they can empower agents to provide faster, more personalized service using next-generation AI.
We’re excited to announce three Microsoft Copilot features now generally available in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service in October, along with the new summarization feature that was made generally available in September. Copilot provides real-time, AI-powered assistance to help customer support agents solve issues faster by relieving them from mundane tasks—such as searching and note-taking—and freeing their time for more high-value interactions with customers. Contact center managers can also use Copilot analytics to view Copilot usage and better understand how next-generation AI impacts the business. The following features are generally available to Dynamics 365 Customer Service users:
Ask Copilot a question.
Create intelligent email responses.
Understand Copilot usage in your organization.
Summarize cases and conversations with Copilot (released in September 2023).
Copilot uses knowledge and web sources that your organization specifies, and your organizational and customer data are never used to train public models.
Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform
Copilot features are empowering marketing, sales, and customer service teams in new ways.
Whether they’re responding to customers using the phone, chat, or social media, agents can use Copilot to harness knowledge across the organization to provide quick, informative answers, similar to having an experienced coworker available to chat all day, every day. When an administrator enables the Copilot pane in the Dynamics 365 Customer Service workspace or custom apps, agents can use natural language to ask questions and find answers. Copilot searches all company resources that administrators have made available and returns an answer. Agents can check the sources that Copilot used to create a response, and they can rate responses as helpful or unhelpful. Contact center managers can then view agent feedback to see how their agents are interacting with Copilot and identify areas where sources may need to be removed or updated.
The ability to ask Copilot questions can save agents valuable time. Microsoft recently completed a study that evaluated the impact of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service on agent productivity for Microsoft Support agents providing customer care across the commercial business. They found that agents can quickly look up answers to high volume requests and avoid lengthy investigations of previously documented procedures. One of our lines of business with these characteristics has realized a 22 percent reduction in time to close cases using Copilot.
2. Create intelligent email responses
Agents who receive customer requests via email can spend valuable time researching and writing the perfect response. Now, agents can use Copilot to draft emails by selecting from predefined prompts that include common support activities such as “suggest a call,” “request more information,” “empathize with feedback,” or “resolve the customer’s problem.” Agents can also provide their own custom prompts for more complex issues. Copilot uses the context of the conversation along with case notes and the organization’s knowledge to produce a relevant, personalized email. The agent can edit and modify the text further, and then send the response to help resolve the issue quickly.
3. Understand Copilot usage in your organization
It’s important for service managers to measure the impact and improvements as part of the change that generative AI-powered Copilot has on their operations and agent experience. Dynamics 365 Customer Service historical analytics reports provide a comprehensive view of Copilot-specific metrics and insights. Managers can see how often agents use Copilot to respond to customers, the number of agent/customer interactions that involved Copilot, the duration of conversations where Copilot plays a role, and more. They can also see the percentage of cases that agents resolved with the help of Copilot. Agents can also rate Copilot responses so managers have a better understanding of how Copilot is helping to improve customer service and the overall impact on their organization.
4. Summarize cases and conversations with Copilot
Generally available since September, the ability to summarize cases and complex, lengthy conversations using Copilot can save valuable time for agents across channels. Rather than spending hours to review notes as they wrap up a case, agents can create a case summary with a single click that highlights key information about the case, such as customer, case title, case type, subject, case description, product, and priority. In addition, agents can rely on Copilot to generate conversation summaries that capture key information such as the customer’s name, the issue or request, the steps taken so far, the case status, and any relevant facts or data. Summaries also highlight any sentiment expressed by the customer or the agent, plus action items or next steps. Generating conversation summaries on the fly is especially useful when an agent must hand off a call to another agent and quickly bring them up to speed while the customer is still on the line. This ability to connect customers with experts in complex, high-touch scenarios is helping to transform the customer service experience, reduce operational cost savings, and ensure happier customers.
Next-generation AI that is ready for enterprises
Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It also allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection.
AI solutions built responsibly
We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In the digital age, spatial data management and analysis have become integral to a wide array of technical applications. From real-time tracking to location-based services and geospatial analytics, efficient handling of spatial data is pivotal in delivering high-performance solutions.
Azure Cache for Redis, a versatile and powerful in-memory data store, rises to this challenge with its Geospatial Indexes feature. Join us in this exploration to learn how Redis’s Geospatial Indexes are transforming the way we manage and query spatial data, catering to the needs of students, startups, AI entrepreneurs, and AI developers.
Introduction to Redis Geospatial Indexes
Azure Cache for Redis Geo-Positioning, or Geospatial, Indexes provide an efficient and robust approach to store and query spatial data. This feature empowers developers to associate geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) with a unique identifier in Redis, enabling seamless spatial data storage and retrieval. With geospatial indexes, developers can effortlessly perform a variety of spatial queries, including locating objects within a specific radius, calculating distances between objects, and much more.
In Azure Cache for Redis, geospatial data is represented using sorted sets, where each element in the set is associated with a geospatial coordinate. These coordinates are typically represented as longitude and latitude pairs and can be stored in Redis using the GEOADD command. This command enables you to add one or multiple elements, each identified by a unique member name, to a specified geospatial key.
If you’re eager to explore the Azure Cache for Redis for Geo-positioning, be sure to tune in to this Open at Microsoft episode hosted by Ricky Diep, Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft and Roberto Perez, Senior Partner Solutions Architect at Redis.
Spatial Queries with Redis
Azure Cache for Redis equips developers with a set of commands tailored for spatial queries on geospatial data. Some of the key commands include:
– GEOADD: Adds a location(s) to the geospatial set. – GEODIST: Retrieves the distance between two members. – GEOSEARCH: Retrieves location(s) by radius or by a defined geographical box. – GEOPOS: Retrieves the position of one or more members in a geospatial set.
These commands empower developers to efficiently perform spatial computations and extract valuable insights from their geospatial data.
Benefits of Redis Geospatial Indexes
In-Memory Performance: Azure Cache for Redis, as an in-memory database, delivers exceptional read and write speeds for geospatial data. This makes it an excellent choice for real-time applications and time-critical processes.
Flexibility and Scalability: Redis Geospatial Indexes can handle large-scale geospatial datasets with ease, offering consistent performance even as the dataset grows.
Simple Integration: Azure Cache for Redis enjoys wide support across various programming languages and frameworks, making it easy to integrate geospatial functionalities into existing applications.
High Precision and Accuracy: Redis leverages its geospatial computations and data to ensure high precision and accuracy in distance calculations.
Common Use Cases
Redis Geospatial Indexes find applications in a diverse range of domains, including:
Location-Based Services (LBS): Implementing location tracking and proximity-based services. Geospatial Analytics: Analyzing location data to make informed business decisions, such as optimizing delivery routes or targeting specific demographics. Asset Tracking: Efficiently managing and tracking assets (vehicles, shipments, etc.) in real-time. Social Networking: Implementing features like finding nearby users or suggesting points of interest based on location. Gaming Applications: In location-based games, Redis can be used to store and retrieve the positions of game elements, players, or events, enabling dynamic gameplay based on real-world locations. Geofencing: Redis can help create geofences, which are virtual boundaries around specific geographical areas. By storing these geofences and the locations of mobile users or objects, you can detect when a user enters or exits a specific region and trigger corresponding actions.
For use cases where only geospatial data is needed, users can leverage the GeoSet command. However, if use cases require storing more than just geospatial data, they can opt for a combination of RedisJSON + RediSearch or Hash + RediSearch, both available in the Enterprise tiers, to accomplish real-time searches.
Conclusion
Redis Geospatial Indexes present a potent and efficient solution for storing, managing, and querying spatial data. By harnessing Azure Cache for Redis’s in-memory performance, versatile commands, and scalability, developers can craft high-performance applications with advanced spatial capabilities. Whether it’s location-based services, geospatial analytics, or real-time tracking, Redis Geospatial Indexes empower students, startups, AI entrepreneurs, and AI developers to unlock the full potential of spatial data processing.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introduction
The healthcare industry is no stranger to complex data management challenges, especially when it comes to securing sensitive information. As technology continues to evolve, healthcare professionals are increasingly turning to modern frameworks like Blazor to streamline operations and improve patient outcomes. However, as with any new technology, there are challenges to overcome. One of the biggest hurdles is implementing delegated OAuth flow, a security measure that allows users to authenticate with delegated permissions. In this blog post, we’ll explore step-by-step how Visual Studio and MSAL tools can accelerate your time to value and abstract away many of the complexities in the OAuth delegated flow for Blazor.
Pre-requisites
Latest version of Visual Studio 2019 with the ASP.NET and web development workload
Open Visual Studio and create a New Blazor Web Assembly project and provide the name of your project and local file path to save the solution.
On the Additional Information screen, select the following options:
Framework: .NET 7
Authentication Type: Microsoft Identity Platform
Check the box for ASP.NET Core Hosted
Hit Create to continue
You will now be seeing the Required components window with the dotnet msidentity tool listed. Press next to continue.
Follow the guided authentication window to authenticate your identity to your target Azure tenant.
this is so that Visual Studio is able to assume your identity to create the AAD application registrations for the Blazor Web Assembly.
Once authenticated, you will see a list of owned applications for the selected tenant. If you have previously configured application registrations, you can select the respective application here.
For the purposes of this demo, we will create a new application registration for the server.
Once the application is created, select the application you have created.
Hit Next to proceed.
In the next prompt we will provide information about the target Azure DevOps service, choose theAdd permissions to another APIoption to let Visual Studio configure the Azure DevOps downstream API.
Scopes – set to 499b84ac-1321-427f-aa17-267ca6975798/.default
Note: this value does not change, as it is the unique GUID for Azure DevOps APIs with the default scope.
Hit Next to proceed.
Next, the tool will create a client secret for your newly created app registration. You can choose to save this locally (outside of the project/git scope) or copy it to manage it yourself.
Note: if you choose to not save to a local file, the secret will not be accessible again and you will need to regenerate the secret through the AAD app registration portal.
Afterwards, review the Summary page and selectively decide which components the tool should modify in case you have your own configuration/code already in place.
For this demo, we will keep all boxes selected.
Hit Finish to let the tool configure your project with the Microsoft Identity Platform!
Test your Blazor Web Assembly Project’s Microsoft Identity Platform Connectivity
Now that the Blazor Web Assembly project is provisioned, we will quickly test the authentication capabilities with the out-of-the-box seed application.
On the Visual Studio window after provisioning is completed, our solution will now have both the Client and Server projects in place
Ensure your Server is set as your Startup Project
If it isn’t, you can do so by right clicking your Server Project on the Solution Explorer.
Test your OAuth configuration
Run your application locally
On the web application, press the Log in button on the top right corner to log into your Azure DevOps organization
Once logged in, you should see a Hello, ! message
Getting to this point verifies that you are able to authenticate to Azure Active Directory, but not necessarily Azure DevOps as we have yet to configure any requests to the Azure DevOps REST APIs.
If you chose not to use the template-guided method of provisioning your Blazor application with MS identity, there are some steps you must take to ensure your application registration to function properly.
Navigate to your tenant’s Active Directory > App registrations
Note the two application registrations – one for the Server, and another for the Client
Configuring the Server app registration
In order to allow your application to assume the logged-in identity’s access permissions, you must expose theaccess_as_user API on the application registration.
to do this, selectExpose an API on the toolbar and selectAdd a Scope
For the Scope Name, ensure you provideaccess_as_useras well as selectingAdmins and users forWho can consent?
Now go to theAuthentication blade and selectAdd a platformto configure yourWeb platform’s API redirect
For when you deploy to your cloud services, the localhost will be replaced by your application’s site name but will still have the /signin-oidcpath by default for redirects (can be configured within your appsettings.json)
On the same page (Expose an API) selectAdd a client application around the bottom to add yourClient app registration’s Application ID to allow for your client to call this API
Save the authorized scopes for your client configuration within your Visual Studios project
Configuring the Client app registration
Navigate to theAuthentication blade and do the same as in step 2.b but for your client’s callback URL
Now ensure that both your client and server’s appsettings.json in the Web Assembly project mirrors your app registration’s configurations
Client app settings can be found within thewwwrootdirectory by default and should have the following details
Server app settings can be found at the base tree and should look like the following
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In any business organization, you need to be able to communicate effectively with your clients and prospects, as well as access and manage relevant documents and data in real-time. Microsoft Teams is a powerful tool that enables seamless collaboration and communication among team members, as well as with external parties. But when it comes to file management in Microsoft Teams, there are some nuances that need to be taken care of.
With Microsoft Teams being built on the capabilities of SharePoint, whatever data we store in Microsoft Teams, is directly stored in SharePoint.
But one of the drawbacks of uploading a file in a Teams conversation is that you have no control over where it is stored. It automatically goes into the root folder of the SharePoint site that is linked to the team. If you want to move the file to a different folder, you would have to do it manually, which is time-consuming.
Other than this, one of the biggest use cases is of Microsoft chats. Most of the time, file sharing happens on chats. So, the question is, where do the files stored in chats go? Well, they are stored in the user’s ‘OneDrive for Business’ account rather than SharePoint.
An altogether another cloud storage!
This makes the search and retrieval of files complicated. Your business is losing money when your employees waste time looking for files rather than focusing on their core tasks, especially if they are sales reps or customer services reps, impacting customer experience as well.
As you can see, one of the drawbacks of using Teams independently for file management is that we have no control over our files.
So, you then have to manually sit and copy/move all such files to a centralized cloud storage. If you miss moving even one file, it will come to bite you back during crunch moments.
And as your business scales, your organization’s data also scales. And with the above challenges we discussed, your organization can face significant hurdles in communication and collaboration.
One solution to the above hurdle is to integrate Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams and leverage their combined capabilities. Check out this article for a step-by-step guide on integrating Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Suppose you are on a client call using Teams, and the client shares some updates on their order in the form of a note attachment/ directly in the chat. As you have integrated your CRM and Teams, you can add it against the respective record directly.
From within Teams, you can access the ‘Files’ tab of the respective CRM record and store it in the respective SharePoint site. You need to enable SharePoint Integration for this which is natively available. As there is only one SharePoint instance for each tenant, the root site is the same for your Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams. So even though the subsites may be different, both Dynamics 365 documents and Microsoft Teams files are stored on the same SharePoint site.
This way, all your files will be stored in your SharePoint and that too against their respective records. To retrieve it, you can just go to the record in CRM and access the file without having to manually go back to the conversations/chats.
One other way to manage files smartly is Inogic’s Attach2Dynamics, a popular file and storage management app.
With Attach2Dynamics, you get a button right on your CRM entity grid (custom or OOB) which lets you manage the cloud (SharePoint) documents right from within your CRM.
You can drag and drop files and folders from your system directly into your SharePoint. Create new folders in your SharePoint from within CRM, rename, upload, delete, do a deep search, download a sharable copy, email directly as an attachment or as a link, and much more. You get a plethora of options with this advanced UI.
In this way, you can access all your files and folders stored in SharePoint right from your CRM, make updates to them as required, and do a lot more without toggling between different tabs.
Other than Teams, you get most of the attachments through emails. This can also create a gap in document retrieval as some documents are in SharePoint and some in your CRM emails. Also, over a period of time, these email content and attachments consume a lot of your Dynamics 365 space. This gives rise to CRM performance issues and buying additional Dynamics 365 space is also costly.
So, to truly centralize your file storage and take your file management to the next level, move these email attachments as well to the same SharePoint location. And how great it would be if you could automate this process?
No more your client files are scattered in different locations; be it Teams files, Email files, or CRM files.
Note: This app only works in Teams when integrated with Dynamics 365. For more details on how to best use it along with Teams integration, reach out to Inogic at crm@inogic.com.
It does not end with just centralizing the file storage with Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration, we also need to look at having a custom folder structure and the security aspects of these files which we will cover in our next post. Keep checking this space for it.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In a Security Operations Center (SOC), time to resolve and mitigate both alerts and incidents are of the highest importance. This time can mean the difference between controlled risk and impact, and large risk and impact. While our core products detect and respond at machine speed, our ongoing mission is to upskill SOC analysts and empower them to be more efficient where they’re needed to engage. To bridge this gap, we are bringing Security Copilot into our industry-leading XDR platform, Microsoft 365 Defender, which is like adding the ultimate expert SOC analyst to your team, both raising the skill bar and increasing efficiency and autonomy. In addition to skilling, we know that incident volumes continue to grow as tools get better at detecting, while SOC resources are scarce, so providing this expert assistance and helping the SOC with efficiency are equally important in alleviating these issues.
Security Copilot provides expert guidance and helps analysts accelerate investigations to outmaneuver adversaries at scale. It is important to recognize that not all generative AI is the same. By combining OpenAI with Microsoft’s security-specific model trained on the largest breadth and diversity of security signals in the industry–over 65 trillion to be precise. Security Copilot is built on the industry-transforming Azure OpenAI service and seamlessly embedded into the Microsoft 365 Defender analyst workflows for an intuitive experience.
Streamline SOC workflows
To work through an incident end to end, an analyst must quickly understand what happened in the environment and assess both the risk posed by the issue and the urgency required for remediation. After understanding what happened, the analyst must provide a complete response to ensure the threat is fully mitigated. Upon completion of the mitigation process, they are required to document and close the incident.
When the SOC analyst clicks into an Incident in their queue in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, they will see a Security Copilot-generated summary of the incident. This summary provides a quick, easy to read overview of the story of the attack and the most important aspects of the incident. Our goal is to help reduce the time to ramp up on what’s happening in the SOC’s environment. By leveraging the incident summary, SOC analysts no longer need to perform an investigation to determine what is most urgent in their environment, making prioritization, understanding impact and required next steps, easy and reducing time to respond.
Figure 1: Microsoft 365 Defender portal showing the Security Copilot-generated incident summary within the Incident page
After verifying the impact and priority of this incident, the analyst begins to review IOCs. The analyst knows that this type of attack usually starts with a targeted attack on an employee and ends with that employee’s credentials being available to the threat actor for the purposes of finding and using financial data. Once the user is compromised the threat actor can live off the land in the organization and has legitimate access to anything that user would normally have access to such as financial account information for the company. This type of compromise must be handled with urgency as the actor will be difficult to track after initial entry and could continue to pivot and compromise other users through the organization. If the targeted organization handles this risk with urgency, they can stop the actor before additional assets/accounts/entities are accessed.
The SOC analyst working on this incident is in the incident summary page and sees that the attack began with a password spray, or the threat actor attempting to access many users with a list of passwords using an anonymous IP address. This must be verified by the analyst to determine urgency and priority of triage. After determining the urgency of this incident, the analyst begins their investigation. In the incident summary, the analyst sees many indicators of compromise including multiple Ips, Cloud Applications, and other emails that may be related to the incident. The analyst sees that Defender disrupt suspended one compromised account and captured additional risk including phishing email identification. In an attempt to cast an organizational-level view, the analyst will investigate these IOCs to see who else interacted with or was targeted by the attacker.
The analyst pivots the hunting experience and sees see another “Security Copilot” button. This will allow the SOC analyst to ask Security Copilot to generate a KQL to review where else in the organization this IOC has been seen. For this example, we use, “Get emails that have ‘sbeavers’ as the sender or receiver in the last 10 days” to generate a KQL query. This reduces the time to produce the query and the need to look up syntax. The analyst now understands there’s another user account that was reached out by the adversary and the SOC needs to validate risk level / check the account state. The “llodbrok” account will be added to the incident by the analyst.
Figure 2: Microsoft Defender Security Portal showing the query assistant within Advanced hunting editor
After identifying all entry vectors and approached users, the SOC analyst shifts focus to the action on targets and what happened next for the incident they are investigating. This incident does not contain a PowerShell IOC, but if the analyst found PowerShell on the “llodbrok” user’s machine, the analyst would be able to click on the PowerShell-related alert and scroll down in the righthand pane to find the evidence component. After the analyst clicks on the PowerShell evidence, they see the “Analyze” button with the Copilot symbols. This will take a command line and turn it into human-readable language. Oftentimes attackers leverage scripts to perform network discovery, elevate privilege, and obfuscate behavior. This script analysis will reduce the time it takes to understand what the command does and respond quickly. Having human-readable scripts is also useful when the analyst is investigating an alert in a language, they are unfamiliar with or haven’t worked with recently.
Figure 3: Microsoft 365 Defender portal showing the Security Copilot-generated script analysis within the Incident page
After the analyst has confirmed these indicators of compromise are legitimate, the next step is to initiate the remediation process. To do this, the analyst navigates back to the Incident page in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal and scrolls down in the right-hand pane. Right below the incident summary, the analyst will see a set of “guided response” recommendations. The SOC analyst has verified the incident IOCs are legitimate and selects the “Classify” dropdown and the option “Compromised Account” to indicate to other analysts this was a true positive of BEC. The SOC analyst also sees ‘quick actions’ they can take to quickly remediate the compromised user’s account, selecting “Reset user password” and “Disable user in Active Directory” and “Suspend user in Microsoft Entra ID.”
In this process, the SOC analyst is assisted by Security Copilot in what actions to take based on past actions taken by the organization in response to similar alerts or incidents in the past. This will improve their abilities from day one, reducing early training requirements.
Figure 4: Microsoft 365 Defender portal showing the guided response within the Incident page
Finally, the analyst needs to send a report to their leadership. Reporting and documenting can be a challenge and time-consuming task, but with Security Copilot, the analyst can generate a post-response activity report with the click in seconds and provide partners, customers, and leadership with a clear understanding of the incident and what actions were taken.
Here is how it works: the SOC analyst selects the “Generate incident report” button in the upper right corner of the Incident page or the icon beside the ‘x’ in the side panel. This generates an incident report, that can be copied and pasted, showing the incident title, incident details, incident summary, classification, investigation actions, remediation actions (manual or automated actions from Microsoft 365 Defender or Sentinel) and follow-up actions.
Figure 5: Microsoft 365 Defender portal showing the Security Copilot-generated incident report within the Incident page
What sets Security Copilot apart
As a part of this effort, our team worked side-by-side with Security Researchers to ensure that we weren’t providing just any response but providing a high-quality output. Today, we are reviewing a few key indicators to inform us of our response quality using clarity, usefulness, omissions, and inaccuracies. These measures are made up of three core areas that our team focused on: lexical analysis, semantic analysis, and human-oriented clarity analysis. There are three core areas that our team focused on: lexical analysis, semantic analysis, and human-oriented clarity analysis. The combination of core areas provides a solid foundation for understanding human comprehension, content similarity, and key insights between the data source and the output. With the help of our quality metrics, we were able to iterate on different versions of these skills and improve the overall quality of our skills by 50%.
Quality measurements are important to us as they help ensure we aren’t losing key insights and that all the information is well connected. Our security Researchers and Data Scientists partnered together across organizations to bring a variety of signals across our product stack, including threat intelligence signals, and a diverse range of expertise to our skills. Security copilot has obviated the necessity for labor-intensive data curation and quality assessment prior to model input.
You’ll be able to read more about how we performed quality validation in future posts.
Share your feedback with us
We could not talk about a feature without also talking about how important your feedback is to our teams. Our product teams are constantly looking for ways to improve our product experience, and listening to the voices of our customers is a crucial part of that process SOC analysts can provide feedback to Microsoft through each of the skill’s User Interface (UI) components (as shown below). Your feedback will be routed to our team and will be used to help influence the direction of products. We use this constant pulse check via your feedback, and a variety of other signals to monitor how we’re doing.
Security Copilot is in Early Access now, but to sign up here to receive updates on Security Copilot and the use of AI in Security. To learn more about Microsoft Security Copilot, visit the website.
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