Celebrate #SkillUpSeptember with Some Digital Swag!

by Scott Muniz | Sep 8, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

This month, we have THREE wallpaper options for you!

Hello, world!

It’s me again, with your monthly digital swag!

This month, we are celebrating #SkillUpSeptember and will be sharing resources for everyone from the person who is brand new to coding all the way up to the seasoned pro!

So, to get your month and learning adventure started right, here are THREE new wallpapers / Teams backgrounds for you. Choose your favorite out of blue, purple, and orange (or switch between all three, we won’t judge ;))!

What do you plan on learning this month? Post in the comments below and we will help you find the best place to get started :party_popper:

Down the wallpapers / Teams backgrounds here ⬇

Auto-Triage Infrequent Country Alerts using MCAS & Power Automate

by Scott Muniz | Sep 8, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

By: Caroline Lee & Sebastien Molendijk

Update on where to find our Power Automate templates: we will post all of our templates on GitHub (https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-Cloud-App-Security/tree/master/Playbooks) including instructions on how to import the templates into your Power Automate instance. Comment below with any questions!

Welcome back to the Automation in Cloud App Security series with Sebastien & Caroline. For those of you who are reading for the first time, this series covers advanced scenarios for our Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) users; providing Power Automate flows to solve the most common customer asks the Customer Experience team sees today.  

Go check out our first blog to see how we auto-remediated information protection alerts https://aka.ms/MCAS/Auto-Blog. In today’s post, we will be covering how to use Power Automate in Cloud App Security to dismiss Infrequent Country alerts. 

The Infrequent Country Alert in Cloud App Security is a popular detection for many companies. The alert triggers when there is sign-in activity outside of normal user locations. For example, imagine you have an employee who normally works out of the New York corporate office but then you see there is a sign-in activity for that person from China, you probably want to investigate this type of alert. In MCAS, you can tune the policy by scoping it to specific users, groups and by the type of sign in activity (see below template).  

Activity from infrequent country template in MCAS 

We’ve also recently published an anomaly detection alerts investigation guide to aid administrators in distinguishing true positives vs. benign true positives vs. false positives. But what about when employees go on vacation? Or are travelling outside of the country for work? How do you manage the volume of alerts especially for large enterprises? 

We have developed a new flow in Power Automate to answer these questions. (Note: You will be able to select the template within the Power Automate gallery by searching for “Microsoft Cloud App Security.”) If you haven’t configured a Power Automate Flow in MCAS before, check out these steps in our documentation. So, how does this flow work? Essentially, when an infrequent country alert gets triggered, we’ll send it to Power Automate. In the flow, it will look at a couple of different details: 

1. The user profile (job title, department, email address, etc.) 
2. If the user has an out of office (OOO) message enabled 
3. Any groups the user is a part of 

Based off these details, we can set conditions to auto-resolve the alert or request further investigation. The logic will be: If the user has an OOO message, then resolve the alert. You could also add more conditions around the user groups. For example, if you have a user who is part of a sensitive group such as Security Administrators, you could add logic to say if the user has no OOO message and is in the Security Admin group, then you may want to investigate the alert. 

As folks start to take leave for vacation or staycation, this flow could help to save time in the alert investigation as admins will be able to focus on the most critical activities and lessen the sheer volume of alerts seen in MCAS. Keep an eye out for our next post and comment below if there are any other topics you’d like us to cover! 

New discounts on meeting and calling experiences in Microsoft Teams

by Scott Muniz | Sep 8, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

We have identified key trends that define how customers are using meeting and calling solutions and rethinking how your communications infrastructure can support long term resilience and productivity.

The post New discounts on meeting and calling experiences in Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

“Makers make magic” ? – The Intrazone podcast

by Scott Muniz | Sep 8, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

Like a rabbit out of the hat. An ace up their sleeve. Disappearing right before your eyes … OK, I think you get it. There are people out there that wield magic – technical magic – power at their fingertips. They take the ordinary and go beyond. They make Houdini look like he takes PowerNaps. The real difference is their willingness to share their secrets. Listen closely to the makers and the magic can be yours.

In this episode, Chris and I talk with Shane Young (Power Apps guru from PowerApps911) and Chris Kent (Office 365 Practice Lead at DMI) – maker magicians both – Shane a Power Apps sorcerer and Chris a wizard of lists. Throughout the discussion, we learn how makers make, the approach to making – which tools – what techniques, and how you, too, can be a maker.

Listen to podcast below (and then start making magic of your own)

Subscribe to The Intrazone podcast! And listen to episode 56 now + show links and more below.

Intrazone guests – clockwise, Shane Young (Power Apps guru | PowerApps911) and Chris Kent (Office 365 Practice Lead | DMI), with co-host, Mark Kashman (senior product manager | Microsoft).

Links to important on-demand recordings and articles mentioned in this episode:  

• Articles and sites
  • “The great migration of SharePoint Workflow to Power Automate” by John Liu
  • Microsoft Docs – The home for Microsoft documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals. 
  • Microsoft Tech Community Home
  • Stay on top of Office 365 changes
  • Listen to other Microsoft podcasts
• Events
  • GlobalCon3 [Sept.8-11.2020]
  • Microsoft 365 Saturday – Gurgaon [Sept.19.2020]
  • Microsoft Ignite [Sept.2020]| @MS_Ignite
• Hosts and guests
  • Shane Young | LinkedIn | Twitter | PowerApps911 [guest]
  • Chris Kent | LinkedIn |Twitter | DMI [guest]
  • Mark Kashman |@mkashman [co-host]
  • Chris McNulty |@cmcnulty2000 [co-host] 

Subscribe today!

Listen to the show! If you like what you hear, we’d love for you to Subscribe, Rate and Review it on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Be sure to visit our show page to hear all the episodes, access the show notes, and get bonus content. And stay connected to the SharePoint community blog where we’ll share more information per episode, guest insights, and take any questions from our listeners and SharePoint users (TheIntrazone@microsoft.com). We, too, welcome your ideas for future episodes topics and segments. Keep the discussion going in comments below; we’re hear to listen and grow.

Subscribe to The Intrazone podcast! And listen to episode 56 now.

Thanks for listening

The SharePoint and Power Platform teams wants you to unleash your magic, creativity, and productivity. And we will do this, together, one poof of magic at a time.

The Intrazone links

• Show page
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Play Music
• Spotify
• Pandora
• Stitcher
• Overcast
• TuneIn
• RadioPublic
• iHeart
• RSS

+ Listen to other Microsoft podcasts at aka.ms/microsoft/podcasts.

Left to right [The Intrazone co-hosts]: Chris McNulty, director PMM (SharePoint, #ProjectCortex – Microsoft) and Mark Kashman, senior product manager (SharePoint – Microsoft).

The Intrazone – a show about the Microsoft 365 intelligent intranet (https://aka.ms/TheIntrazone)

How to operationalize your data analytics pipelines

by Scott Muniz | Sep 8, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

Azure Synapse Analytics is an analytics platform that provides productive developer experiences such as the Synapse Studio bulk load wizard helping data engineers quickly get data ingested and datasets onboarded through a code-less experience. The platform also comes with other low-code authoring experiences for data integration where it is now even easier to take the next step and further orchestrate and operationalize loads in just a few clicks. You can use built-in data pipelines that are extremely flexible where you can customize them according to your requirements all within the Synapse studio for maximum productivity.

This how to guide walks you through how to quickly set up a continuous data pipeline that automatically loads data as the files arrive in your storage account of your SQL pool.

1. Generate your COPY statement within a stored procedure by using the Synapse Studio bulk load wizard.

2. Use familiar dynamic SQL syntax to parameterize the COPY statement’s storage account location. You can also generate the time of ingestion using default values within the COPY statement. Sample code:

CREATE PROC [dbo].[loadSales] @storagelocation nvarchar(100) AS

    DECLARE @loadtime nvarchar(30);
    DECLARE @COPY_statement nvarchar(4000);

    SET @loadtime = GetDate();
    SET @COPY_statement = 
        N'COPY INTO [dbo].[Trip] 
		(
			[DateID] 1, 
			[MedallionID] 2, 
			[HackneyLicenseID] 3, 
			[PickupTimeID] 4,
			[DropoffTimeID] 5,
			[PickupGeographyID] 6,
			[DropoffGeographyID] 7,
			[PickupLatitude] 8,
			[PickupLongitude] 9,
			[PickupLatLong] 10,
			[DropoffLatitude] 11,
			[DropoffLongitude] 12,
			[DropoffLatLong] 13,
			[PassengerCount] 14,
			[TripDurationSeconds] 15,
			[TripDistanceMiles] 16,
			[PaymentType] 17,
			[FareAmount] 18,
			[SurchargeAmount] 19,
			[TaxAmount] 20,
			[TipAmount] 21,
			[TollsAmount] 22,
			[TotalAmount] 23,
			[loadTime] default ''' + @loadtime + ''' 24
	)
		FROM '''  + @storagelocation + ''' 
		WITH (
			FIELDTERMINATOR=''|'',
			ROWTERMINATOR=''0x0A''
		) OPTION (LABEL = ''loadTime: ' + @loadtime + ''');';

        EXEC sp_executesql @COPY_statement;

3. Create a Synapse pipeline in the Synapse Studio with an event-based trigger for when a blob is created in your storage container and parameterize the blob path (folder path and file name) as part of the pipeline. Additional documentation on pipeline triggers is here.

Parameterized pipeline:

Event-based trigger:

Trigger parameters:

4. Add the stored procedure to a stored procedure activity in your pipeline where the stored procedure parameter is the blob path pipeline parameter and publish your pipeline to your workspace. Additional documentation on the stored procedure activity is here.

In just 4 steps, you have now created a data pipeline which automatically and continuously loads files as they land in your staging storage account location using the COPY statement in a stored procedure. You did not need to provision or integrate any event notification services such as Azure Event Grid or Azure Queue Storage to support this auto-ingestion workflow and there were minimal code changes.

Synapse pipelines are flexible where there is a range of configurations and customization you can set to address your scenarios. Here are some other considerations when operationalizing your data pipelines:

1. Add additional transformation logic for further processing within your stored procedure or create additional stored procedures (activities) in your pipeline
2. Instead of creating a stored procedure, you can leverage the pipeline COPY activity with the COPY statement. This will make your data pipeline authoring experience code-less. You can configure the COPY activity to ingest data based on blobs’ last modified date.
3. Use data flows where you can quickly use pre-defined templates for handling common ETL patterns such as SCD1 and SCD2 in your pipeline – code free dimensional and fact processing.
4. You can batch up files instead and leverage a schedule-based trigger. You can use a static storage location as your staging area to upload files. Note you may need to move and clean up files at the end of your pipeline to prevent duplicate loads if you follow this pattern – Synapse pipelines also has this capability built-in through the delete activity or move template.

For more information on Synapse data pipelines and getting started with data integration, visit the following documentation:

• List of supported data stores and file formats with Synapse pipelines
• COPY statement used to ingest data into a SQL database
• Getting started with the COPY statement and the Synapse Studio

Lab: Serverless Synapse – From Spark to SQL On Demand

by Scott Muniz | Sep 8, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

Documentation says:

“SQL on-demand is serverless, hence there is no infrastructure to setup or clusters to maintain. A default endpoint for this service is provided within every Azure Synapse workspace, so you can start querying data as soon as the workspace is created. There is no charge for resources reserved, you are only being charged for the data scanned by queries you run, hence this model is a true pay-per-use model.

If you use Apache Spark for Azure Synapse in your data pipeline, for data preparation, cleansing or enrichment, you can query external Spark tables you’ve created in the process, directly from SQL on-demand.” https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql/on-demand-workspace-overview

About Spark: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/spark/apache-spark-overview

“Apache Spark provides primitives for in-memory cluster computing. A Spark job can load and cache data into memory and query it repeatedly. In-memory computing is much faster than disk-based applications. Spark also integrates with multiple programming languages to let you manipulate distributed data sets like local collections. There’s no need to structure everything as map and reduce operations.”

Using Synapse  I have the intention to provide Lab loading data into Spark table and querying from SQL OD.

This was an option for a customer that wanted to build some reports querying from SQL OD.

You need:

1) A Synapse Workspace ( SQL OD will be there after the workspace creation)

2)Add Spark to the workspace

You do not need:

1) SQL Pool.

Step by Step

Launch Synapse Studio and create a new notebook. Add the following code ( phyton):

%%pyspark



from pyspark.sql.functions import col, when

df = spark.read.load('abfss://<container>@<storageAccount>.dfs.core.windows.net/folder/file.snappy.parquet', format='parquet')

df.createOrReplaceTempView("pysparkdftemptable")

Add some magic by include another cell and running Scala on it:

%%spark

spark.sql("CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS SeverlessDB")

val scala_df = spark.sqlContext.sql ("select * from pysparkdftemptable")

scala_df.write.mode("overwrite").saveAsTable("SeverlessDB.Parquet_file")

Run.

If everything ran successfully you should be able to see your new database and table under the Data Option:

Now it is the easy part. Query the table ( Right button -> New SQL Script -> Select):

Super quick and easy.

That is it!

Liliam C Leme

UK Engineer