Four new ways to simplify your work with Microsoft Teams and Power Automate

by Scott Muniz | Aug 20, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

Microsoft Teams can help people stay connected while working apart with capabilities like chat, meetings, and calling, but users often ask how it can help streamline the work they do. Fortunately, Teams and Microsoft Power Automate work seamlessly together to simplify how you and your team work – whether you’re on the Sales team, the Product team, the HR team, or just the office ping pong team.

Power Automate allows you to create low-code workflow automation for yourself and your entire team using logic-based building blocks, starting with a trigger that sets one or more actions in motion. The new “for a selected message” trigger is unlocking new ways to drive business processes, starting from a message in Teams. Below are four examples of how teams are doing this, but the possibilities are endless. Templates are now available for each of these scenarios to help you get started right away!

1. Sales teams: Convert a chat to a Sales opportunity
“Create an opportunity from a message” template
Creating a customer opportunity is a critical step in any Sales process, and often that opportunity starts with a conversation. Now Teams users can create an opportunity right from the conversation where it began.

When you build the workflow below using the “for a selected message” trigger, anyone in your team can easily create a Sales opportunity just by clicking the “…” on the right side of a message and selecting “Create Sales Opportunity”. Simply fill out a custom form, and the information you enter is automatically sent to your CRM system.

2. Project Management teams: Track project information where your team works
“Create an item from a message” template
A rich and open dialogue means that projects can happen faster, and nearly all projects require us to keep lists – whether that’s a project status, the plan for an event, or a list of materials to develop.

SharePoint lists are a great way to organize information and rich file types for you and your team, and now Teams users can easily add content to their SharePoint lists directly from chat with this new Power Automate trigger. Once the flow has been created, users can add critical data to their list right from a chat – for example, when they learn that a project deliverable has been received.

3. Product teams: Streamline product development
“Create a work item from a message” template
The product development process is complex and often relies on multiple teams working together. With so much collaboration and planning happening over chat, messages can be a great way to request or report new work items to your development team.

By combining the “for selected message” trigger with the Azure DevOps “create a work item” action, you can now use the message as the starting point to create a work item. All the necessary details can be added to Azure DevOps to provide more details for the work item.

4. Any team: Follow-up on important conversations
“Follow-up on a message” template
Many of us have been there – you receive an important message right as you’re about to start a meeting or are in the flow of important work. Now it’s easy to remind yourself to follow-up on an important message from a colleague at a later time, like after your Teams meeting or once you’ve finish working on an important document.

Building a simple “follow-up” flow will allow anyone on the team to create a custom message reminder just by clicking the “…” on the right-hand side of a message and specifying when they want to be reminded. The Flow bot will send a reminder and a link to the message right in Teams.

Check out the “for a selected message” documentation to learn more about this new capability. Of course the examples above are just scratching the surface of what is possible for you and your team to automate, so check out the Power Automate templates for Teams and learn to build your own flows to achieve even more. We’re excited to hear about what you build!

[Guest Blog] Navigating my own journey in tech

by Scott Muniz | Aug 20, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

This article was written by Microsoft Ignite 2020 Humans of IT student ambassador Ebonee Swann, a Computer Information Systems graduating senior from Grambling State University. This is the second article in a series featuring this year’s student ambassadors. Ebonee shares about how she is currently navigating her personal career journey in tech.

Meet Ebonee – this is her story:

Ebonee Swann – Grambling State University Computer Information Systems undergraduate and Microsoft Ignite 2020 Student Ambassador

I always knew at a very young age that I craved a passion for technology. The small things such as troubleshooting the Wi-Fi at my Mom’s house would excite me. It was something that I looked forward to outside of school and going to cheer practice. Everyone in my household knew if they had a tech problem, they could count on me. I knew growing up that was the direction I wanted to take, but I just didn’t know how I would get there. Eventually life began to hit, and it was time to choose the college that would give me the tools I needed for success.

What changed my aspirations on life?

Nelson Mandela once said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done”.  This has been my personal mantra since my high school graduation in 2016. I never knew where I would end up or which college I would attend until I tried my luck at Alabama State University. I started off as a computer science major and quickly knew that it was NOT the major for me. After a few classes, I realized that I was unhappy there, and that I wasn’t going in the right direction. I decided it was best if I sat out a semester. During this time, I evaluated my life goals and decided to come up with another plan.

After tedious research I just knew that the college I transferred to next would be my last – I did not want to have to keep transferring and become unsettled each time. The college I decided to attend was Grambling State University – enrolling as a computer science freshman. I know what you’re thinking: why was I once again going down the same road I was before I left school the first time? I did not what my options were, but I knew it was time to make a change for my life and break generational curses.

Once I enrolled, I began looking at different options to change my major and sought the help of friends who were Computer Information Systems majors and ultimately helped lead me in the right direction. It was a big adjustment since it was a major that includes marketing, management, and accounting. After the first semester of changing my major I saw the change within myself. I started to take school more seriously, gained valuable connections and built positive relationships with my professors. Grambling State’s motto is, “Where everybody is somebody“, and I never really understood the full meaning until I started to take my career plan more seriously. I knew at that very moment I was finally gaining the keys to success and would do everything to make the best out of it. I fell in love with my school and professors more because they started to pour into my life more. I then learned about the importance of networking and setting goals for a real tech career after college. Now that I had the tools, I needed it was time to put them into action.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it – the journey is not easy: I went through numerous interviews and rejections. However, I always viewed them as stepping stones for my next opportunity. I knew I had to be patient and remain humble even on days when I wanted to give up. 

Today, I am now a graduating senior at the phenomenal Grambling State University. I have been given so many amazing opportunities that will stick with me for a lifetime. Being chosen for the Microsoft Ignite Student Ambassador is an opportunity that I would never imagine getting and it shows me that other people see and value my hard work.

I want to leave you with these words as you think about your own tech journey, no matter what stage you are in life: Never give up on your dreams even if someone says they are too big.

I want to give a huge thank you to my GSU family for molding me into a powerful and ambitious woman who will help shape the future of tech. 

#HumansofIT

#StudentAmbassadors

#GramFam

#GramFam

#Igntite2020

Microsoft Threat Protection now uses more descriptive incident names

by Scott Muniz | Aug 20, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

The new incident naming feature in Microsoft Threat Protection now lets you understand an incident’s scope at a glance!

When you are looking at the incident queue and need to determine which incident you should look at next, hints about the content of the incident play an important role in making this choice. Giving incidents automatic names is complex because it encompasses a variety of different suspicious activities.

Our researchers have developed a state-of-the-art algorithm that automatically describes incidents with comprehensive names, leveraging the MITRE ATT&CK® categories we have for each alert. Instead of having numerical incident names like Incident 1234, you now see incident names like Multi-stage incident involving Discovery & Collection reported by multiple sources.

Now, analysts can quickly understand the scope of the incident right from the Microsoft Threat Protection incident queue. Having the incidents name and supporting data (like the number of endpoints affected, users affected, detection sources, categories, and more) in one view, analysts can make faster decisions based on the nature of the incident. This improvement saves analysts time and effort better spent investigating and remediating high-priority threats.

Here are some examples of incident names developed with the new algorithm:

• ‘Dirtelti’ backdoor was prevented on multiple endpoints
• Office process dropped and executed a PE file on multiple endpoints
• Multi-stage incident involving Initial access & Execution on one endpoint reported by multiple sources
• Ransomware activity
• Multi-stage incident involving Discovery & Command and control on one endpoint

To learn more about incident in Microsoft Threat Protection go to the following links:

• Inside Microsoft Threat Protection: Correlating and consolidating attacks into incidents
• Inside Microsoft Threat Protection: Mapping attack chains from cloud to endpoint
• Inside Microsoft Threat Protection: Attack modeling for finding and stopping lateral movement
• Inside Microsoft Threat Protection: Solving cross-domain security incidents through the power of correlation analytics

9 Back to School Updates for OneNote and Class Notebooks – August 2020

by Scott Muniz | Aug 20, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

With back to school coming in much of the world, we wanted to make sure that educators have the tools they need to be successful, whether they are working in a hybrid learning environment, remote learning, or in person. We’ve been listening to OneNote-loving educators and students around the world, and as always, we try and ensure that their needs are met with our tools.

1) More inclusive with OneNote Live Captions

As announced at the BETT conference earlier this year, OneNote will be adding a Live Captions feature which allows any student to connect OneNote to Microsoft Translator captions via a Join Code and receive the translation stream directly into the OneNote app.  This allows captions from the educator speaking to flow directly into OneNote for reading, while still allowing the student to take notes. In addition, the student can pause the captions, highlight portions, and then have the entire transcription saved as a page into OneNote. This feature will benefit all learners but especially those who may be hard of hearing or speak a different native language than the educator.  The private education-only preview rolls out in OneNote web next week to our Education Insider program.

2) Embed Adobe Spark Videos and Posts into OneNote

Educators love Adobe Spark, and they also love OneNote!  Adobe Spark lets students and educators transform their ideas into stunning visual stories. Today we are excited to announce support for embedding Adobe Spark Videos and Posts directly into OneNote. This will allow educators and students to interactively engage with the content.  We look to add additional Adobe Spark product support to embed in OneNote in the future.

Note: Adobe Spark posts currently work on OneNote Windows 10, OneNote Online, OneNote iPad and Mac. OneNote 2016 support will come in the future

You can find the entire list of OneNote Embed partners here.

3) Class Notebook and Microsoft Teams Updates

So many educators today are using Microsoft Teams in their in-person or virtual classroom, so ensuring the OneNote Class and Staff Notebook is a core part of that experience is critical.  Today we are excited to announce a set of improvements for OneNote inside of Teams.

Roster updates from School Data Sync automatically update the Class Notebook roster

In the past, when School Data Sync made roster updates from the students in the class, these updates would not happen until the educator went and clicked on the “Class Notebook” tab in the Class Team, which was a big complaint and time water.  Now, these SDS updates automatically flow to the OneNote Class Notebook, and the educator saves a bit of time! 

Set Channels to create sections in Collaboration Space or Content Library

This feature was inspired directly from Dr. David Kellermann of UNSW in Australia.  For the past few years, when creating a new channel, all Sections are created in the Collaboration Space, with no other option. Dr. Kellerman teaches his classes by using Teams channels as units, and always wanted to have any channel he created make a read-only Section in the Content Library of his Class Notebook. With this new update, the educator has the option to choose where new Sections go. THanks to Dr. Kellermann for the inspiration! This update will be found in a new option under “Manage Notebook” inside of Teams, and rolls out in late August.

A better First Run Experience for then “Notes” section in a Channel

To make it easier and more obvious that the “Notes” section in a new Channel is part of the Class Notebook or Staff, we’ve added a first run page that explicitly explains the link between the

Create a new OneNote page in the “New File” dialog of Assignments

When educators are creating assignments, or students are attaching work, it’s handy to be able to create a New File on the fly.  Currently, Teams Assignments supports creating a new Word, Excel or PowerPoint document.  We will be adding the ability to also create a blank OneNote page, that can easily be filled out, through the New File dialog.

Page Distribution speed improvements

One of the top requests we’ve had is to speed up Page Distribution when using the OneNote Class Notebook toolbar.  Our engineers have been hard at work over the summer, and we’ve made a large set of improvements that speed up page distribution on average by 65%!  Mileage may vary, but overall educators and students should experience a significant performance improvements when distributing pages.  Also be sure to follow out OneNote Best Practices  when using the Class Notebook toolbar.

Students and Educators get a notification when a page is distributed
A great benefit of using the Class Notebook inside of Teams is the Class Notebook bot.  We are making a new update that will allow any Educator using Page Distribution in the OneNote client, to ensure that all students get a notification in Teams after the page is distributed! This has been a top UserVoice request that we are glad to take care of. This notification will work for educators using the Class Notebook Toolbar in OneNote Windows 10, iPad, Web and Mac. 

The “Teacher Only” Section Group is enabled by default now

A common request from educators is to just enable the “Teacher Only” section group by default.  It takes extra clicks to go and do this after the Class or Staff Notebook is set up.  So we’ve recently made a change do this will always be enabled by default, and save educators a few less clicks.

For those of you that like lists, here are the updates in list format, with the dates as well:

1. Roster updates from School Data Sync automatically update the Class Notebook roster – live now
2. Page Distribution speed improvements – live now
3. The “Teacher Only” Section Group is enabled by default now – live now
4. A better First Run Experience for then “Notes” section in a Channel – live now
5. Embed Adobe Spark Videos and Posts into OneNote – live now
6. OneNote Live Captions – private beta rollouts to our Education Insiders this week
7. Set Channels to create sections in Collaboration Space or Content Library – end of August
8. Create a new OneNote page in the “New File” dialog of Assignments  – early September
9. Students and Educators get a notification when a page is distributed  – September

We hope you enjoy these new OneNote updates! Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or comments.

Mike Tholfsen

Principal Product Manager

Microsoft Education

@mtholfsen 

Achieve faster backups using tiered storage with DPM and MABS!

by Scott Muniz | Aug 20, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

Hi Everyone! Sujay here from the Program Management team for System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) and Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS)

While talking to DPM and MABS customers I come across many questions around the tiered storage requirement for storage pool. With this blog post I will try to answer the most important question Why tiered storage? and some of the frequently asked questions (FAQs) about using the tiered storage.

This post is going to be a long one, but I promise to be worth your time. And if you are looking for tldr version; Use tiered storage for DPM storage pool, period. 

Before I jump into the questions, I recommend you to get yourself familiarize with the following terminologies I have referenced multiple times in my blog.

• Introduction to Modern Backup Storage blog to understand more about Modern Backup Storage which was introduced with DPM 2016.
• Overview of Resilient File System (ReFS) to understand advantages of ReFS
• Block cloning on ReFS
• Storage Space overview

Note: I might use DPM at many places but everything in this blog is applicable for MABS as well. Make sure you are using MABS v3 with UR1.

Let’s get started.

Why the backup jobs take longer time on Modern Backup Storage over the period?

During the backup process one of the important steps is to take snapshot of the replica on the DPM server to create Recovery Point. This is done using block cloning feature of ReFS. Over a period of time, as daily/weekly backup jobs run and snapshots are taken, it causes increased fragmentation of the replica. Also, with each clone operation the size of the metadata is increases The block cloning operation is metadata intensive. During each block cloning operation, the files metadata and global ref count table would be read from the disk to the memory. This would result in high amount of I/O operations to underlying storage.

Let’s take an example of 400GB replica size (the replica contains the backup data stored on DPM server for specific data source). We observed that with the worst possible fragmentation, the metadata size can go up to 4% of the replica size, which would be 16GB in this case. This would result to read of 16GB of metadata during every cloning operation. If we assume ReFS cluster size of 4K, total I/O operations required for single cloning operation would be around 4 million. With the standard disk (HDD) of around 200 IOPS, this can take almost 20K seconds or around 5 hours to just clone the replica. This is the worst-case scenario – we are assuming all IOPS are random and worst possible fragmentation. This may not be always the case with your environment.

How does the tiered storage solve this problem?

With DPM 2019, we enhanced MBS to take advantage of hybrid storage aka Tiered Storage feature in ReFS configured using Storage Spaces. ReFS divides volume into two logical storage known as tiers. These tiers can have their own drive and resilience types, allowing each tier to optimize for either performance or capacity. Once these tiers are configured, ReFS uses them to deliver fast storage for hot data and capacity-efficient storage for cold data. DPM uses this in a slightly different way to improve the overall backup performance.

DPM (with the help of ReFS), uses the performance tier (SSD) to store entire file system metadata which is required for block cloning operation. This improves the cloning performance to a great extent. If we take the same example as above and take the cheapest SSD available in the market, it offers 10K IOPS. The cloning time would cut down drastically to around 6 to 7 minutes. The tiered storage is the cost-efficient solution offered by ReFS to cater to high IOPS demanding application and DPM makes the most out of it by using just the small size of SSD.

What should be the size of SSD tier and Why?

As mentioned above in the worst possible fragmentation scenario the metadata size of the file system can grow up to 4% of the replica size. And since DPM requires SSD tier to store only ReFS metadata (which is required for cloning operation) the SSD size of 4% of total DPM storage is recommended.

Do I need to upgrade my server or external storage if it doesn’t support SSD?

The storage for DPM pool could be directly attached storage (Internal) or the external storage like SAN storage.

If you are using internal storage you need to connect SSD to the DPM server and if your server doesn’t have provision for SSD you can also use PCIe based SSDs.

If you are using external storage (like SAN device) and if your storage supports SSD you can add the SSD to external storage. If that’s not possible you can still use the SSD connected directly to the DPM server (including PCIe based SSD) in combination with HDDs from external storage to create tiered storage.

What if my DPM server is running on Virtual Machine? Can I use tiered storage on VM?

Yes. Configuring tiered storage using Windows Storage Spaces is supported on Virtual Machine.

The VM should have virtual SSD carved out of Physical SSD on the Hyper-V host. The Hyper-V host can have the physical SSDs connected locally or from external storage. While configuring the Windows Storage Space on Virtual Machine, you need to make sure that Media Type for the disk are configured correctly.

Use the following command to set the appropriate Media Type:

Set-PhysicalDisk -UniqueId <UniqueId String> -MediaType <HDD|SSD>

How can I configure the tiered storage?

Please refer to our documentation here which provides the step by step guidance to configure tiered storage. Additionally, I strongly recommend you to review the pre-requisites for Storage Spaces here.

What resiliency option can be configured for tiered volume in DPM?

DPM supports all the resiliency option supported by Windows Storage Spaces: Simple, Mirror and Parity. The Storage Space pre-requisites document explains the pros and cons of each option here.

For DPM, you can also use the combination of the resiliency option to optimize performance or capacity.

Note: When you are configuring Storage Spaces, you should not configure any resiliency (RAID) at hardware layer. This is pre-requisite for the Storage Spaces.

What is the recommended sector size for tiered storage?

We strongly recommend keeping the sector size to 4096. And to avoid multiplexing / demultiplexing of IO operations, the sector size should be consistent across all the layers from ReFS to storage hardware.

Why is Windows Server 2019 recommended to install DPM 2019 or MABS v3?

As you know DPM is highly dependent on Resilient File System (ReFS). Windows Server 2019 brings various enhancements to ReFS which are not available with Windows Server 2016. Also, it is important that you always install the latest Cumulative Update for Windows Server 2019 which brings additional fixes to ReFS. For example, recently the January 23, 2020—KB4534321 update had performance improvement for ReFS block cloning operation.

Is there any alternative to improve the backup job performance?

Although we highly recommend you to migrate to tiered storage, there is another way which can help you to improve the backup performance. If the backup jobs are taking longer time only for specific data sources, to reduce the fragmentation, you can move the data source to another volume where you have enough free space. This will allow to store the replica in more contiguous space which should result in reduced fragmentation. Remember having enough free space on the volume is important to get contiguous space. While this should improve the performance but over the period as the fragmentation increases you might see degraded performance.

With DPM 2019 UR2, you can use optimized migration to migrate only active replica to new volume while retaining the older recovery points on the existing volume. Read more about how to migrate data source to new volume here.

How do I know the current fragmentation status of the replica?

We have added –CheckReplicaFragmentation parameter to Copy-DPMDatasourceReplica PowerShell cmdlet. This allows you to check the fragmentation status of the replica for the Data Source.

Note: To use this cmdlet you need to have at least UR1 for DPM 2019 or UR9 for DPM 2016.

I hope this was helpful information and now you know why using tiered storage for DPM storage will improve the backup job performance. So, start using tiered storage and let us know how your experience is. While I have tried to cover most frequently asked questions in this blog, I am sure there will be still more questions. Please post your questions in the comments and I will try to answer them as best as I can.

-Sujay and rest of the DPM team at Microsoft

Microsoft 365 & SharePoint PnP Weekly – Episode 92

by Scott Muniz | Aug 20, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

In this weekly discussion of latest news and topics around Microsoft 365, hosts – Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft), Waldek Mastykarz (Rencore), are joined by Yannick Reekmans – MVP, Microsoft 365 Solution Architect and developer at Qubix.    

Topics raised during this session:  

• Customers’ shifting priorities, Microsoft’s shifting product capabilities, and Partner monetization opportunities. 
• Discussion on purpose-built apps vs delivering experiences
• Teams vs SharePoint extensibility
• Value-add vs branded UI and strategies for Customer migration to cloud and for staying up-to-date on latest technologies. 
• Fundamental approach – lead with Teams and add SharePoint for news and Intranet.  

In this episode, 19 recently released articles from Microsoft and the PnP Community are highlighted.

• Action:   Register – Free Virtual Conference on Microsoft 365 topics on September 1^st  | aka.ms/PnPVirtualConference

This episode was recorded on Monday, August 17, 2020.

• Microsoft 365 SharePoint PnP Weekly – Episode 92

Did we miss your article? Please use #PnPWeekly hashtag in the Twitter for letting us know the content which you have created. 

As always, if you need help on an issue, want to share a discovery, or just want to say: “Job well done”, please reach out to Vesa, to Waldek or to your PnP Community.

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