by Scott Muniz | Jul 15, 2020 | Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The Microsoft Biz Apps for Women community continues to grow in Asia Pacific – pandemic or not.
Originally launched two years ago in Australia’s largest city, The Sydney Microsoft Business Applications Women Meetup has since grown to more than 300 members across multiple locations. Inspired by these efforts, The ASEAN Microsoft BizApps UG Women in Tech event launched in June to further support women in the region.
BizApps MVP and Sydney group organizer Olena Grischenko said she wanted to create a safe place for women to grow and openly discuss ideas. “I wanted to see more women actively engaged in the community and started with myself. I wanted to see more women being recognised for the work they do and simply more women connected and visible in the space,” Olena said.
The purpose of the community is to empower, promote, and support women involved with Microsoft Business Applications to speak at conferences and other events. They also run study groups to help people to prepare for certifications.
The group – whose committee includes Linda Do (Microsoft Product Marketing Manager), Abby (Mi) Kong (Dynamics 365 Applications Specialist), Gill Walker (Founder and Managing Director at Opsis), Karen Scott Davie (Microsoft MTC and Senior Consultant), and Katherine Woods (Dynamics 365 Consultant) – has since expanded to Melbourne and Auckland, New Zealand.
Further, the group recently enjoyed being only one of four community groups invited to set up a booth at Microsoft Ignite in February.
Usually, the group can be found on the first Thursday of every month at the Microsoft Reactor in Sydney. The monthly meetup, however, has recently been using Office 365 and Microsoft Teams to stay connected during the coronavirus pandemic. Recent virtual topics covered by the group include “The Seven Deadly Sins of Dynamics 365 Training” and “Tactics to Surviving Corona Disruptions and Staying Connected.”
“Although we miss our live events, I have to admit there are some good things which happened to us, too,” Olena said. “The most important thing is that we got closer to our New Zealand peers. We share the audience and actively interact with each other, especially on the leadership level.”
Supporting and promoting Asian Pacific Women in BizApps grew even further thanks to the efforts of another group in Singapore. Manonmani VS, Geetha Chockalingam, and Jeevarajan Kumar – in conjunction with Panjaporn Vittayalerdpun from Microsoft and other ASEAN BizApps UG leads – organized the ASEAN Microsoft BizApps UG Women in Tech event on June 13 to empower all women in the ecosystem to effectively use the platform for a better tomorrow.
More than 180 participated in this Women in Tech event via Microsoft Teams and learnt practical information of Power Platform and Dynamics 365, career stories of women in leadership, and use cases.
Coorganizer and MVP Jeevarajan said the team wanted to inspire and encourage all women interested in BizApps to be “part of us, ride, and rise with us.”
“There has been much less participation from women in all past community meetups. This meetup had more new women participants and all women speakers highlighted their journey – which inspired not only women but also men to know more about the platform and other Microsoft initiatives around this platform,” Jeevarajan said.
Eleven women speakers including 4 MVPs and 4 MSFTs spoke on a variety of topics with regional relevance. For example, New Zealand MVP Elaiza Benitez presented on “Tackling an NZ use case with AI Builder Forms Processing”. Moreover, Australian MVP Ee Lane Yu spoke about building trivia using “PVA Bot, Adaptive Cards and Teams”, Indian MVP Roohi Shaikh delved into moving Power Apps Biz Logic to the Cloud for better results, and Sri Lankan MVP for Microsoft Azure Hansamali Gamage demonstrated how to create a payment reminder using Power Apps, Excel, and Azure Functions.
Hansamali said she was excited to take part in an event which focused on inspiring women to improve their day-to-day work. “Since it’s all about women speakers, I was very thrilled to be part of it,” she said.
Check out the Microsoft User Group Singapore YouTube channel to see presentations from the day. For more information on the Sydney Microsoft Business Applications Women community, visit their Meetup page.
by Scott Muniz | Jul 15, 2020 | Azure, Microsoft, Technology, Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Initial Update: Wednesday, 15 July 2020 19:49 UTC
We are aware of issues within Application Insights and are actively investigating. Globally 17% of customers may not be able to access Live Metrics stream in Azure portal.
- Work Around: None
- Next Update: Before 07/15 22:00 UTC
We are working hard to resolve this issue and apologize for any inconvenience.
-Sindhu
by Scott Muniz | Jul 15, 2020 | Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Grab your coffee or tea and join us for a half-day of conversations with developers from the community on pressing topics for frontend developers, such as building inclusive and accessible web applications, static sites, serverless, and much more.
This event will packed with great content on static web apps, serverless applications, a discussion panel on working remotely, and finally a workshop on a few of the frameworks offered in Azure Static Web Apps! See the full event agenda at https://aka.ms/createfrontend.
We will even have some fun stuff for kids too! Don’t miss this FREE Event!
by Scott Muniz | Jul 15, 2020 | Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft Rocket, an open-source project from Microsoft Research, provides cascaded video pipelines that combined with Live Video Analytics from Azure Media Services, makes it easy and affordable for developers to build video analytics applications in their IoT solutions. Unprecedented advances in computer vision and machine learning have opened opportunities for video analytics applications that are of wide-spread interest to society, science, and business. While computer vision models have become more accurate and capable, they are also becoming resource-hungry and expensive for 24/7 analysis of video. As a result, live video analytics across multiple cameras also means a large computational footprint on premises built with a good amount of expensive edge compute hardware (CPU, GPU etc.).
Total cost of ownership (TCO) for video analytics is an important consideration and pain point for our customers. With that in mind, we integrated Live Video Analytics from Azure Media Services and Microsoft Rocket (from Microsoft Research) to enable an order-of-magnitude improvement in throughput per edge core (frame per second analyzed per CPU/GPU core), while maintaining the accuracy of the video analytics insights.
In a previous blog, we introduced Azure Live Video Analytics (LVA), a state-of-the-art platform to capture, record, and analyze live videos and publish the results (video and/or video analytics) to Azure services (in the cloud and/or on the edge). With Live Video Analytics’ flexible live video workflows, developers are now empowered to analyze video with a specialized AI model of their choice, and build truly hybrid (cloud + edge) applications that can analyze live video in the customer’s environment and combine video analytics on their camera streams with data from other IoT sensors and/or business data to build enterprise-grade solutions.
What is Microsoft Rocket?
Microsoft Rocket is a video analytics system that makes it easy and affordable for anyone with a video stream to obtain intelligent and actionable outputs from video analytics. Microsoft Rocket provides cascaded video pipelines for efficiently processing live video streams. In the cascaded video pipeline, a decoded frame is first analyzed with a relatively inexpensive light Deep Neural Network (DNN) like Tiny YOLO. A heavy DNN such as YOLOv3 is invoked only when the light DNN is not sufficiently confident, thus leading to efficient GPU usage. You can plug in any ONNX, TensorFlow, or Darknet DNN model in Microsoft Rocket. You can also augment the cascaded pipeline with a simpler CPU-based motion filter based on OpenCV background subtraction, as shown in the figure below.
In the cascaded video analytics pipeline in the above figure, decoded video frames are filtered first using background subtraction detection and focused on a line of interest in the frame, before calling even the low-resource light DNN detection. Frames requiring further processing are passed through a heavy DNN detector.
Rocket plus Live Video Analytics’ cascaded video analytics pipelines lead to considerable efficiency when processing video streams (as we will quantify shortly). By filtering out frames with limited relevant information and being judicious about invoking resource-intensive operations on the GPU, it allows the analytics to not only keep up with the frame-rates of the incoming video stream, but also pack the analysis of more video analytics pipelines on an edge compute box.
Up to 17X improvement in efficiency!
We benchmarked our performance and compared it against naïve video analytics pipelines that execute the Yolov3 DNN on each frame of the video. As shown in the graph below, Rocket plus Live Video Analytics cascaded pipeline is up to nearly 17X more efficient in its processing, bumping up the video analytics pipeline’s processing rate from 10 frames/second with the Yolov3 DNN to over 200 frames/second. Benchmark results across the NVIDIA T4 (which is available in Azure Stack Edge), K80, and Tesla P100 GPUs show that the gains in efficiency hold across the different GPU classes. Further, by carefully tuning simple knobs for downsizing and sampling frames, the video analytics rate goes up to nearly 700 frames/second in our benchmarks with little loss in accuracy (as shown in the tables below).
As a result of these efficiency improvements, an edge compute box that can process only three video streams in parallel when the YoloV3 object detection model is executed on each frame, goes up all the way to processing 17 video streams in parallel with Rocket plus Live Video Analytics’ cascaded pipelines (with the requirement to process at the rate of at least 10 frames/second for acceptable accuracy, which we have seen in our prior engagements on traffic video analytics).
Benchmark results of Live Video Analytics and Rocket containers, with improvement factors marked alongside each bar. Live Video Analytics plus Rocket achieves ~17X higher processing rates (measured in frames/second) compared to naïve solutions that run Yolov3 DNN on each frame of the video. We measure the performance of two cascaded modes of Rocket after background subtraction (BGS): “Full Cascade” (BGS → Light DNN → Heavy DNN) and “Heavy Cascade” (BGS →Heavy DNN). In fact, when we count the cars on the freeway, we can also use just BGS alone for counting as the freeway lanes are unlikely to contain any other objects (and thus requires no confirmation from the DNNs of the objects being cars). The choice of the pipeline and parameters is video-specific.
Impact of varying the frame resolution and frame sampling on the processing rates. Note that for all the experiments in the table above, there was no drop in the accuracy of the video analytics.
Check out the code and take it for a spin!
You can now take advantage of the open-source reference app with extensive instructions to build and deploy Live Video Analytics and Rocket containers for highly efficient live video analytics applications on the edge (as shown in the architecture figure below). The project repository contains helpful Jupyter notebooks as well as a sample video file for easy testing of an object counter for various object categories crossing a line of interest in the video.
The above figure shows the architecture where the Azure Live Video Analytics container works in tandem with Microsoft Rocket’s container (with cascaded video analytics).
We also open-source
Microsoft Rocket’s cascaded pipeline for video analytics. This should allow for bringing in your own DNN models, adding efficiency improvements, and expanding the video analytics capabilities beyond the (line-of-interest based) object counter included in the code.
Check out the
source code of Microsoft Rocket, make your custom modifications for video analytics, and let us know your feedback! We have already tested it with many real-world use cases (e.g., for
road safety and efficiency), and look forward to hearing about your deployment experiences!
Contributors: Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Yuanchao Shu, Mustafa Kasap, Avi Kewalramani, Milan Gada, Victor Bahl
by Scott Muniz | Jul 15, 2020 | Azure, Microsoft, Technology, Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Machine learning is a complex and task heavy art, be it cleaning data, creating new models, deploying models, managing a model repository, or automating the entire CI/CD pipeline for machine learning.
As more companies embark on the journey of machine learning in everything they do, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning provides them with enterprise-grade capabilities to accelerate the machine learning lifecycle and empowers developers and data scientists of all skill levels to build, train, deploy, and manage models responsibly and at scale.
Azure Machine Learning studio is the web user interface of Azure Machine Learning, enabling data scientists to complete their end-to-end machine learning lifecycle, from cleaning and labeling data, to training and deploying models using cloud scalable compute, in a single enterprise-ready tool.
We are excited to announce that Azure Machine Learning studio is now generally available worldwide, supporting 18 languages and over 30 locales!
Azure Machine Learning studio caters to all skill levels, with authoring tools such as the automated machine learning user interface to train and deploy models in a click of a button, and the drag and drop designer to create ML pipelines using a visual interface. All resources and assets created during the ML process – notebooks, models, pipelines, are all available for team collaboration under one roof.
With this release, studio is even more comprehensive and easy to use
Notebooks: Intellisense, checkpoints, tabs, editing without compute, updated file operations, improved kernel reliability, and many more. Read more about Azure machine learning studio notebooks here.
Notebooks are integrated into Azure Machine Learning studio
Experimentation: Compare multiple runs graphically using an improved charting visualization experience including chart smoothing, displaying aggregated data and more.
Charts and metrics for tracking and analyzing runs
Security: Granular Role Based Access Controls (RBAC) are now supported (in preview) out of the box for the most common actions in your studio workspace. Specific actions or controls will now be hidden based on your role assignment automatically as setup by your IT Admins.
Compute: Compute instance has tons of improvements in quality, reliability, availability, provisioning latency, and user experience:
New enterprise readiness and administrator capabilities:
- REST API and CLI support to help automate creation and management of compute instance
- ARM template support for provisioning compute instance with sample template documented and downloadable from UI
- Ability for admin to create compute instance on behalf of other users and assign to them through ARM template and REST API. Data scientists do not need to have create/delete RBAC permissions and can access Jupyter, JupyterLab, RStudio, use compute instance from integrated notebooks, and can start/stop/restart compute instances (this is in preview).
- Validating user subnet NSG rules in virtual network for improved compute instance creation.
- Encryption in transit using TLS 1.2
More information available in the updated compute creation panel
Designer (preview): Improved performance and reliability. Updates to user experience and new features:
- New graph engine, with new-style modules. Modules have colored side bars to show the status and can be resized.
- New asset library, to split Datasets, Modules, Models into 3 tabs
- Output setting. Enable user to set module output datastores.
- New modules:
- Computer Vision: Support image dataset preprocessing, and train PyTorch models (ResNet/DenseNet), and score for image classification
- Recommendation: Support Wide&Deep recommender
New style to Modules in the drag-and-drop Designer
Data Labeling: Create, manage, and monitor labeling projects directly inside the studio web experience. Coordinate data, labels, and team members to efficiently manage labeling tasks. Supports image classification, either multi-label or multi-class, and object identification with bounding boxes.
The machine learning assisted labeling feature (Preview) lets you trigger automatic machine learning models to accelerate the labeling task.
Learn more about Azure Machine Learning data labeling in this blog post.
Data labeling updated style and machine learning assisted labeling
Fairlearn (preview): Azure Machine Learning is used for managing the artifacts in your model training and deployment process.
With the new fairness capabilities, users can store and track their models’ fairness (disparity) insights in Azure Machine Learning studio, easily share their models’ fairness learnings among different stakeholders. Beyond logging fairness insights within Azure Machine Learning run history, users can load Fairlearn’s visualization dashboard in studio to interact with mitigated or original models’ predictions and fairness insights, select a pleasant model, and register/deploy the model for scoring time.
Fairlearn visualization now available as preview in the studio
Automated machine learning user interface (preview) Automated machine learning is the process of automating the time-consuming, iterative tasks of machine learning model development to enable non data scientists to operationalize their machine learning models.
The new Data Guardrails helps fix and alert users of potential data issues. The model details tab includes key information around the best model and the run. There is more control over which visualizations are generated – choose a metric of interest and visualizations pertaining to that metric will display.
Data guardrails in automated machine learning will alert for issues in the data and even fix some of them
Continuing the journey together
Our customers inspire us to continue the journey, building together experiences that make machine learning easier to use, productive, and fun!
Send us your feedback
Use the feedback panel to share your thoughts with us
Feedback panel to share your thoughts
by Scott Muniz | Jul 15, 2020 | Azure, Microsoft, Technology, Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
By: Gourav Bhardwaj (VMware), Trevor Davis (Microsoft) and Jeffrey Moore (VMware)
Challenge
When moving to Azure VMware Solution (AVS) customers may want to maintain their operational consistency with their current 3rd party networking and security platforms. The types of 3rd party platforms could include solutions from Cisco, Juniper, or Palo Alto Networks and the means for connectivity is independent of the NSX-T Service Insertion/Network Introspection certification process for vSphere or AVS. The following is a use case based on an actual customer deployment.
Solution
The Azure VMware Solution environment allows access to the following VMware management components:
- vCenter User Interface (UI)
- NSX-T Manager User Interface (UI)
Within this architecture design, the uplink of the 3rd party appliance can be connected to a segment that is attached to the NSX-T “Tier 1” router while the individual or trunked downlinks of the appliance will support the connectivity of the Virtual Machine (VM) workloads which is similar to the On-Premises deployment model as depicted in the following diagram:
Diagram 1: Deployment Model for Connectivity of a 3rd Party Appliance with NSX-T
Once the appliance is attached to the NSX-T “Tier 1” router, static routes need to be configured to direct traffic through the 3rd Party appliance. Within the NSX-T Manager UI, the customer has the ability to create these static routes on the NSX-T “Tier 1” router which will assist in the network traffic direction through the 3rd Party appliance and to the customer’s VM workloads within AVS. Once the static routes are created, they can be redistributed within the dynamic routing protocol, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).
This would allow for the static route information to be dynamically sent from the NSX-T “Tier 0” router through the uplink to the Top of Rack (ToR) platform and eventually, to the Azure Express Route backbone which will allow for the end-to-end connectivity from the customer’s locally attached On-Premises Express Route service to the AVS environment. This approach would provide a means to maintain the operational consistency between what is currently On-Premises and the Azure VMware Solution environment.
Diagram 2: Operational Consistency Deployment Model of 3rd Party Appliance in Azure VMware Solution
An additional consideration for this design is related to the location of the VM’s within the cluster and the potential vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) event which attempts to load balance the VM’s across the ESXi hosts within a cluster via vMotion based on available resources. During such as event, the 3rd Party appliance may reside on one ESXi host while the VM workload resides on another ESXi host. Within a customer’s On-Premises data center, this situation can be resolved by stretching the VLAN’s on the ToR switch that are associated to the uplinks and downlinks attached to the 3rd Party platform which would provide connectivity independent of which ESXi host the platforms and VM’s reside. Within Azure VMware Solution, this needs to occur as well using NSX Segments or vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS).
Once the solution is verified based on these mentioned topics, the customer is able to consume the 3rd Party platform within Azure VMware Solution in the same way as the On-Premises data center environment which will align with the requirement for operational consistency between On-Premises and AVS for services such as Disaster Recovery.
Author Bio’s:
Gourav Bhardwaj
Staff Cloud Solutions Architect (VMware)
VCDX 76 (VCDX-xx)
Digital and workspace transformation expert; Speaker at conferences and workshops.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vcdx076/
Trevor Davis
Azure VMware Solutions, Sr. Technical Specialist (Microsoft)
Twitter: @vTrevorDavis
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevorpdavis/
Jeffrey Moore
Staff Cloud Solutions Architect (VMware)
3xCCIE (#29735 – RS, SP, Wireless), CCDE (2013::20)
Focused on incubation and acceleration efforts for Azure VMware Solution (AVS).
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jjtm/
Twitter: @Jeffrey_29735
by Scott Muniz | Jul 15, 2020 | Azure, Microsoft, Technology, Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
One of Azure’s largest online conferences returned even bigger this year as Brazil’s technical community rallied to “uncomplicate” all things cloud.
The fifth edition of Uncomplicating Azure – or Descomplicando o Azure – expanded from one to two weeks thanks to the support of more than 40 expert presentations on Cloud, Dev, Data, AI, IoT, Productivity and more.
The online conference from June 15-26 expanded farther than South America’s largest country to include speakers from 11 countries. So far, the event’s 35 hours of content has received 28,000 views and counting.
MVP and event organizer Rubens Guimarães said the conference sought to connect communities, people, cultures, and knowledge through digital channels in real-time.
“Participating in communities is something that requires effort, constant learning, time, and dedication, but it is very rewarding when colleagues come to you to talk about having earned a new certification through a lecture tip or getting a new job or even solving a problem of project,” Rubens said. “Being part of communities is something that completes my daily life, strengthening me as an individual in society.”
The ability to connect different people of different backgrounds was a particular highlight, Rubens said, with speakers hailing from Russia, India, USA, Argentina, Chile, and other countries. The event’s multi-platform nature enabled for the addition of subtitles in several languages.
Especially in the context of Brazil’s ongoing battle against the pandemic, the conference served as a meeting ground for members of the technical community to reconnect with each other and the wider world.
“As usual, being part of the Microsoft Community is incredible – and even now with this complicated situation, Brazilians can keep warm and alive through webinars,” said Brazilian Sara Barbosa, who previously served as an MVP for Office Apps & Services before recently joining Microsoft as an FTE. “The energy and content each speaker shared were great. Even though Descomplicando o Azure has a focus on Azure, the diversity of presentations allowed customers, enthusiasts, and community folks to learn about a variety of Microsoft technologies such as SQL, Power Platform, and others.”
Similarly, Brazilian MVP for Data Platform Rodrigo Crespi reinforced the benefit of consistently learning from other like-minds at home and abroad. “Being part of a technical community allows me to meet and interact with the brightest minds in IT,” he said. “There were several important moments, but I highlight my great satisfaction in sharing the little of my knowledge with various people around the world.” Brazilian MVP for Data Platform Fabricio Lima agreed that the event further developed his professional skillset.
Irish-based MVP speaker Alexandre Malavasi praised the sheer breadth and depth of the conference speakers, noting that the diversity of themes meant any audience from students to company managers would find something of use.
“It is extremely rare to see an event that involves so many speakers, including those with international participation, being completely free to the community,” Alexandre said. “I am sure that the event contributed for IT professionals, in general, to understand more accurately the potential, extent, and possibilities that Azure can provide for the development of robust, resilient, high-performance, and cost-effective applications.”
US-based MVP Gaston Cruz said the conference’s international perspective would be useful to many going forward. “This event not only allowed people to learn but also to get a lot of new ideas of how to implement cutting edge technologies and leverage them to support business needs and transform them in the worldwide context that we are in now.”
Argentine-based MVP Sebastián Pérez said he enjoyed the engagement of attendees, with some even following up after his presentation for more information. Meanwhile, German-based MVP Reconnect member Thiago Lunardi said he simply enjoyed being back in the Microsoft community with other thought leaders. “For me, [the highlight] was the minutes before going live. I was out of the spotlight for over 2 years, and the feeling to be back contributing was like I had never left it behind. It’s great to be part of Microsoft community, just great.”
While Uncomplicating Azure is an annual event, Rubens said the organizing team was already looking for an adaptation to be held every six months. Check out the YouTube channel to watch presentations from the conference.
by Scott Muniz | Jul 15, 2020 | Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
With three months until support for Office 2016 for Mac and Office 2010 ends this October, now is the time to transition to Microsoft 365 Apps. We know that transitions like this can be challenging – we’ve heard your concerns about app compatibility, managing configurations and the installation process, and getting users up and running on new devices even while working remotely. In the most recent update to the Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise guided tour, we’ve included a few new videos that show how you can use Microsoft’s cloud deployment tools to address these concerns. Keep reading – and watch the videos – to learn more about these tools.
App Compatibility
Your apps – whether they’re custom line-of-business or just apps from other sources – need to keep working once you’ve upgraded to Microsoft 365 Apps. That’s why we offer the Microsoft Desktop App Assure service, which pledges that if you encounter app compatibility issues with any eligible Windows 10 or Microsoft 365 services, we’ll help you resolve them at no additional cost.
Managing configuration and installation
Every organization is unique, and software installation, configuration, and update processes must be tailored to fit your needs. The Office Customization Tool simplifies preparations and provides granular control over the installation process, with configuration settings grouped into intuitive categories. Easily deploy Office to fit the needs of your organization, from different languages to application preferences.
Simplifying deployment for remote workers
Microsoft’s suite of cloud provisioning tools simplifies and accelerates the deployment process for IT admins and end-users – even when they’re not working in the same location. Learn more about empowering remote workers with Microsoft 365 on Microsoft Docs.
With these tools, we’ve made it simpler for IT to deploy Microsoft 365 Apps. Find out more about how to get started – and the tools available to help – at the Deployment guide for Microsoft 365 Apps. Still have questions? Ask us directly during the Microsoft Office End of Support AMA on September 9, 2020, 9-10 AM Pacific.
by Scott Muniz | Jul 15, 2020 | Azure, Microsoft, Technology, Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
AI and Machine Learning techniques are changing the ways industries process data. And one of the most exciting developments is the ability to process at the edge, next to cameras, sensors, or other systems generating that data. This allows you to get insights right away, without needing to send everything to the cloud first – saving you bandwidth and getting results faster.
We designed Azure Stack Edge for exactly these situations. It’s an extension of the Azure cloud that lets you run analysis locally, but still controlled and managed from the cloud. So, you can deploy and monitor from the cloud, but have everything running at your site, right where your data is generated. Whether that’s a grocery store improving operations, a hospital improving efficiency in the Operating Room, or cities looking to improve traffic safety and efficiency.
One of the cool things about Azure Stack Edge is you can install it, and then have it analyze data from your existing systems. This opens up all sorts of new opportunities you might not expect. For example, airports have big existing scanners checking luggage for dangerous items. But as part of conservation efforts, they also want to check for illegal animal parts. This can reduce poaching and improve environment sustainability. With Azure Stack Edge you have those scanners do double duty. They can continue to do their normal work looking for dangerous items, and also send the scans to Azure Stack Edge to run AI models designed to detect other items. There’s a new Microsoft Mechanics video that highlights this use case and how it uses Azure Stack Edge as a platform to run locally. Definitely check out the video to get the full story.
If your business is looking to do AI analysis at the edge, Azure Stack Edge is a great solution. It’s part of Azure, so there’s nothing to buy. You sign up like any other Azure service and we send you a server and bill you monthly on your normal Azure bill. It has built in ML acceleration hardware, and works with Microsoft’s container deployment systems. Read more about Azure Stack Edge here, or order one from the Azure Portal.
by Scott Muniz | Jul 15, 2020 | Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
[Co-authored by @Susan Hanley and @Mark Kashman with guidance from @Melissa Torres]
Having a solid information architecture (IA) is an important prerequisite for realizing a well-maintained and well-performing intranet. Good IA helps people find what they need and accomplish the tasks they want to complete – in a way that makes sense to them. A great IA helps improve user adoption, satisfaction, and productivity, reduce IT cost, reduce information overload, and minimize governance compliance and bad information risk.
Great IA takes good planning. It requires knowledge of the domain or content, understanding the user and user experiences, and awareness of approaches and best practices in Microsoft SharePoint. An important best practice is providing a consistent experience for everyone.
SharePoint powers your entire intelligent intranet and the intranet architecture (IA) is vital. The above diagram references logical site groupings and adherence to design consistency throughout.
Many people complain that going from site to site across their organization’s intranet feels disjointed. Each site looks different from the other with similar types of information scattered in different places. While it’s great to allow site owners flexibility, without some basic design principles and guidelines that can be applied consistently, the impact is costly and time consuming – for both site owners and visitors.
The best way to ensure a positive experience for site owners and visitors is to establish design patterns for your intranet sites and use site designs and templates to ensure that the patterns are applied consistently on all sites.
Below, we will dive into the following areas + resources throughout:
- Ensure consistency across all sites throughout your intranet scripting
- Organizing with hubs that can organize themselves
- Utilizing Microsoft Teams templates
- Manage who can create Microsoft 365 Groups
On to the details…
Ensure consistency across all sites throughout your intranet scripting
When people in your organization create new SharePoint sites, you want to ensure a level of consistency across all sites or sets of sites. For example, you may need consistent:
- Branding, theming for look and feel
- Library or list configurations to help people achieve more and ensure metadata alignment
- Functionality by configuring settings, features, extensions, and solutions
- You may also have detailed site provisioning scripts, such as using example designs from the SharePoint Look Book, that can be applied each time a new site is created.
Applying a new site design to a SharePoint site.
All help make your intranet more governable, consistent, predictable, and more usable on day one – for each project, team, event; a more automated, intranet-as-a-service – at scale.
Let’s breakdown how it is done…
Planning your site designs
- Audience targeting site designs (for sites and hubs)
- Setting a single default design for your tenant
- Applying to existing sites, tackling updates after the initial setup
- Extending their power via PnP and reference Look Book examples
When people in your organization create new SharePoint sites, you often need to ensure some level of consistency. For example, you may need proper branding and theming applied to each new site. Site designs are like a template. They can be used each time a new site is created to apply a consistent set of actions. They can also be applied to existing modern sites (group-connected team sites and communication sites). Most actions typically affect the site itself, such as setting the theme or creating lists. And a site design can also include other actions, such as recording the new site URL to a log or sending a notification.
When the actions in the scripts are completed, SharePoint displays detailed results of those actions in a progress pane.
Learn more about how to design and use SharePoint site designs and site scripts.
Organizing with hubs that can organize themselves
SharePoint hubs connect and organize sites based on preferred organizational attributes. You can associate both existing sites and enable new site creation from within hubs themselves. And associated sites can be a mix of team sites and/or communication sites.
Once connected, hubs determine the connected sites’ theming, navigation, search, news, and content rollup, and visitor permissions. And to take this even further, you can use site designs to further customize (adapt) each connected site to programmatically assert content and site customization for desired outcomes.
The combination helps ensure consistency across projects, departments, divisions, regions, as you organize and save time throughout your teams – throughout your intranet.
Here are a few examples:
- Ensuring a consistent approach for project sites – and facilitating management of a portfolio of client-specific projects. A company has a business unit that does projects for a variety of customers. There are multiple projects for each customer. There is a client manager for each customer who needs an easy way to access and roll up content across all the projects for the customers whose portfolios they manager. The business unit wants a way to ensure that each project is executed in a similar way, leveraging resources from the Project Management Office (PMO). The architecture decision is to create a hub for each customer – and use the hub site to store shared assets (such as deliverable templates and customer contact information) for the customer portfolio. To ensure that all project sites are created consistently, they use a site design for project team sites. Each time a new project is created from the customer hub, a script is run to apply the design template, ensuring that both look and feel as well as shared metadata is applied consistently in all project sites. The key outcome is that all project sites share a common structure and when team members work on more than one project, they can easily find and share the information they need. Moreover, the client relationship manager for each client can use the hub “roll ups” for easy visibility into the status of key deliverables across all projects in the portfolio.
- Sharing consistent metadata and home page design. The global legal team for a large organization wants to ensure that all local legal sites follow a consistent design and share common metadata for legal documents. A site design is created that incorporates a home page layout for all legal sites, a standard set of pages, and a document library with shared metadata attributes. The script is run for all new legal sites that associate to the Global Legal hub but also for local legal sites that are linked rather than associated to the Global Legal hub. In this example, local legal teams have the option of associating to a geographic hub rather than Global Legal if the sites are created in local language. Shared metadata values are stored as managed metadata so that when there are updates to values, all the legal sites are immediately updated. When a new column is required, the site script is re-run to ensure that all sites are updated with the new column. This approach empowers local legal teams to focus on content rather than structure as the create their legal sites. It also ensures that search consistently finds critical assets no matter where they are located with the use of shared metadata for all legal sites.
- Creating a common look and feel for intranet sites. While many organizations leverage more than one hub for different geographies, functions, or portfolios, some smaller organizations start with one hub for the intranet. To ensure that each intranet site starts with a consistent look and feel, sites are created with a site design that ensures, as an example, that the Site Owner is always displayed in the lower left hand corner of the home page and frequently needed links are always in a narrow column on the right towards the top of the home page. By ensuring that each site follows a consistent pattern, visitors know that they can always easily find someone to help them (by scrolling to the bottom of the page) and that the site owner has carefully curated links to the most frequently needed items and applications on the right side of the home page. This ensures that visitors can quickly execute their top tasks on each site. However, since the pages follow patterns aligned to user expectations, visitors also know that they will be able to browse and search for content to help them find what they need and get back to work.
Planning your hub sites
SharePoint hubs provide an important building block for your intranet. They are the “connective tissue” you use when organizing families of team sites and communication sites together.
One of the key principles of modern intranets based on Microsoft SharePoint is that each unit of work should get a separate site collection to optimally manage governance and growth over time. Each communication site and Microsoft 365 group-connected team site is created as a site collection that can have its own permissions. A hub (commonly created from a communication site) should also be considered its own unit of work that brings together numerous other sites.
All organizations need intranets that make it easy to align experiences with the way you work and that can adapt to the inevitable changes in the way you work. This is a key benefit provided by SharePoint hubs; they model relationships as links, rather than hierarchy or ownership, so that you can adapt to the changes in the way you work in a dynamic, changing world.
Learn more about planning your SharePoint hub sites.
Setting up a hub site design
Sites can inherit the hubs site design when they are initially associated to the hub.
Easy for people to create sites from hub
The Contoso Travel HR communication shown here as a part of the HR hub site, Web view on the left, within the SharePoint mobile app on the right.
You can automate tasks such as creating, removing, or controlling permissions for hubs. You can also control a site’s properties when it is becomes a part of an established hub – its theme, list and library structures, content, permissions, etc..
Learn more about setting up your hub sites.
Utilizing Microsoft Teams templates
Teams templates are pre-built definitions of a team’s structure designed around a business need or project. You can use Teams templates to quickly create rich collaboration spaces with channels for different topics and preinstall apps to pull in mission-critical content and services. Teams templates provide a predefined team structure that can help you easily create consistent teams across your organization.
Use Teams templates for people to save time and adhere to predefined team structure.
Learn more about how to get started using Teams templates.
Manage who can create Microsoft 365 Groups
AKA, manage who can create sites, teams, plans, and more. Creating Microsoft 365 Groups is meant to be easy for collaboration agility. Depending on your business, however, you might want to control who can create groups. You can restrict Microsoft 365 Groups creation to the members of a particular security group in Azure Active Directory (AAD). In turn, this equates to whom can create Teams teams, SharePoint sites, Planner plans, etc. It is easy for admins to establish and manage who can and cannot create Microsoft 365 Groups using Windows PowerShell.
Admins manage who can and cannot create Microsoft 365 Groups.
Learn more and get started today.
Last thoughts
One of the most important goals for well-used intranets is to share and leverage organizational knowledge. Traditional intranets are typically not much more than a collection of sites. Modern intranets provide a collection of experiences that align to business outcome goals and initiatives. Creating great experiences for users means that you need to focus on the content and task stories that the visitor needs to accomplish – not just the content and stories that the site owner wants to tell. Establishing a consistent (and flexible) pattern for sites helps site owners of each individual site optimize their information architecture to create the best visitor experience. Stories that can be told, read, and understood.
Site designs and site scripts allow you to quickly and consistently create sites that incorporate your organization’s preferred design patterns and governance. This allows site owners to focus on quality content instead of page layout and ensures that site visitors can quickly find what they need. Hubs extend the ability to create optimal experiences by allowing you to create families of related sites that work in concert to improve user experiences with shared navigation, scoped search, consistent designs and connected content.
Package and templatize to optimize and balance. The happiest of sites and site owners are those that spend time creating content – furthering the business – not fumbling through site structure. And with known structure, IT can better support, meet “customer” expectation, and maintain a realm of policy and predictability.
Resources
Thanks, Susan Hanley – Microsoft MVP and IA / KM expert and Mark Kashman – senior product manager (SharePoint/Microsoft)
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