Introducing Dark Mode in Microsoft Office for Android

by Contributed | May 20, 2021 | Technology

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

You asked, we listened! Dark Mode is now rolling out in the Office app for Android phones. It’s been a highly requested feature by many of our customers, and we’re proud to begin releasing it today. Many people prefer using Dark Mode as they find it provides a more comfortable visual experience for reading and working on mobile devices.  

The Office app helps you get work done on a mobile device by combining Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single app and adding many rich capabilities for creating and working with PDFs, images, scanning, capturing notes, and much more. Now you can do all this using a theme of your choice — based on the time of day, your surroundings, or your device settings. Dark Mode ensures that you can adjust the Office app to low-light environments, while providing you with better viewing options and keeping battery consumption low.  

How to enable Dark Mode 

The newest version of the Office app for Android will automatically adjust to Dark Mode if your device is already set to that preference. You can also turn Dark Mode on or off by tapping your profile icon on the Home tab in the Office app, selecting Settings, and then selecting Light, Dark, or System Default from the Theme options.  

Download the Microsoft Office Mobile App today and always keep it up-to-date to ensure you have the latest features and improvements. The feature will be rolling out to users worldwide over the next few weeks, so if you do not see it in your app yet, you can expect to receive an update in the near future that will have it.  

Please share your feedback with us about Dark Mode right from the app by tapping your profile icon on the Home tab, and then select, “Send Feedback.” For more information about Dark Mode investments across Microsoft apps, check out this “Designing Dark Mode” article on Medium.  

Continue the conversation by joining us in the Microsoft 365 Tech Community! Whether you have product questions or just want to stay informed with the latest updates on new releases, tools, and blogs, Microsoft 365 Tech Community is your go-to resource to stay connected! 

End-to-End IoT analytics and machine learning with Azure Data and AI services

by Contributed | May 20, 2021 | Technology

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

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology stack in Operational Technology (OT) is widely used across various industries, including oil & gas, manufacturing, utilities, and natural resources, for solving operational challenges and delivering mission-critical insights and analytics.

More and more organizations are leveraging Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to perform large scale analytics and machine learning using data from IoT assets, something that had not been simple to do using traditional systems such as Scada and Historians.

In this article, we preview an end-to-end Azure Data and AI cloud architecture that enables IoT analytics. This article is based on our 3-part blog series on the Databricks Blog site. You can find more information and code samples starting with

• Part 1: How to Use Databricks to Scale Modern Industrial IoT Analytics – Part 1 – The Databricks Blog


• Full 3-part series index: Articles by Hubert Duan – The Databricks Blog

Here is the overall architecture discussed in this article and the Databricks blog series:

For making this article applicable on a common IoT use case, consider the scenario of balancing optimal short-term utilization of an asset, such as a wind turbine, against its long-term maintenance costs.

In order to develop insights on short-term optimization as well as longer term maintenance costs, various data sources need to be considered and ingested into the cloud for centralized storage and analysis. Here are a few Azure cloud services to consider, depending on whether the data sources can be stream or batch processed.

• For streaming data into Azure, IoT Hub or Event Hub should be used
  
  
  
  • Here is a reference on comparing these two services: Compare Azure IoT Hub to Azure Event Hubs | Microsoft Docs 
  
  
  • In general, for connecting IoT devices to Azure, Azure IoT Hub is recommended
  
  
  
  


• For batch data ingestion and data orchestration, Azure Data Factory should be considered

For the wind turbine scenario, streaming data can be the sensor data collected from the turbines, while structured data can be maintenance and failure data collected in a batch process.

Once the data sources are ingested into Azure, there are a few options, again depending on stream or batch processing, to process and store the data. In this architecture, the Delta format in Azure Databricks backed by Azure Data Lake Gen 2 is the preferred data format for large-scale IoT data sources: Delta Lake and Delta Engine guide – Azure Databricks – Workspace | Microsoft Docs

• For streaming data that is ingested into IoT Hub or Event Hub, Azure Databricks can leverage Spark Streaming: Structured Streaming – Azure Databricks – Workspace | Microsoft Docs to consume data from the ingestion service in order to process and perform analysis 
  
  
  
  • As a standard practice, Spark streaming can be used to stream from IoT Hub or Event Hub to a Databricks Delta table in the data lake: Table streaming reads and writes – Azure Databricks – Workspace | Microsoft Docs
  
  
  
  


• Alternatively, Data Factory can be used to move batch data to the data lake as well

Once the data is ingested, processed and stored into Delta format, Azure Databricks can be used for big data analytics including data engineering and data science using Spark. As a common pattern, multiple zones within the data lake and aggregations are highlighted below identified through

• Bronze for raw granular IoT data


• Silver for aggregated data, commonly used for machine learning and data science


• Gold for enriched data ready for analytics and reporting purposes

Data engineers can use Azure Databricks and create 3 Delta tables corresponding to these three zones. Users can use programming languages namely Python, Scala, R, and SQL in Azure Databricks for accelerated data engineering and data science development.

Azure Machine Learning can be used for machine learning, most commonly together with Azure Databricks, in this IoT architecture. For example, Azure Databricks can be used with Spark to engineer features and aggregate data. Then Azure Machine Learning can be used to build models through code, drag-and-drop, or even automated machine learning. In addition, Azure Machine Learning can be used to deploy and operationalize machine learning models.

For the wind turbine scenario, the bronze Delta table could be the granular IoT sensor data from the turbines while the silver Delta table is the aggregated (by the hour for example) data. Then Azure Databricks can be used to perform feature engineering and feature selection to build a machine learning and analytics ready dataset. This dataset would then be loaded in Azure Machine Learning to build a predictive maintenance model or a power generation prediction model.

Finally, once the predictions and gold enriched data is created in the gold Delta table with Azure Databricks, it can be loaded into Azure Synapse Analytics for BI analytics and reporting scenarios together with Power BI. Azure Data Explorer provides real-time operational analytics so IoT data can be streamed directly from IoT Hub or Event Hub to Data Explorer.

In summary, this article covered the end-to-end steps for enabling IoT data analytics and machine learning on the Azure cloud platform, including some best practices, recommended services, and application with wind turbine operations use case. This blog series has the full details and provides code samples as well: Articles by Hubert Duan – The Databricks Blog.

Join us for an AMA!

by Contributed | May 20, 2021 | Technology

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

The Microsoft Defender for Office 365 team wants to hear from you! We’re excited to invite you to join us for a Tech Community Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA). Our team will be on hand to answer any of your questions about Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Exchange Online Protection, and email and collaboration security in general, so come prepared!

The AMA will take place Thursday, May 27, 2021, from 9:00-10:00am Pacific Time. We hope to see you there!

Use the link below to add a reminder to your calendar and to join the discussion.

https://aka.ms/ama/DefenderO365