Microsoft Azure

Best practices to simplify governing employee access across your applications, groups and teams

As requirements change with new applications being added, or users needing additional access rights, IT staff may not know who should have access or to which applications. To succeed at scale, an identity governance process must enable all users’ access to be able to change with their needs, without burdening IT staff to be involved in each access request.

Announcing the public preview of Microsoft Graph change notifications delivery via Azure Event Hubs

We’re pleased to announce the public preview of an additional delivery mode for Microsoft Graph change notifications. You can now use Azure Events Hubs to receive change notifications instead of traditional webhooks.

Azure Cost Optimization Tools

Azure providing services as a utility, being consumed on demand it drives a fundamental change that impacts planning, bookkeeping, and organization. The ability to have virtually unlimited compute resources at one’s disposable means your organization must always be wary of excess costs that are not providing business value.  The tools listed here will help your organization get an idea of where it is spending the most and where some cost optimization might be had.

Enterprise grade Kubernetes on Azure

Welcome to Ignite 2020 the online edition.  In this article, Brendan is excited to share even more features that help all of our users build and secure their applications on the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Available for private preview: New Bookings experience and capabilities help streamline scheduling

Bookings is a Microsoft 365 app built to help organizations and businesses easily manage and simplify the complexities of scheduling.  We are continuing to evolve Bookings and address the growing need to schedule and manage appointments both inside and outside of your organization. We are bringing you an enhanced, redesigned user experience and adding new capabilities to support broader use cases and large-scale deployment.

Authorize developer accounts by using Azure Active Directory in Azure API Management – Multi Tenants

It is practical to enable access to the developer portal for users from multiple Azure Active Directories. This article show you how to manage the external groups of multiple tenants.

What’s new in Microsoft Information Governance and Records Management

The unprecedented times we’re living in have dramatically accelerated remote work and collaboration, creating unique challenges for organizations of all sizes.  During Microsoft Ignite 2020 we announced new capabilities in Microsoft Information Governance and Records Management to help customers meet these unique challenges such as regulatory record labels, Yammer message policies and much more.

Windows Server

Exchange News and Announcements – Microsoft Ignite 2020 Edition

We are announcing that the next versions of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Skype for Business Server and Project Server will be available in the second half of 2021, and are only available with the purchase of a subscription license. Subscription entitles access to support, product updates, security and time zone patches.

Third-Party Updates and Windows Update for Business

While using Windows Updates for Business (WUfB) is not for everyone, its simplicity and familiar end-user experience make it quite attractive to many organizations. One thing that WUfB does not provide today is updates for third-party products. For that, you need to continue to use an on-premises solution like Microsoft Endpoint Manager Configuration Manager to complement WUfB.

System Center 2012 Configuration Manager is Approaching End of Support

Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager has a support and servicing lifecycle during which we provide new features, software updates, security fixes, etc. This lifecycle lasts for a minimum of 10 years from the date of the product’s initial release.  Check out this article to see when products will reach end of support.

Windows Client

Revised end of service date for Windows 10, version 1803: May 11, 2021

support We have heard your feedback and understand your need to focus on business continuity in the midst of the global pandemic.  As a result, we have decided to delay the scheduled end-of-service date for the Enterprise, Education and IoT Enterprise editions of Windows 10, version 1803.

Windows lifecycle fact sheet

Every Windows product has a lifecycle. The lifecycle begins when a product is released and ends when it’s no longer supported. Knowing key dates in this lifecycle helps you make informed decisions about when to update, upgrade or make other changes to your software.

Using SharePoint Online CSOM to Capture Versions of Document Sets

With the latest release of SharePoint Online Client Components aka CSOM (Client-Side Object Model) (version: 16.1.20317.12000 or above), we now support methods to capture versions of Document Sets in SharePoint Online document libraries.

Microsoft Endpoint Manager announces support for Windows Virtual Desktop machines

With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can move from a simple Proof-of-Concept (PoC) to a fully operational environment faster than ever before. This week, Microsoft announced several new capabilities that make it even easier to deploy, secure and scale your virtual desktop deployments.  Microsoft Endpoint Manager customers can leverage our integration with Windows Virtual Desktop to help manage and operate their deployments efficiently and accelerate the move to a secure remote work solution.

Security

Conditional Access policies now apply to all client applications by default

Organizations use Azure AD Conditional Access to enforce Zero-Trust Least-Privileged Access policies.  To help organizations more easily achieve a secure Zero Trust posture, we’re announcing 2 updates to help customers block legacy authentication: new Conditional Access policies will apply to legacy authentication clients by default and the client apps condition, including improvements to the client apps admin experience, is now in General Availability.

Azure Active Directory External Identities goes premium with advanced security for B2C

Over the past six months, we have seen organizations adapt to remote business environments and engage with an unprecedented number of external users, and we’ve seen our own service usage growing like crazy for B2B and B2C scenarios.  We are excited to announce the Public Preview of Conditional Access and Identity Protection for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) B2C.

Office 365 ATP is now Microsoft Defender for Office 365

At Ignite we announced Microsoft 365 Defender which brings the threat protection service portfolio across Microsoft 365 together under a unified brand. Microsoft 365 Defender offers powerful prevention, detection, hunting and response capabilities to threats across identities, endpoints, cloud apps, email, and documents.  This new unified branding is a testament to our continued endeavor to integrate the different threat protection focused services across Microsoft.

Announcing Priority Account Protection in Microsoft Defender for Office 365

We are excited to announce the public preview of a critical new feature in the Microsoft Defender for Office 365 portfolio – Priority Account Protection. This capability is extremely valuable in helping security teams prioritize focus on critical individuals within the organization, offer them differentiated protection and thwart costly breaches in the process.

Introducing Microsoft Tunnel for remote access to corporate resources from iOS and Android

Microsoft Endpoint Manager is pleased to announce a public preview of Microsoft Tunnel Gateway.  The Microsoft Tunnel Gateway solution allows Microsoft Intune-enrolled iOS and Android devices to access on-premises apps and resources. Tunnel is fully integrated with the Microsoft 365 cloud and takes advantage of single sign-on capabilities using Azure Active Directory (AAD) authentication from the client to Tunnel Gateway.

A unified approach to data loss prevention from Microsoft

Protecting sensitive data from risky or inappropriate sharing, transfer or use is simplified with Microsoft’s unified approach to Data Loss Prevention (DLP).  With the recent Public Preview of Microsoft Endpoint DLP, we added native fully built-in DLP capabilities to Windows 10, Office Apps (e.g. Excel), and Microsoft Edge to help prevent risky or inappropriate sharing, transfer, or use of sensitive data across applications or services.

Secure external collaboration using sensitivity labels

In this article we are going to clarify a topic which has been causing a lot of confusion and questions among our customers: “How do we securely share emails and documents with someone outside of our organization using sensitivity labels?”

Updates and Support Lifecycle

Preview: Automatic VM guest patching for Windows VMs in Azure

Enabling automatic VM guest patching for your Windows VMs helps ease update management by safely and automatically patching virtual machines to maintain security compliance.  Automatic VM guest patching is currently in Public Preview.

Released: September 2020 Quarterly Exchange Updates

We are announcing the availability of quarterly servicing cumulative updates for Exchange Server 2016 and 2019. These updates include fixes for customer reported issues as well as all previously released security updates.

September 2020 Hybrid Configuration Wizard Update

We are happy to announce an update to the Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) which enables either a Full or Minimal Hybrid deployment from a single on-premises organization to more than one cloud tenant.

Microsoft Information Protection SDK 1.7: Now Available

We’re pleased to announce that the Microsoft Information Protection SDK version 1.7 is now generally available via NuGet and Download Center.

Products reaching End of Support for 2020

Microsoft Premier Support News

Check out Microsoft Services public blog for new Proactive Services as well as new features and capabilities of the Services Hub, On-demand Assessments, and On-demand Learning platforms.