by Contributed | Sep 23, 2020 | Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As IT leaders, we have the ability to make the work experience more inclusive of the 1 billion people in the world with disabilities with the technology products and capabilities we choose to make available to our organizations. This week, we’ve announced exciting new features that everyone—including people with disabilities—can leverage to be more productive and to make the workplace more inclusive. From Live transcripts, to search to personal wellbeing insights, read on to learn all the ways Teams can help you work more inclusively.
Meetings & Calling & Devices
Live captions and transcripts with speaker attribution available for 1:1 calls and meetings
With more important calls, meetings and events happening virtually, it’s critical to make sure everyone can understand the discussion and participate easily, including people with disabilities. Live captions and transcripts with speaker attribution can make meetings more inclusive of people who are hard of hearing or deaf, or have learning disabilities like dyslexia and prefer spoken content to be reinforced with text. You can now provide live captions and transcripts with speaker attribution for 1:1 calls, all the way through to interactive meetings of up to 1,000 participants. And when you need to expand the reach of your meeting even further, up to 20,000 participants can view the meeting and live captions to follow along. These features can be enabled via the control bar within the call or meeting window, and will be made available in the coming months. Speaker attribution for live captions in meetings is now Generally Available for Commercial customers.
Live captions with speaker attribution during a Microsoft Teams meeting.
New Together mode scenes
When managing our mental health and wellbeing, it’s important to make sure we feel connected and close to other people—whether family members, local communities or those we collaborate with at work. We commissioned a Harris Poll survey of over 2,000 remote workers in six countries, and nearly 60% of people surveyed reported feeling less connected to their colleagues since they started working remotely more often. In China, this number spiked to 70%. In the past few months we’ve introduced new capabilities to make it easier for each of us to more naturally connect with teammates, and to take control of our wellbeing. One of these new capabilities is Together mode, a view in Teams meetings that makes you feel like you’re sitting in the same room with your teammates, and makes it easier to pick up on the non-verbal cues that are so important to natural human interaction and connection. This week we announced new Together mode scenes, coming later this year, including various auditoriums, conference rooms and a coffee shop. Presenters will also be able to select a scene from the gallery as the default scene for all meeting attendees. We hope you can find a Together mode scene that works for you and your team, and that can help your team feel closer together, even when you’re apart.
Read more: What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2020
In case you missed it
- Touchless experiences in Microsoft Teams Rooms — Touchless experiences not only make Teams Meetings Rooms safer as we return to physical workplaces, they also make them more inclusive of employees with disabilities. Teams Meeting Room devices and other conference calling devices are typically placed in the middle of large conference room tables, making them difficult if not impossible to access for those with limited reach or strength. With Cortana voice assistance and Room Remote on Microsoft Teams Room devices, people with vision and mobility disabilities can more easily use shared meeting room devices with their voice—completely hands free—or with their mobile device. These new capabilities build on the flexibility already afforded by proximity join.
- Dynamic view — Dynamic view gives you more control over how you see shared content and other participants in a meeting. New controls—including the ability to show shared content and specific participants side-by-side—let you personalize the view to suit your preferences and needs. This is particularly important for participants who are deaf and use sign language interpreters to participate in the discussion. With Dynamic View, participants can view shared content and pin their interpreter so they are always in view.
- Live Presentations in Teams — Every presenter knows how hard it is to get—and keep—your audience truly engaged throughout a presentation. With PowerPoint Live, audience members can follow along with the presentation from their personal device, move through slides at their own pace, and enable live subtitles in their preferred language. Not only will Live Presentations help empower participants who are hard of hearing, it will also break language barriers and make sure that everyone in the audience is engaged and included.
- Read more about these recent announcements: Reimagining virtual collaboration for the future of work and learning
Chat & Collaboration
Wellbeing and productivity insights coming in Teams
The rise in remote and hybrid work during the ongoing pandemic is pushing people and organizations to work in new ways, introducing challenges as well as opportunities for a new normal. Our research shows four clear challenges: after hours work is on the rise, boundaries between work and home are being eliminated, the rise of virtual collaboration and video meetings has led to a rise in stress levels, and people feel less connected to their colleagues when working remotely. To help us address some of these challenges so we can thrive and build resilience, we’re bringing wellbeing and productivity insights to Microsoft Teams. From unwinding with Headspace on your virtual commute to discovering opportunities to prevent burnout, see how new insights for individuals, teams, and organizations can help.
Read more: Introducing insights in Teams to power wellbeing and productivity
Wellbeing and productivity insights in Microsoft Teams
Improved search experience
A new search experience in Teams, powered by Microsoft Search and available by the end of 2020, will make finding messages, people and files faster and more intuitive for everyone, including people with disabilities who use assistive technologies like screenreaders. A redesigned search results page provides better context and faster results, with AI-powered relevance based on the people and content you engage with most in Teams, and other Microsoft 365 services. Assistive technology users will be able to use the ‘Control F’ shortcut to access the search bar, initiate a search, and bring information right to their fingertips. It’s everything you love about Search in other Microsoft 365 applications, right in the Teams experience.
Read more: What’s new for Microsoft Search – Ignite 2020 Edition
New search experience in Microsoft Teams powered by Microsoft Search.
In case you missed it
- Less typing, please! — Whether you’re looking to increase your productivity, or have a mobility or learning disability like dyslexia that makes typing or writing difficult, Cortana in Teams and Suggested replies in the Teams mobile app give you another way to communicate with teammates. Cortana is now Generally Available in the Teams mobile app on iOS and Android to Microsoft 365 Enterprise users in the U.S. in English. Suggested replies are also now Generally Available to Commercial customers.
- Read more: Reimagining virtual collaboration for the future of work and learning
Microsoft 365 Announcements
Play My Emails more broadly available – Play My Emails lets you listen and respond to what’s new in your inbox hands-free using Cortana, giving people with learning disabilities like dyslexia a way to consume written content that doesn’t require reading blocks of text. Play my Emails is already available in Outlook for iOS and Android in English in the United States, and will start rolling out in the coming months in English in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and India. With updates this month to Outlook for iOS in English in the United States, users can interact with their inbox via their headphones while their phone is in their pocket, initiate a call with the sender of an email to move the conversation forward in real time, play emails from a specific person, time or topic, and connect multiple eligible accounts—whether personal or professional—to the experience.
Voice commands in Outlook Mobile—Now you can use your voice to write emails, schedule meetings, and make calls, all from within Outlook mobile. Tap the microphone, and say “Email Adele that I’m running late”, “Schedule a meeting about Group Meditation with Megan”, or “Call Anna on Teams”. Outlook will find the relevant person, draft up a message, meeting or provide the option to start a call, and help you be more productive, all with voice. Voice capabilities like these provide people with learning disabilities like dyslexia, another way to write content, that doesn’t require typing. It also gives those with mobility disabilities another way to create content on the go.
Briefing Email from Cortana improvements — The Briefing Email is becoming generally available in September for Microsoft 365 Enterprise users with Exchange Online mailboxes in English. And with updates coming by the end of the year, the Briefing email will streamline meeting preparation. Actionable reminders will make it easy to add an agenda or a Teams link for an upcoming meeting if you forget, and to spot if a meeting is missing quorum. Integration with Microsoft To Do will make it seamless to follow up on a suggested task later. We’re also working on bringing specialized insights for people managers to help boost your team’s productivity and wellbeing, such as prompts to schedule regular one-on-one time with your direct reports and reminders to follow up on key asks. The Briefing Email gives people with disabilities like memory loss or ADHD, more proactive assistance and tools to stay on top of their important tasks and relationships.
Read more: What’s new with Cortana, your personal productivity assistant
Read MVP Jeff Stokes’ story here: What I Learnt While Not Remembering: Technology and its use in Traumatic Brain Injury
A reimagined Microsoft Stream – This week we announced a new vision for Microsoft Stream—to bring intelligent video creation, sharing, and viewing to all parts of Microsoft 365, while empowering users and administrators to manage video just as they would any other file. Part of this new vision is an enhanced playback experience that displays more accurate transcripts with speaker attribution for meeting recordings, among other exciting enhancements. These experiences will be made available over the coming year.
Read more: A new vision for Microsoft Stream
In case you missed it
Learn more and take action
1. Watch these Microsoft Ignite sessions to learn more about building an inclusive culture with support from Microsoft 365, and to get a closer look at these new inclusive features:
2. Complete the “Configure Microsoft Teams meeting and calling for Inclusion” training module to learn what you can do to configure Microsoft Teams in a way that maximizes inclusion of your diverse employees.
3. Find more Microsoft 365 Inclusive Workplace resources
by Contributed | Sep 23, 2020 | Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
temp
by Contributed | Sep 23, 2020 | Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The Update Staging Lab is now Test Base for Microsoft 365 and today, as part of Microsoft Ignite 2020, we are announcing several new features developed in direct response to your feedback. As we all adjust to remote and hybrid work, organizations big and small are turning to technology and leveraging cloud and automation solutions to facilitate collaboration, stay productive, and ensure business continuity. With Test Base for Microsoft 365, we are looking to modernize application testing for software vendors, IT professionals, and their organizations.
In this post, I’ll share more information about Test Base for Microsoft 365, walk you through the new features, and summarize the steps you can take today to take advantage of this service.
What is Test Base for Microsoft 365?
Test Base for Microsoft 365 is an Azure service that facilitates data-driven testing of applications. Backed by the power of data and the cloud, the service enables software vendors and IT professionals to take advantage of intelligent application testing from anywhere in the world. If you are a developer or a tester, and you do not want to worry about your apps continuing to work as platform dependencies, such as the latest Windows updates, change, consider using Test Base for Microsoft 365. It will help you test your applications without the hassle, time commitment, and expenditure of setting up and maintaining complex test environments. It will also give you access to pre-release Windows updates on secure virtual machines (VMs) and world-class Intelligence on the performance and reliability of your applications.
A new tool in your IT toolbox
As an IT professional, one of your key responsibilities is to keep your device estate current, not only with platform updates like those for Windows and Office, but also with other types of updates, such as those related to drivers and applications. We have heard your feedback loud and clear: you want to be to 100% sure that your business-critical apps don’t break. You want to ensure your end users’ productivity is not interrupted. You must strike a balance between rolling out updates as soon as they are released and testing key apps before broad deployment. This is where a service like Test Base for Microsoft 365 can shine!
Microsoft has improved, and continues to improve, application compatibility with Windows 10 and Office 365, causing fewer regression issues. Recent statistics from our App Assure program indicate that 99.75% of customer and software vendor apps in the ecosystem are compatible with the latest build of Windows 10. We have created assessment tools such as Desktop Analytics, phased deployment options in Configuration Manager and Microsoft Endpoint Manager, and the Windows Insider Program for early flighting—all to help drive confidence even higher.
In spite of these great tools and offerings, the majority of our customers still depend on lab-based testing for their critical applications and drivers. Furthermore, the size of the install base for these applications or the business-critical nature of these apps can make it painful when encountering a failure. Testing continues to provide greater assurance against any surprises. However, most if not all testing is steeped in legacy processes and standing on decades-old test collateral and harnesses. Test Base for Microsoft 365 aspires to help organizations focus their test efforts and get to the level of confidence they seek in far less time.
We are initially extending our Test Base for Microsoft 365 offering to critical third-party software vendors whose applications (e.g. antivirus, VPN, and disk encryption) are relied upon by large customer bases. As we think about extending value to enterprise organizations, we will leverage Microsoft Endpoint Manager deployment workflows to do so. In the future, test results from Test Base for Microsoft 365 will be made available in Microsoft Endpoint Manager natively to help you with device and application assessments, all to drive higher deployment confidence.
While we build this seamless workflow, here is what you can do as an IT professional today:
New capabilities in Test Base for Microsoft 365
We are constantly innovating and adding capabilities based on customer feedback. Here are a few of the new features recently released in the service:
- Support for automated functional tests as customers have told us the out-of-box (OOB) tests do not sufficiently exercise application functionality.
- Support for Windows feature update validation. This was one of the top asks from software vendors enrolled in our private preview. We find that customers carry out more extensive testing when it comes to Windows feature updates and would like to have the assurance that their critical apps will continue to work after deploying these updates.
- Enabled testing with Windows update packages (latest cumulative updates, or LCUs) as opposed to using VHD media to image VMs with updates being tested. This will help better mimic real-world customer scenarios encountered when updating end user devices.
What’s next on the roadmap for Test Base for Microsoft 365?
We are continuously listening to you, our customers, to better understand your current testing practices and challenges. We evaluate every piece of feedback we gather to prioritize the next features and capabilities for the Test Base service. Examples of capabilities that you can expect to light up in the next few months include support for Windows 7 monthly security updates, support for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 monthly security updates, and easier ways to manage application packages you have already uploaded.
We are engaging with select enterprise customers now to understand their needs and design a solution that fits in seamlessly with the deployment workflow in Microsoft Endpoint Manager. If you would like to participate in this discussion, please nominate yourself.
Join the community
If you are interested in shaping the future of this important service for the world, I invite you to come join us on the new Test Base for Microsoft 365 community community on Tech Community where you can share your experiences and connect with other customers using the service. If you are software vendor who is interested in onboarding your applications to Test Base for Microsoft 365, or if you are an IT professional whose organization is interested in nominating a software vendor to participate, please complete the preview sign-up form.
]
by Contributed | Sep 23, 2020 | Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Welcome to HLS Security Monthly! During this live webcast Microsoft’s Scott Murray and Jeremy Windmiller are going to touch on some of the security highlights from Ignite focusing on a handful that are directly relevant to Healthcare and Life Sciences.
- When: 10/05/2020 at 1pm Central, 2pm Eastern
- Featuring: Jeremy Windmiller – Microsoft Security and Compliance Technical Specialist
To attend this live webcast you can click on the provided link below on Monday 10/05 at 2pm Eastern/1pm Central, or grab the .ics calendar invite to add the event with link to your calendar. *Hint, download the .ics calendar invite file and share it with your security colleagues!
Thanks for visiting – Michael Gannotti LinkedIn | Twitter
Michael Gannotti
by Contributed | Sep 23, 2020 | Azure, Technology, Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Azure SQL Managed Instance is a fully managed, secure, and always up-to-date SQL instance in the cloud, providing an ideal destination for modernizing your SQL Server applications at scale. SQL Managed Instance is part of the Azure SQL family of database services which include virtual machines and managed databases. Since its inception, Azure SQL Managed Instance (SQL MI) has been continuously improved based on customer feedback, aiming to meet critical requirements of organizations that migrate and modernize their applications in Azure.
In that spirit we are excited to announce several important capabilities coming to preview or general availability during Ignite 2020, which will bring significant improvements across multiple product aspects: performance, security and compliance, management experience, programmability surface area and application compatibility. This blog post gives you a quick summary of these new capabilities which will help you achieve more with Azure SQL Managed Instance.
Performance
General Availability: Major performance improvements for Azure SQL Managed Instances
We are thrilled to announce a set of major performance improvements for Azure SQL Managed Instances, which enable you to migrate your more performance-hungry database workloads to Azure SQL Managed Instance. These improvements include more than doubled transaction log write throughput for General Purpose and Business Critical instances and superior data/log IOPS for Business Critical instances. Increased performance predictability and stability for General Purpose service tier through better integration and enhanced tempdb performance are also included. These performance improvements are automatically enabled for all existing and future Azure SQL Managed Instances at no extra charge.
General Availability: Global virtual network peering support for Azure SQL Managed Instance
To provide you with an easier network configuration, all managed instances created in empty subnets will be hosted on virtual clusters that are enabled for access over global virtual network peering connections. This enables you to pair managed instances in a failover group configuration, in an easy and performant way, by simply connecting virtual networks in two different regions. By utilizing the global virtual network peering for your managed instances, you will save time through easy network configuration and offload your gateways from database replication traffic.
Compliance
General Availability: Configurable Backup Storage Redundancy option for data residency compliance
Now in general availability, locally-redundant and zone-redundant storage options have been added to Azure SQL Managed Instance, providing more flexibility and choice. These backup storage alternatives give cost-effective options for ensuring data is protected in case of planned and unplanned events.
In addition, if you need to meet specific data residency requirements and ensure that your data does not leave region of database deployment, this option will help you stay compliant.
Use Azure portal to configure backup storage redundancy easily or automate setting desired options in your PowerShell and Azure CLI scrips. For more information, see our Tech Community blog.
Easier management experience
General Availability: Enhanced management experience for Azure SQL Managed Instance
Azure SQL Managed Instance provide management operations that you can use to automatically deploy new managed instances, update instance properties, and delete instances when no longer needed. Most of the management operations in SQL Managed Instance are long-running but until now it was not possible for customers to get detailed information about operation status and progress in an easy and transparent way.
Through the introduction of a new CRUD API, the SQL Managed Instance resource is now visible from when the create request is submitted. In addition, the new OPERATIONS API adds the ability to monitor management operations, see operation steps, and take dependent actions based on operation progress.
Check out this blog post to learn how to effectively utilize new APIs in real-word scenarios.
Preview: Azure Active Directory (AAD) authentication configuration with non-admin privileges
Users can now assign groups to Directory Readers role in Azure Active Directory. This change will promote ease of use when setting up Active Directory Admin for Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance.
Effectively, AAD auth configuration for individual managed instances does not require Global Admin or Privileged Role admin’s action anymore.
With this change, setting AAD authentication managed instances will be much simpler and streamlined in large organizations.
At the high level, improved process will look like this:
- Global Admin or Privileged Role Admin:
- Creates new Azure AD group where managed identities of Azure SQL Managed Instances will reside and assign “Directory Readers” role to this group. This action needs to be performed once per Azure AD tenant.
- Assigns group owners to the group – any Azure AD users without specific roles.
- Group owners then can add managed identity of an instance to the group.
Programmability and application compatibility
Preview: Machine Learning on Azure SQL Managed Instance
Machine Learning Services with support for R and Python languages now include preview support on Azure SQL Managed Instance. When using Machine Learning Services in Azure SQL Managed Instance, you can run R and Python scripts to do data preparation and processing, train machine learning models in database, and deploy your models and scripts into production in stored procedures.
General Availability: Hosting catalog databases for all supported versions of SSRS in Azure SQL Managed Instance
Now in general availability, Azure SQL Managed Instance can host catalog databases for all supported versions of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Last year, SQL Server 2019 Reporting Services introduced native support for hosting catalog databases in SQL Managed Instance. Now you can also use SQL Managed Instance to host catalog databases for earlier supported versions of SSRS.
This is especially useful for fast migration of existing reporting solutions to SQL Managed Instance, without the need to test and adopt the latest version of SSRS. It also helps you get quick business benefits and then modernize further at your own pace.
To learn how to configure your SQL Managed Instance to host catalog databases for earlier supported versions of SSRS, visit the Tech Community blog.
Preview coming soon: Distributed database transactions spanning multiple Azure SQL Managed Instances
Distributed database transactions spanning multiple Azure SQL Managed Instances will be available in next few weeks. This will enable frictionless migration of existing applications and development of modern, multi-tenant applications relying on vertically or horizontally partitioned database architecture.
By utilizing distributed transactions, you will save time when migrating existing applications that require this capability as it eliminates the need to change application code and to perform extensive testing. If you develop new applications, you can benefit from partitioning data into multiple databases to overcome current sizing limitations of Azure SQL Managed Instance, while utilizing distributed transactions to keep partitioned data in a consistent state.
During preview, two methods of running distributed transactions will be supported using BEGIN DISTRIBUTED TRANSACTION statement from Transact-SQL code and using TransactionScope class from .NET code.
Check out Azure Updates to stay tuned with the upcoming public preview announcement!
Recently added features
We would like also to remind you about a couple of useful features that were recently added to Azure SQL Managed Instance. Visit the links below to learn how to utilize them in your application scenarios:
Get started today!
- Get started quickly with Azure SQL Managed Instance using resources from our landing page on Azure.com.
- Find out more about how to migrate, modernize, and develop applications faster with Azure SQL by registering for our digital event Transform Your Applications with Azure SQL.
- Find out how SQL Managed Instance reduces management overhead with its virtually hands-free administration and gives you a low total cost of ownership in this Forrester Total Economic Impact Report.
- Read customer stories to learn how other customers utilize Azure SQL Managed Instance to improve their business
- Try SQL Managed Instance today and let us know what you think! Feel free to submit your comments on this blog or to post product ideas and vote for existing suggestions at Managed Instance feedback page.
by Contributed | Sep 23, 2020 | Azure, Technology, Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Together with the Azure Stack Hub team, we are starting a journey to explore the ways our customers and partners use, deploy, manage, and build solutions on the Azure Stack Hub platform. Together with the Tiberiu Radu (Azure Stack Hub PM @rctibi), we created a new Azure Stack Hub Partner solution video series to show how our customers and partners use Azure Stack Hub in their Hybrid Cloud environment. In this series, as we will meet customers that are deploying Azure Stack Hub for their own internal departments, partners that run managed services on behalf of their customers, and a wide range of in-between as we look at how our various partners are using Azure Stack Hub to bring the power of the cloud on-premises.
Today, I want you to introduce you to Azure Stack Hub Partner Byte. Join our Australian partner Byte as we explore how they are using the Azure Stack products to simplify operations, accelerate workload deployment, and enable the teams to focus on creating value rather than “keeping the lights on”.
Links mentioned through the video:
I hope this video was helpful and you enjoyed watching it. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below. If you want to learn more about the Microsoft Azure Stack portfolio, check out my blog post.
Recent Comments