MidDay Cafe Episode 9 – MBAS, Single Platform, VIVA Connections

by Contributed | May 12, 2021 | Technology

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

MidDay Cafe Episode 9 – MBAS, Single Platform, VIVA Connections

In this episode of MidDay Cafe host Michael Gannotti is joined by Microsoft’s Kendra Burgess and Sue Vencill as they discuss the Microsoft Business Application Summit (MBAS)), Why I Came to Microsoft/Single Platform, and Next Generation Intranets with Microsoft VIVA Connections. 

Resources:

• General information on Teams Online Meetings and Conferencing Software | Microsoft Teams for Work


• Teams as a Platform – Training VoDs. Microsoft Teams platform on the Microsoft Virtual Hub – Microsoft Adoption


• Building Apps for Teams Build apps for the Microsoft Teams platform – Teams | Microsoft Docs


• Introducing Microsoft Viva Connections  


• Microsoft Viva Connections to start rollout to general availability – Microsoft Tech Community


• Add Viva Connections for Microsoft Teams desktop – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Docs
  
  
  
  • Contains information on: Preparation for Viva Connections, Viva Connections requirements and recommendations, step-by-step guide to setting up Viva Connections desktop, and onboarding end users for Viva Connections.
  
  
  
  


• Additional resources to prepare for Viva Connections.
  
  
  
  • Set up a home site for your organization.
  
  
  • Enable and set up global navigation in the SharePoint app bar.
  
  
  • Introduction to SharePoint Online Management Shell
  
  
  
  

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Thanks for visiting – Michael Gannotti   LinkedIn | Twitter

Michael Gannotti

Developer Experiences – Manage Scanning Data Plane using REST APIs.

by Contributed | May 12, 2021 | Technology

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

We are happy to announce that REST APIs for scanning data plane are now released. Software engineers or developers in your organization can now call these APIs to register data sources, set up scans and classifications programmatically to integrate with other systems or products in your company.

Purview Scaning Data Plane Endpoints

You need to have the purview account name to call scanning APIs. Below is how the endpoint will look:

https://{your-purview-account-name}.scan.purview.azure.com

Set up authentication using service principal.

To call the scanning APIs, the first thing you need to do is to register an application and create a client secret for that application in Azure Active Directory.  When you register an application a service principal is automatically created in your tenant. For more information on how to create a service principal (application) and client secret, please refer here.

Once service principal is created, you need to assign ‘Data source Admin’ role of your purview account to the service principal created above. The below steps need to be followed to assign role to establish trust between the service principal and purview account.

1. Navigate to your Purview account.


2. On the Purview account page, select the tab Access control (IAM)


3. Click + Add.


4. Select Add role assignment.


5. For the Role select Purview Data Source Administrator from the drop down.


6. For Assign access to leave the default, User, group, or service principal.


7. For Select enter the name of the previously created service principal you wish to assign and then click on their name in the results pane.


8. Click on Save.

You’ve now configured the service principal as an application administrator, which enables it to send content to the scanning APIs. Learn about roles here.

Get Token

You can send a POST request to the following URL to get access token.

https://login.microsoftonline.com/{your-tenant-id}/oauth2/token

The following parameters needs to be passed to the above URL.

• client_id:  client id of the application registered in Azure Active directory and is assigned ‘Data Source Admin’ role for the Purview account.


• client_secret: client secret created for the above application.


• grant_type: This should be ‘client_credentials’.


• resource: This should be ‘https://purview.azure.net’

Figure 1: Screenshot showing a sample response in Postman.

Scanning Data Plane REST APIs

Once you have followed all the above steps and have received access token you can now call various scanning APIs programmatically. The different types of entities you can interact with are listed below:

• Classification Rules


• Data Sources


• Key Vault Connections


• Scans and scan related functionality like triggers and scan rule sets.

The below examples explains the APIs you need to call to configure a data source , set up and run a scan for the data source but for complete information on all the REST APIs supported by scanning data plane refer here –

1. To create or update a data source using APIs the following REST API can be leveraged:

PUT {Endpoint}/datasources/{dataSourceName}?api-version=2018-12-01-preview

You can register an Azure storage data source with name ‘myStorage’ by sending a PUT request to the following URL

{Endpoint}/datasources/myStorage?api-version=2018-12-01-preview with the below request body:

{

  “name”: “myStorage”,

  “kind”: “AzureStorage”,

  “properties”: {

    “endpoint”: “https://azurestorage.core.windows.net/“

  }

}

2. To create a scan for a data source already registered in Purview the following REST API can be leveraged:

PUT {Endpoint}/datasources/{dataSourceName}/scans/{scanName}?api-version=2018-12-01-preview

You can schedule a scan ‘myStorageScan’ using a credential ‘CredentialAKV’ and system scan rule set ‘AzureStorage’ for the already registered data source ‘myStorage’ by sending a PUT request to the following URL with the below request body:

{Endpoint}/datasources/myStorage/scans/myStorageScan?api-version=2018-12-01-preview

{

  “kind”: “AzureStorageCredential”,

  “properties”: {

    “credential”: {

      “referenceName”: “CredentialAKV”,

      “credentialType”: “AccountKey”

    },

    “connectedVia”: null,

    “scanRulesetName”: “AzureStorage”,

    “scanRulesetType”: “System”

  }

}

The above call with return the following response:

{

  “name”: “myStorageScan”,

  “id”: “datasources/myDataSource/scans/myScanName”,

  “kind”: “AzureStorageCredential”,

  “properties”: {

    “credential”: {

      “referenceName”: “CredentialAKV”,

      “credentialType”: “AccountKey”

    },

    “connectedVia”: null,

    “scanRulesetName”: “AzureStorage”,

    “scanRulesetType”: “System”,

    “workers”: null

  },

  “scanResults”: null

}

3. Once the scan is created you need to add filters to the scan which is basically scoping your scan or determining what objects should be included as part of scan. To create a filter, you can leverage the following REST API

PUT {Endpoint}/datasources/{dataSourceName}/scans/{scanName}/filters/custom?api-version=2018-12-01-preview

You can create a filter for the above scan ‘myStorageScan’ by sending a PUT request to the following URL with the below request body. This will create a scope to include folders /share1/user and /share1/aggregated and exclude folder /share1/user/temp/ as part of the scan.

{Endpoint}/datasources/myStorage/scans/myStorageScan/filters/custom?api-version=2018-12-01-preview

{

  “properties”: {

    “includeUriPrefixes”: [

      “https://myStorage.file.core.windows.net/share1/user“,

      “https://myStorage.file.core.windows.net/share1/aggregated“

    ],

    “excludeUriPrefixes”: [

      “https://myStorage.file.core.windows.net/share1/user/temp“

    ]

  }

}

The above call will return the following response:

{

  “name”: “custom”,

  “id”: “datasources/myStorage/scans/myStorageScan/filters/custom”,

  “properties”: {

    “includeUriPrefixes”: [

      “https://myStorage.file.core.windows.net/share1/user“,

      “https://myStorage.file.core.windows.net/share1/aggregated“

    ],

    “excludeUriPrefixes”: [

      “https://myStorage.file.core.windows.net/share1/user/temp“

    ]

  }

}

4.To run a scan, you need to use the following REST API

PUT {Endpoint}/datasources/{dataSourceName}/scans/{scanName}/runs/{runId}?api-version=2018-12-01-preview

You can now trigger the above scan ‘myStorageScan’ by sending a PUT request to the below URL. The runId is a guid.

{Endpoint}/datasources/myStorage/scans/myStorageScan/runs/138301e4-f4f9-4ab5-b734-bac446b236e7?api-version=2018-12-01-preview

The above call will return the following response:

{

  “scanResultId”: “138301e4-f4f9-4ab5-b734-bac446b236e7”,

  “startTime”: “2019-05-16T17:01:37.3089193Z”,

  “endTime”: null,

  “status”: “Accepted”,

  “error”: null

}

To learn more about Azure Purview, check out our full documentation today.

Central Laser Facility uses WinUI and Uno Platform to envision a new control system for EPAC

by Contributed | May 12, 2021 | Technology

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

The Central Laser Facility (CLF) carries out research using lasers to investigate a broad range of science areas, spanning physics, chemistry, and biology. Their suite of laser systems allows them to focus light to extreme intensities, to generate exceptionally short pulses of light, and to image extremely small features.

The Central Laser Facility is currently building the Extreme Photonics Applications Centre (EPAC) in Oxfordshire, UK. EPAC is a new national facility to support UK science, technology, innovation and industry. It will bring together world-leading interdisciplinary expertise to develop and apply novel, laser based, non-conventional accelerators and particle sources which have unique properties.

The software control team inside Central Laser Facility develops applications that enable scientists to monitor and communicate with a wide range of scientific instruments. For example, the application can be used to move a motorised mirror to direct the laser beam toward a target, to watch a camera feed showing the current status of the system, or to configure and record data from a suite of cutting-edge scientific instruments such as x-ray cameras or electron spectrometers. These applications aggregate data and controls for specific tasks that a user needs to undertake – say, point the laser at a new target – and present them in a single screen to avoid the need to individually access all the different hardware necessary to make that happen.

The Challenge: Moving forward the control system for EPAC

As CLF started planning the design of a new control system for EPAC, their main goal was to tackle some of the challenges they were facing with the existing set of applications:

• Minimise the adaptations needed to run on multiple operating systems. CLF currently supports Windows and Linux, with other platforms like Android and Web in planning.


• Maximize code reuse while, at the same time, creating a scalable user interface. Their applications need to scale from mobile devices to large displays placed around the facility.


• Support advanced graphical features, like themes for easily changing colour schemes; the palette needed for viewing a screen through laser goggles in a laboratory is different than one would use in a control room, where no goggles are necessary.

The Solution

WinUI and Uno Platform were a perfect combination to tackle these challenges.

WinUI provides a state-of-the-art UI platform, which offers the powerful rendering capabilities needed by the application to show the real time feed coming from the cameras; to generate complex graphs that display in real-time the data captured by the instruments; to adapt to different layouts and form factors; ultimately, to easily create easy-to-use experiences thanks to a wide range of modern controls with full support to accessibility and multiple input types. Uno Platform is enabling the Central Laser Facility to take these features which empower the experience built for Windows and run it with no or minimal code changes on all the other platforms targeted by Central Laser Facility: Linux, Android and Web.

“Thanks to WinUI and Uno Platform, we were able to leverage the excellent set of developer tools that exists in .NET, and provides access to the reusable content in the Windows Community Toolkit and the XAML controls gallery.” shared Chris Gregory, Software Control Engineer. “The primary attraction for us was the ability to deploy applications cross-platform. This will allow us to visualise what’s happening with our instrumentation on the Windows machines in the control room, the Linux systems running the back end, on a tablet inside the laboratory, or on a mobile device for off-site monitoring.

This flexibility means that scientists and engineers can see a uniform presentation of the information they need no matter where they are in our facility, with minimal extra developer effort. Added to this, the availability of such a rich set of controls will result in the development of applications that are much more intuitive to use”.

Adopt a Zero Trust approach for security — Essentials Series — Episode 1

by Contributed | May 12, 2021 | Technology

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

Adopt a Zero Trust approach for security and benefit from the core ways in which Microsoft can help. In the past, your defenses may have been focused on protecting network access with on-premises firewalls and VPNs, assuming everything inside the network was safe. But as corporate data footprints have expanded to sit outside your corporate network, to live in the Cloud or a hybrid across both, the Zero Trust security model has evolved to address a more holistic set of attack vectors.

Based on the principles of “verify explicitly”, “apply least privileged access” and “always assume breach”, Zero Trust establishes a comprehensive control plane across multiple layers of defense:

Identity

Azure Active Directory assigns identity and conditional access controls for your people, the service accounts used for apps and processes, and your devices.

Endpoints

Microsoft Endpoint Manager assures devices and their installed apps meet your security and compliance policy requirements

Applications

Microsoft Endpoint Manager can be used to configure and enforce policy management. Microsoft Cloud App Security can discover and manage Shadow IT services in use.

Network

Get a number of controls, including Network Segmentation, Threat protection, and Encryption.

Infrastructure

Azure landing zones, Blueprints and Policies can ensure newly deployed infrastructure meets compliance requirements for cloud resources. Azure Security Center and Log Analytics help with configuration and software update management for on-premises, cross-cloud and cross-platform infrastructure.

Data

Limit data access to only the people and processes that need it.