All blog posts in Microsoft Tech Community

Re: Basic Authentication and Exchange Online – April 2020 Update

Grant_Owens — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 10:28:49 GMT

Hi,

We are using an application that integrates with Outlook clients and connects via Basic Authentication on Exchange Online. We migrated our on-premise Exchange environment to Exchange Online (Office 365) in November last year. User mailboxes were moved from on prem to EXO and the application that integrates with Outlook has be reconfigured to meet these requirements.

We're planning an upgrade of the app that integrates with Outlook and Exchange Online to a new version. The new version has support for OAuth 2.0 which can be (with some difficulty it seems) configured with Exchange Online.

What is the impact of us NOT implementing OAuth 2.0 as part of the upgrade? What will happen to our PRODUCTION system if we do not implement this? We assume the application impersonation to impersonate user email inboxes will fail when Basic Authen is decomissioned but as per the Microsoft notes this is not clear.

What will this mean for end users? Will they not be able to open Outlook and send/receive emails?

We are also using two factor authentication to allow users to access Outlook. Users cannot access Outlook without completing the two factor authentication process.

Thanks

Re: Intune announcing public preview for Android Enterprise corporate-owned devices with a work prof

weberda — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 09:41:04 GMT

Hi,

Intune Release 2102 is out there. COPE Enrollment is still badged with "Preview" label. When will this feature go to GA state?

Thanks!

Re: Released: December 2020 Quarterly Exchange Updates

Lukas Sassl — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 09:31:56 GMT

I was not able to reproduce the issue described above. I've dropped you a PM.

Re: Business Email: Uncompromised – Part One

NitinJaiswal — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 09:30:38 GMT

Thanks. Appreciate that.

Re: Microsoft Defender for Identity Ninja Training

Luigi Bruno — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 09:21:50 GMT

Good.
Thank you .

Re: Microsoft 365 Information Protection and Compliance Deployment Acceleration Guides

Peal400 — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 09:10:51 GMT

Hello, thank you for the great, document, content and knowledge ;)

Re: New Microsoft Edge to replace Microsoft Edge Legacy with April’s Windows 10 Update Tuesday relea

trinhthanhtrung — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 09:02:47 GMT

I really wanted to give the new Chromium-based Edge a try, but I eventually gave up because the new Edge is terrible at PDF annotation (which is the main reason I used the legacy Edge).

Firstly, the writing on PDF is much more terrible on the Chromium Edge. It is slow and very laggy.

Secondly, I cannot use my finger to scroll the PDF file while using drawing anymore.

And another thing, may be a bit nitpicking, but whenever I want to save my annotations, back then I only need to click on Save. Now everytime I press Save, it always shows the Save As.. dialog.

All of these make annotating on PDF files becomes a nightmare. That's why I kept using the legacy Edge.

...until this. Now the legacy Edge was automatically removed and I'm stuck with the Chromium Edge with no way to roll back.

Re: New Meeting and Calling Experience in Microsoft Teams!

Neha_Agarwal — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 08:35:30 GMT

check box itself not available for me how it is enable or disable. Not sure what you meant, but my meetings are not opening in new window :(

Re: Azure Blueprints vs Azure Resource Manager template specs

James van den Berg — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 08:35:05 GMT

Thanks for Sharing with the Community !
Great Blogpost 8)

Re: New Meeting and Calling Experience in Microsoft Teams!

mrodler — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 08:23:55 GMT

It is enabled by default.

Re: New Meeting and Calling Experience in Microsoft Teams!

Neha_Agarwal — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 08:22:09 GMT

I do not want to disable, I want to use this functionality. But under settings I cannot see this new experience option.Please see screenshot for reference in my original post.

Re: Announcing Microsoft Viva Learning private preview

gpetino — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 08:21:25 GMT

hi , that sounds good! thank you very much, I'll go through that in the next days.

Gab

Re: New Meeting and Calling Experience in Microsoft Teams!

mrodler — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 08:18:11 GMT

The new meeting experience is new new standard now. it can't be disabled anymore

Azure Blueprints vs Azure Resource Manager template specs

Pierre Roman — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 08:15:23 GMT

Hello folks,

I’ve had a few conversations lately with IT pros and operations folks that made me think that there may be a disconnect or some confusion about the role of Azure blueprints and ARM templates specs.

There were comments like “are blueprint still even a thing?” and “I’m not bothering with Blueprints since templates specs are almost here.”

Maybe I’m missing the meaning of these interactions. Or there is a disconnect. I’m not 100% sure, however, if there is a chance that someone in the community is confused, I decided to cover the difference and when you would them. We’re not going to take you through the creation of each of these since there are many tutorials and resources available online already.
For example:

The same can be said for ARM Templates Specs

So, let’s start.

What Is Azure Blueprints?

In any enterprise you always have teams that are responsible for defining what and how resources are deployed in your environment. (on-prem, in the cloud or in both). Your networking team defines the network design, the IP addressing, the routing… Your security team defines what services are allowed, who has access… Your legal department may have requirements for compliance such as where you can deploy your resources… You get the picture.

Without any tools to allow you to tie all these requirements together you end up with a deployment process that can take a long time because every teams wants and needs to sign-off on your deployment. And it makes it difficult to replicate since in most cases its tied together with custom scripting.

Azure Blueprint allows you to create a way to package all these components together and makes it super easy to “stamp” your blueprint on any environment dev, test, prod or other.

There are samples available here

What is Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates Specs?

One of the greatest problems when managing your infrastructure as code (IaC) with Azure templates is marrying the need for manageable, secure, versions-controlled way while sharing templates. You can use GitHub, or any other “repo”, however if you’re deploying linked templates for example the link requires either a publicly accessible point or a shared access signature to a blob therefore making them secure is more problematic.

Template Specs is a new resource type for storing ARM templates in a resource group. The purpose of doing that is to allow more efficient sharing, deployment, and control of the Templates shared within an organization. In effect your templates become a first party resource type stored in your subscription. They can be standalone or modular, thus providing you with a very flexible way to deploy them.

And yes, Templates Specs also includes an RBAC (Role based access control) but it’s to control who has access to the template itself and what I can do with it (Read access, vs contributor access for example). Not RBAC in terms of controlling what is the access of the resource deployed by said template.

Conclusion

Now that we’ve covered what both Blueprints and Templates Specs are, we understand that:

Yes, Azure Blueprints are still a thing and you should be investigating them in your own environment if you’re not already, to ensure all your deployments conform to all the requirements of your organization.
Azure Resource Manager Template Specs will NOT displace the need for Blueprints since they server a completely separate purpose.

I can even see in the future, Azure Blueprint pointing at Templates Specs as artifacts within a blueprint.

There you have it folks. Let me know in the comments below if you’d like us to cover specific subjects.

Cheers.

Pierre

Re: Announcing Universal Print: a cloud-based print solution

Sebastian Cerazy — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 08:13:31 GMT

Gave up on UP (never could make it work as expected from promises)

Went with Papercut Mobility Print (and it works as I need it to)

Seb

Customer Offerings:Device Protection w/ Microsoft Endpoint Manager & Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

John_Barbare — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 08:00:00 GMT

Introduction

Welcome to another customer offering article to inform you about how to configure, setup, and deploy endpoint protection policies which include protective measures from Microsoft. In this article, we will present Premier Services Offerings WorkshopPLUS - Device Protection with Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.

Offering Overview

With customers needing a deployment solution to push out Microsoft security policies and configurations, this offering will address this and more. This Premier offering builds on the fundamental security components and features of any Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager environment such as RBAC or role-based administration, Endpoint Protection, Exploit Guard, Application Guard, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, BitLocker Drive Encryption, and Compliance Settings. With this new customer offering, we were able to provide a 3-day hands on training in a live demo tenant to meet and exceed customer expectations.

What the workshop entails

What's Included

The content of this offering is a mix of education, administration, compliance, and security best practices at the L200-L300 level. This offering focuses on the breadth of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, M365 Security (on-prem and in the cloud), and also Intune. The Device Protection with Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint workshop is a three day engagement where you will learn about configuring a tenant using labs hosted in the cloud (Microsoft Labs on Demand) with a full M365 E5 license (EMS E5 + M365 E5 + Office 365 E5). Each module contains scenarios that provide students with in-depth expertise, tools, and hands-on experience to help implement and troubleshoot security related concepts as they pertain to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager.

Endpoint Protection policies

Areas Covered

The sections below sections are covered in detail throughout the three-day offering and expand on each objective to maximize your understanding of each topic and focus area through knowledge transfer modules.

Introduction to Endpoint Security - Overall introduction to security settings and recommendations that can be managed using Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager and Intune.

Role Based Access Control – Overview of Role Based Administration Control concept in Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, including the reporting feature.

Endpoint Protection Technologies Overview - Objectives focus on a deeper dive into the technologies that make up Endpoint Protection.

Antimalware Policies - Objectives focus on learning the basic concepts and terminology for Endpoint Protection Antimalware Policies for Microsoft Defender Antivirus.

CAMP and Security Intelligence Updates - Objectives focus on managing Endpoint Protection Definition updates through Configuration Manager.

Endpoint Protection Alerts and Reporting - Objectives focus on how to configure and use alerts and report notifications within Configuration Manager.

Endpoint Protection Troubleshooting - Objectives focus on learning troubleshooting techniques for securing endpoints.

Exploit Guard and Application Guard - Objectives focus on learning about Attack Surface Reduction, Controlled Folder Access, and Exploit and Network Protection. You will also learn how to mitigate security threats using containers by deploying Application Guard.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint - Objectives focus on learning how to onboard endpoints to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint using Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager and explore basic operational possibilities within Microsoft Defender for Endpoint portal.

Device Encryption - Learn what is BitLocker and explore modern management possibilities to control device encryption with Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager and Intune.

Compliance settings - Dive deeper into the compliance settings topic, including management possibilities using Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Intune).

Hands on with Labs on Demand

During this offering there are multiple hands-on labs exercises using Microsoft’s Labs on Demand. Each student will be an administrator of their own demo tenant where they will create and deploy security policies using Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager. Once the polices are deployed to another machine, the student will be able to view and test out those policies. The areas are listed below are covered in the lab exercises:

Endpoint Security
Implementing RBAC
Endpoint Protection policies
CAMP and Security Intelligence updates
Endpoint protection alerts and reporting
Endpoint protection troubleshooting
Exploit Guard and Application Guard
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Device Encryption
Compliance settings

Creating the configuration file for Endpoints for MDE

Configuring Attack Surface Reduction Rules

Configuring Bitlocker drive encryption in MEM

Objectives

After completing this course, you will understand how to set up, configure, and manage Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager Role Based Access, Endpoint Protection for Microsoft Endpoint Manager, Application Guard and Exploit Guard integration, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, BitLocker Drive Encryption, and compliance settings.

Key Personnel For this Offering

This course is targeted at IT staff who have already started designing and implementing Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager integration with Microsoft Security products and concepts. To ensure that students are successful at the end of this WorkshopPLUS, it is highly recommended they meet the following criteria:

Existing knowledge of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager
Moderate knowledge of Windows Platform and Microsoft Security products
Basic knowledge of Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Intune)

Disclaimer

As of this writing, the above modules are in scope. However, they might change as Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, Intune, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, and M365 Security are subject to change.

Follow up and feedback

For further information, please contact your Microsoft Account Representative, Customer Success Account Manager (CSAM), or Service Delivery Manager (SDM).

To improve this or any other workshop, we always consider feedback from you. At Microsoft, achieving a high level of satisfaction among our customers and partners around the world is a core component of our business. For that reason, please don’t hesitate to complete the surveys and provide feedback.

Credit

Special thanks and credit to the development team:

Anton Tatarkin, Senior Customer Engineer, Intune / EMS / Configuration Manager, Netherlands

John Barbare, Senior Customer Engineer - Cybersecurity, Monitoring Solutions (Sentinel, M365 Defender, MDE, MDI, MCAS), Unites States

Charles Baldridge, Customer Engineer, Configuration Manager, United States

Announcing the preview of Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) option for Azure managed disks

Raman Kumar — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 07:05:02 GMT

We are excited to introduce the preview of Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) option for Azure managed disks! This capability provides synchronous replication of data across the three Zones in a region, enabling disks to tolerate Zonal failures which may occur due to natural disasters or hardware issues. ZRS option is currently supported for Premium SSD and Standard SSD disks.

Use ZRS disks for legacy applications to achieve better availability

You can achieve high availability for your workloads using application-level replication across two zones, for example, SQL Always On. However, suppose you are using industry-specific proprietary software or legacy applications like older versions of SQL Server, which don't support application-level synchronous replication; ZRS disks will provide improved availability via storage-level replication. For example, if a zone goes down due to natural disasters or hardware failures, ZRS disk will continue to be operational. If your virtual machine (VM) in the affected Zone becomes unavailable, you could use a virtual machine in another zone and attach the same ZRS disk.

Use ZRS with shared disks

You can also use the ZRS option for shared disks to provide improved availability for clustered or distributed applications like SQL FCI, SAP ASCS/SCS. You can attach a shared ZRS disk to primary and secondary VMs allocated on different zones to take advantage of both ZRS disks and Availability Zones for VMs for higher availability. In the event of a primary zone failure, you can quickly fail over to the secondary VM using SCSI persistent reservation.

Use ZRS disks to achieve zero RPO

For LRS disks, you can achieve better durability by taking frequent backups of your disks using ZRS snapshots. You can also enable cross-zone disaster recovery for LRS disks via Azure Site Recovery. However, these options do not provide zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO). If your application must meet zero RPO, then ZRS disks could be the solution.

Pricing and performance

You can find the price for Premium SSD and Standard SSD ZRS disks at the disks storage pricing page. The IOPS and bandwidth provided by ZRS disks is same as the corresponding LRS disks. For example, a P30 (128 GiB) LRS Premium SSD disk provides 5000 IOPS and 200 MB/second bandwidth, which is same for P30 ZRS Premium SSD disk. Disk latency for ZRS is higher than that of Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) due to the cross zonal copy of data.

Get started

If you are interested in participating in the preview, request access by filling out this form. A list of regions where the feature is supported can be tracked on the documentation page. We will keep adding new regions throughout the public preview.

Review the ZRS disks preview documentation to learn how to do the following:

Create a VM with ZRS OS and data disks.
Create multiple VMs in different zones with a shared ZRS disk.
Create VMSS with ZRS OS and data disk.

Re: New Meeting and Calling Experience in Microsoft Teams!

Neha_Agarwal — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 06:46:51 GMT

I am not getting this option 'New Meeting and Calling Experience in Microsoft Teams!' under settings, I tried reinstalling teams and still its missing. Any help is appreciated. here is the screenshot from my teams:

Thanks,

Neha

SAP on Azure General Update – February 2021

Cameron_MSFT_SAP_PM — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 05:30:12 GMT

1. Hotnews : Updates to SAP on Azure Documentation

SAP introduced a new feature called HANA data volume partitioning with HANA 2.0 Support Pack Stack 3.

This feature places multiple Hana datafiles onto multiple disks, thereby avoiding the requirement to aggregate disks using LVM. Some Linux Administrators prefer simpler disk structures.

Example: Rather than aggregating 4 x P30 in LVM and placing one large datafile, multiple datafiles can be placed onto 4 separate disks.

Microsoft has updated the SAP Hana on Azure documentation to reflect the usage of this new feature. Customers should test scenarios such as Backup/Restore and DB integrity check.

SAP HANA Azure virtual machine storage configurations - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Docs

SAP HANA Azure virtual machine ANF configuration - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Docs

SAP HANA – Partitioning Data Volumes | SAP Blogs

Other recent documentation updates for Azure NetApp Files include:

Azure Virtual Machines Oracle DBMS deployment for SAP workload

HA for SAP HANA scale-up with ANF on RHEL

SAP HANA scale-out HSR with Pacemaker on Azure VMs on RHEL

SAP HANA scale-out with standby node on Azure VMs with ANF on SLES

SAP HANA scale-out with standby node on Azure VMs with ANF on RHEL

NFS v4.1 volumes on Azure NetApp Files for SAP HANA

Azure Storage Configuration page is frequently updated. It is recommended to review recent changes in:

SAP HANA Azure virtual machine storage configurations. Recently the disk performance table has been updated to include Azure Premium Disk Burst functionality

More information on Disk Performance Tiers can be found here: Performance tiers for Azure managed disks - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Docs

Recent price reductions and performance improvements are announced here More IOPS at no additional cost for Azure Files premium tier | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure

The main SAP on Azure site https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/sap/

SAP on Azure Resources https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/sap/resources/

SAP on Azure Updates on the main Azure site https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/?query=sap

SAP on Azure Documentation “Getting Started” https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/sap/get-started

2. New Azure Monitoring Agent

A new Azure Monitoring Agent is currently in preview and will become Generally Available in due course.

Azure Monitor agent overview - Azure Monitor | Microsoft Docs

The new Azure Monitoring Agent (AMA) has advantages over the current monitoring framework

AMA fully supports Multi-homed Linux VMs and control over version upgrades

AMA is still in Public Preview, but when released AMA will become the default agent installed when a new VM is created. The previous Log Analytics solution will still be available for manual installation.

AMA can also monitor non-Azure servers using ARC Azure Arc – Azure Management | Microsoft Azure

To join the AMA Preview https://aka.ms/AMAgent

Supported Operating Systems include popular Windows, Suse and Redhat releases used by SAP customers Overview of the Azure monitoring agents - Azure Monitor | Microsoft Docs

3. Tuning for SIOS LifeKeeper on Oracle Linux

A significant number of SAP on Azure customers run on Oracle database. Microsoft is continuing to improve and optimize the Azure platform for SAP on Oracle customers. In recent time we have published guidance for deploying Oracle 19.8 on Oracle Linux 8.2 with Automatic Storage Management (ASM). In the future we will publish blogs on Oracle DataGuard and SnapShot Backup of ASM systems.

Oracle customers are often using SIOS LifeKeeper cluster software for the ASCS cluster. Testing has shown the following configuration is optimal for DB, ASCS and SAP Application servers

Increase SIOS cluster timeout to 45 sec (5 sec heartbeats x 9 failures)
Set /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_retries2 = 9 (originally set to 15) on cluster VMs
Set ASCS/SCS for ENSA1 profile parameter to: enque/encni/set_so_keepalive = true restart SAP ASCS/SCS to enable settings
Set net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time = 300 (originally set to 7200) on ALL VMs

Thanks for Goran for contributing this item

SIOS Lifekeeper: Linux High Availabillity Cluster Software | SIOS

4. Recommended Blogs for SAP on Azure Customers & Consultants

Many new useful blogs have been created by Microsoft for SAP customers

Part 1: Application Gateway WAF v2 setup for Internet facing SAP Fiori Apps

The blog provides details to configure Application Gateway WAF v2 which acts a first line of defense for Internet facing SAP Fiori Apps in Azure.

NOTE: There is a difference in the end-to-end SSL setup process with respect to the version of application gateway used (v1 or v2). As this blog highlights configuration using application gateway SKU v2, you will find a difference in setup process if you configure application gateway v1.

Part 2: Single Sign On Configuration using SAML and Azure Active Directory for Public and Internal URLs

We already have an official tutorial that describes Azure Active Directory Single Sign On (SSO) integration with SAP Fiori, but this blog extend the use on achieving SAML based SSO for two different URLs (Public and Internal).

Thanks to Bartosz Jarkowski for contributing this blog on SQL Server TDE with Azure Key Vault

https://blogs.sap.com/2021/01/19/your-sap-on-azure-part-25-sql-server-transparent-data-encryption-with-azure-key-vault/

Thanks to Philipp Leitenbauer for releasing this useful tool – version 2.0 of the Hana on Azure Quality Check tool

SAP-on-Azure-Scripts-and-Utilities/QualityCheck at main · Azure/SAP-on-Azure-Scripts-and-Utilities · GitHub

Thanks to Vamshi Polasa for releasing this whitepaper on migrating Oracle workloads to Azure

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/running-sap-applications-on-the/migrating-sap-on-oracle-workloads-to-azure/ba-p/2109839

Thanks to Anjan for providing a procedure to replication Linux Pacemaker ASCS clusters with ASR

SAP ASCS HA Cluster (in Linux OS) failover to DR region using Azure Site Recovery - Microsoft Tech Community

Another major customer is moving from SAP ECC on Azure to S4 running on Hana Enterprise Cloud running on Azure.

Zespri selects SAP cloud solutions in multi-year deal - SAP Australia & New Zealand News Center

Thanks to Ralf Klahr for this video about CONA (Coca Cola North America)

https://tv.netapp.com/detail/video/6230415190001

Thanks to Goran Condric and others for these blogs on automating system shutdown & startup

Optimize your Azure Costs by Automating SAP System Start – Stop - Microsoft Tech Community

Hey, SAP Systems! My PowerApp says Snooze! But only if you’re ready yet | SAP Blogs

5. SQL Server 2019 CU8 Distributed Network Name

A new feature has been added in SQL Server 2019 CU8 that eliminates the requirement to have a Internal Load Balancer for the SQL Server AlwaysOn Listener. This new feature simplifies the setup, configuration and operations of SQL Server AlwaysOn. Customers may also notice that failover times are faster with a DNN.

A Distributed Network Name (DNN) Listener can be retrofitted to an existing configuration that has a conventional ILB. Documentation on the setup and configuration of a DNN can be found here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/virtual-machines/windows/availability-group-distributed-network-name-dnn-listener-configure

It is recommended to set MultiSubnetFailover=True and review https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/virtual-machines/windows/availability-group-dnn-interoperability

Note: this feature is exclusively available only as of SQL Server 2019 with CU8 or higher and Windows 2016 or higher.

The default.pfl and Windows environment variables should be updated. A sample ENV can be seen below. The TCP port number specified in the powershell command must be added to both the ENV and default.pfl. The format should be <listenername>,<port>. A comma and not a “.” or “:” must be used

MSSQL_CONNOPTS=MultiSubnetFailover=yes

MSSQL_DBNAME=P01

MSSQL_SCHEMA=p01

MSSQL_SERVER=dnnp01lsnr,6789

The latest SQL Server Service Pack and CU is always supported by SAP and can be downloaded from here https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/sql-server/bg-p/SQLServer/label-name/SQLReleases

SQL Server 2019 CU8 Availability Groups Supports DNNs (microsoft.com)

6. Running Oracle on Azure NetApp Files

It is now supported to run Oracle 19.8 DBMS on Oracle Linux 8.2 connection over NFS to Azure NetApp Files. NetApp features such as Snapshot backup can be used for near instant Backup & Restore

Changes in our Oracle documentation Oracle Azure Virtual Machines DBMS deployment for SAP workload - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Docs
Minimum OEL release (8.2) and minimum DBMS requirement (19.8.0) is documented in SAP note: 2039619 - SAP Applications on Microsoft Azure using the Oracle Database: Supported Products and Versions - SAP ONE Support Launchpad
The Oracle provided dNFS driver should be used in the guest OS. More documentation can be found here: Creating an Oracle Database on Direct NFS - Bing
Thanks to Ralf for providing this blog describing the whole end-to-end process of deployment and configuration with this blog: Deploy SAP AnyDB (Oracle 19c) with Azure NetApp Files - Microsoft Tech Community

Note: VM skus with very high network quota may be needed

7. SUSE Linux 15 Service Pack 2 – Remove Mount Option NOBARRIER

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 (SLES 15) or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 for SAP Applications (SLES for SAP 15) is now certified and supported for both NetWeaver and Hana. The /etc/fstab option NOBARRIER has been depreciated for some time. Suse 15.2 uses a Linux 5.0 kernel. The option NOBARRIER will now cause an error and should be removed. On most modern Linux distributions the NOBARRIER option will be ignored.

The correct IO Scheduler options are documented here SAP HANA Azure virtual machine storage configurations - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Docs

Azure Site Recovery and Azure Hana Backup are both supported on Suse 15 Service Pack 2 (Linux Kernel 5.0)

List of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server kernel (version and release date) | Support | SUSE

8. Update on Support Matrix for SAP on Azure

In recent months many new features have become available for SAP customers. The list below is a very brief overview of recommended features and updated documentation

Azure Disk Encryption is now supported for Gen2 Windows VMs. Gen2 Linux VM support is in progress
Redhat 8.2 is now certified for Netweaver and Hana.
Suse 15.2 is now certified for Netweaver and Hana
Azure Site Recovery now works with Linux Pacemaker clusters and the procedure for protecting and recovering Pacemaker clusters after an ASR failover is documented here https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/blogs/blogworkflowpage/blog-id/SAPApplications/article-id/722
Azure Site Recovery Portal support for PPG is now live https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/how-to-enable-replication-proximity-placement-groups
Azure Backup for Hana now supports incremental backups Azure Backup for SAP HANA databases now supports Incremental backups – Public preview | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure
Azure backup increased SAP HANA soft limit from 2 TB to 8 TB volume
Customers with a requirement for Immutable Storage for legal or compliance reasons and/or to prevent modification of objects such as backups can use https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-immutable-storage
Customers are recommended to review “Azure Monitor for SAP” which is in preview - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/sap/azure-monitor-providers

The Azure platform offers ADE and additional encryption solutions. These will be discussed in an upcoming blog:

Double Encryption https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/disks-enable-double-encryption-at-rest-portal
Encyption at Host https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/disks-enable-host-based-encryption-portal

9. New Azure Monitor Counters – Guest VM Throttling

Customers and Partners should setup Azure Monitor and leverage new performance counters to ensure SAP on Azure solutions are correctly sized for optimal cost savings and performance.

Over-sizing VMs leads to excessive costs. Undersizing VMs can lead to performance and stability problems.

Each Azure VM is assigned a specific quota of CPU, RAM, Disk & Network. If these quotas are saturated for extended periods performance and stability problems may occur. It is recommended to size VMs such that there are only momentary spikes to 100% for brief periods, typically no more than tens of seconds

Forunately the Azure platform comes with Azure Monitor – a very powerful and useful tool. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/overview

Azure Monitor Quickstarts for Linux and Windows can be found here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/learn/quick-monitor-azure-vm

A list of all the Azure Monitor metrics can be found here

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platform/metrics-supported but the more useful counters for SAP IaaS VMs can be found here Azure Monitor supported metrics by resource type - Azure Monitor | Microsoft Docs

The counters that monitor disk quota consumption are labelled “Consumed Percentage”. In addition to the below monitoring the network throughput may also be useful.

The quotas of typical VMs used for SAP systems can be found in this link below.

Edv4 and Edsv4-series - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Docs

Additional Links & Notes

The new Azure Portal Application is faster and has useful features – available for download

https://portal.azure.com/App/Download

Redhat support cycle and support dates Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle - Red Hat Customer Portal

Azure Files NFS 4.1 is now in Preview https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-files-support-for-nfs-v41-is-now-in-preview/ Azure Files NFS removes the need for a highly available NFS VM infrastructure

Azure Certification and Training courses

Collections - MicrosoftAzuretrainingandcertifications | Microsoft Docs

SAP on Azure Free Online Training Course. Exam AZ-120: Planning and Administering Microsoft Azure for SAP Workloads

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-120

A free Certification Exam offer is here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/microsoft-build-cloud-skills-challenge-2020-free-certification-exam-offer

This Red Hat article How to in-place upgrade SAP environments from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 - Red Hat Customer Portal describes the supported combinations. For HANA, according to the article the in-place upgrade is only supported on non-cloud systems: “The in-place upgrade of RHEL 7 with SAP HANA can be performed from RHEL 7.7 to RHEL 8.2 only, on x86_64 only, and on non-cloud systems only. A SAP HANA system running on RHEL 7.6 or earlier must be updated to RHEL 7.7 “

Re: Automated publish improvement in ADF's CI/CD flow

skammili — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 04:28:32 GMT

Hello Microsoft team,

NPM Utility is removing Azure DevOps Git configuration from my Data Factory integration.

I had to set after every build. Do we have any fix for this?

What’s New in Azure Disk Storage at Microsoft Ignite 2021

henryyan — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 04:10:42 GMT

Since Ignite last September, we’ve been focused on delivering enhancements to Azure Disk Storage to help our customers migrate their mission-critical workloads to Azure. Today, at Microsoft Ignite 2021, we are excited to share a new set of innovations for Azure Disk Storage across key elements, including reliability, scale & performance, security, data protection, and cloud native applications.

This blog post gives you an overview of these new capabilities which will help you run your business-critical applications on Azure.

Reliability

Increase availability for your applications with Zone redundant storage (ZRS) on Premium and Standard SSDs, in preview

Provide synchronous replication of data across zones in a region, enabling disks to tolerate zonal failures which may occur due to natural disasters or hardware issues.
Enable customers to maximize their virtual machine availability without the need for application-level replication of data across zones, not commonly supported by legacy applications such as old versions of SQL or industry-specific proprietary software. This means that if a virtual machine becomes unavailable in an affected zone, you can continue to work with the disk by mounting it to a virtual machine in a different zone.
Can be used with shared disks to provide improved availability for clustered or distributed applications like SQL FCI, SAP ASCS/SCS or GFS2.

Sign-up for the preview.

Read the blog and documentation to learn more about ZRS for Azure managed disks.

Scale & Performance

Achieve sustained higher performance by changing tiers without disruption to your workloads, in preview

In November 2020, we announced the general availability of performance tiers on Premium SSDs, which provides you the flexibility to scale the disk performance without increasing the disk size by selecting a higher performance tier. You can also change tiers to bring the disk back to your baseline performance tier, enabling you to achieve higher performance and cost savings. Performance tiers is critical for planned events like a seasonal sales promotion or running a training environment, where you need to achieve sustained higher performance for a few hours or days and then return to the normal performance levels. Now, in preview, you can change the performance tiers of Premium SSD without any downtime to your application - even when the disk is attached to a running virtual machine.

Sign-up for the preview.

Read the documentation to learn more about performance tiers on Premium SSDs.

Boost disk performance on-demand with new disk bursting experience on Premium SSDs, in preview

We are extending disk bursting support for larger Premium SSDs (above 512 GiB) with a new enhanced experience. Unlike credit-based bursting where you can only burst your performance if you have accrued credits, on-demand bursting allows you to burst up to 6x of the provisioned limit (up to 30,000 IOPS and 1,000 MBps) whenever needed. On-demand disk bursting is most suitable for mission-critical workloads where a limit in performance cannot be tolerated even for unexpected spikes. With on-demand disk bursting, you will be charged a burst enablement fee and for any additional transactions over the provisioned limit.

Read the documentation to learn more about on-demand bursting.

Security & Data Protection

Keep your data secure with auto-key rotation of customer-managed keys, in preview

Azure managed disks provide end to end encryption of data with your keys stored in Azure Key Vault. Now, you can choose to enable automatic rotation of your keys. When you generate a new version of a key in your Key Vault, the system will automatically update all the managed disks, snapshots, and images to the new key version within an hour.

Read the documentation to learn more about auto-key rotation of customer managed keys.

Protect your critical data with per disk backup, in preview

Per disk backup provides snapshot lifecycle management by automating periodic creation of snapshots and retaining it for configured duration using a backup policy. You can easily manage disk snapshots with no additional costs and without need for custom scripting or any management overhead. This is an agent-less and crash-consistent backup solution that takes point in time backup of a managed disk using incremental snapshots with support for multiple backups per day.

Several key aspects of per disk backup include:

Faster and more frequent backups without disruption to your applications
Supports backup and restore for both OS and data disks (including shared disks), regardless of whether they are currently attached to a running Azure Virtual machine.
Cost-effective solution to backup specific disks

Sign-up for the preview.

Read the documentation to learn more.

Cloud Native Applications

Deploy and protect Stateful Kubernetes applications with Azure Disk CSI Driver, generally available

Container Storage Interface (CSI) is a standard for exposing block and file storage systems to containerized workloads on Kubernetes. With the GA of the Azure Disk CSI driver, starting in Kubernetes v1.20, you can now:

Take advantage of the latest Azure Disk functionality by updating to the new CSI driver version, without the need to wait for Kubernetes release cycles.
Create, manage and delete disk volume snapshots via Kubernetes native API, as well as, create new disk volumes pre-populated with the data from a snapshot via Kubernetes dynamic volume provisioning - providing a singular interface for volume and snapshot management.
Use RWX raw block volumes from multiple pods.

Azure Disk CSI driver is now available with Kubernetes v1.20 onwards with AKS Engine and will be available on AKS coming soon.

Application Troubleshooting - Stateless/Stateful Services Cannot Be Started In Service Fabric

Ping_Wu — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 03:05:16 GMT

This blog introduces troubleshooting steps for the issue that stateless/stateful services cannot be started in service fabric as well.

Customer could read this information and follow up the troubleshooting steps to identify the exception and the issue events when stateless and stateful try to start.

Stateless and Stateful Service Lifecycle

The lifecycle of a stateless service is straightforward. Here's the order of events:

1. The service is constructed.

2. Then, in parallel, two things happen:

* StatelessService.CreateServiceInstanceListeners() is invoked and any returned listeners are opened. ICommunicationListener.OpenAsync() is called on each listener.

* The service's StatelessService.RunAsync() method is called.

3. If present, the service's StatelessService.OnOpenAsync() method is called. This call is an uncommon override, but it is available. Extended service initialization tasks can be started at this time.

Stateful services have a similar pattern to stateless services, with a few changes. For starting up a stateful service, the order of events is as follows:

1. The service is constructed.

2. StatefulServiceBase.OnOpenAsync() is called. This call is not commonly overridden in the service.

The following things happen in parallel:

* StatefulServiceBase.CreateServiceReplicaListeners() is invoked.

* If the service is a Primary service, all returned listeners are opened. ICommunicationListener.OpenAsync() is called on each listener.

* If the service is a Secondary service, only those listeners marked as ListenOnSecondary = true are opened. Having listeners that are open on secondaries is less common.

* If the service is currently a Primary, the service's StatefulServiceBase.RunAsync() method is called.

3. After all the replica listener's OpenAsync() calls finish and RunAsync() is called, StatefulServiceBase.OnChangeRoleAsync() is called. This call is not commonly overridden in the service.

Events and Cancellation Token

CreateServiceInstanceListener is to supply the communication listeners for the service instance, it is normally override in stateless service like using Kestrel , https and so on.

RunAsync() is executed in its own task. Note that in the code snippet above, we jumped right into a while loop. There is no need to schedule a separate task for your workload. Cancellation of your workload is a cooperative effort orchestrated by the provided cancellation token. The system will wait for your task to end (by successful completion, cancellation, or fault) before it moves on. It is important to honor the cancellation token, finish any work, and exit RunAsync() as quickly as possible when the system requests cancellation. It will be triggered for stateful primary replica or all stateless instances and normally override in stateful service.

Cancellation token is provided to coordinate when your service instance needs to be closed. In Service Fabric, this open/close cycle of a service instance can occur many times over the lifetime of the service as a whole. This can happen for various reasons, including:

* The system moves your service instances for resource balancing.

* Faults occur in your code

* The application or system is upgraded.

* The underlying hardware experiences an outage.

Troubleshooting

Please follow up below steps to idenify the exception method:

1. RDP to service fabric node. (primary replica node if it is stateful service)

2. Check Application event logs for any exception if no exceptions go to step 3.

3. Check if the port is occupied by the other services.

For TCP: Get-Process -Id (Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort YourPortNumberHere).OwningProcess For UDP: Get-Process -Id (Get-NetUDPEndpoint -LocalPort YourPortNumberHere).OwningProcess

4. For non-prod environment, remote debug would be helpful to get more insight, please ref more details via Debug your application in Visual Studio

5. List underlying exceptions and capture dump via procmon

Start-bitstransfer "https://download.sysinternals.com/files/Procdump.zip"

procdump.exe -accepteula -e 1 -f "" -w "processname"

6. Then capture the dump for specific exception.

procdump.exe -ma -e 1 -f "NullReferenceException" -w "processname"

7. Use Windbg, Debugdiag to get details about exception like method call stack.

Troubleshooting 4xx and 5xx Errors with Azure APIM services

SherrySahni — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 03:01:54 GMT

Part I - Troubleshooting 4xx Errors

Debugging and Troubleshooting Overview

The API Management is nothing but a proxy which help to forward the request from client side to destination API service. It has the ability to modify the request or process based on the inputs from the client side before it reaches the destination. In an ideal scenario, APIs configured within an APIM service are expected to return successful responses (mostly 200 OK) along with the accurate data that is expected from the API.

In case of failures, you may see an incorrect response code along with a precise error message of what went wrong during the API call.

However, there may be scenarios where you may observe API requests failing with generic 4xx or 5xx errors without a detailed error message, and it could be difficult to narrow down or isolate the source of the error.

In such cases, the first point is to isolate whether the error code is thrown by APIM or the backend configured by the APIM. This proves to be an important method as most of the error codes are generated by the backend and APIM being a proxy forwards the response (error codes) back to the users who initiated the request. This makes the user think that the error code is thrown from the APIM.

Troubleshooting Azure APIM Failed Requests

Let's suppose you have initiated an API request to your APIM service and the request eventually fails with a “HTTP 500 – Internal Server Error” message.

With generic error messages such as above, it becomes very difficult to isolate the cause or the source of the failed API request since there are several internal and external components that participate during an API invocation process.

If responseCode matches backendResponseCode, then there is an issue with the backend and we should troubleshoot the backend configured with the APIM
If responseCode does not match backendResponseCode and errorReason is empty, then we should check if their policy logic is returning the error using inspector traces.
If errorReason is not empty, it’s a problem in APIM and the troubleshooting of error codes can help to resolve the issue.

Inspector Trace

If the issue is reproducible on demand, then your best option would be to enable tracing for your APIM API requests. Azure APIM services have the option of enabling the “Ocp-Apim-Trace” for your API requests. This generates a descriptive trace containing detailed information that helps you inspect the request processing step-by-step in detail and gives you a head-start on the source of the error.

Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/api-management-howto-api-inspector

Diagnostic Logging to Azure Monitor Log Analytics

You could also enable diagnostic logging for your APIM services. Diagnostic Logs can be archived to a storage account, streamed to an Event Hub resource, or be sent to Azure Monitor Log Analytics logs which could be further queried as per the scenario and requirement.

These logs provide rich information about operations and errors that are important for auditing as well as troubleshooting purposes. The best part about the diagnostic logs is that they provide you with granular level per-request logs for each of your API requests and assist you with further troubleshooting.

Reference Article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/api-management-howto-use-azure-monitor#resource-logs

While storage accounts and event hubs work as single targeted destinations for diagnostic log collection/streaming, if you choose to enable APIM diagnostic settings with the destination as Log Analytics Workspace, you would be offered with the below 2 modes of resource log collection:

Azure diagnostics - Data is written to the AzureDiagnostics table, which collates diagnostic information from multiple resources of different resource types.
Resource specific - Data is written to individual table for each category of the resource. For APIM, the logs would be ported to ApiManagementGatewayLogs table

Reference Article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platform/resource-logs#send-to-log-analytics-workspace

If you want the resource logs to be ported to the ApiManagementGatewayLogs table, you would have to choose the option ‘Resource specific’ as highlighted in the sample screenshot below:

Below are the sample diagnostic logs generated on the Log Analytics Workspace. These logs would provide granular level details for your API requests such as the timestamp, request status, api/operation id, time taken values, caller/client IP, method, url invoked, backend url invoked, response code, backend response code, request size, response size, error source, error reason, error message, et cetera.

NOTE: Post initial configuration, it may take a couple of hours for the diagnostic logs to be streamed to the destination by the resource provider.

Depending on your mode of log collection, here are a few sample queries that could be used for querying the logs pertaining to diagnostic data for your API requests. You can also choose to filter through the logs by fine-tuning the query to retrieve data specific to an API ID or specific to a response code, et cetera.

Maneuver to Azure Portal a APIM service a Logs blade under “Diagnostic Settings” section to execute the queries

AzureDiagnostics | where TimeGenerated > ago(24h) | where_ResourceId == “apim-service-name” | limit 100

ApiManagementGatewayLogs | where TimeGenerated > ago(24h) | limit 100

Log to Application Insights

Another option is to integrate APIM service with Application Insights for generating diagnostic log data.

Integration of APIM with Application Insights - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/api-management-howto-app-insights

Below is a sample query that can be used for querying the “requests” table that can retrieve the diagnostic data concerned with Azure APIM API requests

Maneuver to the respective Application Insights resource a Click on Logs under “Monitoring” section.

requests | where timestamp > ago(24h) | limit 100

Alternatively, the error handling in APIM can be carried out using the API management error handling policy - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/api-management-error-handling-policies

Now that we have enabled diagnostic logs in order to retrieve details about the different types of errors and errors messages for failed API requests, let’s walk through a couple of commonly observed 4xx and 5xx errors with APIM services.

This troubleshooting series focuses on

Capturing some of the common 4xx and 5xx errors observed while making API requests using Azure APIM services.
Providing guidance to APIM users as to how can they debug or troubleshooting API requests that fail with these errors.
Possible solutions for fixing some of the commonly observed 4xx and 5xx errors.

Troubleshooting 4xx and 5xx errors with APIM services

The very first pivotal step with troubleshooting failed API requests is to investigate the source of the response code that is being returned.

If you have enabled diagnostic logging for your APIM service, then the columns “ResponseCode” and “BackendResponseCode” would divulge this primary information.

If the 4xx or the 5xx response being returned to the client is primarily being returned by the backend API (review “BackendResponseCode” column), then the issue has to troubleshoot more often from the backend perspective since the APIM service would then forward the same response back to the client without actually contributing to the issue.

4xx Errors:

Error code: 400

Scenario 1

Symptoms:

The API Management has been working fine during its implementation. It is now throwing a ‘400 Bad Request’ when invoked using the ‘Test’ option under the API Management in Azure portal. While accessing it using a client app or application, the desired result is yielded.

Troubleshooting:

Now, from the above scenario, we understand that the API is throwing a ‘400 Bad Request’ when invoke only from API Management under the Azure portal.

But the other method of invoking is yielding results. The error message clearly states that the endpoint could not be resolved. In case, if it was an issue with the endpoint, then the issue should occur across the invoking methods of the API. Since it is not our case, let us try verifying the endpoint. You can either try to resolve the endpoint from the same machine using command prompt or try a ping test.

Resolution:

In this kind of scenario’s, it is always recommended to check if the API Management is present within a Virtual Network and also notice that it will be configured in the internal mode.

As per the official documentation, “The Test console available on the Azure Portal will not work for Internal VNET deployed service, as the Gateway Url is not registered on the Public DNS. You should instead use the Test Console provided on the Developer portal.”

Scenario 2

Symptoms:

While invoking the API present under the API Management, we encounter ‘Error: The remote server returned an error: (400) Invalid client certificate’.

Troubleshooting:

Let us analyze the scenario,

This issue occurs when the customer has implemented mutual client certificate authentication, in this case client should pass the valid certificate as per the condition written in the policy

To check whether the certificate is passed or not we can enable the ocp-apim-trace. The below trace shows that no client certificate received.

Resolution:

Issue resolved after adding the valid client certificate.

Similar Scenario’s:

Scenario 3

Error Reason: OperationNotFound
Error message: Unable to match incoming request to an operation.
Error Section: Backend

Resolution:

Make sure that the operation which is invoked for the API is configured or present in the API Management. If not, add the operation or modify the request accordingly.

Scenario 4

Error Reason: ExpressionValueEvaluationFailure
Error message: Expression evaluation failed. EXPECTED400: URL cannot contain query parameters. Provide root site url of your project site (Example: https://sampletenant.sharepoint.com/teams/sampleteam )
Error Section: inbound

Resolution:

Ensure that the URL contains only the query parameter defined in the API according to the configuration in the API Management. Any mismatch might lead to such error messages. For example, if the expected input value is integer and we supply a string, this scenario might lead to the error.

Error code: 401 - Unauthorized issues

Scenario 1

Symptoms: The Echo API suddenly started throwing HTTP 401 - Unauthorized error while invoking the operations under it.

Message-

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized

{ "statusCode": 401, "message": "Access denied due to missing subscription key. Make sure to include subscription key when making requests to an API."}

{
"statusCode": 401,
"message": "Access denied due to invalid subscription key. Make sure to provide a valid key for an active subscription."
}

Troubleshooting:

To get access to the API, developers must first subscribe to a product. When they subscribe, they get a subscription key that is sent as a part of request header that is good for any API in that product. Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key is the request header sent for the subscription key of the product that is associated with this API. The key is filled in automatically.
Regarding error Access denied due to invalid subscription key. Make sure to provide a valid key for an active subscription, it's clear that you are sending a wrong value of Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key request header while invoking Create resource and Retrieve resource operations.
You can check your subscription key for a particular product from APIM Developer portal by navigating to Profile page after sign-in as shown below.
Select the Show button to see the subscription keys for respective products you have subscribed to.

If you check the headers being sent from Test tab, you notice that the value of Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key request header is wrong. You might be wondering how come that is possible, because APIM automatically fills this request header with the right subscription key.
Let's check the Frontend definition of Create resource and Retrieve resource operations under Design tab. Upon careful inspection, you would notice that these operations got a wrong hard-coded value of Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key request header added under Headers tab.
You can remove it, this should resolve the invalid subscription key problem, but still you would get missing subscription key error.

You may get the following error message:

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized

Content-Length: 152

Content-Type: application/json

Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2018 14:29:50 GMT

Vary: Origin

WWW-Authenticate: AzureApiManagementKey realm="https://pratyay.azure-api.net/echo",name="Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key",type="header" {

"statusCode": 401,

"message": "Access denied due to missing subscription key. Make sure to include subscription key when making requests to an API."

}

Go to the Echo API settings and check if it is associated with any of the available products. If not, then you must associate this API with a product so that you get a subscription key.

Resolution:

Developers must first subscribe to a product to get access to the API. When they subscribe, they get a subscription key that is good for any API in that product. If you created the APIM instance, you are an administrator already, so you are subscribed to every product by default.

Error code: 401 Unauthorized issues

Scenario
Symptoms:

The Echo API has enabled OAuth 2.0 user authorization in the Developer Console. Before calling the API, the Developer Console will obtain an access token on behalf of the user from Authorization header in the Request.

Message :

Troubleshooting:

To troubleshoot the scenario, we would start with checking the APIM inspector trace. We can also find the Ocp-Apim-Trace link from the response.
We notice the existence of a “JWT Validation Failed : Claim Mismatched” message in the traces which is unable to decode the header token provided.

To check the scope of the “JWT Validation” policy, select the Calculate effective policy button. If you don't see any access restriction policy implemented at any scopes, next validation step should be done at product level, by navigating to the associated product and then click on Policies option.

Resolution:

The claim name provided in the Claim section does not match with the APP registered in the AAD.

Provide the Client app registered Application ID in the Claims section to fix the authorization error.
After providing the valid app id, the HTTP response results with HTTP/1.1 200 OK.

Error code: 403 - Forbidden issues

Symptoms:

GetSpeakers API operation fetches the details of speakers based on the value provided in the parameter. After few days of using it, The Operation started throwing HTTP 403- Forbidden error whereas the other operations are working fine as expected.

Message:
HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
{
"statusCode": 403,

"message": "Forbidden"
}

Troubleshooting:

To troubleshoot the scenario, we would start with checking the APIM inspector trace. We can also find the Ocp-Apim-Trace link from the response

We notice the existence of a “ip-filter” policy that filters(allow/denies) call from specific IP address ranges.

To check the scope of the 'ip-filter' policy, select the Calculate effective policy button. If you don't see any access restriction policy implemented at any scopes, next validation step should be done at product level, by navigating to the associated product and then click on Policies option.

Resolution:
HTTP 403 - Forbidden error can be thrown when there is any access restriction policy implemented.

As we can see the IP address is not whitelisted in the error screenshot, we need to allow the IP address in the Policy to make it work.
Before:

<ip-filter action="allow"> <address-range from="13.66.140.128" to="13.66.140.143" /> </ip-filter>

After:

<ip-filter action="allow"> <address>13.91.254.72</address> <address-range from="13.66.140.128" to="13.66.140.143" /> </ip-filter>

Once we allow the IP address in the IP-Filter Policy we would be able to receive the response.

Error code: 404

Symptoms:

The Demo API is being invoked by either of the means below,

- Developer portal

- ‘Test’ option under API Management

- Client app like PostMan

- Using user code

The result of the call is a 404 Not Found error code.

Troubleshooting:

Make sure that the issue is existing to proceed with the troubleshooting steps.

Note: The API Management is not present in any Virtual Network which eliminates the option of Network elements causing the issue.

According to the API Management configuration, below are the settings

Name of the API – Demo API

Web Service URL - http://echoapi.cloudapp.net/api

Subscription Required – Yes

Below is the error scenario for the 404 error code using the API Management and the PostMan.

Postman:

API Management portal:

Based on the trace file, we can see that the error code is thrown from the forward-request section and we do not obtain much insights from it.

The configured web service URL is also reachable, and it displays us a visible content.

Web Service URL:

Hence, we proceed on collecting the browser trace while replicating the issue in the API Management section in Azure portal.

Steps to collect browser trace:

- Replicate the issue in the browser (chrome, steps for other browsers might differ slightly)

- Press F12 and navigate to the network tab.

- Make sure that the actions are recorded.

- Right click on any one of the actions and select the last option (Save all as HAR with content).

From the trace, we could see the below information which is show in preview state.

The Requested URL does not lead to a proper content over the mentioned Web Service URL. This is the reason that though the Web Service URL is reachable, the API was still throwing a 404 Not found error code when it was invoked.

Resolution:

Make sure that the Web Service URL leads to a valid destination which helps in the issue resolution. The best approach is to create a proper backend structure which hosts the APIs and then map it to the respective API of the API Management and not vice versa.

The following pointers are the main reason to encounter a 404 Not found error message from an API Management.

You might hit the wrong http Method, (for example, the operation might be POST but you are calling it as GET.)
You might be calling a wrong URL (that either has a suffix or wrong operation path).
You might be using a wrong protocol (HTTP/HTTPS).

In our case, the error is in correspondence with the second point where the configured URL is not pointing to the destination. This has been confirmed by the Browser trace too and hence correcting the URL/path will resolve the issue.

Continue Reading 5xx Error Series

Troubleshooting 4xx and 5xx Errors with Azure APIM services

Janani_R — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 03:00:55 GMT

Part II - Troubleshooting 5xx Errors

This is a continuation of troubleshooting series for 5xx errors. You can find the link of 4xx here.

In the below section, we are referring to the diagnostic logs present under the Log Analytics ApiManagementGatewayLogs when we quote “Diagnostic/Gateway Logs”

Scenario 1: Http Error code 500 with BackendResponseCode logged as 500

Symptom:

A certain API call fails with the error message “500 – Internal Server Error” as highlighted below.

The diagnostic log for this specific failure indicates 500 for the value of the column BackendResponseCode

Cause:

Under the diagnostic logs, if you observe the BackendResponseCode value logged as 500, it means that the backend API has returned a 500 response to the APIM service.

In scenarios where the backend API itself has returned a status code 500 for the incoming request, the APIM service would forward the same response back to the client

Resolution:

The issue would further have to be investigated from the backend API perspective and the backend API provider has to verify why are the backend servers returning the HTTP 500 errors.

Scenario 2: Expression Value Evaluation Failures

Symptom:

Few API requests may return a 500 response code due to failures in the evaluation of the policy expression that the API request invokes.

The error message would be logged as follows:

“ExpressionValueEvaluationFailure: Expression evaluation failed. Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”

Cause:

This error normally occurs due to a “NullReferenceException” wherein you attempt to read a parameter value that hasn’t been defined yet or is set to null.

The ErrorSource column in the diagnostic logs would indicate the name of the policy that is causing the error during the evaluation.

Resolution:

Recommendation is to revisit the policy definition for the API operation which fails evaluation during request processing and fix the null reference exception.

Scenario 3: APIM Client Connection Failure with response code 0 or response code 500

Symptom:

In the gateway logs, you may observe scenarios where the:

Response code column contains either a 0 or 500 response
Error Reason column contains the value “ClientConnectionFailure” logged
Error Message column contains error messages such as “The operation was cancelled, “A task was cancelled”, et cetera.

Cause:

The term ‘Client Connection Failure’ essentially means that the client application (which initiated the API call) terminated the connection with the APIM service even before the backend API could revert with the expected response for the incoming API call and APIM could forward the same back to the client.

It basically implies that the client abandoned the request before the response could be received. APIM has no control over when or why the client decides to abandon the request.

These failures generally occur when the request is taking too long to complete so the client either gives up (a user may close the browser) or the client application may have a time out.

Here a few possible causes for such failures:

Issues with client network
Azure Virtual Network stability
Issues with client application
Low time-out value in client application
Increased request processing time
The Backend API takes abnormally long to respond (possibly due to large payload)

Most of the time, you can observe from the diagnostic logs that the clientTime values for these requests are quite high and contribute to most of the totalTime.

In order to explain what these fields indicate:

totalTime - Total time for the request measured from the first byte received to last byte sent to the client. This includes backend roundrip and client ability to read.
backendTime - Number of milliseconds spent on overall backend IO (connecting, sending, and receiving bytes). If this time is high, it means the backend is slow and the performance investigation needs to be focused there.
clientTime - Number of milliseconds spent on overall client I/O (connecting, sending, and receiving bytes). If this time is high, the client bandwidth or processing might not allow to read response fast.

Resolution:

In most scenarios, Client Connection Failures primarily have to be investigated further from a client perspective since it is the client that essentially terminates the connection with the APIM service.

Few possible suggestions are increasing the Timeout value at the client end, decrease the response processing time, et cetera which depend from scenario to scenario.

Additionally, using the diagnostic logs, you can also find the specific process during which the client abanonds the request by looking into the ErrorSource column.

For example,

If the column contains the value “forward-request”, it means that the client terminated the connection while the APIM service was still forwarding the request to the backend API
If the column contains the value “transfer-response”, it means that the client terminated the connection while the APIM service had received the response from the backend API and was forwarding it back to the client.

Scenario 4: APIM Backend Connection Failures

The APIM service logging “BackendConnectionFailure” under the ErrorReason column in the diagnostic logs essentially indicates that the APIM service failed to establish a connection with the backend API.

This error could be happen due to various reasons and with multiple types of error messages.

Few of the commonly observed error messages for Backend Connection Failures are listed down below. The corresponding error message for the failure would be logged under the ErrorMessage column in the diagnostic logs.

Scenario 5: Unable to connect to the remote server

Symptom:

API requests fail with Backend Connection Failure with the below error message highlighted in the Ocp-Apim traces/diagnostic logs

Cause and Resolution:

The error “Unable to connect to the remote server” normally occurs due to the below reasons:

APIM performance/capacity issues.
SNAT port exhaustion on the APIM VMs
There is an additional network device (like a firewall) that is blocking the APIM service from communicating with the backend API
Backend API isn’t responding to the APIM requests (backend down or not responding)
Network issues/latencies between the APIM service and the backend.

Using the Capacity dashboard on the Metrics blade of the APIM service, you can verify whether there have been any abnormal fluctuations with the average capacity which could have possibly contributed to the issue.

SNAT Port Exhaustion is a hardware specific failure.

The following document highlights that the max concurrent requests from APIM to a back-end is 1024 for the developer tier and 2048 for the other tiers.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/management/azure-subscription-service-limits#api-management-limits

Let’s take the example of a Developer Tier service to understand what this means.

The Developer Tier is an APIM service where the APIM service is hosted on a single underlying VM/node/host machine.

Each VM is internally assigned 1024 SNAT ports for communication. Hence, in case of the Developer tier you cannot have more than 1024 outbound connections to the same destination at the same time (concurrent connections). If the number exceeds beyond 1024 outbound connections (possibly due to huge influx of incoming requests) the service will encounter SNAT port exhaustion issues and will fail to establish a connection with the backend server.

NOTE: You can have more than 1024 connections at the same time if the destinations are different (not concurrent).

If it has already been verified that the issue has not occurred due to either capacity issues or SNAT failures, then the issue could possibly be occurring because either the backend API was down, unavailable to establish connection with the APIM service or was terminating the connection due to network latencies between the APIM service and the backend

In order to confirm this, you would have to collect network traces from the underlying VMs/nodes hosting the APIM service while the issue is being reproduced and then analyze the traces for establishing the point of failure.

In most scenarios, you can observe from the diagnostic logs that the "BackendTime" was almost equal to or greater than 21 seconds for all the failed requests and contributed to most of the “totalTime”.

This indicates possibilities of a TCP connection failure to the backend (21 seconds is the usual TCP timeout). APIM tried to engage with the backend, but there was no response from the backend. So, the connection timed out after 21 seconds and a HTTP Status Code 500 was returned, which indicates that the backend server was down or was not responding to connection requests or was unable to maintain the connection.

Scenario 5: The underlying connection was closed: A connection that was expected to be kept alive was closed by the server.

Symptom:

API requests fail with Backend Connection Failure with the below error message highlighted under the errorMessage section in the diagnostic logs

“The underlying connection was closed: A connection that was expected to be kept alive was closed by the server.”

Cause:

This is usually caused by a known APIM issue.

APIM keeps connections to the backend open for as long as possible so it can re-use them and so that it doesn't have to perform TCP/SSL handshakes to establish new connections every time, which has a negative impact on performance. However, if a connection doesn't get used for a certain period of time due to low/no activity (4 minutes), the internal Azure Load Balancer silently drops the connection. When this happens, if APIM tries using the dropped connection next time, the connection fails and the above error message gets logged.

Resolution:

This can be avoided by using the retry logic in APIM.

Reference: APIM Retry Policy - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/api-management-advanced-policies#Retry

Scenario 6: The remote name could not be resolved

Symptom:

API requests fail with Backend Connection Failure with the below error message highlighted under the errorMessage section in the diagnostic logs:

“The remote name could not be resolved”

Cause:

When one machine has to connect to another machine, it has to perform DNS name resolution.

The above error indicates that APIM wasn't able to convert the hostname of the backend (e.g. contoso.azurewebsites.com) to an IP address and couldn't connect to it.

The most frequent cause for this error is using an incorrect hostname while setting up the API configuration. If the service is in a VNET and is using custom DNS, it could mean that custom DNS server was unavailable or did not contain a record for the backend that APIM is attempting to connect to.

Resolution:

Accordingly, the issue has to be troubleshot from a network perspective as per the dependent scenario. The most reliable method of isolating the issue and zeroing down on the exact cause is analysis of network traces for sample failures.

Scenario 7: The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel

Symptom:

API requests fail with Backend Connection Failure with the below error message highlighted under the errorMessage column in the diagnostic logs:

“The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel”

Cause:

This error is normally encountered when the backend has been configured to use a self-signed certificate instead of using a publicly trusted root CA certificate.

APIM services are hosted in the Azure infrastructure using PaaS VMs that run on Windows OS.

Hence, every APIM instance trusts the same default Root Certificate Authorities that all windows machines trust.

The list of trusted Root CAs can be downloaded using the Microsoft Trusted Root Certificate Program Participants list - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/security/trusted-root/participants-list

Resolution:

There are 2 possible solutions for resolving this issue:

Add a valid trusted root CA certificate that resolves to a Microsoft Trusted Root Participant list.
Disable certificate chain validation in order for APIM to communicate with the backend system. To configure this, you can use the New-AzApiManagementBackend (for new back end) or Set-AzApiManagementBackend (for existing back end) PowerShell cmdlets and set the -SkipCertificateChainValidation parameter to True.

Below is the sample PowerShell command:

$context = New-AzApiManagementContext -resourcegroup 'ContosoResourceGroup' -servicename 'ContosoAPIMService' New-AzApiManagementBackend -Context $context -Url 'https://contoso.com/myapi' -Protocol http -SkipCertificateChainValidation $true

References for creating/updating backend entity:

Scenario 8: Unable to read data from the transport connection: The connection was closed.

Symptom:

API requests fail with Backend Connection Failure with the below error message highlighted under the errorMessage column in the diagnostic logs:

“Unable to read data from the transport connection: The connection was closed.”

Cause:

This error occurs when the APIM service is still trying to read the response from the backend, but the connection was suddenly aborted.

The process by which an APIM service transfers a response to the client is highlighted below:

APIM reads the response status code and header first. The payload will stay in network stream.

Once the header and the status code is received, then APIM will stream across the response body from the backend service to the client.

While the data stream is underway, if any exception is encountered, then the above error message is logged.

Resolution:

Users can implement the retry logic in APIM for avoiding this error:

Reference: APIM Retry Policy - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/api-management-advanced-policies#Retry

Scenario 9: The underlying connection was closed: The connection was closed unexpectedly

Symptom:

API requests fail with Backend Connection Failure with the below error message highlighted under the errorMessage column in the diagnostic logs:

“The underlying connection was closed: The connection was closed unexpectedly”

Cause:

This error occurs when either the APIM service or the backend service abruptly terminates the connection while the communication between the APIM service and the backend was still underway.

Resolution:

In order to isolate the source of the issue and resolve the same, the scenario would require collection of network traces from the underlying VMs/nodes hosting the APIM service while the issue is being reproduced and then analyze the traces for establishing the point of failure.

Implementing retry logic may help to some extent if the frequency of the issue is highly rare.

Error Code: 501

Scenario 1: Not Implemented

Symptom:

Sometimes, you can observe API requests fail with HTTP 501 errors with either of the below error messages highlighted under the errorMessage column in the diagnostic logs:

NOTE: This is not an exhaustive list and the error message would depend on the actual cause:

“Header BPC was not found in the request. Access denied.”
“Unable to match incoming request to an operation.”
“Header RegionID was not found in the request. Access denied.”

Cause:

This is not a rarely observed error with the usage of APIM services.

The above HTTP server error response code means that the server does not support the functionality required to fulfill the request.

In APIM terms, if the client makes a request to the server but the server finds the request as inappropriate since it does not support the feature/method to process the request, then it could return a 501 response to the caller.

Reference: https://www.checkupdown.com/status/E501.html

The server returning the 501 response in this scenario would be the

Backend if the BackendResponseCode in the logs is 501. APIM would return the same response to the client.
APIM service if the ResponseCode is 501 and BackendResponseCode is either blank or 0 in the diagnostic logs.

Resolution:

In case it’s the APIM service which returns a 501 response and not the backend, a very popular occurrence is where APIM logs the following error message – “Unable to match incoming request to an operation” for which both the API configuration within the APIM service as well as the request formation and invocation processes have to be reviewed at client-side as per the scenario.

Or there are also possibilities where the 501 error code is being returned by a policy effect that is being evaluated during request processing. If that is the case, you would find the corresponding policy name highlighted under the “ErrorSource” column in the diagnostic logs.

Resolution:

The best option in such scenarios is to collect Ocp-Apim Trace which would retrieve detailed request processing details and assist isolating the point of failure.

Error Code: 502

Scenario 1: Bad Gateway

Cause/Resolution:

APIM services forwards a 502 Bad Gateway response to the client in case of Backend Connection Failures.

Hence, the troubleshooting and debugging remain the same as the Backend Connection Failures section documented above and is dependent on the details observed under the “ErrorMessage” column in the diagnostic logs.

The most commonly found error message logged by APIM for a 502 response is “The remote name could not be resolved”

Error Code: 503

Scenario 1: Service Unavailable

Symptom:

Sometimes, you can observe API requests failing with HTTP 503 errors and the error message indicating that the Service is Unavailable.

Below is a sample error message observed on Postman while attempting to invoke an API

Cause:

503 responses are mostly returned by the backend servers amongst popular occurrences.

However, APIM services also return a 503 response to the client even before the request is forwarded to the backend in scenarios where there are certain policy effects being applied to the incoming request before forwarding it to the backend and the request is terminated due to the application/evaluation of the inbound policy effect.

Resolution:

Verify the “ErrorSource”, “ErrorReason” and “ErrorMessage” columns in such scenarios and proceed accordingly.

Error Code: 504

Scenario 1: Gateway Timeout

Cause/Resolution:

Below are some of the popular scenarios where APIM services return a 504 response to the client:

Scenario 1: The APIM service has waited too long to establish a connection with the backend server but the backend is not available or responding.

The troubleshooting performed remains the same as that of troubleshooting Backend Connection Failures highlighted above.

In the diagnostic logs, specifically look out for the sub-component time values and the columns “ErrorReason” and “ErrorMessage” in order to isolate the source of the issue.

Scenario 2: The backend service is taking too long for request processing leading to the APIM service terminating the connection. In such scenarios, you can observe under the diagnostic logs that the “BackendTime” is high when compared to the total time taken for request processing and consumes most of the total time.

There are 2 possible solutions for mitigating this issue:

Increase the timeout value of the APIM service under the <forward-request> policy such that it is in tally with the average time taken by the backend for request processing.
Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/api-management-advanced-policies#ForwardRequest
Improve backend performance by reducing the response time.

Scenario 3: The timeout value configured for the APIM service within the <forward-request> policy is low.

Popular mitigation step is to Increase the timeout value of the APIM service under the <forward-request> policy section such that it is in tally with the average time taken by the backend for request processing.

NOTE: For APIM API request processing, the default timeout value imposed by APIM services is 300 seconds/5 minutes.

The default timeout value can be increased using the forward-request APIM policy - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/api-management-advanced-policies#ForwardRequest

For "timeout", the maximum value can be set to any valid integer, but as the above documentation states, the real maximum value is going to be around 240 seconds since values greater than 240 seconds may not be honored as the underlying network infrastructure can drop idle connections after this time.

Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/api-management-advanced-policies#attributes-1

[UI Only] Event Trigger Renamed to Storage Event Trigger

ChenyeCharlieZhu — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 03:05:28 GMT

As we public preview the new Custom Event Trigger, that processes and responds to Custom Topics in Event Grid, we are making one minor change to the beloved Event topic: we are renaming the trigger to Storage Event trigger, to better convey its use cases and capabilities.

Storage event trigger kick offs pipelines based on events such as the arrival or deletion of a file in your Azure Storage account. The trigger supports both Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and General-purpose version 2 storage accounts.

To create a Storage event trigger, in ADF UI portal, select Storage event in the trigger type drop down menu

Similarly, the monitoring tab is renamed to Storage Events under Trigger run monitoring page

3 Key points for renaming:

The renaming only impacts UI experience: in that instead of selecting Event Trigger, customers should select Storage event trigger
Renaming has no impact on existing triggers. Backward compatibility is guaranteed
Renaming has no impact on JSON definitions, or SDK usage. For JSON definition, trigger type remains "BlobEventsTrigger". SDK and JSON editing users will not be impacted by this change

Delivering an even better Redis experience on Azure

kteegarden — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 02:41:36 GMT

As ever more applications are built to be cloud native, services like Redis are essential to enable these applications to perform and scale under heavy loads. To allow developers to utilize the speed and flexibility of Redis without the hassle of operation, Azure offers Azure Cache for Redis, a fully managed Redis service. A third-party benchmark recently showed that Azure Cache for Redis can improve latency and throughput performance by up to 800% when added to existing Azure architectures. To build on this powerful technology, we announced an innovative collaboration with Redis Labs almost a year ago to bring their Redis Enterprise software to Azure as a part of Azure Cache for Redis. Customers both large and small have been excited to try the expanded capabilities during the preview, and developers have found novel ways to solve their application challenges with the offering. Today, we’re proud to announce the general availability of the Enterprise and Enterprise Flash tiers of Azure Cache for Redis.

What’s in the box?

The new Enterprise offerings enhance and expand the range of use cases for Redis today. Redis modules from Redis Labs, like RediSearch and RedisTimeSeries, enable new use-cases for Redis such as real-time search and IoT data ingestion. At the same time, the offering also improves your existing Redis experience by making caches larger, more resilient, and capable of being distributed around the globe. The powerful features available include:

Active Geo-Replication (in Preview)
Higher availability—architected for 99.99% with zone redundancy, and 99.999% with active geo-replication.
Redis Modules, including
- RediSearch
- RedisBloom
- RedisTimeSeries
The latest version of Redis—Redis 6.0
Redis on Flash, using both DRAM and NVMe storage to enable cache sizes up to 13TB at a lower price per GB.

If you currently use Redis Enterprise on-prem, this offering allows you to enjoy many of your favorite features in a native Azure solution. Streamlined billing, familiar security and monitoring tools, and the ability to use your Azure spend commitment are all included. Even better, support for the Enterprise offering on Azure is backed all day, every day by the Microsoft support team, who have a direct line to the experts at Redis Labs if additional assistance is needed.

Active Geo-Replication

New in the Enterprise offering is a much-requested upgrade: the ability to geo-replicate data across caches in an active-active configuration. Now in preview, this feature allows data to be written locally in more than one region, with changes automatically replicated to and merged with other regions. Active geo-replication enables you to create a worldwide distributed cache with local latency access for users around the globe. This feature opens many exciting possibilities:

One key application is handling user sessions across regions. A huge advantage of Redis is the blazing-fast latencies gained from accessing data in-memory. If a user is far away from the data center holding the cache, however, this advantage is limited due to network latency. With active geo-replication, user session data can follow a user without complicated data management on the backend. The data is simply duplicated to the Redis instance in the closest data center, with all changes synchronized automatically.

Another important use case is with applications that are distributed worldwide. Active geo-replication greatly simplifies the data layer by reducing the need to manage geographies. For instance, a mobile game might have a worldwide leaderboard. Instead of developing infrastructure to share and rank scores between regions, high scores from each user can simply be written to a Redis sorted set that is distributed across regions worldwide. Through conflict-free resolution in active geo-replication, scores will be ranked seamlessly.

Increased Availability

One significant advantage of active geo-replication is that it makes a Redis deployment substantially more resilient to single-region failures. This, combined with the option to deploy Redis across multiple availability zones in a single region, provides two additional high-availability options. Deploying across availability zones gives up to 99.99% availability, while active geo-replication is designed for up to 99.999% availability—less than six minutes of downtime per year. This increased resiliency is essential to many retail and financial services customers who rely on Redis for inventory or pricing systems.

Redis Modules + Redis 6.0

The Redis Enterprise offering on Azure doesn’t just boost geographic distribution and availability, however. It also includes powerful features that enable new use cases. With the introduction of Redis 6.0, Azure Cache for Redis users gain access to the Redis Streams data type for the first time. Streams can be used to implement messaging systems, allowing Kafka-like functionality where clients can intelligently consume items from the stream. Three Redis Modules are additionally supported: RedisBloom, RediSearch, and RedisTimeSeries:

Customers like SitePro have already started using these highly-effective modules in their workflows, for example using RedisTimeSeries for IoT data ingestion:

"We are extremely excited about the added functionality in the Azure Cache for Redis, Enterprise Tiers. We know, love, and have used Redis for years as a key component in our industry leading real-time IoT control & monitoring platform. The Enterprise tiers allow us to do more with Redis by leveraging the RedisTimeSeries module to support data collection and analytics from hundreds of thousands of IoT sensors. "

-CEO and President

Learn More

Interested in learning more? Watch the session at Microsoft’s Ignite conference for a deeper dive and a demo of active geo-replication, and read the blog from Redis Labs.

Want to go ahead and give the new features a try? Read the documentation, and start your free Azure trial today.

Re: Workbook Link support coming to Excel for the web

gilacha2000 — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 02:34:31 GMT

Todavia no nos aparece a nosotros en un tenant de Argentina, alguien sabe algo? no hay información.

Re: Enhanced performance, designed for simplicity – the new Outlook for Mac

MSM59 — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 00:31:33 GMT

I have two accounts, 1 gmail and 1 POP. Emails from the POP account are stored in folders in "On My Computer", including the Inbox. All the other folders are a subfolder to Inbox.

- What happens to all the emails stored in these subfolders "On My Computer" when I switch to New Outlook?

-- If these emails are first exported to a .pst file, can they then be imported to the New Outlook? and stored similarly as "On My Computer"?

- If I switch back to the Old Outlook, will these emails reappear, or will I have to import them from the save .pst file?

Thanks

Re: Storage Migration Service October 2020 Update

Ned Pyle — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 00:29:15 GMT

Hi, follow the steps here to bypass this issue. We have a proper fix coming

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-migration-service/known-issues#storage-migration-service-transfer-validation-returns-error-hresult-e_fail-has-been-returned-from-a-call-to-a-com-component

Re: Step-By-Step: Enabling Hyper-V for use on Windows 10

PatriceDipama7gmail — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 00:25:07 GMT

propre

Re: Enhanced performance, designed for simplicity – the new Outlook for Mac

Tom_Croll — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 00:06:16 GMT

Hi Folk,

I have been commenting on this forum for some time now trying to be as objective as I could regarding the lack of support, in the new Outlook, for basic old Outlook functionality. Particularly that found on the Windows platform.

There was a lot of development that was due for release in Feb 2021, so I thought I would go check it out.

I thought it was right to post some of my recent findings, to see what has actually been done by Microsoft, to see if some of the development in the Roadmap has been released to the preview program.

The "Pros" I have found.

All my different email accounts, most of them IMAP have come across into the new Outlook.
All the folders and subfolders (Gmail Labels) associated with those accounts have successfully come across, except those on my computer.
All my contacts have come across and are shown under each account. This is brilliant as it gives me the opportunity to easily clean up all my contacts.
All my Calendars from iPhone, Google Calendars (multiple) have come across and can be shown in a combined view.
It is really easy to turn on or off any of the calendars in the combined view, therefore enabling one to zero in on one by reducing the clutter of having all calendars shown.
The look and feel are really good.
The ease of use in maintaining items is really intuitive
- Calendar items I can add and maintain entries in my Calendars and they immediately sync to other people who have those calendars. But see the Cons below.
- Contacts are very easy to manage but see the Cons below.
- ToDo tasks albeit by the web interface that is automatically loaded when you go to edit a ToDo item.
- If I go to my Gmail account and add "Labels" to my mail account they automatically appear in new Outlook after sync occurs.
- If I go to my iCloud mail using the Apple Mail app I can create and maintain "Mail Boxes" and that maintenance is reflected in my new Outlook after syncing. You can leave this to sync automatically or you can force a sync to ensure the maintenance occurs immediately.
- I can move mail entries from one folder to another and that movement is reflected in the original Gmail "Labels" and or iCloud account Mail Boxes.
- I can't move mail entries from one account to another account. I think that is a Pro, but some might consider it a Con.
I really like how I can see "My Days appointments / Calendar entries" to the right of my email.

The Cons I have found so far:

Folders on My computer did not come across. I believe these should show up inside new Outlook if only in a virtual sense?
I can't create folders for any IMAP accounts, I have to go to the original account like Gmail and do that by adding using the "Label" Google Web or Google Mail app.
I can't create Mail Boxes for any Apple accounts, I have to go to the original account like Apple Mail and add or maintaining Mail Boxes there.
I can't maintain folders for IMAP accounts. That has to be done back in the original (Google, Apple) mail app.
I am really disappointed with the dropping of One Note by Microsoft. I believe they would have been far better of adding the ToDo functionality to OneNote and integrating that with new Outlook, rather than developing the new ToDo task manager.

In summary, the new Outlook is still lacking some of the essential bi-directional IMAP functionality but it is definitely getting better. If this development continues over the next couple of months I see the new Outlook being a real winner.

BUT only if the development continues, so for now I will continue testing for a few more days and report any significant findings and then switch back to old Outlook, such a shame new Outlook is still not quite ready.

Re: Add up to 25 embedded, editable labels to your tasks

Andy LUCE — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 00:05:30 GMT

So helpful in Planner. Was able to add "Blocked Business" and "Blocked IT" as two new lables, and then delete the Blocked bucket. Now blocked work can remain in the correct bucket, but be labeled as blocked. I could not find a way to move the colors I wanted (RED and ORANGE to draw attention) up behind the existing 6 colors. I wanted the colors used to be at the top, so I don't have to scroll down to get the ones I want, and the yet to be defined to be grouped together. Great change though, but if anyone finds a way to reorder the colors let me know.

Azure Sphere OS version 21.02 Update 1 is now available for evaluation

AzureSphereTeam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 23:40:00 GMT

Update 1 of the Azure Sphere OS version 21.02 is now available for evaluation in the Retail Eval feed. This release fixes a security vulnerability discovered since the last release. This update will not restart the 21.02 evaluation period because the change will not impact any customer scenarios. The Retail feed will continue to deliver OS version 21.01 until we publish 21.02 later this week.

The evaluation release includes only an OS update; it does not include an updated SDK.

For more information on Azure Sphere OS feeds and setting up an evaluation device group, see Azure Sphere OS feeds and Set up devices for OS evaluation.

For self-help technical inquiries, please visit Microsoft Q&A or Stack Overflow. If you require technical support and have a support plan, please submit a support ticket in Microsoft Azure Support or work with your Microsoft Technical Account Manager. If you would like to purchase a support plan, please explore the Azure support plans.

Re: New Meeting and Calling Experience in Microsoft Teams!

Ryan Steele — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 23:15:47 GMT

: Click the "three dots" button, then click Transfer.

Re: New certification: Microsoft Power Platform Solution Architect Expert

brynhh — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 23:09:34 GMT

That's exactly why I didn't post what the questions were about, just that they were around a topic that didn't seem appropriate and therefore highlighting a potentially serious issue. Can you tell me which specific point you think I've breached, rather than copying and pasting the entire thing which appears to just be trying to get me into trouble?

didn't seem to have a problem with my messages on here and we had a good discussion, plus it now seems like the exams are being updated, which implies Microsoft have determined there was an issue with the content. Therefore this will be for the benefit of everyone sitting exams in the future and not potentially failing due to unexpected questions. But if she thinks they should be removed, I'd be more than happy for her or a moderator to do so, as there was no ill intent, which is fairly obviously to see upon reading my comments in detail.

Is your certification expiring soon? Renew it for free today!

Sudarshan — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 23:00:00 GMT

We continue to advocate for our learners to have a continuous learning mindset. This key principle is critical because cloud technologies are rapidly changing and it’s important to keep your skills current. Plus, maintaining an active certification can validate your up-to-date knowledge and your ability to perform in the job role. A couple months ago, we announced a new approach – free certification renewals – to reduce stress, complexity, and cost of keeping your certifications active.

Today, we’re proud to announce that 19 certifications are now available to renew on Microsoft Learn, with additional certifications following shortly. Within six months of your role-based or specialty certification expiring, you’re eligible to renew it by passing an online assessment – at no cost and on your own schedule. If you’re within the eligibility window, visit your Certification Dashboard to find more information about renewing your certification.

How can you prepare?

To help you prepare for the certification renewal assessment, we offer a curated collection of bite-sized learning content aligned to each assessment, and you can access it at any time – even before you’re eligible to renew your certification. Completing the collection is optional but we highly recommend it, especially if you’re not familiar with the latest technology updates. To understand what the assessment might include, you can review the skills measured section on the renewal page specific to your certification. Based on your assessment performance, we’ll also curate a personalized collection of learning content for you to save so you can learn which topics you might need to spend more time on.

When should you take the assessment?

Another key principle we’re adopting is to help learners keep their certification active with more flexibility and less friction. The eligibility window begins within six months before your certification expires, providing you the ability to complete the assessment online at a time that works best for you.

You may take the assessment as many times as you need to pass. If you don’t pass the first time, you may immediately attempt it again. After your second attempt, you must wait at least 24 hours before trying again. Keep in mind that you must pass the renewal assessment before your certification expires, otherwise the assessment will no longer be accessible and you’ll need to earn the certification again by passing the required exam (or exams). Be sure to factor this in as you plan to renew your certification. Note that the renewal assessment won't be available to you prior to your eligibility window, but the learning collection will always be available so you can continuously learn and keep your skills up to date.

What if you have multiple certifications? To avoid renewing your certifications in the same week or month, you’ll have the flexibility to stagger your renewal assessment time frames, thanks to the six-month eligibility window. We recommend that you review the expiration dates for all certifications you currently have and plan your renewal assessment cadence accordingly. For example, if you have three certifications expiring in December, your eligibility window for all three certifications begins in June. You may decide to spread out your workload by taking one renewal assessment in June, another in August, and the third in October.

No matter when you pass the assessment, your certification will be extended by an additional year from its current expiration date. Note that if you have an expert-level certification for which an associate-level certification is a prerequisite, you only need to pass the assessment for the expert-level certification to renew it. Your associate-level certification needs to be renewed separately, and you need to follow the eligibility window based on when you earned that certification. In other words, you aren’t required to pass two renewal assessments to keep your expert-level certification active. If you choose to let your associate-level certification expire, you can keep your expert-level certification active by passing the renewal assessment for that certification only.

Exam updates and their impact on renewal

Renewal assessments are at the certification level and not for individual exams that lead up to the certification. Assessments are kept in sync with any changes made to the certification exams to help ensure that content and skills measured are aligned. If updates are made to the exam (or exams) that lead to a certification you already have, there’s no need to re-take the updated exam as changes will be reflected in the skills measured within the renewal assessment.

For example, if you earned a Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification by passing Exam AZ-103 initially, no action is required on your part to take the replacement Exam AZ-104. You only need to pass the certification renewal assessment to keep your certification active. If a certification retires altogether because the job role associated with it has evolved, the ability to renew the certification will no longer be available.

What about newly released certifications?

As we continue to invest in new certifications, we’ll also release associated renewal assessments and collections of learning content approximately six months after the certification has been in market. Additionally, renewal assessments will be updated periodically to reflect changes to the technology that impact the job role. To keep your certifications active, be sure to pass the assessment every year before your certification expires.

Find details on how to renew your Microsoft Certification. We're excited to share the evolution of our certification program to help you validate your up-to-date skills with more flexibility while supporting you through your continuous learning journey.

What’s new in Azure AD at Microsoft Ignite Spring 2021

Alex Simons (AZURE) — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 23:00:00 GMT

Howdy folks,

It’s that special time of year with another digital edition of Microsoft Ignite on the horizon. We know that security is top-of-mind for you and your business leaders, maybe now more so than ever. So we’re excited to share several Azure AD announcements that will help you strengthen your Zero Trust defenses in this current era of hybrid work. We’ll be updating our key news on Tuesday morning as Microsoft Ignite starts, so please watch our Microsoft Security blog for further announcements.

Once you’ve checked that out, be sure to tune in to Azure Active Directory: our identity vision and roadmap airing first at Wednesday, March 3^rd at 5:00pm PT, delivered by Joy Chik, as she shares a deeper dive on how Azure AD helps you maximize control while enabling a seamless and secure user experience. Joy will be joined by a team of our identity expert to show off cool demos and share best practices to strengthen your authentication, simplify onboarding, and secure access to all your apps.

Please also join our experts for a live Q&A where they will answer your burning questions on our identity announcements, tips for deploying secure passwordless solutions, and Zero Trust as the proactive approach to cybersecurity.

No matter where you are in the world, I hope you will join us through our live and pre-recorded sessions. Join the conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn with the hashtag #MSIgnite.

Additional technical deep dive sessions available starting Tuesday

Go passwordless | Hands-on tour in Azure AD with FIDO2 keys and Temporary Access Pass - watch
Taking identity and privacy to a new level – watch
Prevent attacks by protecting your applications with Azure Active Directory – watch
Winning Azure Active Directory strategies for identity, security, and governance – watch
Zero Trust – The proactive approach to cybersecurity – watch

Looking for more ways to engage with our identity content and experts?

Visit the Connection Zone where various engagement opportunities will help deepen your knowledge and skills.

Compete and win free certification exams while building your expertise by participating in Cloud Skill Challenges
Tune into Plan implement and administer conditional access, a Learn Live session which will highlight how to plan and implement security defaults, test, and troubleshoot conditional access policies implement application controls and session management as well as how to configure smart lockout thresholds.
Want to have your questions answered by a Microsoft Professional? Visit One-on-one Consults to schedule a 45-minute consultation where you can engage directly with an identity expert.

Best regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @alex_a_simons)

Corporate Vice President Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

AzureRM will retire by 29 February 2024

dcaro — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 22:32:53 GMT

Can you remember 2015? Apple launched the Apple Watch, Microsoft launched Windows 10, and we announced AzureRM v1.0!

After years of service and coexistence with its replacement, the time has come to share the next steps we are taking with AzureRM.

Looking back

In 2018, we introduced a new generation of PowerShell modules named “Az”, bringing several advantages:

Based on .NET Standard library for cross-platform execution.
Addressed customer feedback about the length of commands.
Reduced inconsistencies between cmdlets and modules.

After two years of existence and continuous improvements, the Az PowerShell modules feature the following benefits:

Security and stability
- Token cache encryption
- Prevention of man-in-the-middle attack type
- Support authentication with ADFS 2019
- Username and password authentication in PowerShell 7
Support for all Azure services
- All generally available Azure services have a corresponding supported Az PowerShell module
- Multiple bug fixes and API version upgrades since AzureRM
New capabilities
- Support in Cloud Shell and cross-platform
- Can get and use access token to access Azure resources
- Cmdlet available for advanced REST operations with Azure resources

We are now announcing that the AzureRM PowerShell module will retire by 29 February 2024.

If you are still using AzureRM modules, we advise you to migrate to Az at your earliest convenience.

How do I migrate?

When we talked with customers, the effort needed to migrate scripts based on AzureRM to Az was one of the main blockers.

We provide a toolkit comprised of three options to help you migrate to Az:

A PowerShell module to convert your scripts automatically.
A compatibility mode with the “Enable-AzureRmAlias” cmdlet allowing you to run AzureRM scripts with Az modules.
A VSCode extension if you want to perform the migration of your scripts with an IDE.

The following page has all the resources and technical information to help you migrate your scripts to Az: https://docs.microsoft.com/powershell/azure/migrate-from-azurerm-to-az

Open an issue on GitHub if you encounter problems with the migration toolkit.

Products and services using AzureRM

Some products and services have dependencies on the AzureRM modules. We are working closely with them to provide you with a path forward.

Next steps

We encourage you to start your migration as soon as possible and share with the community best practices that you may have, including tips and tricks.

The entire team is listening to your feedback and welcomes issues and contributions.

For issues on the migration toolkit: https://github.com/Azure/azure-powershell-migration
For best practices sharing: https://github.com/Azure/azure-powershell/discussions

And as always, you can reach out to us via Twitter @azureposh

Meet the 2021 Imagine Cup World Finalists

Student_Developer_Team — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 22:08:48 GMT

The 2021 Imagine Cup is where passion meets purpose, and student innovators can bring their boldest tech ideas to life to impact our world. This year’s all-digital competition saw thousands of teams developing projects in four categories that aligned with their passions: Earth, Education, Healthcare, or Lifestyle. Students were invited to complete the Microsoft Learn Challenge as the first step in their competition journey and form teams of one to four people to leverage innovative tech, like AI, Power Platform, and Big Data, to develop a project proposal to make a difference.

We are consistently inspired by solutions students create to tackle common issues, and the 2021 competition is advancing with the selection of our World Finalist teams.

2021 prizes

These teams are heading to the next stage of the virtual World Finals to compete for USD10,000, Azure credits, and four spots in the World Championship. Runners-up will win USD2,500 and Azure credits. During the World Finals, teams will pitch their ideas to expert judges, demo their tech, and engage in a question and answer session. Projects will be judged on their innovative use of Azure technology, accessibility and inclusion, and marketability as a business idea.

Meet the World Finalists!

Earth category

Team Green Guru, United States Project: Green Guide
Team Intelligent Hives, Poland Project: Intelligent Hives - Bee Monitoring System
Team ProTag, New Zealand Project: ProTag
Team SimplyLCA, Germany Project: SimplyLCA
Team Spiffeng, Singapore Project: IoT Hydroponic System
Team Virtual Radiologist, Nepal Project: Pico Sat

Education category

Team Agent of Change, Japan Project: Ujiyan
Team Cafrilearn, Kenya Project: Makini
Team Hands-On Labs, United States Project: Hands-On Labs - How can we enable every student to have a truly 'hands-on' learning experience' online?
Team JAN/A, Czech Republic Project: KnowledgePicker
Team Nyansapo AI, United States Project: Digital Literacy Assessment
Team ReadAR, United States Project: TeamAR

Healthcare category

Team Atheia, United States Project: Atheia
Team Breathe Mongolia, Mongolia Project: Sky Watcher
Team Cepha, United States Project: Cepha
Team Cloud Access, Indonesia Project: CardiWatch
Team Flourish, Canada Project: flourish
Team Intelli-Sense, India Project: Vision - the Blind Assist
Team JBAwesome, Singapore Project: Phychant -- Development of Physical Disability and Speech Difficulties Assistant
Team K-CPR, Korea Project: K-CPR
Team Neural Bionics, United States Project: Neural Bionics
Team REWEBA, Kenya Project: REWEBA (Remote Well Baby)
Team Sentirech, Mexico Project: Sentirech
Team Guardian, United States Project: Guardian: A Novel Deep-Learning Based Fall Detection and Monitoring System for Senior Citizens
Team Ubo, Tunisia Project: Ubo

Lifestyle category

Team Assurance, United States Project: Assurance - Re(Imagine) Safety
Team DataMasker, China Project: WellMask
Team Detectd, India Project: Detectd- A sophisticated Artificial Intelligence based online Deepfake Detection platform
Team EasyGov, United States Project: EasyGov
Team En#Plane, Korea Project: HSG : Hate Speech Guard for Children
Team INTELLIVOLT, Kenya Project: Power Monitoring System
Team Mimibot, Singapore Project: Mimibot
Team Roball Go, China Project: Intelligent Visual Inspection Spherical Robot with Active Drive and Recovery
Team Threeotech, Thailand Project: JustSigns
Team Virtuoso Music, United States Project: Virtuoso-Hyper-realistic AI Musician Using a Novel Multi-resolution Approach with deep convolutional neural networks
Team Zephyr Air, United States Project: Zephyr Air

*Two World Finalist teams from Pakistan still to be announced.

Follow the action

Congratulations to all these incredible young developers for making it this far! Follow their journeys on Instagram and Twitter as they head to the World Finals to pitch their projects.

Re: Endpoint management deep dives + Q&A in March

Petia Dimitrova — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 22:08:20 GMT

Looking forward for these sessions !

Re: Mastering Configuration Manager Patch Compliance Reporting

NewMem2022 — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 21:58:45 GMT

Hi, Jonasoh! I followed the instructions you provided for this custom report but I am receiving this warning message "Warning: The dataset ‘UpdatesSummaryView’ refers to the shared data source ‘/coh/{5C6358F2-4BB6-4a1b-A16E-8D96795D8602}’, which is not published on th
e report server. The shared data source ‘/coh/{5C6358F2-4BB6-4a1b-A16E-8D96795D8602}’ must be published before this shared dataset can run." What can I do to correct this error?

Re: The next Windows 10 Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release

K_Wester-Ebbinghaus — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 21:54:04 GMT

A License bought through Dell for example can't be moved to an HP. That will also increase license and operational costs.

please revisit Terms Of Use of LTSC 1809 and later. Windows Server OEM licenses can be transferred in EU (finally). So I would be shocked if they applied local legislation only into the ToS of Server LTSC and not Client LTSC.

Re: The next Windows 10 Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release

K_Wester-Ebbinghaus — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 21:51:46 GMT

depends how you deploy. even in small businesses we achieved a near zero touch deployment using MDT, WinPKG and MSI based GPO installations with no golden images. If you need the profiles USMT is a thing or UE-V if you have SA. Is this is a way to go?

Re: Top 5 ways your Azure AD can help you enable remote work

m82cross — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 21:38:27 GMT

Thank you very much for sharing this Azure AD insight with the community.

Universal Print ready printers by Epson

Epson_UniversalPrint — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 21:00:54 GMT

In September 2020, we announced that we are working with Microsoft on Universal Print integration. Epson is happy to share that we are ready to release Epson printers with built-in support for Universal Print from Microsoft.

Our Universal Print ready support is available by updating firmware according to the list of models below:

Support starting end of March 2021:

(Japan) PX-M7080FX, PX-M7090FX, PX-S7090X
(Other regions) WF-C878R, WF-C879R, WF-C878RB, WF-C879RB

Support starting May 2021:

(Japan) LX-10050MF, LX-10050KF, LX-7550MF, LX-6050MF
(Other regions) WF-C20600 Series, WF-C20750 Series, WF-C21000 Series

- Epson Universal Print

Re: Getting to know the Windows update history pages

K_Wester-Ebbinghaus — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 20:59:09 GMT

8.0 is out of support for long. Unfortunately they did not do the same with Server 2012 to avoid flak.

maybe you can invite me into a meeting with your customer to talk about why they hesistate to go to 8.1 which is still a free offer or upgrading from 8.1 to 10 at a later time. from a security standpoint 8.0 is even more insecure than Win7.

Re: Microsoft Defender for Identity Ninja Training

BrandonLawson — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 20:43:27 GMT

Yes, we are referencing the Ninja training and additional materials at the new Microsoft Security Technical Content Library. https://aka.ms/MicrosoftSecurityTechnicalContentLibrary

Re: February Project Update Blog

TonyStark — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 20:36:35 GMT

Question: MS Project initial release in 1984.

Bonus: One before 1984, MS Word in 1983

Re: Announcing Universal Print: a cloud-based print solution

Jeffrey Allen — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 20:30:03 GMT

, according to the M365 Message Center in the admin portal: "Universal Print enters general availability in early March."

Re: Organize content your way with the Preview of Project Moca

Carolina123 — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 20:26:05 GMT

Hi,

This was very useful. May I please ask you whether you have a workaround for a -very frustrating issue- that I have with Project Moca, please?

I used to use Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc. but eventually, I realised that for my needs (I'm doing a PhD) I wanted a simple interface with no distractions. Project Moca provides that. However, when I create a Task in Project Moca with various subtasks, sometimes I need to edit a subtask and if by mistake I press the backspace or delete key more than once, the whole task with all subtasks disappears!

I haven't found a way to undo this action or to simply lock the task/sub-tasks until further notice. Either option would be nice.
I have noticed that they still show on my To do in Outlook, but I can't see an option to show them on Project Moca again (there is "copy" or "Move" option but they work within To Do and not in Project Moca).

Your help would be invaluable.
Thank you!

Re: WinObj v3.01

Cibavision — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 20:25:18 GMT

it still crash on 'Restricted' though

Re: SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: February 2021

Harold van de Kamp — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 20:21:02 GMT

Thanks for the SharePoint pit stop. Looking forward to the App Bar and Page Analytics features.

Re: Announcing Universal Print: a cloud-based print solution

David Green — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 20:12:27 GMT

As a school district provisioning all of our devices with Azure AD Join, we desperately need Universal Print. When will this become GA???

Re: SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: December 2020

Edgardo13 — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 19:59:08 GMT

SharePoint has become a major platform contributor to today's day and age, with the ongoing pandemic Teams as well as Sharepoint has be efficient in organizing the work being done today. It continues to develop day in day out.

Re: Automated publish improvement in ADF's CI/CD flow

skammili — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 19:55:48 GMT

I have noticed, while testing the ADF NPM utility, that the deleted pipelines are not getting undeployed from ADF environment.

Does the ADF utility not support this feature?

Do we need to follow some steps apart from the utility?

Re: Getting to know the Windows update history pages

szavala — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 19:55:22 GMT

I'm often called upon to troubleshoot OEM versions of Windows 8.0 > customers are not interested in upgrading beyond Windows 8.1. Is there any consideration for providing an update history page for Windows 8.0?

Re: New Meeting and Calling Experience in Microsoft Teams!

Molly1545 — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 19:52:15 GMT

As someone who answers a lot of calls, I am finding the new pop out window every call extremely cumbersome. Are there any tips or tricks to make this easier? A call comes in and a window opens, I put the caller on hold, move the new window to another screen so I can access the chat function to locate the person who the caller is asking for - then take the caller off hold to transfer. Is there a way to transfer from hold like the previous version?

The meeting experience may be easier, but the incoming calls are not.

February Project Update Blog

Microsoft Project Team — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 23:57:50 GMT

Microsoft Project Trivia!

We’re starting trivia this month to help people learn more about Microsoft Project & its history. Leave your guesses to these questions in the comments & check back next month to see if you were right!

Question: What year was Microsoft Project first released?

Bonus: How many Windows applications did Microsoft release before Project?

Reimagine Project Management with Microsoft

Microsoft Project is hosting a free digital event to help our users learn more about how to leverage Project, Microsoft Planner, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations to best manage your projects – both big and small!

This includes 6+ hours of on-demand demos and product walkthroughs to help you discover and leverage new features and learn best practices to keep your projects on track. Get tailored guidance directly from the engineering teams behind these products.

This event goes live on March 18^th, 2021. You can learn more here.

New Features

Flexible Deployment for Project for the web ~ This feature is now available to all users! Create different environments for Project for the web based on organization, business unit, or team needs. Check out our blog post to learn more about this new experience
Filter on Project Home ~ Use a search bar to easily find your projects on Project Home.

Upcoming Features

Export Timeline to PDF ~ Print your timeline information to a PDF so you can share your project schedule with external stakeholders.
Project Accelerator ~ The Project Accelerator allows users to leverage Power Apps to manage the entire lifecycle of your projects, including demand management, financial goals, team development, and artifact tracking.
Assign tasks to non-group members ~ Assign a task to someone without automatically adding them to your project group.
Effort in the Project details pane ~ See overall effort on your project directly in the Project details pane, including the total effort, completed effort for your project, and remaining effort on your whole project.

FAQ:

This section includes questions we see frequently, either through the in-app Feedback button or from the comments of last month’s blog.

Q: What dependencies are supported in Project for the web?

A: Project for the web currently only supports Finish-to-Start dependencies. If you need additional dependencies, please submit feedback using our in-app “Feedback” button in the top-right corner of the product. This best helps us keep track of customer needs.

Q: Where are attachments stored in Project?

A: You can find all your attached files in your Team’s SharePoint library.

Note that you can't attach files to tasks in Project unless you have already shared your project to a group. You can do this by using the “Group members” button in the top-right corner of the product.

You can attach links to your tasks even before you add a group to your project.

We want to hear from you! If you have feedback, submit it by using the “Feedback” button in Project for the web. Make sure to include your email address so we can contact you directly with any follow up questions or comments. Your comments on our blog posts are also monitored, so let us know what you think about this or other articles.

Re: Microsoft Endpoint Manager at Microsoft Ignite: March 2021 edition

NicklasAhlberg — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 19:46:29 GMT

Really looking forward to this!

//Nicklas Ahlberg

Re: New certification: Microsoft Power Platform Solution Architect Expert

Tobiasz J. Koprowski — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 19:43:41 GMT

There is a more important problem with your post. Apart of your complain about content in the exam (I've many times content outside of official exam topics, over my exam). It is mentioned in materials: "exam would contain topic xxx bt not excluded to..." So it always could be more and wider than you expect.

But for me, the biggest problem is that you actually broke NDA which you signed just before the exam.

If a candidate violates any testing rule, exam policy, or term within the exam agreement (NDA), or engages in any misconduct that diminishes the security and integrity of the Microsoft Certification Program in any way, the candidate may be permanently prohibited from taking any future Microsoft Certification exams. In addition, the candidate may be decertified from the Microsoft Certification Program, and test scores and certifications may be revoked.

Examples of such misconduct, misuse, and fraud include, but are not limited to, the following:

Falsifying score reports, by modifying and/or altering the original results/score reports for any exam record
Cheating during the exam (such as looking at the monitors of other exam takers, using an unauthorized device, or looking at notes)
Providing or accepting improper assistance
Bringing non-authorized items into the testing center during an exam session (such as notes or unauthorized materials and electronic devices, such as cell phones)
Using unauthorized material in attempting to satisfy certification requirements (this includes using "brain-dump" material and/or unauthorized publication of exam questions with or without answers)
Falsifying identity or impersonating another individual to gain access to an exam
Misconduct as determined by statistical analysis
Copying, publishing, disclosing, transmitting, selling, offering to sell, posting, downloading, distributing in any way, or otherwise transferring, modifying, making derivative works of, reverse engineering, decompiling, disassembling, or translating any exam in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, verbal or written, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose
Disclosing Microsoft intellectual property (IP)
Disseminating actual exam content
Using the exam content in any manner that violates applicable law
Violating the current exam retake policy
Violating the Microsoft non-disclosure agreement (NDA) in any way
Violating the agreement with the exam delivery provider in any way

Microsoft Endpoint Manager at Microsoft Ignite: March 2021 edition

Joe Lurie — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 19:52:06 GMT

Microsoft Ignite 2021: March edition is almost here! And here’s your guide to everything you’ll find that’s Microsoft Endpoint Manager related! And we mean EVERYTHING!

Jump to: Core sessions | On-demand sessions | Ask the Experts | Depth on demand | Endpoint management deep dives - Q&A in March

Microsoft Endpoint Manager continues to be the one product, that hub, to unify security, apps, access, compliance, and the end-user experience across your entire estate. And whether those devices are Windows devices, Android, iOS, iPad OS, Mac OS, whether they are used by information workers or are being used as kiosks, whether they are assigned to a single user or are configured as shared devices, and whether they are on-premises or remote – or any combination, Endpoint Manager can help keep your organization running smoothly, whatever the future brings.

If you are currently using Configuration Manager to manage your devices and haven’t moved to the cloud, or you’ve started that path to cloud management, or you are natively managing all of your endpoints with Microsoft Intune, now is the time to hear about everything new with Endpoint Manager- even since last September. If you haven’t already, register at https://myignite.microsoft.com and start building your schedule. You can click the session titles below and add them to your schedule (aka: digital backpack). Make sure you bookmark this post as we’ll be updating it each day with links to all our announcements, in-depth learning on demand, and all post-Ignite activities.

Here's what’s on the agenda, live and on-demand at Microsoft Ignite 2021: March edition!

Core sessions

Spotlight on the future of work

Start the event with Modern Work CVP Jared Spataro, as Jared talks about flexible work, and how Microsoft is empowering people to work from home, on the go, and at the office.

The hybrid workplace – Tuesday, March 2 | 9:45AM-10:15AM PST
The hybrid workplace – Tuesday, March 2 | 7:15PM-7:45PM PST

Engineer to engineer: let's talk Windows!

After Jared’s keynote, even though this is a Windows session, you need to join our Windows CVP Aidan Marcuss with his guests (from left to right) Gabe Frost (Windows), Ramya Chitrakar (Endpoint Manager), and David Weston (security) for a fun conversation about all of the great features and capabilities we’ve built into Windows, security, and management based on YOUR FEEDBACK AND SUGGESTIONS. And how we’re carrying those further to help prepare your organization for the future.

We’ll have live Q&A throughout the session, too, so pick the time that works best for you and add it to your backpack!

After the Wednesday. March 3rd "Let's talk Windows" session, around 4:30 PM PST, Steve Dispensa, Rob Lefferts, and Rudra Mitra will also join the live anchor desk to talk about the convergence of endpoint management and security so keep an eye on the MyIgnite main channel!

On-demand sessions

After or in between core sessions, we have also great sessions that you can watch or save to your digital backpack to watch on demand any time:

Ask the Experts

We offer live Q&A during the core sessions and in-between segments, but if you miss those, we also have our SMEs taking your questions live via Teams Live Events! Come join our diverse group of engineers, support, and other product experts as we discuss and answer your questions live! Space is limited so make sure you click your desired session to RSVP!

Ask the Experts: Zero Trust – The proactive approach to cybersecurity
Wednesday, March 3 | 11:00AM-11:30AM PST
Ask the Experts: Securing your endpoints with Defender and Microsoft Endpoint Manager
Wednesday, March 3 | 2:30AM-3:00AM PST

Microsoft Edge

If you have specific questions around deploying and managing Microsoft Edge, join Colleen Williams and members of the Edge engineering team on Tuesday, March 2 | 11:30PM-11:59PM PST for Ask the Experts: Microsoft Edge: Top reasons why customers love Microsoft Edge

Windows & Devices

If you are also looking for advice on deploying, managing, and servicing Windows & Devices, we have lots of goodies for you! First, we’ll offer live Q&A during the fireside chat with Panos Panay and Roane Sones on Tuesday, March 2 | 11:30AM PST. And if that time doesn’t work for you, keep an eye on the session builder as we’ll be replaying this session later in the day.

Then check out the special Ask the Experts sessions: Let’s talk Windows, which we’ll have live at two timeslots:

And for more session on Windows & Devices, check out our blog post here: Windows & Devices at Microsoft Ignite 2021: March edition

Depth on demand

And finally, we know you come to Microsoft Ignite for deep, technical learning, and to build your technical skills. Like we did in September, we have a breadth of deep dive videos on the Video Hub on Tech Community. These are direct from our engineers and product experts!

What's new in Windows management with Microsoft Endpoint Manager – Matt Call & Mike Danoski
What's new in iOS/macOS management with Microsoft Endpoint Manager – Arnab Biswas & Anya Novicheva
What's new in Android management with Microsoft Endpoint Manager – Priya Ravichandran
Microsoft Defender + Tunnel: simple, secure mobile connectivity – Tyler Castaldo & Shravan Thota
Enabling frontline workers with Microsoft Endpoint Manager – Chris Baldwin & Cory Ferro
Application reliability in Endpoint analytics – Zach Dvorak

Endpoint management deep dives – Q&A in March

Of course, you’ve already heard about our Microsoft Endpoint Manager deep dives and Q&A events that are happening after Ignite! For more information on our Endpoint Management Acceleration Day, our 1:1 consults, and Ask the Experts Q&A, check out the Microsoft Endpoint Manager Blog!

Learn more

If you are looking for more of a prescriptive learning path, we’ve got some learning guides to help you manage and protect devices and apps with Endpoint Manager.

And, finally, here are some additional guides to help you maneuver around all that is Microsoft Ignite 2021: March edition.

Stay informed

Follow us at @MSIntune for the latest announcements and updates on Microsoft Endpoint Manager throughout Microsoft Ignite and beyond.

* Timing subject to change Refer to the MyIgnite session catalog for the latest times and updates.

Re: Announcing Microsoft Viva Learning private preview

Pablomcse — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 19:34:15 GMT

Thanks for that . It could be amazing organise the content as LMS. Really excited to try this new tool. Regards

Re: Add up to 25 embedded, editable labels to your tasks

Harold van de Kamp — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 19:34:02 GMT

Great to see this highly requested feature is released! For me, this is definitely enough for my daily work.

Our customers hit the previous limit quite often, therefore I'm curious how often they will hit the 25 labels limit.

Remotely run DDL and DML in Synapse from a SQL Managed Instance using Linked Servers

pedrorebelo — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 19:18:19 GMT

Imagine you have a SQL Managed Instance and a SQL Dedicated Pool. Now imagine that for some reason you need to run a SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE or even a CREATE TABLE on your SQL Dedicated Pool but executed from your SQL Managed Instance. In case you didn't know, you can do this using Linked Servers.

For those unfamiliar with Linked Servers, they enable the instance in which you create them to read data from remote data sources and also to execute commands against remote database servers.

You can setup Linked Servers using SSMS or you can use T-SQL as well. Here's a short example of how to setup a Linked Server from a SQL Managed Instance to Azure Synapse Analytics SQL Dedicated Pool, using T-SQL.

First, we need to start by creating the Linked Server on our SQL Managed Instance, and configuring it to point to our SQL Dedicated Pool:

-- Configure the linked server on your SQL Managed Instance EXEC sp_addlinkedserver = 'yourLinkedServer', -- specify here the name you want for your linked server @srvproduct = N'', = 'MSOLEDBSQL', -- recommended OLE DB provider @datasrc='yourworkspacename.sql.azuresynapse.net', -- add here your SQL Dedicated Pool server name @catalog = 'yourDatabase'; -- add here your SQL Dedicated Pool database name as initial catalog (you cannot connect to the master database)

After having created the Linked Server, we need to define the credentials with which we want to connect to your SQL Dedicated Pool:

-- Add credentials and options to this linked server EXEC sp_addlinkedsrvlogin @rmtsrvname = 'yourLinkedServer', @useself = 'false', -- so we can specify below which user and password to connect with @rmtuser = 'yourLogin', -- add here your login on your SQL Dedicated Pool @rmtpassword = 'yourPassword'; -- add here your password on your SQL Dedicated Pool

Lastly, by default Linked Servers are not able to make stored procedure calls so we need to enable a setting:

-- Enable RPC to the given server EXEC sp_serveroption = 'yourLinkedServer', @optname = 'rpc out', @optvalue = true;

Once you've successfully executed all the previous steps, you can now remotely run T-SQL commands on your SQL Dedicated Pool directly from your SQL Managed Instance.

Executing T-SQL via Linked Servers requires we declare the objects we are referencing with a 4-part name in the format of:

-- Query the data using 4-part names SELECT * FROM yourLinkedServer.yourDatabase.yourSchemaname.yourTablename;

However, if you try to run DDL or DML (other than SELECT) using this 4-part name you'll get error messages as follows:

INSERT INTO yourLinkedServer.SampleSQL.dbo.Employee VALUES(1);

Msg 46706, Level 16, State 1, Line 29
Cursor support is not an implemented feature for SQL Server Parallel DataWarehousing TDS endpoint.

CREATE TABLE yourLinkedServer.SampleSQL.dbo.t1(col1 INT NULL);

Msg 117, Level 15, State 1, Line 31
The object name 'yourLinkedServer.SampleSQL.dbo.t1' contains more than the maximum number of prefixes. The maximum is 2.

A way to get around this is by running the DDL and DML in the format of:

EXEC ('DDL/DML') at yourLinkedServer

So for two previous examples, the T-SQL would be:

--to create a table EXEC ('CREATE TABLE dbo.t1(col1 INT NULL)') at yourLinkedServer;

--to insert a row into the table EXEC ('INSERT INTO dbo.t1 VALUES(1)') at yourLinkedServer;

Hope you find this useful!

Microsoft Defender for Identity and CMMC Applications

Shawn Hays — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 19:38:20 GMT

Microsoft Defender for Identity uses Active Directory signals to identify, detect, and investigate advanced threats, compromised identities, and malicious insider actions directed at your organizations. Defender for Identity monitors and analyzes user activities and information across your network, such as permissions and group membership, creating a behavioral baseline for each user that is then used to identify anomalies using built-in AI.

Many of these capabilities help to address Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) requirements across several Domains. For example Audit and Accountability (AU) 3.051 states DIB suppliers must "Correlate audit record review, analysis, and reporting processes for investigation and response to indications of unlawful, unauthorized, suspicious or unusual activity." The insights provided by Microsoft Defender for Identity can help administrators identify suspicious activities and reveal advanced threats, compromised users, and insider threats. Defender for Identity also provides security reports and analytics to help quickly identify and assess paths of attack inside your organization.

With Microsoft Defender for Identity and the integration of Azure AD Identity Protection and Cloud App Security, monitoring and alerting can be applied for identities that span both on premises and in the cloud. Learn how Microsoft Defender for Identity uses adaptive built-in intelligence, giving you insights into suspicious activities and events, revealing the advanced threats, compromised users, and insider threats facing your organization. All of this and more can assist in meeting CMMC and DFARS requirements tied to NIST 800-171 / 53.

In this video famed Microsoft Security Architect and speaker (aka.ms/SosemanTV - 6K+ Subscribers) provides this excellent introduction to Microsoft Defender for Identity and how it addresses several key Practices and Domains within #CMMC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdipZXtNEs8

#MSDefender #MicrosoftSecurity

CMMC Audit and Accountability

https://info.summit7systems.com/blog/...

Microsoft Defender in Office 365 GCC and GCC High

https://info.summit7systems.com/blog/microsoft-defender

Session from February 2021 CS2 Conference

http://cs2.cloud

Re: Released: December 2020 Quarterly Exchange Updates

Lukas Sassl — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 18:55:19 GMT

thanks for reporting. We’ll have a look at it.

Re: Released: December 2020 Quarterly Exchange Updates

DAvid445 — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 18:48:13 GMT

Hi all, I have hit a funny ex2019 cu8 setup error. Installation on clean English Win2019 srv. Setup script ConfigureCryptoDefaults.ps1 throws error that registry path 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Ciphers\DES 56\56' does not exist. There is apparent error in construction of the path within this script because there is wrong slash at the end (correct 56/56). However it kills the setup. Solution seems to create key '56' under key 'DES 56' and than update disabling of 'DES 56/56' manually. What is interesting running this script on Win2012R2 runs correctly, on 2019 ends up this error.

WinObj v3.01

lukekim — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 18:43:45 GMT

WinObj v3.01

This minor update to WinObj fixes a crash on exit.

Re: Announcing Microsoft Viva Learning private preview

John_Mighell — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 18:27:32 GMT

Hi yes absolutely - your own custom learning content stored on SharePoint will connect into Viva Learning and flow through as an available source to users! And we are working on LMS integrations - we will have more details and partner integrations to share later this year.

Re: Automated publish improvement in ADF's CI/CD flow

CesarBerard — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 18:27:11 GMT

This package is not exclusive for the collaboration branch, you can generate any ARM template based on any branch.

Also, it is possible to run a build when a PR is raised and add it as a mandatory check before merging. You can do this in the branch policies section, e.g.,:

Also note that you can also run a build every time there's a new commit in master.

Re: Announcing Microsoft Viva Learning private preview

John_Mighell — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 18:25:09 GMT

Hi we have three great demo videos, aligned by personas, that will be your best bet to give customers a view of the product and features.

Viva Learning - for employees

Viva Learning - for managers

Viva Learning overview

Re: Your Guide to Microsoft Teams @ Microsoft Ignite Spring 2021

Kai Stenberg — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 18:23:14 GMT

Try this one :)

https://myignite.microsoft.com/home

Re: Top 5 things to get the most out of Microsoft Ignite

Pierre Roman — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 18:11:24 GMT

thanks for the head's up. I fixed the link.

Re: Get the Microsoft Lists app for iOS

Vadivelu_B — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:52:50 GMT

@Mark Kashman Any apps without App protection policy+CA are not possible to roll out for users. We need a zero trust model for all apps. Waiting for ETA.

Re: Announcing LAMBDA: Turn Excel formulas into custom functions

Sergei Baklan — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:48:33 GMT

, lambda is at very beginning, actually that's only mockup of future full-scale functionality. Everything is coming.

Re: SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: February 2021

Lindsay Addie — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:45:05 GMT

Some useful updates to SP recently. Looking forward to App Bar appearing on my orgs tenant very soon.

Re: Announcing LAMBDA: Turn Excel formulas into custom functions

AdamDoiron — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:45:04 GMT

I am enjoying lambda so far, it is replacing a lot of simple UDF's - hopefully some of the more complex ones eventually.

One thing that has been an annoyance, is there a workaround to not having custom lambdas autocomplete when calling them? really all i would like is for an opening parentheses to be placed when i hit tab to select which lambda i would like to use. Thanks

Re: Configuring Microsoft Defender Antivirus for non-persistent VDI machines

baker999855 — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:44:30 GMT

For anyone else experiencing issues with this - we resolved it by doing the following:

1/ Delete the local group policy cache %windir%\System32\GroupPolicy (hidden) User and Machine folder.

2/ Configure the settings mentioned in the above blog in local policy only, reboot.

3/ Configure the other settings (scan times, quarantine actions etc) in domain group policy.

4/Set the 'Define order of sources..' as 'Fileshares' only, no other values.

Thanks

Re: ADF adds TTL to Azure IR to reduce Data Flow activity times

Mark Kromer — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:35:12 GMT

Synapse has not yet implemented TTL in the Azure IR feature. This is something that they are currently working on as a top priority.

Re: Configuring Microsoft Defender Antivirus for non-persistent VDI machines

JesseEsquivel — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:18:09 GMT

Hi Baker - the best course of action to receive help on this is to open a Microsoft support case.

Adapt. Automate. Engage: Teams Roadshow

Vasu Sharma — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:07:56 GMT

Microsoft Teams, the HUB for teamwork. You have heard it before, but what does it mean?

As the appetite for new ways of working together grows, new developments, communications, mobility, and cloud services are enabling professionals to communicate and collaborate in ways that were previously not possible.

Microsoft Teams is the framework that enables individuals to blend and customize these new tools – to create unique experiences that align with their needs.

What to expect from this roadshow series?

Knowing that new tools bring new opportunity, we’ve designed this three-part series for healthcare professionals to learn, share and create innovative ideas to improve employee experiences and business value. We will guide you through the following journey, first with an overview of APPs and automation in Teams – then going into greater detail with experience demonstrations and customer success stories.

Session #1 – Teams as a Platform in Healthcare

Introduction and overview of Teams as a Platform in Healthcare. Key agenda focus areas include:

Custom APPs in Teams
Bringing other APPs into Teams
Process Automation

Session #2 – Custom APPs in Teams for Healthcare

Demonstration of the following custom APPs being used through Teams for Healthcare today

Adoption APP
Power Virtual Agents and FAQ BOTs
Virtual Rounding
Company Communicator
Inspections/Employee Ideas APPs

Session #3 – Bringing APPs together in Teams for Healthcare

Demonstration of the following 3rd party APPs being used through Teams for Healthcare today

Service Now
Workday
Amion
InCare
AMN Translation
AGFA
Adobe Sign
JIRA

How do you register to attend this roadshow series?

There is no registration required! We recommend you copy the session links below that best align with your schedule and block your calendar. See you then!

Registration Links: (two options for each session, choose the one that best aligns to your schedule)

Session #1: Teams as a Platform in Healthcare

March 1st, 1pm – 2:30pm EST: Link to Live Event
March 4th, 1pm – 2:30pm EST: Link to Live Event

Session #2: Custom APPs in Teams for Healthcare

March 8th, 1pm-2:30pm EST: Link to Live Event
March 11th, 1pm-2:30pm EST: Link to Live Event

Session #3: Bringing APPs together in Teams for Healthcare

March 15th, 1pm-2:30pm EST: Link to Live Event
March 18th, 1pm-2:30pm EST: Link to Live Event

Get insights on application reliability and device restart frequency with Endpoint analytics

Mayunk Jain — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 18:13:57 GMT

Well-running apps are critical to a great endpoint experience. Users are never happy when an app crashes or a device restarts and their flow is broken. Worst case scenario, they may even lose the work that they just did. Service desks help solve these problems, but they only have visibility into the ones that people report, not the ones where someone just suffers in silence. What is needed is greater visibility into these issues across the entire organization. The two new Microsoft Endpoint Manager features in Endpoint analytics give IT admins the visibility and insights needed to help improve this experience.

Both of these features -- a new application reliability report and new data for reboot frequency in the existing startup performance report -- reflect our commitment to the user experience because users are happier when work isn’t slowed down and IT can focus on helping drive the business when there are fewer support calls.

The application reliability report, available in preview and rolling out over the next few days, gives IT visibility into which desktop applications are hampering the user experience, due to frequent crashes and because they are broadly deployed to users. The report also offers suggestions for improving app performance and alerts IT to issues that users may not have created tickets for yet despite growing frustration, which can help decrease the number of support tickets in the long run.

How to use the application reliability report

If your devices are Intune managed or co-managed, you don't need to do anything to see the application reliability report. It sits alongside the rest of the Endpoint analytics reports in the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center console. If you have devices enrolled through tenant attach, upgrade to Configuration Manger 2006 for this report to populate. On the Overview page is your app reliability score as well as a baseline score, which, by default, represents the median across all commercial organizations. This can help you determine issues unique to your environment—and potentially caused by poor configurations—versus more widespread issues.

Below that is a list of the apps most likely to have reduced user productivity during the previous 14 days. This considers not only crash frequency but also usage to help reduce noise, such as one-off applications crashing 100 times on a single device. On the right column are app reliability Insights and Recommendations prioritized by which are most likely to boost your score.

In the App performance tab is a list of all your organization’s apps, which can be sorted by app name, publisher, active devices, app reliability score, and mean time to failure, which is the average number of times the app can be used across the organization between crashes.

You can also see your organization’s application reliability performance by other pivots like model, and OS version deployed, as well as troubleshoot application reliability issues with individual devices. In device performance, each device is given a device app health score, based on how often applications crashed on that device during the previous 14 days. Clicking into each device gives you a timeline of app crash and app hang events so you know exactly when crashes occurred, which can help speed troubleshooting.

New insights into device restart frequency

To help improve the user experience even further, we have also enhanced the existing startup performance report. New insights on device restart frequency, also known as reboot frequency, will help you identify problematic devices because reboots break the user from their flow and should not be needed often.

To help you better understand the type of reboots that happens, we classify each them as either normal or abnormal. Normal restarts are those that go through the normal Windows shutdown process. These include: Windows update installations, which typically occur once a month; non-update shutdowns from users, typically to save battery power; and non-update restarts, which shouldn’t occur often beyond monthly patching.

In contrast, abnormal restarts are ones that haven’t gone through the normal Windows shutdown process and could suggest problems that need to be investigated further. There are also three categories for this type of restart.

Blue screens: This abnormal restart type is also called a stop error. Usually, less than two stop errors occur per device per year.
Long power button press: This restart happens when a user holds down the power button to force a restart. These shutdowns are typically even less frequent than blue screens.
Unknown: These are shutdowns that don’t fit either of the two other abnormal shutdown types. Microsoft will continue to research these to determine if additional categories should be added.

The restart frequency feature is now in preview and is rolling out to everyone over the next few days regardless of how you’ve configured the telemetry level or Windows Error Reporting in Windows Diagnostics.

Check out the rest of Endpoint analytics

There is so much more to Endpoint analytics than what we just covered. There are also reports on recommended software that help advise organizations on software that can help optimize OS and Microsoft versions for the best user experience. There is also the proactive remediations feature, giving you the power to automatically detect and remediate some of the top issues hampering users’ productivity — sometimes even before users realize something is wrong — while also helping reduce helpdesk call volume.

More information and feedback

For more information on getting started, visit the Endpoint analytics documentation, and check out the FAQ. Tweet your questions or feedback using the hashtag #MEMpowered and if you have an idea for a new feature, add it to UserVoice.

Please follow @MSIntune on Twitter

(This blog is co-authored with Zach Dvorak, Senior Program Manager, and Anthony Smith (A.J.) , Senior Product Manager)

10 Reasons to Love Passwordless #8: You won’t get phished!

Maria_Puertas_Calvo — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:14:02 GMT

In this series, Microsoft identity team members share their reasons for loving passwordless authentication (and why you should too!). Today, Maria Puertas Calvo, data scientist for Microsoft Identity, continues the series.

Hi!

I am honored to be among such a fine group of people bringing you the goodness of passwordless authentication. Today, I’m going to talk about how passwordless dramatically reduces the risk of phishing attacks against your organization. Let’s begin!

Phishing is a form of social engineering in which a victim is tricked into giving their credentials to an attacker. It remains one of the main points of entry into organizations by cybercriminals. The attacker generally presents the user with a sign-in page that spoofs the real authentication page and hopes that the victim enters their credentials. Even long complex passwords won’t help you in a phishing situation if you enter them exactly right unknowingly on a phishing site.

Passwords are the most commonly phished credentials, but some sophisticated attackers go one step further and perform real-time phishing attacks for multifactor authentication credentials, luring the victim to provide the one-time password (OTP) sent to their email or phone. From September 2019 to September 2020, Microsoft Defender for Office blocked 1.6 billion phishing emails linking to around 2 million phishing URL sites. In 2020, phishing incidents rose by 220% compared to the yearly average during the height of global pandemic fears.

OK, you get the point. Phishing is bad and scary, but how does passwordless protect your organization from phishing attacks?

To start, most phishing sites are designed to collect passwords. If you normally don’t use a password to log in, you will be immediately suspicious if the site is asking for it. Even if you think the site is legitimate, you will likely not know your password because you never use it! Sites that phish other credentials, such as OTPs sent to your phone app or hardware token are much less prevalent, so if you choose to go passwordless say for example with the Authenticator app for its amazing usability, you’ll also get enhanced security.

But the benefits don’t end there. Two of our main passwordless authenticators are FIDO2 based - Windows Hello for Business and security keys. If you want to make it extremely hard for your users to get phished, these two authentication methods provide phishing-resistant authentication. How? – you ask. Phishing sites rely on humans not noticing that the domain asking for their credential is not the one they registered that credential with. With FIDO, this problem is avoided because the server domain is used by the client (i.e. browser) to ask the authenticator (i.e. security key) to sign the login request. What this means in simpler words is that only when the site visited is foobar.com the authenticator will provide a credential that’s valid for foobar.com. If an attacker creates foodbar.com and tries to phish the user credentials, the authenticator will sign a message that won’t be accepted by foobar.com, hence making phishing impossible.

So that’s it, one more reason to love passwordless. Go passwordless and drive cybercriminals out of business by keeping them out of your business.

Learn more about Microsoft identity:

Return to the Azure Active Directory Identity blog home
Join the conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn
Share product suggestions on the Azure Feedback Forum

Check out the other posts in this series:

What's New in Passwordless Standards, 2021 edition!
10 Reasons to Love Passwordless #1: FIDO Rocks
10 Reasons to Love Passwordless #2: NIST Compliance
10 Reasons to Love Passwordless #3: Why biometrics and passwordless are a dream combination
10 Reasons to Love Passwordless #4: Secure your digital estate, while securing your bottom line
10 Reasons to Love Passwordless #5: The Ease of Use and Portability of Security Keys
10 Reasons to Love Passwordless #6: The Passwordless Funnel
10 Reasons to Love Passwordless #7: Authenticator app for easy phone sign in

PolyBase error - 100001;Failed to generate query plan.

NathanMSFT — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:46:54 GMT

Problem

We've seen several cases come in lately where customers have been trying to use PolyBase feature and encountering "Failed to generate query plan" error. Depending on which command you run, the error will display differently.

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE or CREATE EXTERNAL DATA SOURCE command fails with:

Msg 110813, Level 16, State 1, Line 21

100001;Failed to generate query plan.

SELECT from an existing external table fails with:

Msg 7320, Level 16, State 110, Line 1

Cannot execute the query "Remote Query" against OLE DB provider "MSOLEDBSQL" for linked server "(null)". 100001;Failed to generate query plan.

In either of the above scenarios, if you open the <ServerName>_<InstanceName>_DWEngine_errors.log, you'll see an error like the following:

{datetime} [Thread:<ThreadID>] [ServerInterface:InformationEvent] (Info, Normal): Starting processor ExecuteMemoProcessor. [Session.SessionId:SID##][Session.IsTransactional:False][Query.QueryId:QID##]

{datetime} [Thread:<ThreadID>] [EngineInstrumentation:EngineQueryErrorEvent] (Error, High):

Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Common.ErrorHandling.UnexpectedStatementException: 100001;Failed to generate query plan. ---> Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Sql.Optimizer.MemoDeserializer.UnknownElementException: Unknown element DatabaseUser is found.

at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Sql.Optimizer.MemoDeserializer.MemoDeserializer.ShowMemoXMLState.HandleState(XmlReader reader, MemoDeserializer deserializer)

at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Sql.Optimizer.MemoDeserializer.MemoDeserializer.Deserialize(XmlReader reader)

at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Sql.Optimizer.MemoProvider.AbstractMemoGenerator.DeserializeMemoFromXML(SqlXml memoXml, ExecutionEnvironment executionEnvironment)

--- End of inner exception stack trace ---

at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Sql.Optimizer.MemoProvider.AbstractMemoGenerator.DeserializeMemoFromXML(SqlXml memoXml, ExecutionEnvironment executionEnvironment)

at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Sql.Statements.OptimizedStatement.GenerateMemo(IMemoProvider memoProvider, IQPTelemetry queryProcessingTelemetry, Boolean isLocalShellSession)

at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Engine.Utils.EventUtils.PublishApplicationEventAndExecute(ApplicationEventTrigger beginTrigger, ApplicationEventTrigger endTrigger, ApplicationEventTrigger errorTrigger, ApplicationEventTrigger cancelTrigger, PublishedEventPayloadDelegate payload, Action callback)

at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Engine.Processors.ExecuteMemoProcessor.OnExecuteRequest()

at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Engine.Processors.AbstractProcessor.OnProcess()

at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Engine.Processors.AbstractProcessor.OnExecute() [Session.SessionId:SID##][Session.IsTransactional:False][Query.QueryId:QID##]

You may also observe a memory dump file (SQLDmpr*.dmp) created in SQLServerInstallDrive:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL15.<InstanceName>\MSSQL\Log\Polybase\dump.

The problem has only been observed in SQL Server 2019 on Windows.

Cause

The problem occurs when SQL Server Engine has been patched to at least Cumulative Update 8 (15.0.4073) and the PolyBase feature hasn't been updated to the same build.

The most common way of encountering this problem is to already have installed SQL Server 2019 and patched to CU8 and then subsequently add the PolyBase feature. When you add a feature to an existing SQL Server instance that has been patched, the feature added is still at the original RTM version. This isn't specific to PolyBase feature, but any feature added to an existing instance that has been patched. This would lead to problem with being unable to create the external table.

In order to get the error when selecting from the external table, you must have already successfully created the external table. We've seen this scenario when there's been some problem applying Cumulative Update 8 to the PolyBase feature, but installation of CU8 to the SQL Engine was successful. In scenarios like this, we've seen customers have uninstalled the PolyBase feature and reinstalled it, but then failed to subsequently apply CU8 to PolyBase feature.

How to Confirm

You must determine the SQL Server Engine version and PolyBase Engine version and compare.

Determine SQL Server Engine version.

This can be done a few different ways.

Check errorlog - at the top of the file errorlog (which you can find in SQLServerInstallDrive:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL15.<InstanceName>\MSSQL\Log) the first line in the file will show the version of SQL Server Engine. For example:

{datetime} Server Microsoft SQL Server 2019 (RTM-CU8) (KB4577194) - 15.0.4073.23 (X64)

Connect to SQL Server and run the query

SELECT @@VERSION as SQLEngineVersion

The output will look something like:

SQLEngineVersion

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Microsoft SQL Server 2019 (RTM-CU8) (KB4577194) - 15.0.4073.23 (X64)

Sep 23 2020 16:03:08

Developer Edition (64-bit) on Windows Server 2019 Datacenter 10.0 <X64> (Build 17763: ) (Hypervisor)

Determine PolyBase Engine version

PowerShell - if PolyBase Services are running, run the following command:

Get-Process mpdwsvc -FileVersionInfo | Format-Table -AutoSize

The output will look something like:

ProductVersion FileVersion FileName

-------------- ----------- --------

15.0.2000.5 2019.0150.2000.05 ((SQLServer).190924-2033) C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL15.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\Binn\Polybase\mpdwsvc.exe

PowerShell - if PolyBase Services aren't running, run the following command:

cd 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server'

ls mpdwsvc.exe -r -ea silentlycontinue | % versioninfo | Format-Table -AutoSize

The output will look something like:

ProductVersion FileVersion FileName

-------------- ----------- --------

15.0.2000.5 2019.0150.2000.05 ((SQLServer).190924-2033) C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL15.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\Binn\Polybase\mpdwsvc.exe

If for some reason the two above examples don't work, you can use the original setup media and run SQL Discovery

Start SQL Server setup (setup.exe)
Click on Tools in left pane
Click Installed SQL Server features discovery report. It will generate a Setup Discovery Report that will look something like this:

Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Setup Discovery Report

Product	Instance	Instance ID	Feature	Language	Edition	Version	Clustered	Configured
Microsoft SQL Server 2019	MSSQLSERVER	MSSQL15.MSSQLSERVER	Database Engine Services	1033	Developer Edition	15.0.4073.23	No	Yes
Microsoft SQL Server 2019	MSSQLSERVER	MSSQL15.MSSQLSERVER	SQL Server Replication	1033	Developer Edition	15.0.4073.23	No	Yes
Microsoft SQL Server 2019	MSSQLSERVER	MSSQL15.MSSQLSERVER	PolyBase Query Service for External Data	1033	Developer Edition	15.0.2000.5	No	Yes
Microsoft SQL Server 2019	MSSQLSERVER	MSSQL15.MSSQLSERVER	PolybaseCore\PolybaseJava	1033	Developer Edition	15.0.2000.5	No	Yes
Microsoft SQL Server 2019	MSSQLSERVER	MSSQL15.MSSQLSERVER	Azul-Java-Runtime	1033	Developer Edition	15.0.2000.5	No	Yes

You can check KB4518398 - SQL Server 2019 build versions (microsoft.com) to see which ProductVersion value corresponds to which Cumulative Update.

Compare Versions

If the versions don't match and PolyBase Engine version is less than SQL Server Engine, and SQL Server Engine is at least 15.0.4073, then you have confirmed the problem is due to not having applied the same Cumulative Update to PolyBase feature.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, you need to apply the same Cumulative Update to PolyBase features that SQL Engine is already on.

Additional Information

In Cumulative Update 8 there was a change made to the XML memo that is sent from SQL Server Engine to PolyBase Engine. If the PolyBase Engine is on a build prior to CU8, it will be unable to "deserialize" the memo and throw this error because it cannot generate a query plan.

In general, any time any feature is added to an existing SQL Server instance that has been patched, you need to reapply the same patch to bring the feature to same build.

Re: Why can't I see the Microsoft Teams Meeting add-in for Outlook?

K-Diddy — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:46:00 GMT

Three years later, and this article fixed me right up. I had to close Outlook, restart Teams, restart Outlook a few times, but I am happy to have my Teams schedule meeting button back. It has been missing for a couple months. Thanks, !!

Re: Top 5 things to get the most out of Microsoft Ignite

swimburger — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:37:08 GMT

Thanks for sharing.
FYI, the first link is broken: "https://myiginte.microsoft.com"

Re: What is a “Dev Tenant” and why would you want one?

Julie Turner — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:35:14 GMT

Agree with as I know of several people who are not actually writing code who are maintaining their dev tenant... that said in all those cases they have at least one solution in the tenant app catalog... in their case Microsoft 365 learning pathways

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 118

Christine_Alford — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:30:42 GMT

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 101 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below:

Applications
	AddPro Azure Managed Services: AddPro helps manage Microsoft Azure resources at resource group and subscription levels. AddPro will use delegated access to set up, configure, monitor, and operate services.
	AI-FI Demand Forecasting ML: Alithya Digital helps optimize supply chain material procurement and demand planning with AI analytics. You can more accurately predict future material demand by product category or store location with machine learning (ML) methods.
	AI-Powered Azure Automation as a Service: Dynapt Solutions offers this comprehensive automation, monitoring, and management solution for Microsoft Azure. This management platform helps take the grunt work out of managing your Azure usage.
	An EMR that replicates paper: Clinicea from Technolarity converts paper forms into a customized electronic medical record (EMR) that is classified based on its clinical significance. Built on Microsoft Azure, Clinicea creates an ongoing medical summary for each patient.
	ArchiveBox: This self-hosted internet archiving solution by Linnovate Technologies is written in Python 3. You feed it URLs of pages, and it saves them to disk in a variety of formats depending on the configuration and the content it detects.
	Azure Blob Connector for SAP: The CaRD Azure Blob ArchiveLink Connector for SAP uses Microsoft Azure containers as content repositories in SAP. You can save all your SAP-managed documents as attachments or documents in Azure.
	Azure Cost Optimization: Acuvate’s AI-driven managed services are designed to help you better predict and transform future outcomes, optimize Microsoft Azure spending, monitor AI-based anomalies, and build more intelligent IT environments.
	BIC For Payers: Score +: Score+ by Citiustech is a real-time quality performance platform to improve Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) scores. It is designed to give health plan providers the granular visibility and transparency they need.
	Birlasoft intelliOpen Solution: Leaders are looking for ways to rebuild safer workplaces. Birlasoft intelliOpen is an intelligent system for contactless screening, monitoring social distancing, and contact tracing without collecting any personally identifiable information (PII).
	BlueVoyant MDR for Azure Sentinel: BlueVoyant managed detection and response (MDR) for Microsoft Azure Sentinel combines the power of a SIEM tool with a security operations team to identify and remediate cyberattacks.
	ByteSave: TSG offers this simple tool for small and medium-sized businesses to back up and restore files or folders into Azure Blob Storage. This application is available in English and Vietnamese.
	CentOS 7.9: This pre-configured image by Cloud Whiz Solutions provides CentOS 7.9 on Microsoft Azure. CentOS Linux is a rebuild of the freely available sources for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
	CentOS 8.3: This pre-configured image by Cognosys provides CentOS 8.3 on Microsoft Azure. CentOS is a stable, predictable, manageable, and reproducible computing platform.
	CentOS 8.3 Cloud Ready: This pre-configured image by Cloud Whiz Solutions provides CentOS 8.3 on Microsoft Azure. CentOS Linux is a rebuild of the freely available sources for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
	Chartmuseum - Helm Chart Repository: ChartMuseum is an open-source Helm chart repository that is used in development, especially for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) in Kubernetes environments.
	Clinic Assist Software: This comprehensive clinic management solution by Assurance Technology consists of practice management and electronic medical records functions to support clinic operation, management, documentation, and compliance.
	Corvidae - A radically new approach to attribution: Corvidae unbundles marketing data silos, including Google Ads and Facebook marketing campaigns, and rebuilds your data. Corvidae deploys entirely in Microsoft Azure and can feed directly into Microsoft Dataverse.
	Cyren Inbox Security: Phishing, business email compromise, and fraud attacks are getting past existing email defenses. Delivered as a native cloud service, Cyren Inbox Security establishes a continuous and automated layer of security right in users’ mailboxes.
	Data Privacy Manager: This privacy management platform helps solve common General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) problems. The platform design enables full control over personal data processing, ranging from data collection to data removal from all systems.
	Debian GUI Linux by Techlatest.net: This pre-configured image contains a Debian 10 GUI-based Linux desktop environment built by Techlatest.net. Debian is composed of free, open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project.
	Dynasty - Information and Case Management: Available in Finnish and Swedish, Innofactor Dynasty is a certified public sector case management suite for municipal and state administration. It contains case, document, meeting, contract, decision, and information management modules.
	eGain Customer Engagement Suite on Azure: Delivering memorable customer journeys, the eGain Customer Engagement Suite provides a digital customer engagement omnichannel experience that is unified and personalized for the enterprise.
	eInsight CRM: Cendyn's platform provides marketing automation and guest intelligence for enterprise hotels, multi-property hotels, and multi-brand hotels. It consolidates, engages, and measures disparate data points about travelers throughout the guest journey.
	Email TeamMate by harmon.ie: Many organizations have rapidly rolled out Microsoft Teams during the pandemic. Email TeamMate brings an Outlook interface into Microsoft Teams for users to select and share Outlook emails within Teams conversations and chats.
	EmpowerIQ: Microsoft 365 User Adoption Service: Crayon US developed this self-service training portal to educate about the modern workplace tools and technologies that Microsoft 365 provides. With over 4,000 learning materials, you can benefit from personalized learning tracks.
	Eolementhe CC collaborative subtitling platform: Developed by Videomenthe for marketing, communications, HR professionals, journalists, and content creators, Eolementhe CC automates subtitling with human revision in 120 languages. This app is available in French, English, and Spanish.
	eSklep - Online store from home.pl: home.pl offers a complete store for online sales and business development. You can create your store without a sales commission and operate it from any device. This app is available only in Polish.
	FACEPLATE IIoT: FACEPLATE's platform provides advanced remote monitoring of discrete and process manufacturing through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). FACEPLATE’s mission is to connect equipment, visualize information, and analyze efficiency.
	Genesys Engage Enterprise Contact Center: Engage is an omnichannel and customer engagement solution for large-scale Microsoft Azure customers. With Genesys Engage, you can unify voice and digital channels, self-service, work items, and inbound and outbound interactions.
	Handshakes App: Powered by proprietary data analytics technology, Handshakes provides real-time access to information on specific persons or companies. Map out relationship networks and uncover potential conflicts of interest.
	Health Hero Wellness Engagement: Health Hero Bot on Microsoft Teams allows teams of any size to create fun and engaging well-being activities and challenges that bring your team and peers together to receive activity points.
	Inno App: Revitalize and optimize your application portfolio with containers and Kubernetes. Mindtree helps you utilize cutting-edge DevOps, enabling app developers and IT operations to deliver business value with speed and innovation.
	Inspection Management: Available only in Russian, this app oversees preventive and repair work, displays the list of work to be completed by engineers, sends information about the work carried out at sites, and automates reporting.
	Kubernetes Event Exporter Helm Chart: This pre-configured container image from Bitnami provides Kubernetes Event Exporter as a Helm chart. Kubernetes Event Exporter makes it easy to export Kubernetes events to other tools, enabling custom alerts and aggregation.
	Learning Management System Mentor: Available only in Spanish, Mentor TM is OpenTec's learning and talent management system that helps you plan, distribute, monitor, and evaluate training processes in different modalities.
	Levridge Scale: This app can be used to accurately capture weight and grade factors while issuing scale tickets, with tickets issued to drivers or synchronized to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance in real time. This app is available in the United States and Canada.
	Managed Defender for Endpoint (SOC): Truesec adds leading cybersecurity competence, always-on monitoring, and elimination of false positives to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Truesec's Security Operations Center (SOC) as a service provides active threat monitoring.
	MedDream DICOM Viewer: MedDream is designed by Softneta to aid medical professionals in their daily decision-making processes. The DICOM Viewer is FDA-cleared for diagnostic use as a Class 2 medical device and can be installed in Microsoft Azure.
	mGrants - A Grants Management System on Power Apps: Based on MERP Systems’ experience with US federal agencies, state and local governments, and non-profit organizations, mGrants is an all-in-one solution for the grants process, from program initiation through awards management.
	Microsoft Teams Automation Solution: With the rapid adoption of Microsoft Teams, enterprises face the challenge of driving efficiency and governance for Teams. Cambay developed this solution on Power Automate, Microsoft Power Apps, and Azure Automation to drive workflow automation.
	Mission Critical Azure - CSP: Wortell offers a fully managed service for your business-critical Microsoft Azure environment. This package provides seamless Azure management access control via Azure Lighthouse.
	Narad: Cloudstrats Technologies offers this integrated command-and-control center for real-time digital surveillance, disease control, and outbreak management. The COVID-19 Outbreak Management System is included.
	Newgen ActiveScript: Newgen Omnidocs ActiveScript enables end-to-end automation of your industry-specific, document-centric processes. Ensure business continuity and enable remote work while providing access to relevant documents at any time from anywhere.
	Node-RED on IoT Edge: Node-RED is a programming tool for connecting hardware devices, APIs, and online services in new and interesting ways. Using Node-RED with Azure IoT Edge makes it possible to easily communicate with the cloud.
	OnActuate Fraud Protection (SaaS): An extension to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection suite, OnActuate offers risk-based assessment, multi-factor authentication, and two types of identity verification services.
	Orbital Witness: This application helps real estate professionals conduct legal due diligence in the United Kingdom by allowing them to instantly understand legal risks at a site.
	Postgres Pro Standard Database 9.5 (VM+docker): This pre-configured container image by Postgres Professional provides a PostgreSQL-based Postgres Pro Standard Database 9.5 container image with a Debian server. Postgres Professional develops Postgres Pro Database, a private PostgreSQL fork.
	Postgres Pro Standard Database 9.6 (VM+docker): This pre-configured container image by Postgres Professional provides a PostgreSQL-based Postgres Pro Standard Database 9.6 container image with a Debian server. Postgres Professional develops Postgres Pro Database, a private PostgreSQL fork.
	Postgres Pro Standard Database 10 (VM+docker): This pre-configured container image provides a PostgreSQL-based Postgres Pro Standard Database 10 container image with a Debian server. Postgres Professional develops Postgres Pro Database, a private PostgreSQL fork.
	Qumuli Security & Cloud Compliance Platform: Qonsult Systems provides this multi-cloud compliance security posture management (CSPM) platform for security automation, provisioning, compliance monitoring, and reporting. Make it easier to maintain industry compliance.
	SaguiLog: Manage your orders, delivery lists, vehicles, and drivers with SaguiLog, an integrated carrier management app that is compatible with mobile devices and integrates with Microsoft 365. This app is available only in Brazilian Portuguese.
	Scheduling assistant using Microsoft Health Bot: Using AI, language understanding built on Azure LUIS, Azure QnA Maker, and Microsoft Health Bot Service, the IWConnect scheduling assistant drastically reduces the time to schedule appointments, check doctors’ availability, and set reminders.
	Sense Traffic Pulse OneAPI: Sense Traffic Pulse OneAPI together with Intel oneAPI delivers on-demand intelligent video analytics with the power of machine learning and AI. It relies on Microsoft Azure, Intel's OpenVINO Toolkit, and computer vision architecture technology.
	Skalable Stream - AI-Driven Invoice Automation: Stream is an easy-to-use accounts payable platform that cuts the time and expense of manually processing vendor invoices by up to 90 percent. It automates the process of importing accounts payable data and managing vendor invoices.
	Smile CDR CMS FHIR Data Platform: Smile CDR is a complete enterprise Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data platform that can meet the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Interoperability and Patient Access rule.
	Strata - Maverics Identity Orchestrator: Maverics is an abstraction layer that simplifies identity delivery to apps, enables secure hybrid access for Azure Active Directory, and consolidates management of policies and identities across multiple clouds.
	Teams Control: Developed by Infoworker, Teams Control is a governance tool for managing the growth and creation of new teams. It allows you to create different Microsoft Teams templates based on your needs.
	Trivadis Crisis Management App: Ensure that your company continues to operate in crisis situations. The Trivadis app is based on the Microsoft Power Platform and helps you manage exceptional situations by enabling transparent and prompt communication with your employees.
	Trivadis Dashboard: Based on Microsoft Power BI, this dashboard provides you with an overview of important internal and external news, including the latest tweets and media reports, contract status, employee attendance, and more.
	Trivadis Workforce App: Monitor work status and absences with the Trivadis Workforce App, which is based on the Microsoft Power Platform. You can quickly reorganize your team if the situation requires it. The app can be linked to various services, including Outlook.
	Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Minimal Ready to use: Cloud Maven provides this pre-configured, ready-to-use image of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Minimal. Ubuntu Minimal is designed for automated deployment at scale and made available across a range of cloud substrates.
	Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Minimal Ready to use: Cloud Maven provides this pre-configured, ready-to-use image of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Minimal. Ubuntu Minimal is designed for automated deployment at scale and made available across a range of cloud substrates.
	Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Minimal Ready to use: Cloud Maven provides this pre-configured, ready-to-use image of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Minimal. Ubuntu Minimal is designed for automated deployment at scale and made available across a range of cloud substrates.
	Unifield: Create digital twins or predict construction risks earlier in a simulation. Unifield combines the latest business intelligence, AI, and IoT technologies to offer an integrated 5D Building Information Modeling construction management solution.
	Voicy Telephone Agent: Driven by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, Voicy.ai's Telephone Agent is a completely automated service that answers phone calls, solves customer queries, and generates orders.
	WISE-PaaS/IoTSuite: WISE-PaaS/IoTSuite is a complete IoT platform that covers a set of development kits to enable the rapid development of IIoT applications as well as cloud-native applications and data management platforms.
	WitFoo Precinct 6.1 Diagnostic SIEM (BYOL): WitFoo’s Precinct is a big data diagnostic SIEM that provides advanced analytics, log collection, and log aggregation. Bring your own license (BYOL) from a WitFoo reseller.
	WitFoo Precinct 6.1 Diagnostic SIEM (PAYG): Pay as you go (PAYG) to use WitFoo’s Precinct, a big data diagnostic SIEM that provides advanced analytics, log collection, and log aggregation.
	Wrench SmartProject - Project Performance Control: SmartProject is an intelligent cloud-based platform for project owners, consultants, and contractors that is designed to help them collaborate, plan, monitor, and control the lifecycle of their projects.
	Yva.ai SaaS with Microsoft: Yva.ai is a real-time employee experience platform that combines weekly micro-surveys with collaboration analytics across corporate tools to enhance employee wellness and engagement.
	ZFlow: ZFlow lets you easily model and optimize business processes intended for users of both local and cloud versions of Microsoft SharePoint.
Consulting services
	Analytics Quick Start: 10-Hour Workshop: Altitudo will evaluate your Microsoft Azure data analytics systems with respect to the solutions market and to other companies in the sector. This offer is available only in Italian.
	Azure Infrastructure Readiness: 4-Week Assessment: This infrastructure assessment by Agilisys will help build your cloud strategy. Agilisys will identify utilization and interdependencies to provide time and cost estimates for migrating your estate to Microsoft Azure.
	Azure Integration: Clear Ship 4-Hour Workshop: Available only in German, DATA Passion experts will analyze your application integration needs and suggest smart integration solutions built on technologies such as Azure Integration Services or Microsoft BizTalk Server.
	Azure Starter: 2-Week Implementation: Starting with best practices from Azure DevOps and Azure Cloud Services, DataArt will help automate the initial setup of your Microsoft Azure projects to significantly lower the entry threshold for new users.
	Business Intelligence Delivery: 10-Week Implementation: Depending on your business needs and technology stack, SoftwareONE can implement your business intelligence strategy in Microsoft Azure by using Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, and Microsoft Power BI.
	Caloudi App Modernization: 1-Day Assessment: Caloudi Corporation provides end-to-end support throughout your web app transformation journey. Its app assessment will provide you with a modernization plan, a design plan, and a cost estimate.
	Cloud Discovery and Assessment - Two Weeks: This engagement is for customers planning to integrate public or hybrid cloud solutions into their infrastructure. VAST IT offers inventory analysis, roadmap generation, application mapping, vendor analysis, and migration planning.
	Cloud Velocity - Cloud Transformation: 2-Week Assessment: UST offers Cloud Velocity, a platform enabling a simplified and automated approach to move workloads from the datacenter to Microsoft Azure. It includes automated discovery and inventory analysis to minimize business disruptions and decision touchpoints.
	Connected Smart Devices: 4-Week Proof of Concept: Convert your devices into smart connected devices through IoT-friendly Plug and Play modules. Anvation Labs will connect your devices to Azure IoT Hub, manage data flow, and visualize the data in Microsoft Power BI.
	Data Modernization: 6-Week Implementation: Insight Canada will classify your legacy data estate and help you modernize your existing assets or adopt cloud-native approaches to data platform architecture by using Microsoft Azure services.
	Data Modernization Azure in a Day: 4-Hour Workshop: If you are in a data management or technical decision-making role, DataArt invites you to an interactive exploration of how to migrate apps and databases to the cloud. The workshop provides hands-on experience with data migration tools.
	Data Warehouse Cloud Migration: 8-Hour Assessment: BizOne offers this assessment and virtual workshop for organizations that are considering migrating their data warehouse to Microsoft Azure. BizOne will create a high-level architectural suggestion and a cost estimate.
	Datanomics Data & AI practice: 6-Week Implementation: Datanomics provides predictive analytics for retail and fast-moving consumer goods businesses. Using Microsoft Azure technologies and machine learning, Datanomics will help you with data-driven purchasing and optimization of inventory and assortment policy.
	Docker Workshop - 1 Day: Newwave Telecom and Technologies will help your developers and engineers understand the concept of containerization technology using Docker to improve their proficiency in building apps in Microsoft Azure.
	Journey to Cloud: 4-Week Assessment: Nubiral will help you understand the benefit of bringing your business to the cloud and migrating to Microsoft Azure with ease and efficiency. This assessment is available only in Spanish.
	Microsoft Identity Security: 3-Day Workshop: Protect your authorized users' identities and allow them to access the apps they need on the devices they want. Apex Digital Solutions’ workshop provides you with a security posture assessment and a strong security foundation.
	Migesa Risk & Compliance Assessment - 4 Weeks: Migesa will assess your Microsoft Azure environment to detect and mitigate threats. Migesa will also provide a roadmap for implementation, use, consumption, and adoption of services. This service is available only in Spanish.
	Migrate VMware VMs to Azure: 3-Day Assessment: Korcomptenz will help migrate your VMware VMs using Azure Migrate: Server Migration, a Microsoft tool that can seamlessly migrate VMWare virtual machine workloads to Microsoft Azure.
	Move to Microsoft Azure: 8-Week Proof of Concept: Dace IT will assess and migrate services for small businesses seeking to move operations to Microsoft Azure and interested in expenditures that may be eligible for coverage under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
	MultiCloud Manager: 8-Week Implementation: UST MultiCloud Manager enables near zero-touch operation and common end-to-end governance for any cloud. It gives you a standard way to optimize, secure, and govern your complex hybrid cloud environment.
	Openvino Smart Cities Reference Implementation: DACE IT will implement a smart-city reference solution built on Intel's OpenVINO Toolkit and smart city sample.
	Sage 200 on Azure: 4-Week implementation: OfficeTechHub will install your Sage 200 on-premises solution in Microsoft Azure. OfficeTechHub will build virtual machines in Azure, add disaster recovery and backup, and train key users. A demo can be organized at no cost.
	Servian DevOps Compass 1-week - Workshop & Report: One of the Servian Compass solutions, the DevOps Compass program provides a clear and concise path to deliver new functionality in stages, focusing on standard practices across the DevOps lifecycle.
	SIEM - ZenSOC Azure Sentinel 2-Week Assessment: Zensar offers this free assessment to build a business case for your organization to deploy a cloud-native SIEM solution using Microsoft Azure Sentinel to address cyberattacks.
	UNICLOUD MANAGED SERVICES: Take advantage of UniCloud's always-available remote management and consulting for Microsoft Azure services. UniCloud provides virtual machine management, monitoring, security, backups, and storage.
	Windows Virtual Desktop: 1-Day Workshop: Spektra Systems invites you to a one-day workshop covering architecture, deployment, and management aspects of a quality implementation of Windows Virtual Desktop.
	Windows Virtual Desktop: 2-Week Proof of Concept: Spektra Systems offers a free proof of concept for you to try Windows Virtual Desktop in a sandbox or in your own environment along with access to Spektra experts.
	Windows Virtual Desktop: 5-Week Implementation: Spektra Systems will work with your IT and business users to set up a desired Windows Virtual Desktop environment packaged with Microsoft 365 security capabilities.
	X.CELERATE KYC: AI-ML KYC Automation: 6-Week Proof of Concept: Xoriant Corporation will implement a test environment of its X.CELERATE KYC solution, helping streamline your compliance processes by using Microsoft Azure and Azure-based services.
	Zero Trust Framework: 2-Week Security Assessment: Brillio offers this enterprise security assessment to discover IT assets across six domains and recommend tools, services, solutions, and best practices to harden your security.

Re: Azure Sentinel: The connectors grand (CEF, Syslog, Direct, Agent, Custom and more)

aimery21 — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:21:29 GMT

Thanks for the feedback.

SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: February 2021

Mark Kashman — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:00:00 GMT

So, there may be six more weeks of Winter – thanks, Phil. And February may only have 28 days this go around the sun… but it was busy, no matter how long or short the groundhog shadows.

February 2021 brought some great new offerings: Microsoft Viva Topics (GA), SharePoint web part toolbox updates, Lightbox for images, Quick Links web part audience targeting, SharePoint portal launcher scheduler, Microsoft Lists: Number column updates, Managed Metadata column, Microsoft Search in classic SharePoint sites, and more. Details and screenshots below, including our audible, “groundhog, shadow-casted” companion: The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: February 2021 podcast episode – all to help answer, "What's rolling out now for SharePoint and related technologies into Microsoft 365?"

In the podcast episode, I chat with Naomi Moneypenny (LinkedIn | Twitter), principal PM manager at Microsoft focused on building new capabilities in advanced content, knowledge, and search experiences in Microsoft 365. We talk about the challenges of harnessing knowledge in the enterprise, the tech behind Viva Topics, and a future glimpse of what’s to come next from she and the Project Cortex team.

Naomi Moneypenny, principal PM manager at Microsoft (Microsoft) [Intrazone guest], with Mark Kashman on a Teams interview call [host]

All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of February 2021 (possibly early March 2021).

Inform and engage with dynamic employee experiences

Build your intelligent intranet on SharePoint in Microsoft 365 and get the benefits of investing in business outcomes – reducing IT and development costs, increasing business speed and agility, and up-leveling the dynamic, personalized, and welcoming nature of your intranet.

Microsoft Viva Topics (general availability)

Topics is the latest product output from Project Cortex, bringing artificial intelligence (AI) to empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day and to connect, manage, and protect content across systems and teams. It is also the first one of four disclosed Microsoft Viva modules to be released.

Microsoft Viva is the new employee experience platform built on Microsoft 365 that empowers people and teams to be their best from wherever they work. See Viva Topics in action:

Think of Viva Topics as a Wikipedia with AI superpowers. It uses AI to automatically organize company-wide content and expertise into relevant categories like “projects,” “products,” “processes,” and “customers.”

When you come across an unfamiliar topic or acronym, just hover. No need to search for knowledge—knowledge finds you. Viva Topics automatically surfaces topic cards as people work in apps like Office, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams. When employees click on a card, a topic page appears with documents, videos, and related people. Experts at the company can also help curate the information shown in Viva Topics by sharing knowledge through simple, highly customizable web sites called Topic Pages.

Learn more, plus the Viva Topics Buy Now page, which includes cost information, plus licensing requirements.
Roadmap ID: 72069.

SharePoint web part toolbox updates

This one is for page authors or site owners that design a lot of content on their site home page. If you're new to using web parts, one thing the team discovered was the lack of discovery - of all the useful web parts.

So, to help, we are updating the web part toolbox to make it easier to find and use web parts on pages and news posts. We have added categories, a toggle to switch between a grid view and list view, web part descriptions in list view, and a section for the user’s most frequently used web parts.

Updated web part toolbox when authoring SharePoint pages and news articles.

Bring content visualization to life across your intranet pages and news, now with greater creator visibility when using the service.

Learn more, "Using web parts on SharePoint pages" [support article]
Roadmap ID: 70668.

Lightbox for images on SharePoint pages

A lightbox popup is a window overlay that appears on top of a webpage. With this update, when people click or tap on an image in SharePoint, they will be able to see a larger version of the image in the lightbox. When viewing the image in the lightbox, the remainder of the page is inactivated and dimmed.

And then, it's easy to close lightbox and turn back to the rest of the page.

Click on an image from a SharePoint page to get a clearer, focused view of it. The rest of the page will darken, and any image captions will appear below the image.

There has been a lot of new tech for uploading and working with images during the edit phase, to crop, resize, rotate… and once you've gotten just the way you want it, your readers can see it best in all its glory all lit up and large in the lightbox.

Learn more about using the Image web part.
Roadmap ID: 70669.

SharePoint: Audience Targeting for Quick Links web part

We are adding the ability to target specific audiences per link within the Quick Links Web Part. With it, you will be able to target specific links to different audiences, helping you provide more personalized experiences on SharePoint pages.

Enable audience targeting to promote links to specific audiences across the site.

The Quick Links web part "pins" items to your page for easy access.
Roadmap ID 67115.

SharePoint Portal Launch Scheduler

This is an admin feature designed to help coordinate and schedule launch details for SharePoint sites that are expected to receive high volumes of traffic. The Portal Launch wizard available via SharePoint PowerShell is designed to configure the deployment waves when launching a new site. It also provides an automatic redirect for users dependent on which redirect option is selected.

The Portal Launch Scheduler makes it possible for you to manage a phased rollout for a new SharePoint site. It also provides an automatic redirect for existing sites, if needed.

Example PowerShell command to designate portal launch waves.

During each of the waves, you can gather user feedback and monitor performance. This provides a managed way to slowly introducing the portal, giving you the option to pause and resolve issues before proceeding; ultimately ensuring a positive experience for your users from start to fully launched.

Learn more:
- Creating and launching a healthy SharePoint portal
- Launch your portal using the Portal Launch Scheduler
Roadmap ID: 66162.

Teamwork updates across SharePoint team sites, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 is designed to be a universal toolkit for teamwork – to give you the right tools for the right task, along with common services to help you seamlessly work across applications. SharePoint is the intelligent content service that powers teamwork – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization – with integration across Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Planner and much more.

Microsoft Lists | Support for thousands separator and custom symbols in Number columns

With Microsoft Lists and SharePoint lists, owners and members have the ability to add a thousands separator to numbers and to be able to choose their preferred symbol that best represents what the numbers represent - like the various currency symbols used across the world.

When using Number columns in lists, configure numbers based on how you want or need to present them.

There's an important difference between the Yen and the Euro, and you want it to be as clear as it can be. The right symbol goes a long way.

Roadmap ID: 68716.

Adding taxonomy columns for modern SharePoint library views

Yes, the power of metadata in the hands of those that need to manage document library content as the business prescribes. This new feature gives you the ability to add taxonomy-powered columns directly to library views in modern SharePoint libraries.

The Managed Metadata column connects your information to your organization’s term store (taxonomy).

Quick note: SharePoint document libraries are powered by lists for their row and column capabilities.

With this update, users will see a new Managed metadata option as a column type within the Add column menu in SharePoint lists and libraries. Then simply specify the column information such as name and description as well as choose their organization's desired term set or term, to associate the column with. From there, the use of that column is driven by the managed metadata coming from the programmed, managed term set.

Learn more about creating a Managed Metadata column.
Roadmap ID: 70609.

Microsoft Search in classic SharePoint sites

This is a quick and simple one, with lots of power for sites that have been around a while and may still be in classic mode. We are expanding the reach of Microsoft Search; classic SharePoint team sites that do not have customized search experience will be updated to the modern Microsoft Search experience, bringing improved personalization and relevance.

Classic SharePoint pages in Microsoft 365 will start using Microsoft Search, which provides personalized results with higher relevance. Top show the classic search experience – note the top-right search box, and the bottom shows a classic site using Microsoft Search – the search box at the center top.

That's it. Another example of how Microsoft Search is truly powering search throughout Microsoft 365 - aka, no site left behind.

Learn more.
Roadmap ID: 57131.

Related technology

Text predictions are coming to Word for Windows

Initially, text predictions popped up in Outlook for Windows - during composition to help users write more efficiently by predicting text quickly and accurately. Now, text predictions are coming to Microsoft Word when writing documents in English. And we know a lot of Word document are created in Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

Text predictions within Word for Windows appear ahead as you type.

As you type, you'll see suggested text, which you can accept by tapping the Tab key or they can ignore suggestions by simply continuing to type. The feature reduces spelling and grammar errors and learns over time to give the best recommendations based on your writing style.

Note: this is a Microsoft 365 connected experience, and can be turned off by going to any Microsoft 365 application such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint and going to File > Account > Manage Settings. This feature can also be managed through the policy settings for privacy controls.

Learn more.
Roadmap ID: 80179.

Evolution of Microsoft Lens (formerly Office Lens)

And with the evolution, beyond a new name, comes some dynamic new features, like intelligent actions into the camera, including: Image to Text, Image to Table, Image to Contact, Immersive Reader, and QR Code Scan.

One of the new intelligent actions into the camera: Image to Text.

We are releasing an improved scan experience allowing you to re-order pages, re-edit scanned PDFs, apply a filter to all images in the document, scan up to 100 pages as images or PDFs, easily switch between local and cloud locations while saving PDF, along with an easy way to identify local and cloud files.

We're noting it here because Microsoft Lens powers the camera in Microsoft 365 mobile apps, including Office, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive - yes, OneDrive loves lens - scan, scan, scan the physical world right where it needs to be stored digitally.

Learn more, and download for iOS and Android.

OneDrive for Android updates

We’re introducing an updated home screen experience for Android users, plus support for Samsung Motion Photos and 8K video. Now, you can pick up where you left off on recent and offline files, and easily re-discover memories from the past right from the home screen.

The new home screen experience on OneDrive for Android shows recently accessed files, files downloaded for offline use, and “On This Day” photos.

For Samsung Android phones, OneDrive has always saved your Samsung Motion Photos, and now you’ll be able to view them in all their moving glory. Similarly, you’ve always been able store Samsung 8K videos with no loss or compression on OneDrive, and now you can play them back as well. Great storage always, and now rich, new viewing experiences on your Android device.

Learn more. And make sure you have the latest updates with OneDrive for Android.

March 2021 teasers

Psst, still here? Still scrolling the page looking for more roadmap goodness? If so, here is a few teasers of what’s to come to production next month…

Teaser #1: SharePoint app bar [Roadmap ID: 70576]
Teaser #2: SharePoint page analytics [Roadmap ID: 70635]

… shhh, tell everyone – especially Punxsutawney Phil.

Helpful, ongoing change management resources

Install the Office 365 admin app; view Message Center posts and stay current with push notifications.

Microsoft 365 public roadmap + pre-filtered URL for SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer and Stream roadmap items.

SharePoint Facebook | Twitter | SharePoint Community Blog | UserVoice
OneDrive Facebook | Twitter | OneDrive Community Blog | UserVoice

Follow me to catch news and interesting SharePoint things: @mkashman; warning, occasional bad puns may fly in a tweet or two here and there, plus my new blog on Substack: The Kashbox.

Thanks for tuning in and/or reading this episode/blog of the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – February 2021 (blog/podcast). We are open to your feedback in comments below to hear how both the Roadmap Pitstop podcast episodes and blogs can be improved over time.

Engage with us. Ask those questions that haunt you. Push us where you want and need to get the best information and insights. We are here to put both our and your best change management foot forward.

Stay safe out there on the groundhoggy-shadowy-laden road’map, and thanks for listening and reading.

Thanks for your time,

Mark Kashman – senior product manager (SharePoint/Lists) | Microsoft)

The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop - February 2021 graphic showing some of the highlighted release features.

Re: Fostering Team Building and Employee Connections

Josh Leporati — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 15:54:39 GMT

- we did an escape room team building event last week that was really fun! Joined into a meeting and then separated out into breakout rooms. The first room we had to name different movie scenes to unlock enough points to "unlock" the door. The second room was putting pins on a map related to where a landmark / location was at. The farther away your geo'mark the more "points" (miles/km) you lost.

For the movie portion, they titled the event The Great "Insert Team Name" Movie Caper - this is the resource they used

For the location guessing, they titled the event Where in the world is "Insert Team Name" - this is the resource they used

/Josh

Re: Microsoft Teams calling devices for every user

Phil Bowden — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 15:53:18 GMT

So, this could come across as a stupid question, but I'm braving it anyway...

I've got a Lenovo Thinksmart and a Yealink T55a, unboxed in the office, hooked it up, logged in and working fine, however they don't appear to be in the TAC?

I've got a number of MTR's which are running fine and appear in their, but no handsets?

Side Note - Which could well be the dealbreaker, we don't have Intune rolled out in our business (personal frustration) is this why it's not appearing?

Re: Introducing Microsoft Viva Topics

Robert Symmons — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 15:39:30 GMT

I have a question - currently our topics are populating and I am able to confirm and publish them however they're not really appearing anywhere within our apps. I've managed to find one active topic on a SharePoint page, but topics are being referenced within email, word docs or Teams. I remember seeing a product demo where it was creating a link to topics within a Word doc, is this still the case?

Additionally, I'm not sure why after a topic has been published those changes to do replicate to mentioned topics, is this a latency issue?

Support are clueless!

Re: New certification: Microsoft Power Platform Solution Architect Expert

Sang_Park — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 15:31:19 GMT

Good morning, NancyTandy. I became a Microsoft Certified Dynamics 365 + Power Platform Solution Architect Expert in January 2021 by passing the PL-200, PL-400 and MB-600 exams. Since MB-600 exam will be retired in June this year, do I need to take the PL-600 exam to renew my Solution Architect Expert status on this Power Platform subject? Since mine will be expired 2 years from January 2021, I am just curious about my Microsoft Certified Dynamics 365 + Power Platform Solution Architect Expert renewal process approximately 1.5 year later (6 months before the expiration date). I would like to know if it would be better for me to take the PL-600 (just in case) when it becomes available in BETA later this month OR if Microsoft already has any “plan” for the people like me regarding the MB-600 retirement & the PL-600 replacement at this time. Please let me know.

Add up to 25 embedded, editable labels to your tasks

PlannerTeam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 15:30:10 GMT

Labels in Planner are visual cues, drawing attention to a particular set of tasks for a particular reason. For example, you might use labels to tag tasks with the same completion requirements, dependencies, or issues, and then filter your plan on those labels to zero-in on related tasks. In short, labels are a quick, visual way to categorize similar tasks.

But we’ve long heard that the current catalogue of labels (six total) isn’t enough; in fact, adding more labels to Planner is one of the very top asks on UserVoice. This update has been on our radar as long as yours, so we’re thrilled to announce that there are now 25 labels available in Tasks in Teams and Planner on all platforms and in most environments. (GCC availability is coming in March.)

Each of the 25 labels is a different color, and each can be edited with whatever text you’d like. More labels mean more options for getting a similar group of tasks done right: flagging more risks, signaling more reasons for a delay, prompting reviews from more people, and tagging more departments, to name a few.

We’re constantly chipping away at big and small asks alike from UserVoice, and invite you to submit your ideas for improving Planner and Tasks in Teams to that site. In the meantime, keep checking our Tech Community Blog to see which ask we address next.

Save Time and Automate Your Workflows with These Shortcuts for Educators

braydenw — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 15:00:00 GMT

This post was written in collaboration with Gabi Stein, Geri Gillespy, Brian Dang and Jon Levesque

If there is one resource that continually evades the grasp of nearly every educator on earth, it is time. With such a broad set of responsibilities, it seems there simply are not enough hours in the day for a teacher to accomplish everything. Preparing materials, organizing classes, teaching classes, engaging in professional learning, working with parents and families, and playing key roles as co-workers, school leaders, and community members only scratch the surface of what it means to be an educator. When you toss COVID-19 into the mix, it's no wonder that teachers have even less time as they work to fulfill their important roles during a tumultuous time.

Remote and hybrid learning environments are now the predominant means for instruction. Platforms like Microsoft Teams have become the avenue through which teachers teach and students learn. It is our mission to empower every educator to achieve more and we want to help you take meaningful steps toward that end by saving you precious time.

Power Automate can be a useful tool that takes everyday tasks and automates them through various "flows". Like a "flow chart" from which it gets its name, a "flow" is a series of steps that run in order. It can look up rows from a table, send emails, create files, and even play back a set of recorded clicks and keystrokes for desktop automation. Gone are the days of repeating by hand, one by one.

As you will read in the list below, anything from course registration to scheduling announcements can be set to automatically run with very little setup beforehand. The EDU teams within Microsoft have surveyed hundreds of teachers around the world and created automated workflows on common educator tasks including:

Title	Description
Create tasks in Microsoft Planner for onboarding new teacher	Automatically create all the tasks and checklist items a new teacher needs to complete in Microsoft Planner.
Send text to office liaison to translate	Communication from a teacher, administrator, or anyone at the office may need to be translated for families to read in their language. This flow will help an office liaison set up a way to receive content to be translated, automate a basic translation to work from, and return a refined translation to the sender.
Automating registration for courses or school events	This flow will allow you to automatically set up course or event registrations and send confirmation emails to the organizer and attendee.
Collect instructional feedback or other information for staff and students	This flow will allow educators create an automatic system for gathering and collecting information using Microsoft Forms and SharePoint.
Sending posts between Teams channels	This flow will allow for educators to send messages from one Teams channel to a different Team without having to copy and paste. This is different from posting one message across multiple channels within the same Team
Scheduling posts and announcements in Teams	This flow will allow educators to schedule announcements and posts to be published at a designated time in Microsoft Teams such as a schedule for the week.
Creating an assessment calendar	This flow will allow for educators to create a calendar of assessments across the institution. Any teacher can submit an assessment date in a form which will add it to a calendar.
Notification or communication when a list item is added or changed	Leaders and educators may modify documents on a regular basis. This flow would allow them to create an automatic system for notifying users when a SharePoint list is updated or edited.
Submitting professional development (PD) requests	This flow tracks an approval process for professional development credits. Educators submit a form for PD requests, then an approval is automatically sent for consideration.
Track approvals or requests for maintenance	This flow will allow leaders or educators create an automatic maintenance system that involves approvals or requests using Microsoft Forms, Outlook, and SharePoint.

We are here to help you implement the flows you see in this list along with any others you may be able to think up. We are eager to understand how automation can become a meaningful and helpful part of your daily workflow as continue to improve them. If you have a story about how an automated process has improved your life as an educator or if you have an idea for building a new one, we want to hear it! Please contact us here.

It is our hope that these flows can free you from the manual aspects of teaching in remote and hybrid learning environments and give you back some time.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals Customer Finance and Operations Apps Beta Exam Now Available

Liberty Munson — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 15:00:00 GMT

As I mentioned in a previous blog, we have decided to split the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals exam into its core components—customer engagement apps and finance and operation apps. The second one, MB-920: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals Finance and Operations Apps (ERP), is now in beta. This exam covers the features and capabilities of Dynamics 365 finance and operations apps. Candidates should have a fundamental understanding of financial principles and business operations.

When you successfully pass this exam, you will earn the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals Finance and Operations Apps (ERP) certification.

To receive the 80% discount*, use code MB920LMhiking when prompted for payment. You can use this code to register for and take the exam on or before March 26, 2021.

This is NOT private access code.

*The first 300 people who register can take these exams for an 80% discount! (Why beta exams are no longer free.) The seats are offered on a first-come, first-served basis. You must register for the exam on or before March 26, 2021. Take the exam as soon as possible, so we can leverage your comments, feedback, and exam data in our evaluation of the quality of the questions.

Preparing for Beta Exams

Review the MB-920 prep guide and practice the skills listed.
Find classroom and online training from Microsoft Learning Partners.
Explore free learning paths, courses, and hands-on learning on Microsoft Learn.
Need other preparation ideas? Check out my blog post on preparing for beta exams.

Taking a beta exam is your chance to have a voice in the questions we include on the exam when it goes live. The rescore process starts on the day that exams go live, and final scores are released approximately 10 days later. For updates on when the rescore is complete, follow me on Twitter (@libertymunson). For questions about the timing of beta exam scoring and live exam release, see the blog posts The Path from Beta Exam to Live Exam and More Tips About Beta Exams.

Remember, the number of spots is limited, so when they're gone, they're gone. You should also be aware that there are some countries where the beta code will not work (including Turkey, Pakistan, India, and China). You will not be able to take the beta exam in those countries.

Also keep in mind that these exams are in beta, which means that you will not be scored immediately. You will receive your final score and passing status after your exam is live.

Announcing two new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals certifications!

Re: Enhanced performance, designed for simplicity – the new Outlook for Mac

plafferty — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:56:29 GMT

for the love of chips and salsa, when you are going to include support for imap accounts? This has been the online discussion since mid 2020. Why hasn't there been an update? I can't migrate to the new outlook without that functionality.

Re: The February 26th Weekly Roundup is Posted!

Sergei Baklan — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:54:43 GMT

To the events I'd add Excel Reddit AMA on March 10 at 10 AM PT - Microsoft Tech Community

Re: Sending Notifications From SCSM via Office 365

ThisGuyWill — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:53:09 GMT

Following these instructions now and am having difficulties getting this to work. It would be nice if there were some official documentation from MS to properly get O365 working as an outbound mail server or even some out of the box functionality. The latter seems like it should be a given especially with how popular O365 is becoming in the Enterprise. Also, with Basic Auth going away soon, how is this solution going to hold up in the long run?

A response would be very much appreciated.