Category Archives: Blog

Microsoft Cloud Roadshow

All –

I wanted to make you aware of a great site within Microsoft Virtual Academy called “Microsoft Cloud Roadshow,” it has 60+ videos on Office 365, Microsoft Azure, and Windows 10 that might be useful for you and/or your team.

Microsoft Cloud Roadshow
Whether you’re keeping your existing cloud skills current or you’re just getting started, having access to best practices and training is now more critical than ever. Explore these Microsoft Cloud Roadshow sessions to find technical training for IT Professionals and Developers. Get practical insight and helpful tips, directly from the experts who build and run cloud services across Office 365, Microsoft Azure, and Windows 10.

Highlight:
What really happens when there is an Office 365 service incident and what’s my role?
Modernize your datacenter
Run Azure Services in Your Datacenter

mscloud

Regards,
Bea

Announcing SQL Server on Linux

Hi all –

Making sure you are aware of the recent news on SQL!

“It’s been an incredible year for the data business at Microsoft and an incredible year for data across the industry. This Thursday at our Data Driven event in New York, we will kick off a wave of launch activities for SQL Server 2016 with general availability later this year. This is the most significant release of SQL Server that we have ever done, and brings with it some fantastic new capabilities. SQL Server 2016 delivers:

  • Groundbreaking security encryption capabilities that enable data to always be encrypted at rest, in motion and in-memory to deliver maximum security protection
  • In-memory database support for every workload with performance increases up to 30-100x
  • Incredible Data Warehousing performance with the #1, #2 and #3 TPC-H 10 Terabyte benchmarks for non-clustered performance, and the #1 SAP SD Two-Tier performance benchmark on windows
  • Business Intelligence for every employee on every device – including new mobile BI support for iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices
  • Advanced analytics using our new R support that enables customers to do real-time predictive analytics on both operational and analytic data
  • Unique cloud capabilities that enable customers to deploy hybrid architectures that partition data workloads across on-premises and cloud based systems to save costs and increase agility”

To find out more about SQL Server on Linux, you can sign up to get regular updates and provide input to the team.

SQL-Loves-Linux_2_Twitter-002-640x358

Thursday event referred above:
Data Driven Summit – NYC | March 10, 10:00 am PST
Get help building the strategy that you need. Learn about the latest SQL Server, Hadoop, and much more at Data Driven!

ny-event

Thanks,
Bea

Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection

Hi –

I wanted to let you know that yesterday, at RSA Conference Microsoft announced the next step in our efforts to protect enterprise customers, with a new service, Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (WDATP). WDATP is a new services that will help enterprise customers to detect, investigate, and respond to advanced attacks on your networks and it will include:

  • Advance attacks detection
  • Response recommendation
  • Complements Microsoft Advance Thread Detection Solutions

 

To learn more, please visit the Windows blog.

w10

Bea

Cloud Weekly Digest – Week of January 31 – February 6, 2016

Take a look at last week’s news on Microsoft Cloud and miscellaneous.

 WEBINARS & EVENTS

Five reasons to run Microsoft apps on Azure | February 10, 2016 at 10:00 am PST
Join Corey Sanders, Microsoft’s Director of Program Management on the Azure Compute team, to learn the top five reasons why you’ll benefit from running Microsoft apps on Azure.azure-apps

YamJam: OneDrive for Business | February 10, 2016 at 9:00 am PST
Join Reuben Krippner and the OneDrive for Business team for an hour of live Q&A. This is an opportunity to voice feedback, ask questions and learn about what’s next directly from the people behind the product.

yammer

Drive Business Results with Intelligent Tools Series | All webinars (45 minutes) will take place on Thursdays at 10:00 am PST.
Moving to the cloud is no longer a question of “if,” it’s a question of “when.” In this series you will get to see the exciting innovations enabling best-in-class, cross-platform mobile productivity, intelligent tools that can anticipate your needs to deliver timely solutions, collaboration tools built for the modern workforce and how Microsoft has delivered on its commitment to trustworthy computing across security, privacy and compliance.

Business-Results-Webinars

Azure Active Directory Premium Customer Training Webinars
Join us and learn how to get up and running on Azure AD Premium quickly and easily!

AAD-webinars

RSA Conference 2016 | February 29 – March 4, 2016
RSA Conference 2016 is your best opportunity to connect with the technology, trends and people that will protect our digital world.

rsa2016

TechNet Virtual – Conference 2016 | March 1-3, 2016
3 days of technology, inspiration and fun! To attend the event, please visit the event landing page http://aka.ms/technetvc

technet-virtual

Learn new insights from leaders in the business analyst community | Cost: $299 | March 22–23, 2016
The Excel and Power BI teams are hosting a new conference designed specifically for you, the business analyst.

data-summit

Introducing Microsoft Envision, our new event for business leaders | New Orleans, LA | April 4-6, 2016
Microsoft Envision is designed for CxOs and their senior department and functional leaders who are driven to shape their own future and position their organizations and business for success in a mobile first, cloud first world.

Envision-Social-Graphic

Microsoft Ignite 2016: Registration is open—sign up now | September 26–30, 2016
It’s time—register now for Microsoft Ignite and mark your calendar. Be there when top industry leaders talk about what’s next, get direct access to the people who built the products you use every day and surround yourself with smart people talking tech.

ignite

OFFICE 365

Exploring the Office 365 Groups API
Exploring the Office 365 Groups API by Paul Schaeflein.

groups

C# Console Application and Office 365
Great blog post on how to create a C# Console Application and connecting it to the Office 365 API.

console-app

Get ready for Yammer!
Last week, Office announced that we are activating Yammer for every eligible Office 365 tenant—new and existing—without requiring additional action on the part of admins. This allows all Office 365 customers to gain the full benefits of Yammer.

yammer-logo

Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery now enables export to third-party review apps
Last week Office announced the ability for customers to export eDiscovery data from their Office 365 tenant to third-party review applications. This new capability is in addition to the existing export capabilities already present in Office 365, which allow you to download the data directly to your local computer. The new export capability enables secure eDiscovery data export from Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery to a secure Azure Blob storage controlled either by the organization or by the third-party review application.

Stay secure with Advanced Threat Protection in Office 365
ATP provides you with protection against unknown malware/viruses, real-time, time-of-click protection against malicious URLs, and rich reporting and URL trace capabilities.

Episode 083 on Office 365 PNP updates with Vesa Juvonen—Office 365 Developer Podcast
In this episode, Jeremy Thake speaks to Vesa Juvonen on the latest updates from Office 365 PNP.

dev-podcast

AZURE

On-premises and cloud hybrid Hadoop data pipelines with Hortonworks and Cortana Analytics
The Azure Data Factory and Hortonworks Falcon teams jointly announced the availability of private preview for building hybrid Hadoop data pipelines leveraging on-premises Hortonworks Hadoop clusters and cloud-based Cortana Analytics services like HDInsight Hadoop clusters and Azure Machine Learning.

Announcing general availability of Google Widevine license services
We are pleased to announce the general availability of Google Widevine license delivery services in the cloud with Azure Media Services.

Announcing PowerShell v5 support in Azure Automation
Some of the most exciting features include:

  • PowerShell classes
  • PowerShell Workflow performance improvements
  • PowerShell module side-by-side versioning
  • A whole bunch of new cmdlets (ex. Convert-String)
  • A whole bunch of PowerShell DSC improvements (ex. PSRunAsCredential)

powershell

Azure welcomes Parse developers
If you have been using Parse hosting as the backend that supports your mobile apps, this may be the perfect time to try out Azure App Service.

azure-parse

Is your code ready for leap year?
2016 is a leap year, and that can mean trouble for software applications not carefully coded to prevent bugs. Learn more about the types of bugs you should be on the lookout for, and how the leap year has affected Azure and other software in the past.

LeapYear

An early look at Azure Stack and what it means for IT
Azure and Azure Stack share a standardized architecture, including the same portal, a unified application model, and common DevOps tools. This gives you the freedom to decide where applications and workloads reside without being constrained by technology. On this blog post, Jeffrey Snover, Chief Architect, Enterprise Cloud, demonstrates the specific advantages of Azure Stack for those of you in IT.

azure-stack

MISCELLANEOUS

Gartner positions Microsoft as a leader in BI and Analytics Platforms
Industry analysts have taken note of our efforts and we are excited to share Gartner has positioned Microsoft as a Leader, for the ninth consecutive year, in the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms. For the first time, Microsoft is placed furthest in vision within the Leaders quadrant.

gartner-bi

Announcing Power BI “publish to web” preview
Now available in Power BI for free: Publish your interactive data visualizations online with publish to web!

power-bi-web

Microsoft acquires SwiftKey in support of re-inventing productivity ambition
This acquisition is a great example of Microsoft’s commitment to bringing its software and services to all platforms. We’ll continue to develop SwiftKey’s market-leading keyboard apps for Android and iOS as well as explore scenarios for the integration of the core technology across the breadth of our product and services portfolio. Moreover, SwiftKey’s predictive technology aligns with Microsoft’s investments and ambition to develop intelligent systems that can work more on the user’s behalf and under their control.| SwiftKey is joining Microsoft

swiftkey-microsoft

Saying “Goodbye” to DNX and “Hello!” to the .NET Core CLI – Damian Edwards & David Fowler
The .NET Core CLI is coming soon and will replace DNX as the underpinnings of ASP.NET 5 while also being *the* command line experience for .NET Core development on all platforms. Come see David Fowler and Damian Edwards explain how this changes ASP.NET 5 (for the better) and what new scenarios it enables in its own right.

.net

Manage your technical debt with TFS, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio, and SonarQube
#Connect2015 -| By using Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services, and their integration with SonarQube, you now have a way to measure technical debt, stop it from growing, and manage it down. This video shows how to modify a continuous integration build to add a SonarQube analysis, how to take a baseline in Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 to make a fresh start managing your static analysis issues, and how to use the “Changed Documents” filter in the error list to clean-up existing static analysis issues as you change code.

GoingNative 46: [Why you should be trying out] C++ Modules
Learn from our in-house expert why modules is [sic] going to make C++ even more awesome with its various explicit and implicit benefits, and you can take advantage of it right away!

c++

TWC9: VSCode Insiders, Igniting Ignite, Future Edge, NFL Hololens and more…
Last week on Channel 9.

TWC9

Thanks,
Bea

Cloud Weekly Digest – Week of January 24-30, 2016

Take a look at last week’s news on Microsoft Cloud and miscellaneous.

WEBINARS & EVENTS

Azure Stack webcast with PG | February 3rd, 9:00 am PST
Great opportunity to join Mark Russinovich and Jeffrey Snover on their webcast to get the inside the scoop on Azure Stack!
Azure-Stack-webcast

Five reasons to run Microsoft apps on Azure | February 10, 2016 at 10:00 am PST
Join Corey Sanders, Microsoft’s Director of Program Management on the Azure Compute team, to learn the top five reasons why you’ll benefit from running Microsoft apps on Azure.

Take your teamwork to the next level anywhere, anytime with Office 365 and Windows 10 | Wednesday, February 10 and 17 at 10:00 am or 12:00 pm PST
Join us for a Microsoft Immersion Experience session from the comfort of your own office. An immersion experience is a facilitated, hands-on session to “experience the possible” by test-driving Microsoft solutions through simulated everyday business scenarios.

Drive Business Results with Intelligent Tools Series | All webinars (45 minutes) will take place on Thursdays at 10:00 am PST.
Moving to the cloud is no longer a question of “if,” it’s a question of “when.” In this series you will get to see the exciting innovations enabling best-in-class, cross-platform mobile productivity, intelligent tools that can anticipate your needs to deliver timely solutions, collaboration tools built for the modern workforce and how Microsoft has delivered on its commitment to trustworthy computing across security, privacy and compliance.
Business-Results-Webinars

Azure Active Directory Premium Customer Training Webinars
Join us and learn how to get up and running on Azure AD Premium quickly and easily!
AAD-webinars

RSA Conference 2016 | February 29 – March 4, 2016
RSA Conference 2016 is your best opportunity to connect with the technology, trends and people that will protect our digital world.
rsa2016

TechNet Virtual – Conference 2016 | March 1-3, 2016
3 days of technology, inspiration and fun! To attend the event, please visit the event landing page http://aka.ms/technetvc
technet-virtual

Learn new insights from leaders in the business analyst community | Cost: $299 | March 22–23, 2016
The Excel and Power BI teams are hosting a new conference designed specifically for you, the business analyst.
data-summit

Introducing Microsoft Envision, our new event for business leaders | New Orleans, LA | April 4-6, 2016
Microsoft Envision is designed for CxOs and their senior department and functional leaders who are driven to shape their own future and position their organizations and business for success in a mobile first, cloud first world.
Envision-Social-Graphic

OFFICE 365

Developing Outlook add-ins – where to integrate and what you can do
In this blog post, Simon Jaeger, covers some of the key possibilities that you have when integrating with Outlook and using the Office.js library.

Getting started with Microsoft Graph
In this lab, you will investigate the Microsoft Graph.

Overview of Office 365 Development
In this lab, you will work with existing Office 365 Add-ins.

Skype for Business and Lync 2013 Memory Usage
Skype for Business and Lync 2013 clients manage memory differently than previous client versions. This article describes the design change, how it impacts client performance, and how it affects the memory footprint.

New cloud storage options for Office mobile and Office Online
Last week, Office announced real-time co-authoring with Office Online for documents stored in partner cloud services, extending our Office for iOS integration to all partners in the CSPP, and enabling integration between Outlook.com and cloud storage providers Dropbox and Box.

5 commonly overlooked security threats
This post discusses five often overlooked threats to your email security.
Overlooked-security-threats

Episode 082 on PowerApps with Chris McNulty—Office 365 Developer Podcast
In this episode, Jeremy Thake speaks to Chris McNulty on PowerApps.
dev-podcast

AZURE

Progress update: Node.js SDK for Azure App Service Mobile Apps
Back in September, we announced the availability of the first alpha release for the Node.js SDK for Azure App Service Mobile Apps. This SDK streamlines the code for implementing a mobile backend with Azure App Service. We’ve been hard at work since then developing the solution with plenty of real-world experience and feedback from the community.

Introduction to the new Azure Portal
In this video Byron Tardif, a Program Manager on the Azure team, spends some time discussing the new Azure Portal that was recently released.

Announcing the first Technical Preview of Microsoft Azure Stack
Born from Azure, Azure Stack helps organizations deliver Azure services from their own datacenter. | Technical Preview is available for download.

File management with Azure Mobile Apps
The Azure Mobile Apps File Management SDK, is a library that provides client and server components designed to help eliminate complexities using the Azure Mobile Apps SDK, currently using Azure Blob Storage as the underlying storage infrastructure.

Machine Learning in Azure Security Center
Broadly speaking, Microsoft uses Machine Learning to achieve two outcomes: next-generation detection and simplified security management.

13 effective security controls for ISO 27001 compliance
13 effective security controls that can be easily implemented to help address ISO 27001 compliance obligations
iso-27001MISCELLANEOUS

Visual Studio UserVoice
Turn customer engagement and feedback from thousands, or even millions, of users into smart product decisions—all without turning your backlog into a hurricane. UserVoice is the perfect tool for products and development teams looking to build the best products – driven by real feedback from users.
VS-usevoice

Microsoft research project puts cloud in ocean for the first time
The technology to put sealed vessels underwater with computers inside isn’t new. In fact, it was one Microsoft employee’s experience serving on submarines that carry sophisticated equipment that got the ball rolling on this project. But Microsoft researchers do believe this is the first time a datacenter has been deployed below the ocean’s surface. Going under water could solve several problems by introducing a new power source, greatly reducing cooling costs, closing the distance to connected populations and making it easier and faster to set up datacenters.DC-under-water

Cortana Gets Better at Helping You Manage Your Busy Schedule
Use Cortana to request an Uber, assist with meeting prep, track flights or packages and set a location-based reminder that goes with you on all your devices.

Message Analyzer: How to Diagnose Network Traces, Log files, and Windows Event Tracing (ETW) Components
Microsoft Message Analyzer is a powerful tool used for capturing, displaying, and analyzing protocol messaging traffic, events, and other system or application messages in network troubleshooting and other diagnostic scenarios. Join Lex Thomas and Paul Long as they walk us through the new Message Analyzer interface and show us how decryption works.

Incident Response 101: What to do if your Security has been Compromised
Lex Thomas welcomes back Jessica Payne to the show as they discuss the proper way to respond to a cyber security attack in your datacenter. *Hint — running around, waving your arms and screaming at the top of your lungs will not help.

(Part 2) Deploying Windows 10: How to Migrate Users and User Data to Windows 10
Yung Chou, Kevin Remde and Dan Stolts continue their multi-part Windows 10 series and in part 2 they showcase free tools like the User State Migration Toolkit (USMT) that can easily migrate users and user data to Windows 10 from Windows XP, 7 and 8. | Part 1

TWC9: Seth and Shen Stack Azure, Encrypt Web Apps, Challenge VSCode and more…
Last week on Channel 9.
TWC9

Thanks,
Bea