Recent News – Page 180

Posted on April 6, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Collaborate with others and keep track of to-dos with new AI features in Word

Focus is a simple but powerful thing. When you’re in your flow, your creativity takes over, and your work is effortless. When you’re faced with distractions and interruptions, progress is slow and painful. And nowhere is that truer than when writing.

Microsoft Word has long been the standard for creating professional-quality documents. Technologies like Editor—Word’s AI-powered writing assistant—make it an indispensable tool for the written word. But at some point in the writing process, you’ll need some information you don’t have at your fingertips, even with the best tools. When this happens, you likely do what research tells us many Word users do: leave a placeholder in your document and come back to it later to stay in your flow.

Today, we’re starting to roll out new capabilities to Word that help users create and fill in these placeholders without leaving the flow of their work. For example, type TODO: finish this section or <<insert closing here>> and Word recognizes and tracks them as to-dos. When you come back to the document, you’ll see a list of your remaining to-dos, and you can click each one to navigate back to the right spot.

Once you’ve created your to-dos, Word can also help you complete them. If you need help from a friend or coworker, just @mention them within a placeholder. Word sends them a notification with a “deep link” to the relevant place in the document. Soon, they’ll be able to reply to the notification with their contributions, and those contributions will be inserted directly into the document—making it easy to complete the task with an email from any device.

Over time, Office will use AI to help fill in many of these placeholders. In the next few months, Word will use Microsoft Search to suggest content for a to-do like <<insert chart of quarterly sales figures>>. You will be able to pick from the results and insert content from another document with a single click.

These capabilities are available today for Word on the Mac for Office Insiders (Fast) as a preview. We’ll roll these features out to all Office 365 subscribers soon for Word for Windows, the Mac, and the web.

Get started as an Office for Mac Insider

Office Insider for Mac has two speeds: Insider Fast and Insider Slow. To get access to this and other new feature releases, you’ll need a subscription to Office 365. To select a speed, open Microsoft Auto Update and on the Help menu select Check for Updates.

As always, we would love to hear from you, please send us your thoughts at UserVoice or visit us on Twitter or Facebook. You can also let us know how you like the new features by clicking the smiley face icon in the upper-right corner of Word.

Posted on April 6, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft Search—cohesive search that intelligently helps you find, discover, command, and navigate

At Ignite last year, we introduced personalized search across Office 365, a way to bring intelligent search and discovery experiences directly to you. Today, we’re delighted to announce that we are expanding that vision to encompass search both inside and outside of Microsoft 365. By applying artificial intelligence (AI) technology from Bing to the deep personalized insights surfaced by the Microsoft Graph, we are able to make search in your organization even more effective.

With Microsoft Search, we’re introducing new organizational search experiences into the apps you use every day, including Bing.com and Windows, and our vision to connect across your organization’s network of data.

We’re also evolving the notion of what search means. Getting pages of results with hyperlinks to other information is simply not enough. Faced with ever decreasing attention spans, and an explosion of data, we recognize that the challenge is to find and deliver answers to your questions, suggest insights, and enable you to take action on your tasks. This makes search a powerful capability that stretches across your work to make you more productive and take advantage of the collective knowledge from your organization.

Our vision is a cohesive and coherent search capability, prominent in every experience, providing the way to search across all your organization’s data—both inside and outside of Microsoft 365.

Over the next few months, you’ll experience these first steps:

Search will move to a prominent, consistent place across the apps you work with every day. From Outlook to PowerPoint, Excel to Sway, OneNote to Microsoft Teams, Office.com to SharePoint, the search bar will be in the same place—across desktop, mobile, and web.
Personalized results as soon as you click in the search box, such as people you share with the most and documents you were working on recently. No query is required to get suggestions.
The search box itself will also command the application where you are working. For example, begin typing “acc” in Word to get list of suggested actions such as Accept Revision or Accessibility Checker. You no longer need to hunt through toolbars to look for a command.
Search results will include results from across your organization. For example, within Word, you can find not only other Word documents, but also a presentation you were working on. You can navigate straight to that presentation or you can choose to incorporate slides from that file directly into your document.
Extending that same organizational search experience wherever you are working—in Bing.com (when signed in with your Office 365 account), Edge or Windows. Search wherever you want to and get the same experience.
Unified administration of your organizational search results, including admin-curated results such as bookmarks.

Experience Microsoft Search today

Key to delivering the Microsoft Search capability is the ability to have consistent scope of results anywhere you are searching. Even if the interface looks different, the goal is to have the same experience, personalized and contextualized for that specific interaction point.

Microsoft Search in Bing.com

Over the last year, 180 companies participated in our private preview, with files, sites, people, locations, and groups based on Microsoft Graph data. Based on the private preview feedback, we’re announcing the ability to search across conversations in both Teams and Yammer simultaneously.

Searching in Bing returns both your organizational results and web results, making it an easy destination for broad searches to get the best of your work world and secure your web searches. Public preview begins rolling out today. Tenant admins must opt in to the experience for their organization. Visit bing.com/business/explore for details.

Microsoft Search in Office.com

Get back to your work faster with Office.com, surfacing the same search scope across Microsoft 365. Find documents you were recently working on, as well as recommended documents that your colleagues have mentioned you in, and keep up to date with what has been worked on since you last looked at it. Microsoft Search in Office.com goes into targeted release today.

Microsoft Search in SharePoint mobile app

The new version of the SharePoint mobile app includes search as the default experience when you enter the app. It lists common questions, personalized results, and frequent searches that organizations can curate. The new SharePoint mobile app is available for download today.

Microsoft Search in the Outlook mobile app

The Outlook mobile app also highlights search as an important element of the user experience, providing access to commands, content, and people. With “zero query search,” simply placing your cursor in the search box will bring up recommendations powered by AI and the Microsoft Graph. The Outlook mobile app for iOS and Android are available for download today.

Outlook will also bring zero query, fuzzy search, and top results based on intelligent technology to other endpoints as we drive towards coherence. Enhancements to search in Outlook for Windows, Mac, and on the web started to roll out to targeted release mid-September.

Connect and curate data across your organization’s systems

Boundary-less search is only as good as the sources it has access to. We recognize that organizations have a wealth of data in other third-party services and applications. In 2019, we will build native connectors for popular third-party applications that will surface search results inline with Microsoft data into all the search experiences you have, including Office, Windows, Edge, and Bing.com. Administrators will be able to select which connectors they wish to use for their organizations based on which investments they’ve already made in third-party applications. Further extensibility with APIs will also be possible. Organizations will be able customize the search sources and the display of search results with custom refiners and verticals, and control the display of how sources of information look in result pages.

Coming in the first half of 2019

Microsoft Search in Office

Our new suite-wide search in the ribbon offers the same consistent experience and results across your favorite Office apps—across desktop, mobile, and web. Find, command, navigate, and discover directly from the same search box.

Microsoft Search in Windows

Right from your taskbar, perform searches that include local and organizational search results; whether that is people, the location of an office, or your files, you can find it all in Windows.

What’s coming next?

The Microsoft Graph gleans insight from the people, sites, devices, and documents you work with and is the basis for consistent learning across your organization, wherever you and your colleagues work. Microsoft Graph ranks search results relevant to your needs. You can see all the results that satisfy your query, but personalized search prioritizes the results that are most likely to achieve your objective.

Supercharging the Microsoft Graph with advanced AI technology from Bing and its knowledge of the world, we can extend our vision for insightful technology to make it simple to ask natural language questions and get real answers, without manual intervention. For example, a question such as “Can my brother work for me at my company?” means that not only syntactic parsing of the question is necessary but semantic understanding. Your organization’s HR policy probably specifies “close family relationships,” so we use Bing’s knowledge of the world to expand and match “brother” and couple that with searching your organization’s intranet to derive the answer.

Using this machine reading comprehension technology is just one of the many ways we’ll be continuously improving Microsoft Search in the future.

Posted on April 6, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

MyAnalytics, the fitness tracker for work, is now more broadly available

MyAnalytics—the fitness tracker for work—will be available to everyone using Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Business suites that include Exchange Online. Previously, MyAnalytics was only available with an Enterprise E5 plan or as an add-on to E1 and E3 plans.

Via a personal dashboard, an Outlook add-in, and weekly emails, MyAnalytics summarizes how you spend your time at work, then suggests ways to work smarter—from cutting unproductive meeting time to reducing time spent working after hours. It even uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help you stay on top of your to-dos by flagging commitments you’ve made in email.

The MyAnalytics dashboard.

New insights give a more complete picture of how you spend time at work

As we continue to evolve the product, today we’re also making MyAnalytics insights more well-rounded. MyAnalytics currently provides insights based on time spent in Outlook emails and meetings, and Skype for Business calls and chats. This month, we’re adding new insights based on your Microsoft Teams calls and chats, as well as signals from documents you’re working on that are saved in OneDrive and SharePoint. With 329,000 organizations and 87 of the Fortune 100 using Teams, this takes us one step closer to providing you with a more complete picture of how you’re spending time at work.

MyAnalytics Outlook add-in and weekly email.

A recent Gallup study found that two-thirds of full-time employees say they experience burnout at work. Multiple factors are contributing to burnout—such as the increased pace of work, a rise in collaborative work like chats, emails, and meetings, and the continuing trend of technology blurring the lines between work and life. Our customers tell us they’re looking for ways to address these challenges by helping employees find time to focus, improve work-life balance, build better meeting habits, and create deeper connections with their colleagues. By making MyAnalytics features more broadly available to our millions of customers, it is our goal to make work days around the world a little more balanced and fulfilling.

Availability: MyAnalytics insights from Microsoft Teams and documents saved in OneDrive or SharePoint will begin rolling out to existing customers with MyAnalytics in January 2019. With today’s updates, MyAnalytics features will be available for Microsoft 365 E3, Business, and Office 365 E3, E1, Business Premium, and Business Essentials plans. MyAnalytics functionality will roll out in phases, beginning with the Outlook add-in. Beginning mid-March, 2019, MyAnalytics licenses will be assigned and activated; however, users will not be able to see any MyAnalytics functionality. In mid-April, admins will begin to see a toggle in the Exchange Admin Center that supports tenant-level management of MyAnalytics functionality. The add-in functionality will begin rolling out on May 15, 2019.

Note: Today, we’re also announcing new security and compliance packages for our enterprise customers. Please read Introducing new advanced security and compliance offerings for Microsoft 365 to learn more.

Editor’s note 3/15/2019:
This post has been updated to reflect the most current availability of MyAnalytics features.

Posted on April 5, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Helping IT reduce costs, increase security and boost employee productivity

Today, we’re announcing several new Microsoft 365 enhancements to help IT reduce costs, increase security, and boost employee productivity.

Here’s a quick summary:

Windows Virtual Desktop is now in public preview, providing the best virtualized Microsoft 365 experience across devices.
Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) now supports Mac, extending Microsoft 365 advanced endpoint security across platforms.
The new Microsoft Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM) capability in Microsoft Defender ATP will help detect, assess, and prioritize threats across endpoints.
Office 365 ProPlus will now include the Microsoft Teams app, enabling a new way to work.
We’re reducing the time it takes to apply Windows 10 feature updates, making it easier to deploy and service Windows 10.
We’re enhancing Configuration Manager and Microsoft Intune with new insights and deployment options to make it easier to manage your devices across platforms.
Microsoft 365 admin center is now generally available.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1YfK0Kdhzs?feature=oembed&w=960&h=540]

Virtualize Windows 10 and Office 365 on Azure with Windows Virtual Desktop—now in public preview

Today, we’re happy to announce the public preview of Windows Virtual Desktop. Windows Virtual Desktop is the only service that delivers simplified management, multi-session Windows 10, optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) environments in a shared public cloud. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes, with built-in security and compliance.

For more information about Windows Virtual Desktop or how to get started with the public preview, read the full announcement and watch the new Mechanics video.

Address risks and protect more of your Microsoft 365 devices and endpoints with Microsoft Defender ATP—now in public preview

New today, we’re extending support for our Microsoft Defender threat protection platform to Mac. And because we’re extending support beyond the Windows ecosystem, we’re renaming the platform from Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). Starting today, Microsoft Defender ATP customers can sign up for a public preview. For more information, visit our Tech Community blog.

We’re also announcing Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM), a new capability within Microsoft Defender ATP, designed to empower security teams to discover, prioritize, and remediate known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations exploited by threat actors. Using TVM, customers can evaluate the risk-level of threats and vulnerabilities and prioritize remediation based on signals from Microsoft Defender ATP. TVM will be available as a public preview for Microsoft Defender ATP customers within the next month. Learn more about it in our Tech Community blog.

Today’s security announcements are an important milestone in our Microsoft 365 endpoint security journey. For more details, check out Rob Lefferts’s post on the Microsoft Security blog.

Enable a new way to work with Office 365 ProPlus and Teams—starting in March

Starting in March, new installs of Office 365 ProPlus will include the Teams app by default. As a “hub for teamwork,” Teams combines chat, voice, video, files, meetings, and calls into a single, integrated experience.

In addition, the default installation for ProPlus will now be 64 bit, enabling better reliability and more effective use of newer PC hardware. If you have earlier 32-bit installs, a soon-to-be-released in-place upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit Office 365 ProPlus will allow you to upgrade the Office apps without uninstalling and reinstalling.

Reducing the time required for Windows 10 feature updates—starting with version 1709

We made important changes to the Windows update process. Starting with Windows 10 version 1709, devices are updating up to 63 percent faster. Additionally, with the release of Windows 10 version 1703, we’ve seen a 20 percent reduction in operating system and driver stability issues.

Simplify and modernize management with Configuration Manager and Intune

Configuration Manager current branch offers CMPivot for real-time queries and updates to management insights that help with co-management readiness. What’s more, you can now take advantage of new deployment options, including phased deployments and configuring known-folder mapping to OneDrive.

Mobile Device Management (MDM) Security Baselines are now in preview in Intune. These baselines are a group of Microsoft-recommended configuration settings that increase your security posture and operational efficiency and reduce costs. We’re also announcing several new Intune capabilities for unified endpoint management across devices and platforms.

Check out What’s new in Microsoft Intune and Configuration Manager for more detailed information on our broad unified endpoint management investments.

Manage Microsoft 365 with a new admin center—rolling out now

We’re also announcing the that the new Microsoft 365 admin center, previously in preview, will become the default experience for all Microsoft 365 and Office 365 admins. Admin.microsoft.com is your single entry point for managing your Microsoft 365 services and includes new features like guided setup experiences, improved groups management, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for admins, and more.

For more information on this new release, check out the detailed post on the Microsoft 365 Tech Community blog.

More at Microsoft Ignite: The Tour in Amsterdam

We’re sharing more on each of these announcements this week at Microsoft Ignite: The Tour in Amsterdam. I’ll be there to co-present a session with Jeremy Chapman on “Simplifying IT with Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus.” You’ll have a chance to learn more from many of my colleagues in the teamwork, modern desktop, and security sessions. I hope to see you there!

Editor’s note 3/21/2019:
Blog post was updated to correct information regarding Configuration Manager current branch.

Posted on April 5, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft Teams wins Enterprise Connect Best in Show award and delivers new experiences for the intelligent workplace

Today, at the Enterprise Connect event in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft Teams won the Best in Show award for the second year in a row in recognition for its vision for making communication and collaboration easier for the entire workforce, including those on the frontline. This week marks the second anniversary of the worldwide launch of Microsoft Teams. Over the past two years, Teams has grown significantly in both new capabilities and customer usage, as the hub for teamwork that brings people together and fosters a culture of engagement and inclusion. We’re unveiling eight new capabilities in Teams that make collaboration more inclusive, effective, and secure. Watch Microsoft’s keynote at Enterprise Connect live Tuesday March 19, 2019 at 10 AM ET or on-demand.

More than 500,000 organizations, including 91 of the Fortune 100, use Teams to collaborate across locations, time zones, and languages, including Cerner, Cox Automotive, dm-drogerie markt, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Hendrick Motorsports, Konica Minolta, Lexmark, Mitsui & Co., National Bank of Canada, Pfizer, Razer, Ricoh, and Trek Bicycle. Teams is currently available in 44 languages across 181 markets, and soon we’ll roll out support for nine additional languages, including Hindi, Filipino, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Malayalam.

Teams makes collaboration more inclusive, effective, and secure

Microsoft Teams is improving workplace collaboration by helping organizations move from an array of disparate apps to a single, secure hub that brings together what teams need, including chat, meetings, and calling, all with native integration to the Office 365 apps. Users can customize and extend their experience with third-party apps, processes, and devices, giving them the tools they need to get work done.

Following the customizable mobile Teams experience announced in January, today we’re unveiling eight new capabilities in Teams that make meetings more inclusive and effective while delivering new levels of security and compliance.

Customized backgrounds takes our intelligent background blur technology further, allowing participants to select a custom background, such as a company logo or an office environment when working from home, to appear behind them during a meeting or video call. This improves the effectiveness of remote meetings by encouraging the use of video while minimizing distractions. Coming later this year.

Content cameras and Intelligent Capture in Microsoft Teams Rooms will soon support an additional camera for capturing content, such as information on analog whiteboards. Using any USB camera, Microsoft Teams Rooms leverages Microsoft’s new Intelligent Capture processing to capture, focus, resize, and enhance whiteboard images and text, so remote attendees can clearly see whiteboard brainstorming in real-time, even when someone is standing in front of the whiteboard. Coming later this year.

Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams meetings provides an infinite digital canvas for meeting participants to work together directly in Teams. With upcoming support for Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams Rooms, in-person attendees can also contribute. You can even add content from a physical whiteboard onto the Whiteboard canvas without having to recreate it from scratch. Whether you choose to participate from the meeting room or remotely, Whiteboard in Teams enables everyone to actively participate in the conversation. Now in public preview.
Live captions & subtitles make your Teams meetings more inclusive for attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, have different levels of language proficiency, or are connecting from a loud location. Improve meeting effectiveness by allowing attendees to read speaker captions in real-time, so they can more easily stay in sync and contribute to the discussion. English preview coming soon.

Secure private channels allow you to customize which members of the team can see conversations and files associated with a channel. You can restrict channel participation and exposure when needed without having to create separate teams to limit visibility. This is one of our top requested features and we’re excited to be actively testing this internally and with select customers. Coming later this year.
Information barriers avoid conflicts of interest within your organization by limiting which individuals can communicate and collaborate with each other in Microsoft Teams. This helps limit the disclosure of information by controlling communication between the holders of information and colleagues representing different interests, for example, in Firstline Worker scenarios. This is particularly helpful for organizations that need to adhere to Ethical Wall requirements and other related industry standards and regulations. Coming soon.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations enables customers to detect, automatically protect, and screen for sensitive information in chats and channel conversations. By creating DLP policies, admins can help prevent sensitive information from unintentionally being shared or leaked—either inside or outside of the organization. Now generally available in all Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plans that include Office 365 Advanced Compliance.
Live events in Microsoft 365 enables anyone to create live and on-demand events that deliver compelling communications to employees, customers, and partners. Live events use video and interactive discussions across Teams, Stream, or Yammer and can be as simple or as sophisticated as needed. Up to 10,000 attendees can participate in real-time from anywhere, across their devices, or catch up later with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) features—such as automatic transcription—to unlock the content of the event recording. Now generally available.

To learn more about these announcements and more, read our detailed blog on the Teams Tech Community.

Hear it from our customers

All around the world, in businesses of every size and industry, people are using Teams as their hub for teamwork. With the help of Teams, airline crews stay connected, marketing agencies prepare pitches, teachers give all students a voice, financial analysts beat deadlines, patients receive better care, and employers find the right talent. We are thankful to all our customers, partners, and those of you who have become avid Teams users for coming on this journey with us.

NASCAR racing team Hendrick Motorsports gains competitive edge

Legendary race team Hendrick Motorsports chose Teams as the hub for its race communications and decision-making. While the cars speed along the racetrack, race engineers, mechanical experts, and strategists take their positions in the Team Operations Center in Concord, North Carolina—hundreds of miles away. They gather and analyze massive amounts of data and communicate in real-time with the team at the track. “Quick, clear, effective communication is of the utmost importance in racing,” says race engineer Zac Brown. Zac relies on Teams to stay in constant contact with his driver, his crew chief, and pit crew at the track. He uses Teams to share large files and says that because Teams is integrated with the full Office 365 suite, it saves critical seconds otherwise lost in toggling between apps.

Razer wins in the gaming industry with constant, clear communication

Razer dominates the fast-moving gaming lifestyle industry where speed of execution and quality keeps them ahead. Managing dual headquarters in San Francisco and Singapore and an international team spread across the globe, Razer requires the best tools for rapid communication, fast decision-making, and real-time collaboration. They chose Teams to meet this need and gain a competitive advantage in this highly competitive industry. “We use Teams for the rapid-fire burst of communications we need to be super productive, and we’ve really changed the workplace culture, accelerating efficient communications to speed time-to-market—from innovation to manufacturing to marketing,” says Patricia Liu, chief of staff at Razer.

Cerner’s empowered workforce adopts Teams with enthusiasm

Cerner is one of the world’s largest providers of health information technology solutions and services. Cerner’s associates work across the world in different shifts, different time zones, and different languages. Communication and content creation historically happened using disparate tools, making it difficult for employees to work together effectively. Now, Teams allows them to connect and collaborate intuitively. “You know a solution resonates with a workforce when it is adopted without any prompting from IT. This is the case with Teams,” says Bill Graff, CIO at Cerner. “In just a few months, our associates formed more than two thousand teams across the organization—and it all happened organically.”

Konica Minolta accelerates communication and collaboration

Konica Minolta is renowned for pioneering flexible work arrangements. It empowers employees to telework and do their best creative work from anywhere. Konica Minolta decided to embrace a new form of communication centered on chat, to make communication easier and speedier. With Teams, information workers have all their day-to-day tools in one place. Go Kawakami, IT infrastructure manager, says, “We manage tasks with Planner, report the status of projects with OneNote and Excel, and use SharePoint calendars as bulletin boards. With Teams, we can do this seamlessly.” The ability to invite people outside the company to a Teams channel has streamlined cooperation with partner companies. The company has seen many tangible efficiency improvements, from the PR division to the IT Help Desk.

These are just a few examples of how Teams is delivering an intelligent workplace for everyone—whether you’re a team at headquarters, a remote employee working from home, or a Firstline Worker serving customers each day. If you’re not using Teams yet, be sure to try it now.

To see what’s next in our vision for Teams, watch Microsoft’s keynote at Enterprise Connect live Tuesday March 19, 2019 at 10 AM ET or on-demand.

Posted on April 5, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

How to steer clear of tax scams

In the month of February, we saw an average of 300,000 phishing attempts across Microsoft’s browsing platforms daily. Our security experts expect these attempted scams to become increasingly more prevalent through the April 15 Tax Day, especially in the two weeks leading up to it, when about 25 percent of people file their taxes. The phishing campaigns we’ve seen aren’t just in the U.S., though; we’ve also recently uncovered similar tactics in Canada, Brazil and India. It’s important for users across the globe to follow best practices and stay vigilant.

With less than a month until the filing deadline in the U.S., we are urging the public to take the following simple steps to avoid tax scams – especially during the last-minute rush to file taxes.

Watch for suspicious emails. Be suspicious of all links and attachments, especially when the email seems “off” or unexpected – like an unexpected email from your credit card company, or financial institution. Phish-y emails often include spelling and grammatical errors, or will ask you to send personal information. In these cases, you can apply additional scrutiny on the sender, the content, and any links and attachments. If you know the sender, for example, you can double-check with them before opening or downloading the file.

Carefully inspect URLs. Hover over links to verify that the URL goes to the website where it’s supposed to direct you. Is it pointing to the site you expected? URL shorteners provide a lot of convenience, but can make this inspection difficult. If you’re unsure, rather than clicking a link, use search engines like Bing to get to the tax-related website you’re looking for and log in from there.

We recently discovered a phishing campaign targeting Canadian Tax payers where scammers were pretending to help Canadian taxpayers get their refunds, but really aimed to steal banking credentials. We’ve also seen old phishing documents resurface – these claim to be from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), inform victims that they have a refund via e-transfer from the CRA, and ask them to divulge their bank details where the funds will be “deposited”. We’ve also seen similar campaigns in Brazil and India.

Be wary of any attachments. If you haven’t just made a purchase for tax software, don’t be tricked by getting an email with an invoice from a tax preparation company. Sending fake invoices for services is one of the top methods attackers use to trick people into opening a malicious attachment that could automatically execute malware on your computer. Malicious attachments could also contain links that download and execute malicious programs. We’ve seen PDFs that contain innocuous-looking links that lead to people accidentally downloading malicious software designed to steal credentials, like usernames and passwords.

Don’t rely on passwords alone. Scammers take advantage of weak or stolen passwords used across multiple websites, so don’t just rely on your password to keep you safe. When possible, always use multi-factor authentication like the Microsoft Authenticator app for managing your sign-ins for Microsoft accounts and others, and Windows Hello for easy and secure sign-in to your Windows 10 device. These solutions enable biometric authentications like your face or fingerprint to quickly and safely sign in across devices, apps and browsers without you having to remember passwords. Did you know that with a Microsoft Account, you can securely and automatically sign-in to other Microsoft cloud-based applications including Bing, MSN, Cortana, Outlook.com, Xbox Live (PC only), Microsoft Store and Office?

Keep software current. Run a modern operating system, like Windows 10 or Windows 10 in S mode, with the latest security and feature updates, in tandem with next-generation anti-malware protection, such as Windows Defender Antivirus.

Microsoft security solutions can proactively inspect links and attachments, as well as block phishing documents and other malicious downloads to help protect users, even if they accidentally click a phishing link or open a malicious attachment. We expect tax scams to be on the rise in the next several months as global tax deadlines approach so our experts will be on the lookout for new campaigns.

Here’s a couple of examples of what we’ve seen just in the last few weeks: two documents named irs_scanned_551712.doc and Tax(IP.PIN).doc. You’ll notice that the security tools built into Microsoft Office caught these and displayed a warning at the top. Before enabling content like these, ensure that the sender is a trusted source, and notice things like missing or misspelled words.

Be on the lookout for scams like we’ve described here. There will undoubtedly be more schemes that crop up. Stay vigilant! Learn how to report phishing scam websites through Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer and suspicious email messages through Outlook.com, Outlook 2016, or Office 365.

Keep these tips and tricks handy, and share with your networks so we can increase awareness of and stop the spread of Tax Day scams! For more information about Microsoft Security, please visit microsoft.com/security.

Posted on April 4, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator: a community solution to drive social impact

In a world where nonprofit organizations are chronically underfunded, every dollar counts. Technology is often viewed as an overhead expense rather than an area that can help programs innovate. Microsoft’s Tech for Social Impact is designed to bridge this gap by creating solutions and offers with the specific needs of nonprofits in mind. It’s our mission. It’s our passion.

At the core of any nonprofit are fundraising and operations. So last November we launched the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator, a suite of solutions designed to drive deeper programmatic engagement and help nonprofits achieve greater impact. Last week at the Microsoft Nonprofit CXO Summit, we announced the next chapter of this platform: the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator v2, created in collaboration with nonprofits, partners, and sector experts worldwide.

For v2, we’ve dramatically enhanced the Nonprofit Accelerator itself and the underlying Common Data Model (CDM) to unleash a wealth of new capabilities and standards for nonprofits and the growing ecosystem of partners who serve them.

Building out the Common Data Model

Central to our approach is our commitment to building a CDM, publishing that openly, and working across platforms. This enables powerful interoperability to fuel greater insights and efficacy, while also providing true data transparency. Microsoft has long been committed to open data, and we believe this approach is key to driving innovation in the sector.

The v2 doubles the size of the CDM. Last year we delivered 35 different entities with about 700 attributes. With v2, we’ve grown the model to 75 entities with 1,400 attributes. These entities and attributes represent sector-specific data elements, relationships, and best practices as defined by Microsoft, our partners, and a group of nonprofit experts.

The CDM also includes the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Organization and Activity standards, which we have made available via GitHub. Not all nonprofits subscribe to IATI, but for many organizations working with institutional donors or government agencies, it’s a requirement. Recognizing this, we made the IATI modeling available as an add-on so organizations have the freedom to choose whether to add it to their solutions.

Deeper functionality with Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator v2

Microsoft is the first and biggest consumer of the CDM and has incorporated all the best practices the CDM represents into Dynamics 365 through the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator. We are committed to helping nonprofits around the world implement these best practices consistently and efficiently. By incorporating the CDM into the Accelerator, what once required customization is standard today, with the schema included in your Dynamics 365 subscription.

The driving principle behind the nonprofit sector is trust. The Accelerator is designed to help organizations build that trust, communicating their stewardship of donations and grants and demonstrating their impact. With v2, nonprofits have access to a robust set of new features designed to support their most important business needs, including:

Aligning funds to the results framework. Organizations can draw a thread across their operations and tie funds from donations and awards directly to programmatic activities and outcomes by leveraging a new link between Fundraising Designations and Program Delivery Frameworks and Budgets.
Connecting beneficiaries and program delivery. Nonprofits can track the outcomes and impact of program delivery with specific beneficiaries through a new link between Delivery Framework, Indicator Value, and Constituent.
Volunteer coordination. New functionality optimizes volunteer management, capturing preferences, skills, certifications, availability, scheduling, and projects leveraging Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation. (Watch this video to see the functionality in action.)
Membership management. Nonprofits can establish membership programs and engage constituents throughout their membership lifecycle through a single contact record that can be used across multiple roles, including support for membership and benefit levels.
Best practices and resources. To support nonprofits as they work on their own implementations, we’ve expanded the platform’s how-to guides and released new purpose-built nonprofit data schemas, templates, and sample applications that are optimized for interoperability.

A growing partner ecosystem

The interoperability afforded by the CDM is also driving an ecosystem of partner solutions. Since launch, we’ve grown from 14 to 40 global partners, including companies such as Avanade and Blackbaud, and new start-ups like threshold.world, that are committed to contributing to the CDM and creating purpose-built solutions on Dynamics 365 to spur innovation, interoperability, and impact.

The list of partners includes global solutions integrators like Ernst & Young that have helped create some of the sample applications. And we’ve seen a new wave of partners that are not only consuming the model but that are also committed to improving it, including partners that haven’t been closely associated with the Microsoft ecosystem in the past, like Blackbaud, Classy, Fluxx, and Jackson River.

To facilitate this interoperability, we’ve invested in mapping templates to make it easy for partners to map their own data schemas to the CDM. Many partners already have done this and are invested in aligning to this standard including Blackbaud’s Luminate Online, Classy’s fundraising suite, Fluxx’s grant management suite, Jackson River’s Springboard platform, and Volunteer Match’s recruiting solutions. In addition, to help organizations quickly get started putting their data to use across platforms, Microsoft has invested in mapping the CDM to the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack.

We are committed to this as a sector-wide standard, so it’s encouraging to see a broad range of solutions partners adopt the CDM and Accelerator, such as AKA Enterprise Solutions, Flores.nl, lfunds, m-hance, MISSION CRM, QUANTIQ, StratusLive, VolunteerMatch, Wipfli, and others that have already engaged nonprofits to implement the solution.

A true community effort

We think the groundswell of support we’ve seen since our initial launch just a few short months ago speaks to the power of the platform, as well as customers like International Rescue Committee, Leonard Cheshire, SOS Children’s Villages, Team Rubicon and many others that have made the decision to adopt the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator.

We want to go beyond building new technology. Tapping the experiences, expertise, and needs of thousands of nonprofits around the world, we aim to optimize best practices and implementation, and help them unlock the richness of their data as quickly as possible.

In the coming months, we’ll have more updates to the platform. Working with partners, we are committed to helping nonprofits with legacy Microsoft Dynamics implementations, as well as building out both the Dynamics functionality and the underlying CDM with updates coming out quarterly.

Customers and partners can download the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator via AppSource. Take it for a test drive—and then let us know what you think. Members of the nonprofit community can contribute to the offering via the Dynamics 365 Insider Program.

Posted on April 4, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

One Year In: How our $5B investment in IoT and intelligent edge is accelerating innovation

One year ago, we announced our commitment to invest $5B in IoT (Internet of Things) and intelligent edge – technology that is accelerating ubiquitous computing and bringing unparalleled opportunity for transformation across industries. Our commitment is to a build trusted, easy to use platform for our customers and partners to build solutions – no matter where they are starting in their IoT journey.

Our customers are embracing IoT as a core strategy to drive better business outcomes, improve safety and address social issues – from predicting and preventing equipment failures, optimizing smart buildings for space utilization and energy management and improving patient outcomes and worker safety. From the intelligent cloud to the intelligent edge, this year has been one of tremendous growth – in IoT technology portfolio, partner ecosystem and customer momentum – and we are only just beginning.

Accelerating customer innovation in IoT from cloud to edge across industries

What’s truly exciting is seeing our customers achieve real business outcomes with Azure IoT and intelligent edge-based solutions. Our IoT platform is powering customer solutions with thousands of devices, at scale, and the number of devices supported has grown nearly 150 percent year-over-year. This year, many customers such a Starbucks, Chevron, Walmart, Walgreens, BMW, Volkswagen, Toyota Material Handling Group and more are leveraging Azure as their cloud platform with IoT and AI services to accelerate their digital transformation.

Starbucks is using Azure Sphere to connect select equipment, enabling its partners (employees) more opportunity to engage with customers. This includes everything from beverage consistency, waste reduction, the management of energy consumption and predictive maintenance.

With Azure and our IoT services, Chevron is connecting a critical piece of equipment – heat exchangers, which manage the heat from fluids flowing through it as part of the plant’s fuel processing – to do predictive maintenance and ultimately prevent unscheduled outages.

In Walmart’s technology center in Austin, Texas, which is designed accelerate digital innovation, the retail leader is embracing IoT as a way to save energy and prevent product loss. Walmart is using thousands of IoT sensors on HVAC and refrigeration systems that process a billion daily data messages from stores worldwide.

As part of Microsoft’s partnership with Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) to make health care delivery more personal, affordable and accessible for people around the world, WBA will use a portfolio of connected IoT devices for nonacute chronic care management, delivered by Microsoft’s cloud, AI and IoT technologies.

This week with BMW Group, we announced the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP), a new technology framework and open community to share smart factory solutions across the automotive and manufacturing sectors to significantly accelerate future industrial IoT developments.

This year Volkswagen announced a partnership with Microsoft to create the Volkswagen Automotive Cloud with Azure and Azure IoT Edge to create a seamless experience for drivers from the moment they enter, use and leave their vehicles. From 2020 onwards, more than 5 million new Volkswagen brand vehicles per year will be fully connected and will be part of the IoT cloud.

By infusing solutions with artificial intelligence, mixed reality and the IoT, Toyota Material Handling Group is providing solutions to customers meet the global rise in ecommerce, and move goods quickly, frequently, accurately and safely. With Microsoft technologies, the solutions range from connected forklift and field service systems available today to AI-powered concepts that pave the way for intelligent automation and logistics simulations – all designed with Toyota’s standards for optimizing efficiency, operation assisting and continuous improvement.

The stories continue to roll in.

New innovations in our IoT platform

In the last year, we launched more than 100 new services and features in our IoT platform, designed to make IoT solutions more secure and scalable, reduce complexity, make our platform more open and create opportunities in new market areas. Our core focus has been to address the industry challenge of securing connected devices at every layer, as well as advancing IoT to create a more seamless experience between the physical and digital worlds.

Simplifying IoT and securing IoT endpoints at scale

IoT is complex, requiring deep knowledge of cloud, security and devices, but the business benefits are significant. With Azure IoT Central, which became generally available this year, we have created a way for businesses to get started in IoT by quickly provisioning a solution in just a matter of hours and with built-in security features. With valuable data moving closer to the edge, IoT security demands a holistic approach. This year we introduced Azure Sphere, a world-class security solution for connected microcontroller devices (MCUs), which go in everything from smart-home and medical devices to equipment on the factory floor. Windows 10 IoT Core Services includes security and reliability updates for the operating system to keep device security up to date. Azure Security Center for IoT now includes support for Azure IoT services to proactively monitor IoT devices, enabling businesses to implement security best practices for detecting and mitigating threats.

Delivering spatial intelligence at scale

IoT is no longer just about connected endpoints. It’s the sum of the endpoints – the digital objects – that create a holistic solution. We see significant opportunity for our customers to use spatial intelligence to manage physical assets and spaces with digital models and mapping across smart spaces, cities and buildings. This fall, we introduced Azure Digital Twins to enable customers and partners to query data in the context of a space – rather than from disparate sensors – empowering them to build repeatable, scalable experiences that correlate data from digital sources and the physical world. Azure Maps provides developers from all industries powerful geospatial capabilities, and new MR services including Azure Spatial Anchors and Azure Remote Rendering enable customers to create precise points of interest in with mixed reality in physical space as well as enable interactive, high-quality 3D models.

Bringing AI to the edge

The proliferation of IoT devices and resulting massive amount of data requiring real-time intelligence are fueling the need to move compute and analytics closer to where the data resides. This year, we open sourced the Azure IoT Edge runtime, providing developers have even greater flexibility and control of their edge solutions, enabling them to modify the runtime and debug issues for applications at the edge. Over the past year, we added five new Azure Cognitive Services that can run locally on an edge device, and we’ve made it easier to deploy your own Azure Machine Learning models on Azure IoT Edge. We’ve also enabled high-speed inferencing at the edge with Azure Data Box Edge.

Growing the Microsoft IoT partner ecosystem

We’re proud to have one of the largest and fastest-growing partner ecosystems with more than ten thousand IoT partners from intelligent edge to intelligent cloud. Partners are critical to our customers’ success in IoT, bringing rich domain expertise across industries so customers can see clear value to their business, as well as integration for critical apps and infrastructure to increase time to value.

This year, we announced more than 70 new partnerships in IoT, which help our customers build IoT solutions faster. At CES we announced our collaboration with Universal Electronics to launch a new digital assistant platform for the home built on Microsoft Azure using AI and IoT services. PTC announced ThingWorx Industrial Innovation Platform on Microsoft Azure to deliver a robust solution for Industrial IoT and digital product lifecycle management. At MWC, we announced new partnerships with SAP, and Cradlepoint. SAP Leonardo IoT will integrate with Azure IoT services providing our customers with the ability to contextualize and enrich their IoT data with SAP business data within SAP Leonardo IoT to drive new business outcomes. With Cradlepoint, we’re enabling customers to connect their IoT infrastructure to cloud-based applications to a global satellite communications network and to help bridge the OT and IT collaboration gap, respectively.

We’re also working with several device partners to accelerate development at the intelligent edge. With Qualcomm, we created an Azure IoT Starter Kit to enable developers vision AI solution and run their AI models on the device. With NXP, we announced the public preview for Windows 10 IoT Core with built-in Azure connectivity, to enable secure, power-optimized devices for the intelligent edge. We’re also partnering with NVIDIA and DJI to integrate third-party SDKs to simplify development and increase time to value of AI applications at the edge.

Looking ahead: Industry opportunity in IoT

We are one year into our four-year investment. Our priority over the next three years is clear: make it easy for any company to create scalable, secured IoT solutions. We partnered with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to better understand the trends and opportunity for the industry at large. Our findings, captured in the whitepaper here, indicate IoT is moving into broad adoption and yet, some of the greatest barriers to success are not just about technology – it’s also about business strategy and executive leadership. More than 60 percent of executives we surveyed indicated these to be bigger elements of success than technology. One in four executives we surveyed indicated that their companies’ IoT initiatives underperformed expectations. The findings highlight key ingredients for a successful IoT innovation project. You’ll continue to see more announcements from us and our partners and customers to help our customers and partners in their IoT journeys. You can read more about adoption of IoT across industries in the BCG whitepaper.

Posted on April 4, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Video Indexer’s new, AI-based editor helps create new content from existing media within minutes

After sweeping up multiple awards with the general availability release of Azure Media Services’ Video Indexer, including the 2018 IABM for innovation in content management and the prestigious Peter Wayne award, the team has remained focused on building a wealth of new features and models to allow any organization with a large archive of media content to unlock insights from their content; and use those insights improve searchability, enable new user scenarios and accessibility, and open new monetization opportunities.

At NAB Show 2019, we are proud to announce a wealth of new enhancements to Video Indexer’s models and experiences that will be rolled out this week, including:

A new AI-based editor that allows you to create new content from existing media within minutes
Enhancements to our custom people recognition, including central management of models and the ability to train models from images
Language model training based on transcript edits, allowing you to effectively improve your language model to include your industry-specific terms
New scene segmentation model (preview)
New ending rolling credits detection models
Availability in 9 different regions worldwide
ISO 27001, ISO 27018, SOC 1,2,3, HiTRUST, FedRAMP, HIPAA, and PCI certifications
Ability to take your data and trained models with you when moving from trial to paid Video Indexer account

More about all of those great additions in this blog.

In addition, we have exciting news for customers who are using our live streaming platform for ingesting live feeds, transcoding, and dynamically packaging and encrypting it for delivery via industry-standard protocols like HLS and MPEG-DASH. Live transcriptions is a new feature in our v3 APIs, wherein you can enhance the streams delivered to your viewers with machine-generate text that is transcribed from spoken words in the video stream. This text will initially be only delivered as IMSC1.1 compatible TTML packaged in MPEG-4 Part 30 (ISO/IEC 14496-30) fragments, which can be played back via a new build of Azure Media Player. More information on this feature, and the private preview program, is available in the documentation, “Live transricption with Azure Media Services v3.”

We are also announcing two more private preview programs for multi-language transcription and animation detection, where selected customers will be able to influence the models and experiences around them. Come talk to us at NAB Show or contact your account manager to request to be added to these exciting programs!

Extracting fresh content from your media archive has never been easier

One of the ways to use deep insights from media files is to create new media from existing content. This can be to create movie highlights for trailers, use old clips of videos in news casts, create shorter content for social media, or for any other business need.

In order to facilitate this scenario with just a few clicks, we created an AI-based editor that enables you to find the right media content, locate the parts that you’re interested in, and use those to create an entirely new video, using the metadata generated by Video Indexer. Once you’re happy with the result, it can be rendered and downloaded from Video Indexer and used in your own editing applications or downstream workflows.

All these capabilities are also available through our updated REST API. This means that you can write code that creates clips automatically based on insights. The new editor API calls are currently open to public preview.

Want to give the new AI-based editor a try? Simply go to one of your indexed media files and click the “Open in editor” button to start creating new content.

More intuitive model customization and management

Video Indexer comes with a rich set of out-of-the-box models so you can upload your content and get insights immediately. However, AI technology always gets more accurate when you customize it to the specific content it’s employed for. Therefore, Video Indexer provides simple customization capabilities for selected models. One such customization is the ability to add custom persons models to the over 1 million celebrities that Video Indexer can currently identify out-of-the-box. This customization capability already existed in the form of training “unknown” people in the content of a video, but we received multiple customer requests to enhance it even more – so we did!

To accommodate an easy customization process for persons models, we added a central people recognition management page that allows you to create multiple custom persons models per account, each of which can hold up to 1 million different entries. From this location you can create new models, add new people to existing models, review, rename, and delete them if needed. On top of that, you can now train models based on your static images even before you have uploaded the first video to your account. Organizations that already have an archive of people images can now use those archives to pre-train their models. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping the relevant images to the person name, or submitting them via the Video Indexer REST API (currently in preview).

What to learn more? Read about our advanced custom face recognition options.

Another important customization is the ability to train language models to your organization’s terminologies or industry specific vocabulary. To allow you to improve the transcription for your organization faster, Video Indexer now automatically collects transcript edits done manually into a new entry in the specific language model you use. All you need to do then, is click the “Train” button to add those to your own customized model. The idea is to create a feedback loop where organizations begin with a base out-of-the-box language model and improve the accuracy of it through manual edits over a period of time until it aligns to their specific industry vertical vocabulary and terms.

New additions to the Video Indexer pipeline

One of the primary benefits of Video Indexer is having one pipeline that orchestrates multiple insights from different channels into one timeline. We regularly work to enrich this pipeline with additional insights.

One of the latest additions to Video Indexer’s set of insights is the ability to segment the video by semantic scenes (currently in preview) based on visual cues. Semantic scenes add another level of granularity to the existing shot detection and keyframes extraction models in Video Indexer and aim to depict a single event composed of a series of consecutive shots which are semantically related.

Scenes can be used to group together a set of insights and refer to them as insights of the same context in order to deduct a more complex meaning from them. For example, if a scene includes an airplane, a runway, and luggage, the customer can build logic that deducts that it is happening in an airport. Scenes can also be used as a unit to be extracted as a clip from a full video.

Another cool addition to Video Indexer is the ability to identify ending rolling credits of a movie or a TV show. This can come in handy for a broadcasters in order to identify when their viewers completed watching the video and in order to identify the right moment to recommend the new show or movie to watch before losing the audience.

Video Indexer runs on trust (and in more regions)

As Video Indexer is part of the Azure Media Services family and is built to serve organizations of all sizes and industries, it is critical to us to help our customers meet their compliance obligations across regulated industries and markets worldwide. As part of that effort, we are excited to announce that Video Indexer is now ISO 27001, ISO 27018, SOC 1,2,3, HIPAA, FedRAMP, PCI, and HITRUST certified. Learn more about the most current certifications status of Video Indexer and all other Azure services.

Additionally, we increased our service availability around the world and are now deployed to 9 regions for your convenience. Available regions now include East US, East US 2, South Central US, West US 2, North Europe, West Europe, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Australia East. More regions are coming online soon, so stay tuned. You can always find the latest regional availability of Video Indexer by visiting the products by region page.

Video Indexer continues to be fully available for trial on East US. This allows organizations to evaluate the full Video Indexer functionality on their own data before creating a paid account using their own Azure subscription. Once organizations decide to move to their Azure subscription, they can copy all of the videos and model customizations that they created on their trial account by simply checking the relevant check box in the content of the account creation wizard.

Want to be the first to try out our newest capabilities?

Today, we are excited to announce three private preview programs for features that we have been asked for by many different customers.

Live transcription – the ability to stream a live event, where spoken words in the audio is transcribed to text and delivered along with video and audio.

Mixed languages transcription – The ability to automatically identify multiple spoken languages in one video file and to create a mixed language transcription for that file.

Animation characters detection – The ability to identify characters in animated content as if they were real live people!

We will be selecting a set of customers out of a list of those who would like to be our design partners for these new capabilities. Selected customers will be able to highly influence these new capabilities and get models that are highly tuned to their data and organizational flows. Want to be a part of this? Come visit us at NAB Show or contact your account manager for more details!

Visit us at NAB Show 2019

If you are attending NAB Show 2019, please stop by booth #SL6716 to see the latest Azure Media Services innovations! We’d love to meet you, learn more about what you’re building, and walk you through the different innovations Azure Media Services and our partners are releasing at NAB Show. We will also have product presentations in the booth throughout the show.

Have questions or feedback? We would love to hear from you! Use our UserVoice to help us prioritize features, or email VISupport@Microsoft.com for any questions.

Posted on April 3, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New capabilities announced for Azure Security Center

Microsoft Azure Security Center—the central hub for monitoring and protecting against related incidents within Azure—has released new capabilities. The following features—announced at Hannover Messe 2019—are now generally available for the Azure Security Center:

Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Storage—Layer of protection that helps customers detect and respond to potential threats on their storage account as they occur—without having to be an expert in security.
Regulatory compliance dashboard—Helps Security Center customers streamline their compliance process by providing insight into their compliance posture for a set of supported standards and regulations.
Support for Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS)—Easily monitor the security posture of your VMSS with security recommendations.
Dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) service, now available in U.K., Canada, and Australia—Provides cryptographic key storage in Azure and meets the most stringent customer security and compliance requirements.
Azure disk encryption support for VMSS—Now Azure disk encryption can be enabled for Windows and Linux VMSS in Azure public regions—enabling customers to help protect and safeguard the VMSS data at rest using industry standard encryption technology.

In addition, support for virtual machine sets are now generally available as part of the Azure Security Center. To learn more, read our Azure blog.