Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Conversations & chat data in the United Arab Emirates can not be stored in the UAE for data residency compliance purposes.

Microsoft Teams will provide data residency for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) starting November 1, 2019. This means that all new Microsoft Teams customers in the UAE will have data for conversations and chat stored at rest in the UAE. New customers are the Office 365 tenants that are provisioned after the date of launch stated above or customers who have not yet used the Teams service prior to the date of launch.

Teams data residency in the UAE, as well as our other Office 365 data residency commitments in the data-centers located in the UAE, help regulated organizations – such as banking, public sector, government, and healthcare, – onboard to Teams and Office 365 while complying with their data residency requirements.

Where your Teams data is stored

Your Teams data is stored differently depending on the content type. Please watch the Ignite Breakout session on Microsoft Teams architecture for an in-depth discussion.

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Read more at the announcement page here:

• https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-teams-launches-united-arab-emirates-data-residency/ba-p/980330

Have you ever said to yourself, "I wish I had a handy infographic to help remember some of the useful Windows key keyboard shortcuts"?

Download the attached image above.

Review keyboard shortcuts here:
http://aka.ms/WindowsShortcuts

Join this webinar to learn how to use Azure Arc Preview to manage all your resources in a hybrid environment. Seamlessly govern and manage on-premises and cloud resources including Linux and Windows virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and databases within in Azure. Watch a product demo and ask questions through a live Q&A.

You’ll learn how to:

• Centrally manage role-based access control, security policies and implement unique Azure threat detection capabilities.
• Adopt DevOps techniques such as infrastructure as code.
• Automate database tasks at scale such as automated patching and upgrades, and access up-to-date data innovation with Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale.

Register here:

• WEBINAR: Extend Azure Management Anywhere with Azure Arc
  https://info.microsoft.com/ww-on-demand-azure-webinar-series-extend-azure-management-anywhere-with-azure-arc.html?lcid=en-us

For more details:

• Introducing Azure Arc Preview
  Extend Azure management and services anywhere with Azure Arc Preview.
  Explore Azure Arc Preview
• Azure Arc Preview for virtual machines
  Seamlessly govern and manage on-premises and cloud-based Linux and Windows virtual machines.
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We announced a great feature to enable Conditional Access for the aggregated Office 365 services:

Today, I’m super excited to announce the public preview of Conditional Access for the Office 365 suite. For organizations setting policy on Office 365—such as requiring users to perform Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) or have managed devices—of Conditional Access for the Office 365 suite makes the configuration a whole lot easier.

Hundreds of millions of people use the Office 365 apps like SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Microsoft Teams. Part of what makes these services work so well is they interact with each other and a have a collection of supporting services. There are tons of benefits of integration—one example is shared contact information in Exchange for SharePoint and Teams. In many ways, even though Office 365 is composed of many cooperating services, it functions as a single app to help your users be productive.

Conditional Access can be used to protect all Azure AD connected apps, including thousands of pre-integrated SaaS apps, apps your organization has developed, as well as hybrid apps accessed through the Azure Application Proxy. However, because of the close relationship between Office services it makes sense to help you target Office 365 as a single app with Azure AD Conditional Access policies. Many of you have asked for this capability, and we worked with several customers to make sure we got the feature right.

Conditional Access for the Office 365 suite gives admins the option to assign policy across Office 365 with one click.  It provides consistent coverage and improves the user experience by setting a consistent policy across Office 365 apps. Assigning different policies to different services can result in unexpected interrupts as users access data that requires service to service interaction. To learn more about this topic, see our Conditional Access service dependencies documentation.

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Read more about this preview here:

• PREVIEW: Introducing Conditional Access for the Office 365 suite!https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-active-directory-identity/introducing-conditional-access-for-the-office-365-suite/ba-p/1131979

SQL Server customers migrating their databases to the cloud have multiple choices for their cloud destination. To thoroughly assess which cloud is best for SQL Server workloads, two key factors to consider are:

1. Innovations that the cloud provider can uniquely provide.

2. Independent benchmark results.

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For details around these two bullets, visit this recent post:

• SQL Server runs best on Azure. Here’s why.
  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/sql-server-runs-best-on-azure-heres-why/

Web content filtering is a new feature in Microsoft Defender ATP that enables security administrators to track and regulate access to websites based on specified content categories. You can configure policies within Microsoft Defender Security Center to block or gather access data on certain categories across your machine groups. This feature provides the following capabilities:

• Users are prevented from accessing websites in blocked categories, whether they are browsing on-premises or away
• Conveniently deploy varied policies to various sets of users using the machine groups defined in the Microsoft Defender ATP role-based access control settings
• Access web reports in the same central location, with visibility over actual blocks and web usage
• Support for most major web browsers, with blocks performed by SmartScreen and Network Protection.

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Read more on the announcement post:

• PREVIEW: Web content filtering with Microsoft Defender ATP
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-defender-atp/web-content-filtering-with-microsoft-defender-atp-now-in-public/ba-p/1132287

Maximize your business intelligence investments by bringing data together from all your sources with Azure Synapse Analytics. Put your data to work to gain a deeper understanding of your business, and move from reactive reporting to predictive, actionable insights.

Read the Packt Publishing e-book, Cloud Analytics with Microsoft Azure, to learn how to:

• Unify data siloes to deliver insights to all.
• Enable advanced security control across all data.
• Achieve unlimited growth into petabyte-scale analytics.
• Realize unmatched price-performance of up to 14 times faster at a 94 percent lower cost than other cloud providers. 

Learn more about Azure analytics, view real business use cases, and get guidance on setting up your limitless cloud data warehouse.

Download the book from below:

• DOWNLOAD: Free eBook, “Cloud Analytics with Microsoft Azure”
  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-analytics-with-microsoft-azure/

Learn how to keep data safer in the cloud with these five best practices from Microsoft security experts. Get a step-by-step walkthrough with this infographic and discover how to:

• Shift how you think about data protection to include cloud security.
• Reduce problem areas with tools for identifying different types of security threats early.
• Empower your organization with helpful tools and resources. 

Get the infographic from below:

• DOWNLOAD: Five Best Practices for Cloud Security
  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/five-best-practices-for-cloud-security/

Learn best practices for enabling best-in-class productivity experiences across on-premises and cloud-based virtualization environments.

In this webcast, we’ll show you how to:

• Utilize FSLogix
• Save disk space with OneDrive Files On-Demand
• Benefit from the latest Outlook improvements for virtual environments

We will also walk you through best practices for running Microsoft Teams in virtual environments, then provide support updates.

• DATE/TIME:
  10:00AM-11:00AM PST
  February 13, 2020

Register now for our webcast!

• WEBCAST: Productivity Best Practices for Virtual Environments – Feb 13th, 2020
  http://aka.ms/webcast/virtualproductivity

When planning your organization’s move to Teams from Slack, it’s important to decide what you need to keep (if anything).

This article starts off by describing what types of data can be migrated and then walk you through how to assess your needs, plan your move, and then make the move.

• INFO: Migrate from Slack to Microsoft Teams
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/migrate-slack-to-teams

(To learn more about Slack export options, go to the Slack website: https://get.slack.help/hc/articles/204897248-Guide-to-Slack-import-and-export-tools)