Kurt Shintaku's Blog

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)

Last year over 30,000 people joined us for the Microsoft Flow Online Conference.

Now, we are coming back and want YOU to join us for the 2020 POWER PLATFORM ONLINE CONFERENCE!

Come and join some of the best teachers, trainers and Power Platform MVP’s from around the world as they bring 9 hours of back-to-back training and tutorial sessions live and on-demand to you!

The day will consist of 18 unique 30 minute sessions ranging from beginner at the start of the day all the way to advanced content toward the end of the day. This ensures that no matter what your skill set is, you will be able to get valuable insights and new skills to help take your #LessCodeMorePower game to the next level.

Join us for a fun day of laughs and learning, right from the comfort of your own living room or office!

• DATE/TIME:
  Fri, March 20, 2020
  6:00 AM – 3:00 PM PDT
  Add to Calendar
• LOCATION:
  Online
• REGISTRATION:
  http://aka.ms/powerplatformconference

Download recipes for PowerAutomate to do some cool things like:

• Auto-lock your workstation
• Auto-create a ICS Calendar invite
• Trigger based on location/GeoFence
• Create a Planner task from a Flagged Email
• Send session slides to all attendees

Have you had some time to check out the new & improved Power Automate Community Cookbook?! If not, you should head over there and experience the new format asap! (Seen in screenshot below) Some of the awesome new features we have added to the new and improved cookbook are:

• A new "gallery like" feel with tiles and thumbnail images
• Ability to sort recipes by category and/or top kudos & posting date
• Required .zip file attachment for uploading your exported flows
• Ability to add an optional instructional video to your recipe

…

Read the rest of the announcement here:

• RELEASE: New & Improved Power Automate Community Cookbook
  https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/News-Announcements/New-amp-Improved-Power-Automate-Community-Cookbook/m-p/440388

The Microsoft Azure Active Directory deployment webinar series is coming back in 2020!

This round will have a companion Ask-Microsoft-Anything (AMA) blog, so reply here with your burning Identity questions and priorities for the coming year and we’ll share out best practices from our experts.

Check out the schedule here:

• TRAINING: Learn how to deploy Azure AD from the experts
  http://aka.ms/aadwebinarcommunity