Posted by: kurtsh | January 24, 2025

NEWS: Exchange Online introducing External Recipient Rate Limit

If you have marketing, communications or sales departments that are using Exchange Online to “email blast” messages out to more than 2,000 recipients a day, you need to read the following:

In April 2024, we announced that Exchange Online would begin enforcing an external recipient rate limit (ERRL) of 2,000 recipients in 24 hours. This will begin in October 2025 at the earliest. (MC787382 – Exchange Online to introduce External Recipient Rate Limit)

Exchange Online currently enforces a Recipient Rate limit of 10,000 recipients. The 2,000 External Recipient Rate Limit (ERRL) will become a sub-limit within this 10,000 Recipient Rate limit. There is no change to the Recipient Rate limit, and both of these will be rolling limits for 24-hour windows. You can send to up to 2,000 external recipients in a 24-hour period, and if you max out the external recipient rate limit then you will still be able to send to up to 8,000 internal recipients in that same period. If you don’t send to any external recipients in a 24-hour period, you can send to up to 10,000 internal recipients.

This new limit is not going to be applicable to the following Microsoft integrations until further notice:

How will this change happen?
The new “External Recipient Rate limit” will be introduced in 2 phases:

  • Phase 1 – October 2025, the limit will apply to cloud-hosted mailboxes of trial tenants and all cloud-hosted mailboxes of tenants created after that date. This phase will include an Exchange Admin Center mail flow report detailing the External Recipient count of cloud-hosted mailboxes belonging to the tenant.
  • Phase 2 – April 2026, we will start applying the limit to cloud-hosted mailboxes of existing tenants.

Please refer to the ACS email documentation (Prepare an email communication resource for Azure Communication Services – An Azure Communication Services concept article | Microsoft Learn) or reach out to your Microsoft account team for further support in this journey.

What are the options for customers who have business needs that exceed the ERR limit?
If you have a cloud-hosted mailbox that needs to exceed the ERR limit, you can move to Azure Communication Services for Email, which is designed specifically for high volume email sent to recipients external to your tenant.

Is this limit counted against per recipient or per unique recipient?
We will be counting per recipient not per unique recipient. So, if you sent 100 emails to the same 5 external recipients, it would count as 500 external recipients.

Read more about this & remediation steps here:

(Note: This change only applies to Microsoft 365 Commercial instances. The rate limit will be applied to GCC instances in the future however at the moment, they are exempt.)

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Posted by: kurtsh | January 24, 2025

INFO: Automatic archival of unlicensed OneDrive user accounts beginning January 27, 2025

Beginning on Jan 27th, 2025, any OneDrive user accounts in Microsoft 365 COMMERCIAL cloud instances that have been unlicensed for longer than 93 days will be inaccessible to admins & end users.

  • For example, if a OneDrive account became unlicensed on August 1st, 2025, this account will be inaccessible as of Oct 1st, 2025.

Accounts become unlicensed when the admin removes the license, or the user is deleted from Entra ID. These accounts will be automatically archived and will still be viewable via admin tools but will not be accessible until admins take action on them through the following:

  1. Setting up the Archive billing for unlicensed accounts to be able to access and edit the archived files.
  2. Optionally re-license the unlicensed account to maintain access.

All Purview features will work with archived, unlicensed OneDrive accounts including retention policies, legal holds, and eDiscovery search & export, however to access the data that is eDiscovered or legally held, you MUST establish Microsoft 365 Archive billing or the content will not be extractable or downloadable.

To learn how to establish Archive billing, read more about this change below:

(Note: This will apply to Microsoft 365 GCC/Government cloud instances in the future however a specific date is not set yet.)

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Posted by: kurtsh | January 23, 2025

WHITEPAPER: How effective is multifactor authentication at deterring cyberattacks?

We have a .PDF whitepaper that is downloadable from Microsoft Research that goes over the efficacy of MFA.

This study investigates the effectiveness of multifactor authentication (MFA) in protecting commercial accounts from unauthorized access, with an additional focus on accounts with known credential leaks. We employ the benchmark-multiplier method, coupled with manual account review, to evaluate the security performance of various MFA methods in a large dataset of Microsoft Azure Active Directory users exhibiting suspicious activity.

Our findings reveal that MFA implementation offers outstanding protection, with over 99.99% of MFA-enabled accounts remaining secure during the investigation period. Moreover, MFA reduces the risk of compromise by 99.22% across the entire population and by 98.56% in cases of leaked credentials. We further demonstrate that dedicated MFA applications, such as Microsoft Authenticator, outperform SMS-based authentication, though both methods provide significantly enhanced security compared to not using MFA. Based on these results, we strongly advocate for the default implementation of MFA in commercial accounts to increase security and mitigate unauthorized access risks.

Download the whitepaper here: (Click the PDF link on the left)

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Posted by: kurtsh | January 22, 2025

INFO: Blocking 3rd party AI Notetaking Tools from joining Microsoft Teams meetings

Copilot for Microsoft Teams has a feature called “Intelligent Recap” which provides:

  • AI-generated text summaries of Teams Meetings, in addition to the transcript
  • bundling of the presented PowerPoints from the meetings
  • aggregation of action items discussed
  • timemarks for meeting recordings (if one was recorded) for when each person speaks
  • searching for key phrases uttered in the meeting & jumps to that point in the recording

This has the benefit of being an Enterprise-managed solution (summaries are encrypted, eDiscoverable transcriptions with retention/deletion policies, secured exclusively to attendees & resident in regulatory compliant cloud storage, commitment to not training AI models on conversations, etc.) while also providing easy-to-use, time-saving value for end users.

But what about other AI notetaking solutions?

3RD PARTY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SOLUTIONS FOR TEAMS MEETINGS
If this is a concern for your organization, we recommend starting with establishing a well-communicated HR policy prohibiting these tools use.  For example at Microsoft, while Microsoft 365 Copilot is of course secured, managed & available to Microsoft employees, 3rd party AI solutions are strictly prohibited by Microsoft Standards of Business Conduct,, particularly the use of ‘3rd party AI meeting notetakers’.  The reason this is such a high level concern is that there are many legal concerns with these tools including a lack of eDiscoverability, lack of Litigation Hold & potential deletion, lack of retention policies, lack of FedRAMP regulatory compliance (or CJIS or Tax1075 or…), etc.

The most common techniques to block these tools from use in Microsoft Teams are:

Also, if 3rd party Artificial Intelligence tools are able to present themselves as authorized attendees in your Microsoft 365 environment, they are unfortunately taking advantage of weakly IT-configured EntraID application authentication security.  Please review:

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Posted by: kurtsh | January 20, 2025

INFO: Enable Right click – “End Task” in the TaskBar

Want a quick shortcut to kill frozen applications directly from the Windows taskbar?

  1. Go to Windows Settings – System – For Developers
  2. Switch “End Task” to the ON position

The next time you right click an application in the Windows Taskbar, you should see a new menu option called “End all tasks”.

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Posted by: kurtsh | January 14, 2025

INFO: Customer data privacy & encryption policies when using Azure AI Services

Q: Where does it say that all data that Azure Open AI uses is encrypted?

A: Azure OpenAI Service encryption of data at rest – Azure AI services | Microsoft Learn
All data processed by Azure AI Services is encrypted. The Azure OpenAI Service, part of Azure AI services, uses FIPS 140-2 compliant 256-bit AES encryption for data at rest. This encryption and decryption process is transparent, meaning that encryption and access are managed for you.

Q: Where is it documented that Microsoft does not train its Artificial Intelligence models on Enterprise (or Public Sector) customer data?

A1: FAQ: Protecting the Data of our Commercial and Public Sector Customers in the AI Era
A2: Protecting the data of our commercial and public sector customers in the AI era  

Microsoft’s generative AI solutions, including Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot services, do not use your organization’s data to train foundation models without your permission. Additionally, customer data, including prompts and completions, is not shared with OpenAI and is not used to train OpenAI models.

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Posted by: kurtsh | December 21, 2024

OFFER: Free SharePoint Premium services until June 2025

[This promotional offer has now been extended through June 2025]

Did you know you can run advanced AI services like document translation, data extraction, document assembly, AI-driven document & image tagging, image OCR, & eSignature within SharePoint Online at no charge?

These services are called “SharePoint Premium” and were announced back at Ignite 2023.

To help you get started with pay-as-you-services as part of SharePoint Premium, we’re excited to share a new promotional offer that provides monthly free capacity for select SharePoint Premium services including:

CapabilityDescriptionIncluded with offer
Unstructured document processing Automatically classifies and extracts information from files like letters and contracts. Read more about unstructured document processing at https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/syntex/document-understanding-overview.100 pages per month are included in the promotional offer.
Structured document processing Automatically identifies field and table values from structured or semi-structured documents, like forms and invoices. Read more about structured document processing at https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/syntex/form-processing-overview.100 pages per month are included in the promotional offer.
Prebuilt document processing   Recognizes documents and the structured information in documents. Read more about prebuilt document processing at https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/syntex/prebuilt-overview.100 pages per month are included in the promotional offer.
Content assembly Automatically generates standard repetitive business documents, like contracts, statements of work, service agreements, letters of consent, sales pitches, and correspondence. Read more about content assembly at https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/syntex/content-assembly.50 documents per month are included in the promotional offer.
Taxonomy tagging Automatically tags documents in SharePoint libraries with terms configured in your term store using artificial intelligence. Read more about taxonomy tagging at https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/syntex/taxonomy-tagging-overview and https://wbaer.net/2023/12/a-quick-trip-around-taxonomy-tagging/.50 documents per month are included in the promotional offer.
Image tagging Automatically tags images with descriptive keywords using artificial intelligence. Read more about image tagging at https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/syntex/image-tagging-overview.2,500 images per month are included in the promotional offer.
Optical character recognitionExtracts printed or handwritten text from images and documents. Read more about optical character recognition at https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/syntex/ocr-overview.2,500 pages per month are included in the promotional offer.
Translation Enables you to translate content among dozens of languages. Read more about translation at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/syntex/translation-overview. 1 million characters per month are included in the promotional offer.
eSignature Lets you securely send documents for signature to people both inside and outside of your organization. Read more about SharePoint eSignature at https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/syntex/esignature-overview.5 per customer per month are included in the promotional offer.

GETTING STARTED
To get started, you’ll need your Azure subscription ID to configure pay-as-you-go billing. Each month through the end of June 2024, every Microsoft 365 tenant will get a particular set capacity for each of these select services. Note: this monthly capacity is not cumulative; it will reset each month.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/sharepoint_premium_blog/new-promotional-offer-for-sharepoint-premium/4021740

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Posted by: kurtsh | December 21, 2024

TRAINING: Microsoft Americas Azure Events (Jan-Feb)

Learn first-hand from Microsoft subject matter experts how you can leverage some of the most popular Azure services allowing you to deliver applications and services faster than ever before.

Microsoft Innovation Workshops presents 1/2 day to full day training events on a variety of Azure topics, that include hands-on-labs. Events are delivered through Microsoft Teams and it is recommended that users install the Teams app for the richest interactive experience. All participants must register individually and will be initially added to our waitlist. You’ll receive an email confirmation once your registration has been approved.

  • Lunch & Learn – Integrate Azure OpenAI Into Your App
    In this workshop, you’ll explore how to harness the power of the Azure OpenAI Service to create advanced AI applications, such as chatbots and language models, that excel at understanding and processing natural human language. Azure OpenAI provides access to powerful pre-trained AI models and a comprehensive suite of APIs and tools that enable you to deploy, customize, and fine-tune these models to suit the specific needs of your application.
  • Lunch & Learn – Code Suggestions with GitHub Copilot in VS Code
    In this workshop, you’ll explore the capabilities of GitHub Copilot, a powerful AI-based coding assistant that provides real-time code suggestions and completions. While GitHub Copilot supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, it excels particularly in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, C#, and C++.
  • Developing AI Applications with Azure AI Studio
    In this hands-on lab, participants will explore the capabilities of Azure AI Studio. This lab is designed for AI developers, data scientists, AI enthusiasts, cloud engineers, and AI engineers who want to enhance their skills in model evaluation and fine-tuning using Azure AI Studio’s Prompt Flow. Participants will gain hands-on experience in developing custom AI models, evaluating their performance, and refining them for improved results. The lab also covers the integration of chat flows and essential tools while ensuring responsible AI practices through content safety measures.
  • Innovate With AI
    In this Hands-on Workshop, you will be working with Azure AI tools, like Azure cognitive services, Azure ML, Metric Advisor, Azure Bot. At starting, you will be doing a document processing with Summarization with Azure Form Recognizer and Cognitive Service for Language. You will be working on Knowledge mining with Cognitive Seach and will be creating a Conversational AI with Bot Service using Power Virtual Agents. You will be exploring on Metrics Advisor with the help of Azure cognitive services.
  • Mitigating Vulnerabilities with GitHub Advanced Security and Azure DevOps
    In this hands-on lab, you will explore and learn about enabling, configuring, and managing security features across various tasks, such as secret scanning, dependency scanning, code scanning and explore the DevOps security findings and inventory provided by Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
  • Lunch & Learn – Get started with Azure OpenAI Service
    In this workshop, you will explore the Azure OpenAI Service, which integrates the generative AI models developed by OpenAI into the Azure platform. This service empowers you to create advanced AI solutions that leverage the robust security, scalability, and seamless integration capabilities offered by the Azure cloud platform. Whether you’re building chatbots, generating content, or developing other AI-driven applications, Azure OpenAI Service provides the tools and infrastructure to bring your ideas to life, ensuring they are both secure and scalable within the Azure ecosystem.
  • GitHub Copilot Innovation Workshop
    In this hands-on lab, you’ll gain a comprehensive understanding of the distinctions between GitHub Copilot for Individuals, GitHub Copilot for Business, You’ll also explore various use cases for GitHub Copilot for Business, including real-life examples showcasing how customers have leveraged it to boost their productivity and also how to leverage the GitHub Copilot in Jetbrains IntelliJ IDE.
  • Get Started With OpenAI And Build Natural Language Solution
    In this hands-on lab, you’ll learn how to get started with Azure OpenAI. You’ll provision the service as an Azure resource and use Azure OpenAI Studio to deploy and explore OpenAI models. Azure OpenAI Service brings the generative AI models developed by OpenAI to the Azure platform, enabling you to develop powerful AI solutions that benefit from the security, scalability, and integration of services provided by the Azure cloud platform.
  • Use Azure Open AI Like A Pro To Build Powerful AI Applications
    In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Azure OpenAI tools to build AI-powered applications. You’ll gain practical experience using Azure OpenAI service and API to develop applications of various types, workloads, and languages. Starting with integrating custom datasets, you’ll learn to use the Azure OpenAI API effectively. Later, you’ll explore creating OpenAI-powered applications, including integrating with PowerApps for enhanced functionality.
  • NET App Modernization
    In this Hands-on Workshop, you will be migrating your application using Azure Migrate, assessing your website’s compatibility with Azure using the App Service Migration Assistant tool. Transition smoothly into the realm of Azure SQL Database through the insightful guidance of the Data Migration Assistant (DMA). Culminate your learning by exploring serverless computing; create an Azure Function and incorporate Azure Storage Queue to process orders asynchronously. By the end of this session, you’ll be adept at leading any application towards a cloud-optimized transformation.
  • Azure API Management
    Discover the power of Azure API Management in this hands-on lab. Learn to publish APIs, add products, import using OpenAPI, configure CORS, implement caching, apply transformation policies, and manage versions and revisions. Elevate your API management skills and enhance developer engagement with Azure.
  • Build Prompt Engineering With Azure OpenAI Service
    In this workshop, you’ll learn how to deploy a model in Azure OpenAI and use it in your own application to summarize text. With the Azure OpenAI Service, developers can create chatbots, language models, and other applications that excel at understanding natural human language. The Azure OpenAI provides access to pre-trained AI models, as well as a suite of APIs and tools for customizing and fine-tuning these models to meet the specific requirements of your application. Also, you’ll learn how different prompts for similar content help shape the AI model’s response to better satisfy your requirements.
  • Build Intelligent Apps With Microsoft’s Copilot Stack & Azure OpenAI
    In this hands-on lab, you will gain a strong understanding of Generative AI basics, Azure Open AI, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns, Semantic Kernel, and how to utilize these concepts to create your own Copilot for your business needs. You will also explore use cases that showcase Copilot product experiences. Using Microsoft’s Copilot stack and practical use cases this workshop will guide you in envisioning and creating intelligent systems that integrate foundation models resulting in improved productivity and hyper-personalized product experiences.
  • Azure Red Hat OpenShift Workshop
    Azure Red Hat OpenShift is a fully managed Red Hat OpenShift service in Azure that is jointly engineered and supported by Microsoft and Red Hat. In this hands-on lab, you’ll go through a set of tasks that will help you understand some of the concepts of deploying and securing container based applications on top of Azure Red Hat OpenShift.
  • Use Your Own Data And Explore Content Filter With Azure OpenAI Services
    In this hands-on lab, you’ll learn how to deploy a model in Azure OpenAI Studio and verify the chat behavior with and without adding your own data. The Azure OpenAI Service enables you to use your own data with the intelligence of the underlying LLM. You can limit the model to only use your data for pertinent topics or blend it with results from the pre-trained model.
  • DevOps With GitHub
    Intro to Azure DevOps, What is CI/CD automation, Setting up GitHub Action, Project management with DevOps
  • Azure Virtual Machine And Compute
    In this hands on lab we will create and deploy a Windows Server 2019 Datacenter virtual machine. We will also configure a backup of the virtual machine that will be user-accessible for recovery. You will also be able to load a web application in the VM you have just provisioned in Azure.
  • Implement CI/CD with GitHub Actions
    In this workshop, you’ll learn how to elevate your software development process. This will work as a user-focused guide on implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) using GitHub Actions. Learn to automate your build, test, and deployment processes using GitHub Actions’ intuitive features. Streamline your development cycle and deliver code with confidence. Start your journey to efficient CI/CD practices today and transform your development workflow with GitHub Actions.
  • Automate Document Processing By Using Azure AI & OpenAI
    In this hands-on lab, you will learn how to implement automated document processing using a combination of Azure AI services, including Azure OpenAI, Azure Document Intelligence, Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure App Service. Automated document processing is a crucial component in modern business operations, helping organizations extract valuable information from documents efficiently and accurately. By the end of this lab, you will have a working system that can process and search through various types of documents.
  • Build Prompt Engineering With Azure OpenAI Service
    In this workshop, you’ll learn how to deploy a model in Azure OpenAI and use it in your own application to summarize text. With the Azure OpenAI Service, developers can create chatbots, language models, and other applications that excel at understanding natural human language. The Azure OpenAI provides access to pre-trained AI models, as well as a suite of APIs and tools for customizing and fine-tuning these models to meet the specific requirements of your application. Also, you’ll learn how different prompts for similar content help shape the AI model’s response to better satisfy your requirements.

See the above sessions and more at:

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Posted by: kurtsh | December 21, 2024

EVENT: Microsoft Technical Takeoff (our FREE Desktop Conference) – March 3-6, 2025

Microsoft Technical Takeoff, the *free* #Windows & #Intune virtual conference, is back w/ deep dives & panel discussions for Windows, #Windows365, Intune, #AzureVirtualDesktop & #Security – March 3-6, 2025

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Posted by: kurtsh | December 21, 2024

TRAINING: Free “Mastering GitHub Copilot for AI-Paired Programming” course

Microsoft & GitHub are excited to launch 9-lesson, open-source course on “Mastering GitHub Copilot for AI-Paired Programming”.

Learn GitHub Copilot’s autocompletion, customizable features & advanced programming techniques. Learn to harness AI-driven algorithms & optimize code quality.

From GitHub repos to Visual Studio Code integration, perfect your coding prowess in Javascript, Python & more.

#javascript #python #msftadvocate #GitHub #copilot #ai #Microsoft

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