Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Join us live during Teams On Air where we discuss the latest features and roadmap for Intelligent Communications in Office 365. You will also get the chance to participate in our live Q&A where your questions will be answered by experts from Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business.

• LIVE:
  Teams On Air is every other Friday @ 9AM PST. To join go to aka.ms/TeamsOnAir.
  (Next event Friday, 11/10/17)
• ON-DEMAND:
  Each episode will be made available for on demand viewing after the broadcast at aka.ms/TeamsOnAirReplay. 

There’s an amazing page on the Office web site that provides 3 very interesting lists:

1. Top questions you should ask  when considering the cloud for IT services…
   (and how Office 365 answers these questions)
2. Top 10 security and privacy features of Office 365
3. Top 10 compliance areas of Office 365

Here’s a list of the questions it answers – IN PRINT – for your reference:

1. Who owns the data we store in your service? Will you use our data to build advertising products?
2. Do you offer privacy controls in your service?
3. Do we have visibility into where you store our data in the service?
4. What is your approach to security and which security features do you offer to protect your service from external attacks?
5. Can we get our data out of your service?
6. Will you inform us when things change in the service, and will you let us know if our data is compromised?
7. Are you transparent with the way you use and access our data?
8. What kind of commitments do you have with respect to security and privacy?
9. How do you ensure that your service is reliable?
10. What are your commitments regarding keeping my service up?

Visit the page for the answers:

• Office 365 Top 10 Lists about Security, Compliance, and Privacy
  https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-trust-center-top-10-trust-tenets-cloud-security-and-privacy

Q: How do we find out which country our data is stored in when depositing it in the cloud with Office 365 or Dynamics 365?

A: Visit our “Where’s My Data” web site for details.

• SITE: Office 365/Dynamics 365 – Where is my Data?
  https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=401277

Since I don’t know how else you’d know about this event, I’m once again posting it here.

The Xbox One X Launch is happening at the Microsoft Store in Los Angeles/Century City, CA on November 6th from 5PM-12Mid.  (Note: It’s also going on at other store locations. Check HERE for details.)

Celebrate the launch of the new Xbox One X with Microsoft Store.* Come to our in-store launch event featuring 4K gameplay, gaming tournaments, food, prizes, giveaways, and more!

If you pre-ordered at your local store, you can take home your console at midnight on the east coast and as early as 9:00 PM on the west coast! 

Schedule:

• 4:00PM: Registrations for Halo 5 Tournament begin
• 5:00PM-9:00PM: Halo 5 Tournament (2v2)
  Exclusive prizes to be awarded.
• 8:00PM: Registrations for Forza Motorsport 7 Tournament begin
• 9:00PM-12:00Mid: Forza Motorsport 7 Tournament
  Exclusive prizes to be awarded.

*No purchase required. Open to players 13+, some restrictions apply. See store for full Official Rules. 

For more details visit the Launch site:

• EVENT: “Xbox One X Launch Party” – Microsoft Store Los Angeles/Century City, Nov 6 – 5PM-12Mid
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/locations/xbox-one-x-launch

We just released Premium Outlook.com accounts… available at no charge for all Office 365 Home subscribers. 

1. Ad-free. No Banner ads & no ads in the message list.
2. Heavy-duty Malware Protection.  Advanced, rigorous testing & protection against difficult-to-detect malware disguised within attachments.
3. Real-time Detection of Bad Hyperlinks. Just in time examination of links that are clicked within emails to protect users from phishing & malware sites.
4. 50GB of Email Storage (up from just 15GB)
5. Premium Support for Outlook.com. New access to PHONE-BASED & in-app support.

Read more here:
https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/10/30/premium-outlook-com-features-now-available-to-office-365-subscribers/

Join the next OpenDev, a live technical series featuring open source community leaders.

This episode features DevOps, which increases business agility by delivering business value to customers faster. Learn how to combine leading projects in a DevOps toolchain, with the power of Azure, benefiting legacy and cloud-native applications.

For details, register here:

• EVENT: Microsoft Azure OpenDev – Oct 25, 2017 – 9:00AM-12:00Noon PST
  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/opendev/

This is a the Microsoft IoT event for IoT industry members – FREE of charge.

If you’re in the industry of manufacturing IoT devices, writing software that enable IoT, etc., this event is for you. 

• EVENT: “Microsoft IoT in Action” – Boston, MA – Oct 30th
  https://iotinactionevents.com/

For more information around Microsoft IoT, check out this article in ReadWrite web:

• How Microsoft helps IoT pros take action to overcome challenges
  https://readwrite.com/2017/09/21/how-microsoft-helps-iot-pros-take-action-to-overcome-challenges/

(Note: While educational, it’s not really an event for folks looking to implement IoT in their organization)

We are announcing the new “Azure free” account available to all customers via azure.com/free.

The new “Azure free” account provides $200 credit for 30 days to experiment with a combination of products. It also includes 12-months of free compute, storage, network and database products and 25+ always free products to learn and to build your next ideas.

Visit http://azure.com/free to sign up!

Starting Monday, October 2, 2017, customers will be able to bring the industry-leading performance and security of SQL Server to Linux and Docker containers for production workloads, enabling developers to build intelligent applications using their preferred language and environment.

The new release enables industry-leading performance, innovative security features, transformational analytics with AI built-in, and delivering insights wherever users are with mobile BI.

Learn more about SQL Server 2017.

To assist our customers to fast track their migration to Azure, we are pleased to announce Azure Migrate—a new service that provides the guidance, insights, and mechanisms needed to assist you in migrating to Azure.

Using an appliance-based approach, Azure Migrate provides:

• Discovery and assessment for on-premises virtual machines and servers
• Inbuilt dependency mapping for high-confidence discovery of multi-tier applications
• Intelligent rightsizing to Azure virtual machines
• Compatibility reporting with guidelines for remediating potential issues
• Integration with Azure Database Management Service for database discovery and migration

Azure Migrate gives you confidence that your workloads can migrate with minimal impact to the business and run as expected in Azure. With the right tools and guidance, you can achieve maximum return on investment while assuring that critical performance and reliability needs are met.

To learn more about Azure Migrate and sign up for Limited Preview, please visit https://aka.ms/azuremigrate. The Limited Preview enables discovery, cost analysis, and configuration recommendations for VMware-based environments. Support for discovering Hyper-V environments and for replication-based server migration will be added in the coming months. To access further migration resources, tools, and offers, visit the new Azure Migration Center. Please visit the Azure migration Infopedia page at https://aka.ms/azuremigration_field for field sales and technical information.