Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Imagine this: you point your phone at a dog and ask it, “What kind of dog is this?” and it identifies the exact breed.

That’s precisely what Microsoft’s Research team for Artificial Intelligence demonstrated today.

At the 15^th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, that object recognition technology, dubbed Project Adam, was on display.

In his keynote Monday morning, Harry Shum, executive vice president of Technology and Research, laid out the impact of Microsoft Research’s efforts on the company and how it helps define the Next Big Thing. One of the projects he demonstrated show the company’s progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence: Project Adam.

The goal of Project Adam is to enable software to visually recognize any object. It’s a tall order, given the immense neural network in human brains that makes those kinds of associations possible through trillions of connections.

…

For more video & a greater explanation, check out this blog post:
http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2014/07/14/microsoft-research-shows-advances-artificial-intelligence-project-adam/

For folks looking at where to first start leveraging the cloud’s benefits, business continuity is often the best place to begin.  The cloud can deliver the most flexible, cross-platform, and of course, the most economical solution for ensuring business systems can recover from disasters… while also providing a great vector for moving their solutions completely to the cloud.

Microsoft’s acquisition of InMage, to be integrated with Azure Site Recovery Services, is a huge step is supporting that direction for customers.  InMage provides a solution called “Scout” today that allows customers to:

1. migrate assets between public & private clouds
2. replicate & sync in real-time from on-premise assets for devtest or analytics
3. backup & DR for physical & virtual assets with instrustry-leading recovery point & recovery time objectives

I’m pleased to announce that Microsoft has acquired InMage, an innovator in the emerging area of cloud-based business continuity.

Our customers tell us that business continuity – the ability to backup, replicate and quickly recover data and applications in case of a system failure – is incredibly important. After all, revenue, supply chains, customer loyalty, employee productivity and more are on the line. It’s also very complicated and expensive to do. CIOs consistently rank business continuity as a top priority, but often don’t have the budgets or time to do it right.

As the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, Microsoft is committed to solving this challenge for customers. This acquisition will accelerate our strategy to provide hybrid cloud business continuity solutions for any customer IT environment, be it Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware or others. This will make Azure the ideal destination for disaster recovery for virtually every enterprise server in the world. As VMware customers explore their options to permanently migrate their applications to the cloud, this will also provide a great onramp.

• Microsoft acquires InMage: Better business continuity with Azure
  http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/07/11/microsoft-acquires-inmage-better-business-continuity-with-azure/

This is really neat.  Imagine a game that changes depending on:

• where you are in
• what the traffic is like on the road you’re on
• what the weather is like
• what time of day it is
• …

DreamWorks and Microsoft are unveiling a dragon-themed exploration game today that uses real-world data such as maps, traffic, weather, and time of day. In DreamWorks Dragon Adventure World Explorer, the developers have layered a fantasy world on top of the real world using sophisticated location and mapping technology. They’re targeting the app at children who play games on smartphones and tablets while their parents are taking them on a road trip.

Leveraging the Unity gaming platform, the title is a free cross-platform game that is available for specific devices, including the Nokia Lumia 2520, 1520, 1020, Icon, 928, 925, 930, andl Microsoft Surface RT and Pro tablets.

(NOTE: I’m confirming that Surface Pro devices are supported.  Right now the site reports that only ARM-processor based devices are supported.)

Read more here:

• DreamWorks and Microsoft want to make car rides more fun for kids with their game
  http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/14/dreamworks-and-microsoft-release-a-location-based-dragon-flying-game/ 

This is pretty cool.  A full Yammer Network dedicated to Office 365 IT Professionals & Developers!

Great news! Microsoft recently launched a new Yammer external network called the Office 365 Technical Network, where you can discover and share your knowledge and firsthand experience of Office 365 with technical professionals worldwide. Join more than 10,000 Office 365 IT Pros and technical experts from Microsoft for discussions about Office 365, Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, Project, and Visio.

And today this network is better than ever with the addition of customers, MVPs, Office 365 developers, and Microsofties who are developing solutions for Office 365 joining in the conversations. Let’s bring the power of our network and your networks together, and really work like a network.

To help organize the developer conversations, we’ve added four groups:

• O365 Apps Development
• O365 Service APIs Development
• Publishing/Managing Apps
• O365 Dev Posts

On June 6, we’re getting things started by running a developer-focused YamJam with your favorite Office 365 Technical Marketing Group and engineering team members. You don’t want to miss this one, as it’ll be the perfect chance for you to dive right in. Add yourself to the network to start sharing tips and best practices today and to join the conversation on June 6.

• Join the Office 365 Technical Network
  https://www.yammer.com/itpronetwork

Ever wondered what the differences are between:

The nice people at Windows IT Pro magazine have two articles that are published that explain the differences between the 3:

• Windows Azure Active Directory vs. Windows Server Active Directory
  http://m.windowsitpro.com/identity-management/windows-azure-active-directory-vs-windows-server-active-directory
• Azure Active Directory vs. Azure Active Directory Premium
  http://m.windowsitpro.com/azure/azure-active-directory-vs-azure-active-directory-premium
• An Overview of Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium
  http://m.windowsitpro.com/identity-management/overview-microsoft-azure-active-directory-premium

Back on June 4, 2014, Microsoft ran an event called the Enterprise Mobility Summit in the London.

Speakers include IDC’s John Delaney, who presents findings from the analyst firm’s Mobility Maturity Optimization research; and Chris Weber, Corporate Vice President Device Sales, who discusses Microsoft’s enterprise mobility strategy following the recent Nokia acquisition.

IDC also discussed the current trend AWAY from “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) and the reasons for the trend.

If you have the time, this is a video recap of the entire event.

If you’re interested in monitoring the status of the various services provided by Office 365, here’s the links & web sites you should know.

• Office 365 Service Health Dashboard
  http://status.office365.com/
• POST: “Office 365 Service Health Dashboard Now Supports Per-Tenant Service Status”
  http://community.office365.com/en-us/b/office_365_community_blog/archive/2012/01/07/the-office-365-service-health-dashboard-now-supports-per-tenant-service-status.aspx 
• DOCS: “View the status of your services”
  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-suite-help/view-the-status-of-your-services-HA102817837.aspx

For those of you that leverage this tool to inventory your environment, understand what hardware you have in place for your Microsoft investment, or simply run reports to stay compliant, you’ll wanna check out v9.1:

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) is an agentless, automated, multi-product planning and assessment tool for quicker and easier desktop, server and cloud migrations. MAP provides detailed readiness assessment reports and executive proposals with extensive hardware and software information, and actionable recommendations to help organizations accelerate their IT infrastructure planning process, and gather more detail on assets that reside within their current environment. MAP also provides server utilization data for Hyper-V server virtualization planning; identifying server placements, and performing virtualization candidate assessments. Learn more.

The MAP Toolkit includes the following components:
• MAPSetup.exe. Installation package containing the tool and SQL LocalDB.
• readme_en.htm. Available as a separate download. Provides information to read before installing the MAP Toolkit, including installation prerequisites and known issues.
• MAP_Sample_Documents.zip. Available as a separate download. Contains sample reports and proposals.
• MAP_Training_Kit.zip. Available as a separate download. Contains sample database and instructions for completing various exercises.

Download the toolkit here:

• DOWNLOAD: Microsoft Assessment & Planning Toolkit 9.1
  Date Published:  6/27/2014
  File Size: 71.4 MB, 1.4 MB, 63.5 MB, 17 KB
  http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7826

Looks like this is now public so I guess I can blog about it.

We have a web site where people can sign up to participate in Office pre-release programs.  In particular, I believe they are looking for Office beta testers for Office for Android tablets but I’m pretty sure that there are other beta programs available as well.

If you’re interested in signing up, go to the link below and register.  Remember that signing up does not guarantee that you’ll be selected.

Good luck!

• REGISTRATION: Office Pre-Release Programs
  http://prereleaseprograms-public.sharepoint.com/

If you’re leveraging Azure Rights Management Services, this is the post for you.  Dan Plastina, Lead PM for Right Management Services posted this summary of all the recent documentation for Rights Management Services.

The thing that caught my eye is using PowerShell to manage RMS templates within Azure RMS.  Here’s an excerpt of the post:

This month sees new PowerShell documentation for Azure RMS custom templates. In addition to creating and managing custom templates in the Azure Management Portal, you can now do this from the command line, by using the latest version of the Azure RMS Windows PowerShell module (version 2.0.0.0). For installation instructions and the download link, see Installing Windows PowerShell for Azure Rights Management. The new version of the module ships with updated local help, and now also supports the online parameter so that you can easily get to the online version to check for the latest information.

For example, instead of typing "Get-Help Connect-AadrmService" to read the local help that ships with the module, type "Get-Help Connect-AadrmService -online" to automatically load your web browser and display the online version of the help. Unlike the local help, the online version supports web formatting, so it’s much easier to read. It’s often more up-to-date, and will automatically show localized versions for the standard 10 languages that TechNet and MSDN supports (Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese-Brazilian, Russian, Spanish).

The new cmdlets to support custom templates are:

• Add-AadrmTemplate
• Export-AadrmTemplate
• Get-AadrmTemplate
• Get-AadrmTemplateProperty
• Import-AadrmTemplate
• New-AadrmRightsDefinition
• Remove-AadrmTemplate
• Set-AadrmTemplateProperty

If you are interested in custom templates and missed the blog post announcement, you can read it here: Create custom templates in Azure RMS with the Azure Management Portal. To see what customers are asking about this new feature when they try it out, see Top 10 customer questions about Azure RMS custom templates.

• Read more here:
  http://blogs.technet.com/b/rms/archive/2014/06/30/announcement-azure-rms-documentation-library-update-for-june-2014.aspx