Kurt Shintaku's Blog

I’ve had a customer that asked for "24 hour retention policies” for Microsoft Teams chat messages.  In other words, they wanted chat messages deleted after only 24 hours.

I will say that initially there were some challenges with fulfilling this requirement:  We didn’t actually support “24 hour retention policies” initially back in 2020 – I think the minimum was a few days or something like that, but if I remember correctly, there was an “design change request” escalation done by a few customers through Microsoft Unified Support (which is really the only way to formally request changes from product engineering) and “24 hour retention policies” were eventually developed by the Teams product group & made available due to a couple other customers also asking for it. It was later expanded to all customers & documented.

VISIBLE “DELETED” MESSAGES IS A KNOWN THING

Don’t get it twisted however: Some messages can and do remain visible past the 24 hour retention period.  This is documented here but if you look at the image I’ve pasted on the right, you can see that messages – even if they are manually deleted from Teams – aren’t actually immediately deleted but rather they are moved to something called the “SubstrateHolds” folder for a minimum of 1 day PLUS up to another 7 days and which point it gets marked for deletion for, again, a minimum of ANOTHER 1 day PLUS up to another 7 days or so to actually delete the object.  This sounds convoluted but there’s very good reasons for this.

SUBSTRATE EVALUATION FOR HOLDS

So what’s this SubstrateHolds folder?  It’s a holding area where messages are stored and evaluated for other tenant policies that may supersede the organizational Retention Policy – for example, Litigation Hold.  Litigation Hold is a very intensive process that by definition supersedes retention policy deletion & requires evaluating objects 24/7 all throughout a Microsoft 365 tenant which may contain PETABYTES of data. (In cases where customers have 10,000 mailboxes for instance, it easily does, having 100GB per user in email alone across 14,000 users – never mind OneDrive, SharePoint & Teams objects) 

This volume of data can take days, even a week to scout for operations like “holds” or worse, “full tenant eDiscovery” so objects are put up for permanent deletion until all processes/policies have had a chance to evaluate the object.

DELETION IS HARD WORK!

Additionally, the deletion process (which runs in Azure) takes a bit because, well,  it’s deleting a lot of objects.  Per the documentation:

When the retention period expires and moves a message to the SubstrateHolds folder, a delete operation is communicated to the backend Azure chat service, that then relays the same operation to the Teams client app. Delays in this communication or caching can explain why, for a short period of time, users continue to see these messages in their Teams app.

BTW: You can read a specific example of how 1 day retention policies work here:

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/retention-policies-teams#example-3-delete-only-after-1-day

There’s other things that may prevent a message from immediately deleted and as a result – if I remember correctly – our statement around “24 hour retention policies” was that it was not guaranteed to be deleted in 24 hours but rather a “best effort”.  This was accepted by the customers that “24 hour retention policies” were being built for because the alternatives weren’t attractive – including drastically raising the price of your Microsoft 365 tenant so we can increase the computing power for object search evaluation, transfer & deletion.

Today, a new promotional offer for free credit to use the advanced services of Microsoft SharePoint Premium was announced for Microsoft 365 Enterprise customers. Anyone with:

• an existing Microsoft 365 Enterprise cloud instance
• an existing Azure commercial enrollment

…can get access to this promotional offer for SharePoint Premium.

WHAT DOES THE OFFER PROVIDE
This promotion grants a monthly allocation of credit for 9 services that are part of SharePoint Premium. This includes the items in the table below & as you can see, it’s a fair amount of credit for each service:

HOW TO GET IT
Microsoft 365 Enterprise customers can take advantage of the offer by doing nothing but setting up the connection to your Azure enrollment as documented here:

• Try out Microsoft Syntex and explore its services
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/syntex/promo-syntex
  (Syntex is the former name of some of SharePoint Premium’s services)

That’s it. Your Microsoft 365 cloud instance will receive the credit automatically. The promotional offer for SharePoint Premium is available to customers now through June 30, 2024.

For background on the new promotional offer, visit:

• New promotional offer for SharePoint Premium
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/sharepoint-premium-blog/new-promotional-offer-for-sharepoint-premium/ba-p/4021740

(Note: SharePoint Premium is not yet available in GCC cloud instances, so this offer is only available to Enterprise/Commercial subscribers)

Bring external data into your Microsoft 365 Copilot experience to ground generative AI results using connectors and plugins.

• Use Microsoft Graph connectors to integrate the data sources you want with Semantic Index for Copilot. This option pre-indexes defined read-only information used for retrieval with your prompts to drive the most relevant AI-generated responses.
• Use managed and trusted plugins, such as OpenAI plugins, Microsoft Teams message extensions, and Power Platform connectors. Instead of pre-indexing information, plugins optimize for real-time API based data retrieval, and they can optionally write-back data.

Mary David Pasch, Microsoft 365 Copilot Principal Product Manager, shares how both options follow Microsoft’s comprehensive security, compliance, and privacy approach, while respecting defined boundaries within your organization’s data services and can work together when responding to a single prompt.

• VIDEO: How Copilot for Microsoft 365 can work with your external data
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfpDeM-J4us
• DOCS: Documentation on Copilot Extensibility
  https://aka.ms/CopilotExtensibility

#copilot #ai #microsoft #msftadvocate #extensibility

A new year and new things come from the right and left. New Security Adoption Framework (SAF) from #Microsoft is here to help your organization for End-to-End Security Modernization.

The SAF helps organizations to develop and implement a #security strategy and #architecture that fits their business, security, and technical platform requirements. It uses #ZeroTrust principles for all parts of security modernization and offers a realistic way to improve your security in a hybrid, multicloud, and multi-platform, from strategic and programmatic level to architectural and technical design.

The SAF consists of several elements, such as:

• Security Modernization Overview: A collection of security learnings, principles, and recommendations for modernizing security in your organization. This training workshop is a combination of experiences from Microsoft security teams and learnings from customers.
• The Microsoft Cybersecurity Reference Architectures (#MCRA) are the component of Microsoft’s Security Adoption Framework (SAF) that describe Microsoft’s cybersecurity capabilities and technologies. The diagrams describe how Microsoft security capabilities integrate with Microsoft platforms and third party platforms
• Business Guidance: Multiple planning and execution guides for common focus areas, such as identity and access management, threat protection, information protection, and cloud security.
• Expert Led Workshops: Optional workshops that Microsoft offers for Unified customers to help accelerate their planning and execution of security modernization.

For more details visit:

• Security Adoption Resources – Security documentation | Microsoft Learn
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/security/ciso-workshop/adoption

The tech trends of today are foreshadowing three disruptive shifts of tomorrow—ubiquitous computing, AI co-reasoning and Quantum at scale. These forces are collectively shaping the future direction of the cloud and will enable innovation that transforms government and society in the coming years. ​

Join us for this episode where we will look more closely at the ground-breaking innovations that will influence the trajectory of governments in the coming years. We will explore how departments, agencies and ministries are applying future innovation and emerging technologies. Find out how 5G, Space, AI, quantum computing and other technologies support government missions and tackle some of society’s greatest challenges with innovation, transformation, and trust.

• Date/Time:
  February 07, 2024 9:00 AM
• Registration:
  The Future Cloud and Government: How governments are applying innovation
  https://futureofcloud.eventbuilder.com/event/80227?source=myco

AI governance is not only a matter of compliance and risk management, but also a strategic advantage and a source of trust to accelerate returns on AI investment.

Microsoft is excited to announce that Microsoft is recognized as a Leader in the inaugural IDC MarketScape Worldwide AI Governance Platforms 2023 Vendor Assessment (doc #US50056923, November 2023).

The study represents a vendor assessment of the 2023 AI governance platform market through the IDC MarketScape model. The IDC MarketScape looked at AI governance platforms that ensure AI and machine learning lifecycle governance, collaborative risk management, and regulatory excellence for AI across five key principles: fairness, explainability, adversarial robustness, lineage, and transparency.

Learn more at the announcement post here:

• Microsoft Azure is a Leader in the inaugural IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI Governance Platforms 2023
  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-is-a-leader-in-the-2023-idc-marketscape-for-ai-governance-platforms/
  

"For every $1 companies invest in AI, they are realizing an average of $3.5 in return and 5% of organizations worldwide are realizing an average of $8 in return."

That’s the result of a study done by IDC around the business opportunity of AI. 

Explore the approaches and strategies enterprise organizations worldwide are using to realize an average of 3.5X return on their AI investments—and find out how 5 percent of organizations are realizing an average of 8X in returns, according to IDC research.

Get The Business Opportunity of AI to:

• Discover the profile and attributes of organizations that are realizing business value with AI.
• Learn about developing an AI strategy with business measurement practices that accurately show the business opportunity and potential benefits for your organization.
• Explore principles for responsible and secure AI build, deployment, and scale.
• Find out why Microsoft is a trusted partner to help you accelerate your AI transformation and realize business value.

Downloadable Infographic summary of the IDC study: (.PDF)

• The Business Opportunity of AI:
  How leading organizations are using AI to drive impact across every industry and addressing barriers such as AI governance, upskilling, and cost.
  idcdocserv.com/US51315823-IG-ADA

Downloadable Report of IDC Study: (30pg / .PDF)

• The Business Opportunity of AI:
  https://info.microsoft.com/ww-landing-idc-delivering-real-business-value-from-ai.html

For organizations looking to get better educated on the use of eDiscovery (Standard or Premium) for Microsoft 365, there are a number of avenues you can pursue:

1. ON-DEMAND TRAINING: “MS-101 Manage content search and investigations in Microsoft 365 (FREE)
   This learning path provides instruction on managing content search and investigations in Microsoft 365, including how to search for content in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal, Microsoft Purview Audit, and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery.
   MS-101 Manage content search and investigations in Microsoft 365 – Training | Microsoft Learn
2. LEARNING PARTNER: “SC 400T00 Administering Information Protection and Compliance in Microsoft 365” (4-day – Purchased directly)
   Microsoft-certified training companies or Learning Partners such as New Horizons/United Training deliver instructor-led courses using Microsoft certified curriculum.  The course they teach is a 5 day course called “SC 400T00 Administering Information Protection and Compliance in Microsoft 365”.  It goes beyond Compliance & Governance but covers both eDiscovery & Audit.  They are usually cost around $2-3K/student/class however if you work through an Account Executive, you can sometimes get volume discounts.

   SC 400T00 Administering Information Protection and Compliance in Microsoft 365
   “Learn how to protect information in your Microsoft 365 deployment. This course focuses on data lifecycle management and information protection and compliance within your organization. The course covers implementation of data loss prevention policies, sensitive information types, sensitivity labels, data retention policies, Microsoft Purview Message Encryption, audit, eDiscovery, and insider risk among other related topics. The course helps learners prepare for the Microsoft Information Protection Administrator exam (SC-400).”
   SC-400T00 Administering Information Protection and Compliance in Microsoft 365 | New Horizons

3. UNIFIED WORKSHOP PLUS: “Office 365 Content Search & eDiscovery Case Management” (1-day – Requires use of Unified credits)
   Customers with Unified Support contracts can use its proactive credits for a workshop on eDiscovery which includes eDiscovery Premium. (which is what you folks are licensed for)  I’ve got page 1 of the datasheet for this offering called, “Office 365 Content Search & eDiscovery Case Management” above.  Contact your Unified Customer Success Account Manager to get this scheduled.

After March 31, 2024, any classic Microsoft Teams users that haven’t updated to new Teams client will be automatically updated to new Teams.

(This automatic update does not apply to Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) users. Classic Teams for VDI will reach end of support on June 30th, 2024. Learn more: Upgrade to new Teams for VDI!)

• "Classic Teams users to be updated to new Teams after March 31, 2024"
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/new-teams-automatic-upgrade-announced

#microsoft #msftadvocate #microsoftteams

Microsoft & GitHub are excited to launch 6-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.

• TRAINING: Mastering GitHub Copilot for AI-Paired Programming
  https://github.com/microsoft/Mastering-GitHub-Copilot-for-Paired-Programming

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