Kurt Shintaku's Blog

I was recently asked what the differences are between:

• Microsoft 365 E3 + Microsoft 365 E5 Security
• Microsoft 365 E5

FEATURE MATRIX
Here’s a pre-configured Feature Matrix from M365Maps that shows the differences between E3+E5Sec vs E5:

• https://m365maps.com/matrix.htm
  #000000000001101000000

LIST OF DIFFERENCES
For an outline of what all of these differences are, I’ve written them up for convenience sake:

• Compliance & Governance services
• Compliance Management
• Audit (Premium) – 1 year audit log retention, Premium-only Audit Events, High-bandwidth (2x) access to audit logs through O365 Mgmt APIs
  • Optional 10-year Audit Log Retention (only for E5)
• eDiscovery (Premium) – AI-accurate discovery & legal packaging
• Communications Compliance – Detection of regulatory compliance & business conduct violations
• Premium Compliance Manager Templates (3x ala carte) – Select 3 compliance templates from a catalog of 200+
• Data Lifecycle Management – Retain & delete broad groups of documents & data based on Enterprise policy
• Records Management – Provide specific retention & evidence of deletion on classified documents for compliance
• Message Encryption (Premium) – Restricting external recipient access to messages to meet compliance obligations
• Customer Key – Empowers own to submit & use their own encryption key for M365 services for compliance purposes
• Customer Lockbox – Ensures that Microsoft can’t access your content to do service operations without your explicit approval.
• Double Key Encryption – Uses two keys together to access select, protected content, one key held by Microsoft, the other key held by the instance owner. (Warning: Limits M365 functionality)
• Privileged Access Management for Office 365 – Allows granular access control over privileged admin tasks in Office 365 & protects against breaches that use admin accounts with standing access to sensitive data.
• Graph Access
• Built-in Graph Connector Quota Entitlement – 500 items/license of index quota, which counts towards ingesting content from Microsoft Graph connectors
• Built-in Graph Support for Teams DLP & Export – Real time API access to listen to Teams chats & export chats to 3rd party DLP solutions.
• Data Loss Prevention
  • Teams Data Loss Prevention – Chat-based monitoring & prevention of the sharing of sensitive information
  • Endpoint Data Loss Prevention – Prevents data from leaving laptops & desktops through USB or other means
  • Information Barriers – Restrict communications between two groups (depts) on SharePoint, Teams, Exchange, etc.
  • Insider Risk Management – Detect & prevent internal data leakage, security violations, IP theft, etc.
• Data Classification & Labelling
  • Rules-based Classification (Online) – Automatically apply labels in Office 365 based on policies
  • Rules-based Classification (On-prem) – Automatically apply labels in on-prem files & folders using a crawler
  • Exact Data Match Classification – Detect exact or nearly exact data values to identify classified information
  • AI-Trainable Classifiers – Identify classified content by training classifiers on 1000s of samples using machine learning
• Enterprise Data Analytics
  • Power BI Pro – Provide reports & dashboards against any data source
• Cloud-based Digital Telephony
• Teams Phone – Cloud-based call control & PBX services through Microsoft Teams
• Exclusive add-on: Calling Plans – Provides a primary phone number & calling minutes to make/receive calls.
• Exclusive add-on: Communications Credits – Provides usage if your org runs out of minutes & needs to continue to make calls or dial out from Audio Conferencing meetings.
• Exclusive add-on: Operator Connect – Provides PSTN connectivity with Teams Phone.
• Employee Performance Management
  • Viva Insights (Premium) – Data-driven visibility into how work patterns affect wellbeing, productivity & business performance.

Microsoft 365 Copilot promises to provide a revolutionary accelerator for work productivity. Artificial intelligence will minimize the “drudgery” of the work day.

• Questions will be answered quicker.
• Content will be created faster.
• Production documentation will minimize errors.
• Time saved will provide a business advantage.

Microsoft 365 Copilot & the NEW “Copilot System” service will be the core for the following AI solutions:

• Copilot for Word
• Copilot for Excel
• Copilot for PowerPoint
• Copilot for Outlook
• Copilot for Teams

If you’re a Microsoft 365 E3/E5 subscriber, visit the following sites to learn more on how to prepare & plan to adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot to provide your organization with the productivity advantage that artificial intelligence brings.

1. Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program
2. Microsoft 365 Copilot Adoption
3. How to prepare for Microsoft 365 Copilot
4. Microsoft 365 Copilot Community

If you have MailTips enabled for Office 365 on external recipients and receive the following notifications:

EXTERNAL EMAIL : This email originated from outside of organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.

… and would like to add an exception to remove this notification/MailTip for a specific domain so that the “EXTERNAL EMAIL” warning doesn’t display for those domain senders, follow the instructions below using PowerShell to identify an external domain as “internal”:

You can add the specific domain to a remote domain and set it as internal.

New-RemoteDomain -Name <name> -DomainName <domain name>
Set-RemoteDomain -Identity <domain name> -IsInternal $true

And then enable MailTips for external recipients.

Set-Organizationconfig -MailTipsExternalRecipientsTipsEnabled $true

Are you concerned about your team’s application development skills?

Are you short of staff – much development staff?

Do you need to integrate with legacy systems or 3rd party online services?

Are you looking to deliver immediate impact & minimize the amount of time required to deliver business solutions?

The way forward? Low-code. Edelman Assembly, on behalf of Microsoft, surveyed more than 2,000 IT CIOs and IT pros to understand the benefits they derive from low-code platforms. The research is clear: low-code empowers IT departments to rapidly build technical solutions and streamline data insights all while lowering costs.

According to a 2021 Microsoft-commissioned Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study of Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Azure for Corporate IT, professional developer efficiency with low-code platforms significantly increases over time, averaging 62 percent over three years. These efficiency gains are necessary as 45 percent of IT pros say they first adopted low-code platforms to make up for staff shortages.

…

Read the entire report here:

• Low-code: One of the best investments for IT departments in 2023
  https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/powerplatform/2023/04/13/low-code-signals-2023/

How can low-code help your IT department?
For IT departments and organizations looking to reduce costs, reduce their application backlog, and rapidly turn data insights into actions in 2023, low-code should be a key part of your development strategy. To learn how your organization can start, grow, and develop an expert level low-code practice, take the Microsoft Power Platform Adoption Assessment.

This assessment is designed to help you get started quickly by identifying opportunities to optimize and streamline efforts, and sharing best practices on how organizations can better use Microsoft Power Platform to achieve their business objectives.

• Power Platform Adoption Assessment
  Receive curated and personalized guidance that fits your specific scenarios.
  https://learn.microsoft.com/assessments/3c62fd23-9d36-491c-8941-26d5553365f8/

Azure AI Document Intelligence is the latest release of Azure Forms Recognizer with a series of new capabilities:

• Document classification and splitting
• Document classification model can route documents for specific workflows
• Multi-document folios in a single file can be split
• Multi-instance folios with multiple invoices in the same document can be spilot
• New prebuilt models for contracts and tax forms
• Extract common fields from any legal contract automatically
• Use prebuilt models for 1098 tax, 1098-E, 1098-T, W2, etc.
• Content and structure extraction
• Support for extracting bar codes
• High resolution document extraction (Engineering)
• Formulas can be extracts for scientific research
• Fonts can be extracted as part of the structure
• Custom model updates
• Support for 47 languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic. You can train a custom neural model for documents in any of the supported languages to extract the fields needed.
• Models can be trained with only a single-labeled document
• “Studio” – Document classification model training & test environment
• End user friendly model training tool
• Human-in-the-loop model training to maximize accuracy
• Auto-labeling of documents

With its enhanced capabilities and expanded scope, Azure AI Document Intelligence is set to empower organizations across all industries to harness the full potential of document information.

Document Intelligence is designed to help organizations streamline their operations and boost productivity. it enables efficient extraction of data from diverse document formats. From invoices and receipts to contracts and reports, Document Intelligence is capable of swiftly and accurately capturing information, eliminating the need for manual data entry. This time-saving automation allows employees to focus on more strategic tasks, resulting in increased productivity across the board.

…

Visit the blog for more information, documentation on the new Azure AI Document Intelligence service & details on how to get started today:

• Azure Form Recognizer is now Azure AI Document Intelligence with new and updated capabilities
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-ai-services-blog/azure-form-recognizer-is-now-azure-ai-document-intelligence-with/ba-p/3875765

In partnership with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, we’re announcing new steps to protect our customers and improve the security of Microsoft cloud platforms.

Today we are expanding Microsoft’s cloud logging accessibility and flexibility even further. Over the coming months, we will include access to wider cloud security logs for our worldwide customers at no additional cost. As these changes take effect, customers can use Microsoft Purview Audit to centrally visualize more types of cloud log data generated across their enterprise.

Microsoft Purview Audit enables customers to centrally visualize cloud log data generated across their enterprise, thus helping them effectively respond to security events, forensic investigations, internal investigations and compliance obligations. Thousands of user and admin operations performed in dozens of Microsoft 365 services and solutions are captured, recorded and retained in customers unified Purview Audit logs.

For Microsoft Purview Audit (Standard) customers (E3/G3), Microsoft will now provide:

• Detailed logs of email access and more than 30 other types of log data previously only available at the Microsoft Purview Audit (Premium) subscription level
• Increasing the default retention period from 90 days to 180 days

For Microsoft Purview Audit (Premium) customers already have:

• All available audit logging events, including “Intelligent Insights”, which help determine the scope of potential compromise by using the Audit log search – only available to Audit Premium
• 1 year default retention periods (licensable to 10 yrs retention) and automation support for importing log data into other tools for analysis  

Microsoft will begin rolling out these logging updates in September 2023 to all government and commercial customers.

Learn how this will help defend against nation-state cyber threats:

• How Microsoft is expanding cloud logging to give customers deeper security visibility
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/07/19/expanding-cloud-logging-to-give-customers-deeper-security-visibility/

Learn the differences between Purview Audit Standard & Premium here:

• Comparison of key abilities in Microsoft Purview Auditing solutions
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/audit-solutions-overview?view=o365-worldwide#comparison-of-key-capabilities

Today we announced Extended Security Updates enabled by Azure Arc, for Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 & SQL Server 2012 (years 2 and 3) – as a pay-as-you-go subscription!

This is enabled in the Azure Portal and is charged as a Pay As You Go service – perfect for securing older workloads outside of Azure that you’re planning to upgrade, migrate or decommission.

• Announcement blog: ”New options for Windows Server 2012/R2 end of support from Azure”
  https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2023/07/18/new-options-for-windows-server-2012-r2-end-of-support-from-azure/?WT.mc_id=modinfra-0000-socuff

• Deployment and screenshots: “New options for Extended Security Updates enabled by Azure Arc”
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-arc-blog/new-options-for-extended-security-updates-enabled-by-azure-arc/ba-p/3876737?WT.mc_id=modinfra-0000-socuff

Check your Azure portal for pricing.

Employees are looking to use AI tools to help them unlock creativity and productivity at work—70% say they would delegate as much work as possible to AI according to our Work Trend Index¹. But using AI tools that aren’t built for the enterprise inadvertently puts sensitive business data at risk. As organizations adopt AI, they want to be confident their data is protected.

Bing Chat Enterprise gives your organization AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection. With Bing Chat Enterprise, user and business data are protected and will not leak outside the organization. Chat data is not saved, and no one at Microsoft can view customer data. Additionally, data is not used to train the models. 

Just like Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise is grounded in web data and provides complete, verifiable answers with citations, along with visual answers that include graphs, charts, and images, and is designed in line with our AI principles².

Bing Chat Enterprise is now rolling out in preview at no additional cost as part of Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium subscriptions.

Get started today:

1. Review the Bing Chat Enterprise documentation on Microsoft Learn for guidance on how to turn on Bing Chat Enterprise for your organization.
2. Once Bing Chat Enterprise is turned on, users in your organization will be able to access it from Bing.com/chat , the sidebar in Microsoft Edge, and soon from Windows Copilot, just by signing in with their work accounts.

Reference links:

1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work 
2. https://www.microsoft.com/ai/our-approach?activetab=pivot1:primaryr5

Are you an IT Professional?Do you automate things in PowerShell?

Wouldn’t it be cool to have an AI agent watch your comments and provide you with PowerShell code that fulfills the objective of what you’ve written?  Kinda like Autocomplete for PowerShell?

Enter GitHub Copilot for PowerShell.

• VIDEO: GitHub Copilot for PowerShell
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwtRzAFiXEM

Install & start your free trial of GitHub Copilot: https://aka.ms/get-copilot

More info:
https://github.com/features/copilot

Quick startup guide: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/quickstart