Kurt Shintaku's Blog

To meet increasing digital demand and take advantage of new opportunities, many organizations are modernizing their .NET apps by moving them from on-premises environments to the cloud. Discover the cost advantages of bringing your .NET apps to Azure and learn best practices to prepare for migration. Watch these webinars to see how to move your apps and databases to Azure App Service and Azure SQL Database—and learn about tools to simplify your migration:

• Migrate Your .NET Web Apps to the Cloud to Save Time and Costs – See an in-depth cost comparison of .NET apps running on premises, in Azure App Service, and on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Explore tools to help you improve developer productivity, increase app availability, and quickly get started with migration.
• Prepare Your ASP.NET Apps and SQL Server for Cloud Migration – Learn how to assess your environment, identify the appropriate landing zones such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), migrate your databases, and mitigate common migration blockers.
• Optimize Performance of .NET Web Apps and SQL Databases – Find out how to boost performance with the latest App Service pricing plan and choose the best Azure SQL service tier for your database. Discover best practices for auditing, troubleshooting, and database tuning.
• .NET App Migration Lessons Learned From an Azure Partner – Explore how an Azure partner and a cloud migration platform can simplify your complex web application migration journey. 
• Build Smarter and Faster .NET Web Apps with Azure – Learn how to build smarter and faster applications with functions, APIM, and auto deployment. See how to innovate your apps using native capabilities such as AI and analytics.  
• .NET Web App and Azure SQL Security on Azure – Find out how Azure can provide increased security for your web applications and their accompanying databases.  

Register to watch these on-demand webinars and receive email notifications when new webinars are added to this series.

• .NET Web App Migration Webinar Series
  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/modernize-net-apps-and-data-with-azure-on-demand-webinar-series/

Want to understand how communications and conversations diffuse across and impact your organization? Use “Conversation Insights” on both Yammer and in the Communities app in Microsoft Teams now generally available!

Analytics and data are key to understand the impact of our efforts. Over the last few months, we’ve shipped new ways to measure activity happening in Yammer across Communities, Knowledge, and Live Events.

Today we are thrilled to announce the general availability of Conversation Insights. These insights empower authors and community managers to measure the reach and engagement of their conversations and announcements to understand what content resonates best with audiences.

Conversation Insights is available on Yammer.com on the web, and through the Yammer Communities App in Microsoft Teams.

Read more here:

• Yammer Conversation Insights
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/yammer-blog/new-conversation-insights-help-you-measure-the-reach-and-impact/ba-p/2381246

This “Azure Sentinel Best Practices” whitepaper outlines best practice recommendations for configuring data sources for Microsoft Azure Sentinel, using Azure Sentinel during incident response, and proactively hunting for threats using Azure Sentinel.

Azure Sentinel makes it easy to collect security data across your entire hybrid organization from devices, users, apps, servers, and any cloud. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Sentinel ensures that real threats are identified quickly and unleashes you from the burden of traditional security incident and event management solutions (SIEMs) by automating setting up, maintaining, and scaling infrastructure.

• WHITEPAPER: Azure Sentinel Best Practices (.PDF, 14pgs)
  https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Azure-Sentinel-whitepaper.pdf

Free Downloadable background images for your online meetings – Check out and choose any or all of your favorites  — on us!

• Online Meeting Backgrounds – Outlook, Exchange & Bookings
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/outlook-blog/online-meeting-backgrounds-outlook-exchange-amp-bookings/ba-p/1688841

Just like Gartner, Forrester has a highlighted Microsoft for it’s Endpoint Security offering.

We are excited to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Endpoint Security Software as a Service, Q2 2021¹, receiving one of the highest scores in the strategy category and among the top three scores in the current offering category. Forrester notes that “the focus on endpoint security has increased as cyber risks shift from the network to the endpoints, prompted by increasing amounts of homeworkers and the bulk movement of data from enterprise network-connected data centers to edge devices.”

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint received the highest possible scores in the control, data security, and mobile security criteria, as well as in the Zero Trust framework alignment and security community involvement criteria. Forrester also noted our “impact on endpoint is also notably low when actively running on the endpoint, and that the number of reported false positives by customers is also the lowest in this evaluation.”

Download the report here:

• Microsoft is a Leader in the 2021 Forrester Endpoint Security Software as a Service Wave
  https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/05/25/microsoft-is-a-leader-in-the-2021-forrester-endpoint-security-software-as-a-service-wave/

To help the broader security community go beyond alerts and detections to:

• understand the underlying attack behaviors and technical implementation of adversary techniques
• better respond to investigations of related attacks

Microsoft is releasing SimuLand.

WHAT IS SIMULAND?

SimuLand is an open-source initiative by Microsoft to help security researchers around the world deploy lab environments that reproduce well-known techniques used in real attack scenarios, actively test and verify the effectiveness of related Microsoft 365 Defender, Azure Defender, and Azure Sentinel detections, and extend threat research using telemetry and forensic artifacts generated after each simulation exercise.

These lab environments will provide use cases from a variety of data sources including telemetry from  Microsoft 365 Defender security products, Azure Defender, and other integrated data sources through Azure Sentinel data connectors.

• SimuLand: Understand adversary tradecraft and improve detection strategies
  https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/05/20/simuland-understand-adversary-tradecraft-and-improve-detection-strategies/

We announced a lot of amazing capabilities for developers extending collaborative applications in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

Custom Microsoft Teams Together Mode scenes
Coming this summer, Together mode extensibility lets you create and share your own custom scenes for Teams meetings. This provides an easy design experience, within the Developer Portal for Teams, so developers can craft custom scenes to make meetings more engaging and personalized for your organization.

Some examples:

For more information visit:

• Build the next generation of collaborative apps for hybrid work
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/05/25/build-the-next-generation-of-collaborative-apps-for-hybrid-work/

Join us on Thursday, June 24th at 8:00AM PT to see “what’s next for Windows”, where the we will unveil the next generation of Windows.

Everyone is invited to tune in for the livestream of this public event.

• Date/Time:
  Thursday, June 24th at 8:00AM PT (11am ET)
• Location:
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/event
• Reminder:
  https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RWFdr0

Follow at #MicrosoftEvent.

Golden VM images are good, but have you considered MSIX app attach?

Traditionally, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment requires you to maintain multiple Virtual Machine (VM) images with different applications for your VDI users.

In this webinar, we will discuss a new application layering solution for Windows Virtual Desktop called MSIX app attach. This solution allows you to dynamically attach an application that is an MSIX package to a user session, which eliminates the need to maintain golden virtual machine images and simplifies IT management.

Join to learn about:

• MSIX and how MSIX app attach technologies.
• Benefits and considerations when using MSIX app attach.
• Steps and best practices to successfully use MSIX app attach in Windows Virtual Desktop.

Register for the webinar here:

• Windows Virtual Desktop Webinar: “Manage Apps in Windows Virtual Desktop with MSIX App Attach”
  https://info.microsoft.com/ww-ondemand-manage-apps-in-windows-virtual-desktop-with-msix-app-attach.html?lcid=en-us

For more on setting up MSIX App Attach, visit:

• Set up MSIX app attach with the Azure portal
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/app-attach-azure-portal

FAQs:

• What are the expectations of the availability dates for the non-commercial clouds like US GOV?
  TBD
• Where would I look for logs about this process?
  There is the WVD telemetry and there is https://github.com/stgeorgi/msixappattach/tree/master/event_viewer_filter
• Are any MS apps available pre-packaged as MSIX?
  Any app from the MS Store, there are also apps coming from vendors (Intunes, Slack, PowerBI) that are MSIX
• Do you have to start with an MSI file to make an MSIX package?
  no its only one of the paths
• Can MSIX be used when plug-ins are used? For example, I have several plug-ins for Microsoft Word. Is there a way to get those plug-in to load in an MSIX delivered version of Word?
  Generally yes, but it depends on how the plugins are written, with what tech, and how they communicate with the app
• Can the successfully converted MSI or App-V format be used on different device platforms, i.e.. iOS, Android and Windows 10 and Kubernates containers?
  The MSIX format can be used on iOS but the apps inside cannot be windows and expect them to run on IOS.
• MSIX app attach is strictly WVD or will it work on Azure VDI persistent sessions?
  The management plane that we are going to demo later is strictly WVD, but we have partners that can manage MSIX app attach in VDI on prem
• Can you use MSIX with PS scripts
  Yes https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/app-attach
• Where is the Presentation deck? https://on24static.akamaized.net/event/30/78/00/1/rt/1/documents/resourceList1618508411260/manageappsinwindowsvirtualdesktopwithmsixappattach1618508410015.pdf

Join this Microsoft Viva ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ on Wednesday, June 23, 2021, 9:00-10:00 AM PT!

Microsoft Viva – the first Employee Experience Platform (EXP) built for the digital era – brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources and insights into an integrated employee experience that empowers people and teams to be their best, from anywhere.

Post questions and feedback about Microsfot Viva, and the four Viva Modules (Viva Learning, Viva Connections, Viva Topics and Viva Insights) during this AMA. Members of the Viva team will be on hand to respond between 9:00-10:00 AM PT.

An AMA is a one-hour online forum similar to “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. There is not an audio or video component included. To post a question or comment, click on ‘Start a New Discussion’ in the Microsoft Viva AMA Space.

• Date/Time:
  Wednesday, June 23, 2021, 9:00-10:00 AM PT!
• Location:
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-viva-ama/bd-p/VivaAMA