As a Microsoft Partner Network member, are you looking to build your technical capabilities for Business Applications, including Customer Engagement and Finance & Operations? Learn first-hand from a Microsoft Partner Technical Consultant during a live, interactive technical webinar where you can ask questions as you learn! Best part? There is no cost to MPN members!

There’s more… while technical webinars are the foundation to building your technical skillset, engage with a Partner Technical Consultant through a one-to-one technical consultation to receive technical guidance through virtual white-boarding, architecture reviews and shadowing of real-world scenarios by leveraging your MPN technical presales and deployment benefits.

Learn more about the technical journeys available for the Business Applications practice areas to help you as you get started, grow your practice or optimize your practice: Customer Engagement | Operations.

Register today for an upcoming remote technical webinar! Various dates and times are available to suit your morning, afternoon or evening schedule.

As a Microsoft Partner Network member, are you looking to build your technical capabilities for Data & AI? Learn first-hand from a Microsoft Partner Technical Consultant during a live, interactive technical webinar where you can ask questions as you learn! Best part? There is no cost to MPN members!

There’s more… while technical webinars are the foundation to building your technical skillset, engage with a Partner Technical Consultant through a one-to-one technical consultation to receive technical guidance through virtual white-boarding, architecture reviews and shadowing of real-world scenarios by leveraging your MPN technical presales and deployment benefits.

Learn more about the technical journey available for Data & AI to help you as you get started, grow your practice or optimize your practice – get started!

Register today for an upcoming remote technical webinar! Various dates and times are available to suit your morning, afternoon or evening schedule.

As a Microsoft Partner Network member, are you looking to build your technical capabilities for Cloud Infrastructure & Management? Learn first-hand from a Microsoft Partner Technical Consultant during a live, interactive technical webinar where you can ask questions as you learn! Best part? There is no cost to MPN members!

There’s more… while technical webinars are the foundation to building your technical skillset, engage with a Partner Technical Consultant through a one-to-one technical consultation to receive technical guidance through virtual white-boarding, architecture reviews and shadowing of real-world scenarios by leveraging your MPN technical presales and deployment benefits.

Learn more about the technical journey available for Cloud Infrastructure & Management to help you as you get started, grow your practice or optimize your practice – get started!

Register today for an upcoming remote technical webinar! Various dates and times are available to suit your morning, afternoon or evening schedule.

As a Microsoft Partner Network member, are you looking to build your technical capabilities for Application Innovation? Learn first-hand from a Microsoft Partner Technical Consultant during a live, interactive technical webinar where you can ask questions as you learn! Best part? There is no cost to MPN members!

There’s more… while technical webinars are the foundation to building your technical skillset, you have a few other options to engage with Microsoft technical experts:

1. Dev Chat – chat live to get the technical tips you need to get started and successfully build Office 365 or Azure apps and get answers to quickly resolve programming questions regarding the capability and services (available in English and Mandarin only) – available at no cost to Network, Action Pack, Silver and Gold MPN partners
2. Technical consultations – receive deeper one-to-one technical guidance through virtual white-boarding, architecture reviews and shadowing of real-world scenarios – available to Action Pack, Silver and Gold MPN partners by leveraging your partner advisory hours; some consultations are at no cost

Learn how to access Dev Chat and request deeper technical consultations to help you plan, build and deploy your apps on Microsoft Azure and for Microsoft Office 365.

Register today for an upcoming remote technical webinar! Various dates and times are available to suit your morning, afternoon or evening schedule.

Juan Cruz, Partner Technical Strategist - System Integrators

We are going to be reviewing the Microsoft Azure Security and Management capabilities of the hybrid cloud. This is part one of our security and management blog series covering Azure Security Center.

Securing Azure resources

If we start by looking at what’s happening within cloud technology as it relates to digital transformation, security is what has become a driving factor in the way businesses operate. The rise of more sophisticated threats is presenting our customers and partners with a new set of challenges. This increase in threats affects everyone, regardless of location, public cloud or on-premise.

As cloud adoption grows, many customers will be moving to cloud through a hybrid approach. The journey to the cloud is a shared responsibility between the customer and Microsoft with regards to securing Azure resources.

Microsoft’s commitment is to secure and manage the cloud foundation through:

• Security and management of physical assets: layers of physical protection, state-of-the-art controls, etc.
• Datacenter operations security and management: security operations center, incident assessments, continuous monitoring by security experts
• Cloud infrastructure security and management: secure multi-tenancy, DDoS defense system, etc.

From a customer perspective, they are responsible for securing and managing cloud resources such as virtual machines, applications, and data.

When you look at the traditional way of deploying cloud applications (IaaS), the customer was ultimately responsible for the entire stack (short of the hardware) meaning they must patch servers and applications and secure data. As customers move towards a hosted and integrated solution, the amount of responsibility starts to shift towards the cloud provider.

The cloud provider is responsible for securing the platform, while you are responsible for securing your application and data. Service providers now have more choices for developer entry points along the control-speed continuum. The question is “Where do I start?” not “Which do I choose?” Partners that are traditionally focused on IaaS can now offer multiple entry points to customers.

Microsoft Azure Security Center

Azure Security Center covers three foundational scenarios – unified visibility and control, adaptive threat prevention, and intelligent detection and response.

With Azure Security Center you can manage the security posture of all your hybrid cloud workloads in a single pane of glass, meaning you can see all the events, and recommendations for all your servers and applications, regardless of where they reside.

Security Center provides features such as central policy management, which allows you to apply policies to existing workloads, as well as helping on-board and discover new workloads (as they are provisioned).

Azure Security Center provides the ability for our customers to ingest data from existing security investments. Microsoft offers extensive integration with our partners, Microsoft’s first party solutions, and many third-party solutions.

With a built-in security assessment, you can continuously identify vulnerabilities within your environment. You can look at items like system updates status or check for an unconfigured NSG.

Within Security Center you can look at the top security recommendations for your environment. Many of these recommendations can be remediated from these alerts within the console.

Azure Security Center also has built in cyber defenses to help block malicious access and applications. Two concepts, such as just-in-time access and prescriptive application whitelisting, can help better secure environments from unknown threats.

As important as it is to understand how to defend ourselves from an attack, it’s equally as important to understand what happened during an attack and how you can prevent that from happening again. With Windows Defender ATP, we’re able to detect threats across the kill chain. You can analyze the target of the attack, review items like install and exploit attacks, and provide post breach information.

As we all start to move towards a more automated world, the automation of detection and prevention provides greater ability to protect and secure an environment, without the need of user intervention.

Our customers can gain visibility into the health, performance, and utilization of their platform, apps, and workloads, no matter where they reside. This allows them to get time back to focus on the initiatives that matter most.

Azure provides monitoring and analytics as a SaaS offering, so you can get started quickly without any infrastructure overhead. It is designed to manage your development and IT operations workflows through a unified experience. It can connect to any data source and you can leverage your existing management tools, both on-premise and in the cloud. You can query at cloud scale and gain immediate insight by correlating and analyzing petabytes of machine data. With built-in solutions and machine learning algorithms baked into the service, you can detect and fix issues before it impacts users… no matter what type of platform you use.

In part two, we will look at some of these features in action and how to better secure your environments. Stay tuned in the coming weeks.

Applications and Infrastructure Technical Community

• Community call schedule
• Yammer group
• Blog series
• Watch community calls on demand 

Exchange 2013 CU20 has been released to the Microsoft download centre!  Exchange 2013 has a different servicing strategy than Exchange 2007/2010 and utilises Cumulative Updates (CUs) rather than the Rollup Updates (RU/UR) which were used previously.    CUs are a complete installation of Exchange 2013 and can be used to install a fresh server or to update a previously installed one.  Exchange 2013 SP1 was in effect CU4, and CU20 is the sixteenth post SP1 release.

This is build 15.00.1367.003 of Exchange 2013 and the update is helpfully named Exchange2013-x64-cu20.exe.  Which is a great improvement over the initial CUs that all had the same file name!  Details for the release are contained in KB 4055221.

Whether or not your AD Schema needs to be updated depends upon your initial Exchange 2013 version.  This will dictate if the AD Schema needs to be modified.  Check the values as noted in this post.  There may be additional RBAC definitions, so PrepareAD should be executed prior to installing CU20.  If setup detects that PrepareAD is required it should be automatically executed if the account running setup has the necessary permissions.  This was an issue first discussed in the MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled  post and in Unexpected Exchange AD Object Values.

Exchange 2007 is no longer supported, updates are not provided once a product has exited out of extended support.

Updates Of Particular Note

.NET framework 4.7.1 is fully supported.    Currently this is an optional item, but will be required with the June 2018 CU.  Plan accordingly!   Customers should test, verify and install CU20 then move to update to .NET 4.7.1 which will be required for the June 2018 CU install.

.NET Framework 4.7 is not supported.

TLS 1.2 is now supported on all supported Exchange versions.  Expect to see additional guidance on this subject.  The first post in this series is already available.   This is a work stream that will require attention as Office 365 will enforce TLS 1.2 on October 31st 2018.  This is an extension to the previous announcement, and details are available here.

4073392 Description of the security update for Microsoft Exchange: March 13, 2018

4073096 Emails sent from a shared mailbox aren't saved in Sent Items when MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled is True

4073097 Monitoring probes of ECP.Proxy health checks fail on all CAS roles in Exchange Server 2013 and 2016

4057216 Health mailbox's password is exposed in logs for a failed probe in Exchange Server 2016 and 2013

CU20 includes the security fixes released to address the issues in the March 2018 security bulletin.

CU20 also includes the latest DST updates.

Issues Resolved

4073392 Description of the security update for Microsoft Exchange: March 13, 2018

4073094 Emails outside a UID range are returned when you request for emails by using IMAP

4073097 Monitoring probes of ECP.Proxy health checks fail on all CAS roles in Exchange Server 2013 and 2016

4057216 Health mailbox's password is exposed in logs for a failed probe in Exchange Server 2016 and 2013

4058384 Get-CalendarDiagnosticAnalysis shows DateTime in 12-hour clock in Exchange Server 2016 and 2013

4057290 Incorrect user is returned in the ECP when one user's display name matches another user's alias

4055433 User is added to an entire series when accepting a single instance through Exchange ActiveSync

4058401 Administrator audit logging does not record Set-ServerComponentState cmdlet details in Exchange Server 2013 or 2016 environment

4073095 "550 5.6.0 CAT.InvalidContent.Exception" and email isn't delivered in Exchange Server 2016 and 2013

4058379 All cross-forest meeting updates have to be accepted again in Exchange Server 2016 and 2013

4073093 Save issues occur when you use the plain Text Editor in OWA of Exchange Server 2013

4073096 Emails sent from a shared mailbox aren't saved in Sent Items when MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled is True

Some Items For Consideration

As with previous CUs, this one also follows the new servicing paradigm which was previously discussed on the blog.  The CU package can be used to perform a new installation, or to upgrade an existing Exchange Server 2013 installation.  You do not need to install Cumulative Update 4 or 5 for Exchange Server 2013 when you are installing the latest CU.  Cumulative Updates are well, cumulative.  What else can I say…

For customers with a hybrid Exchange deployment, must keep their on-premises Exchange servers updated to the latest update or the one immediately prior ( N or N-1).

After you install this cumulative update package, you cannot uninstall the cumulative update package to revert to an earlier version of Exchange 2013. If you uninstall this cumulative update package, Exchange 2013 is removed from the server.

• Test the CU in a lab which is representative of your environment

• Review this post to also factor in AD preparation which is to be done ahead of installing the CU onto the first Exchange server

• Follow your organisation’s change management process, and factor the approval time into your change request

• Provide appropriate notifications as per your process.  This may be to IT teams, or to end users.

• After you install this cumulative update package, you cannot uninstall the cumulative update package to revert to an earlier version of Exchange. If you uninstall this cumulative update package, Exchange is removed from the server.

• Place the server into SCOM maintenance mode prior to installing, confirm the install then take the server out of maintenance mode

• Place the server into Exchange maintenance mode prior to installing, confirm the install then take the server out of maintenance mode

• I personally like to restart prior to installing CUs.  This helps identifies if an issue was due to the CU or happened in this prior restart, and also completes any pending file rename operations.  3rd party AV products are often guilty of this

• Restart the server after installing the CU

• Ensure that all the relevant services are running

• Ensure that event logs are clean, with no errors

• Ensure that you consult with all 3rd party vendors which exist as part of your messaging environment.  This includes archive, backup, mobility and management services

• Ensure that you do not forget to install this update on management servers, jump servers/workstations and application servers where the management tools were installed for an application.  FIM and 3rd party user provisioning solutions are examples of the latter

• Ensure that the Windows PowerShell Script Execution Policy is set to “Unrestricted” on the server being upgraded or installed.  See KB981474

• Disable file system antivirus prior to installing.  Do this through the appropriate console.  Typically this will be a central admin console, not the local machine

• Verify file system antivirus is actually disabled

• Once server has been restarted, re-enable file system antivirus

• Note that customised configuration files are overwritten on installation.  Make sure you have any changes fully documented!

• While CU20 does not add any new AD Schema changes.  If you are on an out-dated CU currently, then deploying CU20 may contain AD Schema updates for your organisation – please test and plan accordingly!  Whether or not your AD Schema needs to be updated depends upon your initial Exchange 2013 version.  This will dictate if the AD Schema needs to be modified.  Check the values as noted in this post.  Additional RBAC definitions may also be required.

Please enjoy the update responsibly!

What do I mean by that?  Well, you need to ensure that you are fully informed about the caveats with the CU  and are aware of all of the changes that it will make within your environment.  Additionally you will need to test the CU your lab which is representative of your production environment.

Cheers,

Rhoderick

(This post is part of my review of the Microsoft Professional Program: Cloud Administration)

Course 2 of 11: - Provision and Manage Virtual Machines

Overview:  The "Azure Virtual Machines" course is comprised of 5 modules covering what is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), creating virtual machines, configuring virtual machines, virtual machine disks, and how to manage virtual machines. There is two additional modules which cover a practical assessment and final exam which aims to test your recently gained knowledge to the test. Don't skip the introductory module since it covers setting up a free Microsoft Azure trial account which lands you $200 of Azure credit for 30 days. I love free stuff!

Time Spent / Level of Effort: This course is the first real deep dive into what Azure is all about. Compared to the first course where it took me under 3 hours to complete, this course took me between 8-10 hours. As before, I watched all the videos at double speed then completed each quiz after each module. The module quizzes were easy to pass since the answers are explained in the videos or the self-paced reading material. Maybe I missed a few answers in the videos, but I had to search a few answer on the web to complete a few quizzes. The final exam and lab were pretty straight-forward and I passed the overall course with a 82%.

Course Highlight: The terms SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS are not new. However, the course did a really thorough job on explaining the differences between them all in a very simple and easy to understand manner. I have a fair amount of experience with Azure, but never with a true production environment. Module 3 introduced an important Azure feature for production environments called Availability Sets. As an Azure administrator, you must be prepared for planned (updates) and unplanned (hardware) failures. One way to prepare is with Availability Set, which is a logical grouping of two or more virtual machines. For all Virtual Machines that have two or more instances deployed in the same Availability Set, Microsoft guarantees you will have Virtual Machine Connectivity to at least one instance at least 99.95% of the time.

Suggestions: While navigating through the course, take notes on the numerous resources, tools, and tips that are generously provided in each module. Also, since the labs walk through step-by-step to provide the answers for the quizzes, it is easy to set up the environment and then instantly delete it from your Azure account after answering the questions. Here are two interesting resources that I took note of:

Azure Tools for Visual Studio: Where developers can setup a VM for testing quickly using built in templates in Visual Studio.

Azure Resource Explorer:  is a great tool to view and modify resources you have created in your subscription. The tool is web-based and uses your Azure portal logon credentials. The source for the Resource Explorer tool is available on GitHub, which provides a valuable reference if you need to implement similar behavior in your own applications. This tool is particularly useful in viewing Azure scale sets. With the tool you can see the individual virtual machines and their properties.

If you have taken this course in the past or are going through it now, please leave a comment and share your experience.

Thanks,

Adam Lichtenberg [MSFT]

Harvard Business Review Onlineの特設サイト「AI SHIFT」を公開しました。

AIエリアの有識者を取材した特集記事を掲載していますので、ぜひご覧ください。

日本マイクロソフト 執行役員　最高技術責任者（CTO）兼　マイクロソフト ディベロップメント 代表取締役 社長 榊原彰 のインタビュー

「AIを自社のビジネスに生かすために経営者は何をすべきか」

日本マイクロソフト 執行役員 常務　パートナー事業本部長 高橋 美波のインタビュー

「みんなのAI」は企業のビジネスをどう支援するのか

Exchange 2016 CU9 has been released to the Microsoft download centre!  Exchange 2016 has a different servicing strategy than Exchange 2007/2010 and utilises Cumulative Updates (CUs) rather than the Rollup Updates (RU/UR) which were used previously.    CUs are a complete installation of Exchange 2016 and can be used to install a fresh server or to update a previously installed one. Exchange 2013 has the same servicing methodology.

This is build 15.01.1466.003 of Exchange 2016 and the update is helpfully named ExchangeServer2016-x64-CU9.iso which allows us to easily identify the update.  Details for the release are contained in KB 4055222.

Exchange 2007 is no longer supported, updates are not provided once a product has exited out of extended support.

Updates Of Particular Note

.NET framework 4.7.1 is fully supported.    Currently this is an optional item, but will be required with the June 2018 CU.  Plan accordingly!   Customers should test, verify and install CU9 then move to update to .NET 4.7.1 which will be required for the June 2018 CU install.

.NET Framework 4.7 is not supported.

TLS 1.2 is now supported on all supported Exchange versions.  Expect to see additional guidance on this subject.  The first post in this series is already available.   This is a work stream that will require attention as Office 365 will enforce TLS 1.2 on October 31st 2018.  This is an extension to the previous announcement, and details are available here.

As per Active Directory Forest Functional Levels for Exchange Server 2016, it was announced that Exchange Server 2016 would enforce a minimum 2008R2 Forest Functional Level requirement for Active Directory.  Cumulative Update 7 for Exchange Server 2016 started enforcing this AD DS requirement.

4057216 Health mailbox's password is exposed in logs for a failed probe in Exchange Server 2016 and 2013

4073110 You can't access OWA or ECP after you install Exchange Server 2016 CU8

4073392 Description of the security update for Microsoft Exchange: March 13, 2018

4058401 Administrator audit logging does not record Set-ServerComponentState cmdlet details in Exchange Server 2013 or 2016 environment

4073097 Monitoring probes of ECP.Proxy health checks fail on all CAS roles in Exchange Server 2013 and 2016

4073098 The ETS and EXS groups are incorrectly granted “SeDebugPrivilege” in Exchange Server 2016 on-premises

4077924 Store Worker process crashes when you move, restore, or repair mailboxes that have issues with the logical index within the database in Exchange Server 2016

CU9 includes the security fixes released to address the issues in the March 2018 security bulletin.

CU9 also includes the latest DST updates.

Issues Resolved

4054513 Mailbox usage status bar in OWA displays incorrect mailbox usage

4055433 User is added to an entire series when accepting a single instance through Exchange ActiveSync

4057216 Health mailbox's password is exposed in logs for a failed probe in Exchange Server 2016 and 2013

4058373 "A parameter cannot be found" error when you run Install-AntiSpamAgents.ps1 in Exchange Server 2016 CU7

4058379 All cross-forest meeting updates have to be accepted again in Exchange Server 2016 and 2013

4058383 Exchange Control Panel (ECP) redirection fails in Exchange Server 2016

4058384 Get-CalendarDiagnosticAnalysis shows DateTime in 12-hour clock in Exchange Server 2016 and 2013

4058399 Disabling a mailbox can't remove legacyExchangeDN from user's properties in Exchange Server 2016

4073094 Emails outside a UID range are returned when you request for emails by using IMAP

4073095 "550 5.6.0 CAT.InvalidContent.Exception" and email isn't delivered in Exchange Server 2016 and 2013

4073104 PIN can be reset on a Unified Messaging (UM)-enabled mailbox for a user outside a scoped OU

4073103 The Enable-Mailbox cmdlet doesn't block migrated users from provisioning in Exchange Server 2016

4073107 Language can't be changed when a user from a child domain tries to change language in OWA

4073111 Can't access a CAS website such as OWA/ECP/Autodiscover in Exchange Server 2016

4073110 You can't access OWA or ECP after you install Exchange Server 2016 CU8

4073109 Search-MailboxAuditLog -ShowDetails not showing all messages in Exchange Server 2016

4073114 "ADOperationException" error when OWA text verification fails in Exchange Server 2016

4073214 Can't enable OWA offline access in Exchange Server 2016

4073531 CultureNotFoundException when selecting a LCID 4096 language in OWA for Exchange Server 2016

4076520 MatchSubdomains isn't usable for Set-AcceptedDomain in Exchange Server 2016

4076741 Incorrect NDR when an administrator deletes a message from a queue in Exchange Server 2016

4077655 Event ID 258 "Unable to determine the installed file" after you uninstall Windows PowerShell 2.0

4057290 Incorrect user is returned in the ECP when one user's display name matches another user's alias

4058372 Blank page in Exchange Admin Center Audit Log in Exchange Server 2016

4058382 Can't retrieve time slot information about private calendar items as a delegate on another user's account in Exchange Server 2016

4058401 Administrator audit logging does not record Set-ServerComponentState cmdlet details in Exchange Server 2013 or 2016 environment

4073097 Monitoring probes of ECP.Proxy health checks fail on all CAS roles in Exchange Server 2013 and 2016

4073098 The ETS and EXS groups are incorrectly granted “SeDebugPrivilege” in Exchange Server 2016 on-premises

4073108 “There was a problem loading your options” error when a user accesses OWA Voice Mail options in Exchange Server 2016

4077924 Store Worker process crashes when you move, restore, or repair mailboxes that have issues with the logical index within the database in Exchange Server 2016

4091453 Update improves linguistics features and CJK handling for search in Exchange Server 2016

4073392 Description of the security update for Microsoft Exchange: March 13, 2018

After you install Cumulative Update 9 for Exchange Server 2016, the Accept button disappears in the invitation email message of a shared calendar in Outlook Web App (OWA). Therefore, you cannot add the shared calendar by clicking the Accept button directly.

Some Items For Consideration

Exchange 2016 follows the same servicing paradigm for Exchange 2013 which was previously discussed on the blog.  The CU package can be used to perform a new installation, or to upgrade an existing Exchange Server 2016 installation to this CU.  Cumulative Updates are well, cumulative.  What else can I say…

For customers with a hybrid Exchange deployment, must keep their on-premises Exchange servers updated to the latest update or the one immediately prior ( N or N-1).

• Test the CU in a lab which is representative of your environment

• Review this post to also factor in AD preparation which is to be done ahead of installing the CU onto the first Exchange server

• Follow your organisation’s change management process, and factor the approval time into your change request

• Provide appropriate notifications as per your process.  This may be to IT teams, or to end users.

• After you install this cumulative update package, you cannot uninstall the cumulative update package to revert to an earlier version of Exchange. If you uninstall this cumulative update package, Exchange is removed from the server.

• Place the server into SCOM maintenance mode prior to installing, confirm the install then take the server out of maintenance mode

• lace the server into Exchange maintenance mode prior to installing, confirm the install then take the server out of maintenance mode

• I personally like to restart prior to installing CUs.  This helps identifies if an issue was due to the CU or happened in this prior restart, and also completes any pending file rename operations.  3rd party AV products are often guilty of this

• Restart the server after installing the CU

• Ensure that all the relevant services are running

• Ensure that event logs are clean, with no errors

• Ensure that you consult with all 3rd party vendors which exist as part of your messaging environment.  This includes archive, backup, mobility and management services.

• Ensure that you do not forget to install this update on management servers, jump servers/workstations and application servers where the management tools were installed for an application.  FIM and 3rd party user provisioning solutions are examples of the latter.

• Ensure that the Windows PowerShell Script Execution Policy is set to “Unrestricted” on the server being upgraded or installed.  See KB981474.

• Disable file system antivirus prior to installing. Do this through the appropriate console.  Typically this will be a central admin console, not the local machine.

• Verify file system antivirus is actually disabled

• Once server has been restarted, re-enable file system antivirus.

• Note that customised configuration files are overwritten on installation.  Make sure you have any changes fully documented!

• CU9 does NOT contain new AD Schema updates for your organisation.

While CU9 does not add any new AD Schema changes.  If you are on an out-dated CU currently, then deploying CU9 may contain AD Schema updates for your organisation – please test and plan accordingly!  Whether or not your AD Schema needs to be updated depends upon your initial Exchange 2016 version.  This will dictate if the AD Schema needs to be modified.

Please enjoy the update responsibly!

What do I mean by that?  Well, you need to ensure that you are fully informed about the caveats with the CU  and are aware of all of the changes that it will make within your environment.  Additionally you will need to test the CU your lab which is representative of your production environment.

Cheers,

Rhoderick

Introducing Windows Server 2019 – now available in preview
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2018/03/20/introducing-windows-server-2019-now-available-in-preview/

10 апреля в 11:00 приглашаем наших слушателей на вебинар «Введение в облачную аналитику с помощью машинного обучения в Azure»

Вебинар будет полезен широкому кругу специалистов, которые хотят использовать в своей практической деятельности облачную аналитику для реализации машинного обучения и построения сервисов прогнозов, и которым важна задача визуализации результатов анализа данных и представления отчетов о процессе работы в виде диаграмм.

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (ML) делает машинное обучение доступным для каждого предприятия, научного сотрудника, разработчика, информационного работника, потребителя и специального устройства в любой точке мира.

В вебинаре будут рассмотрены вводные темы, помогающие понять как:

• Описать общую проблематику машинного обучения и то, как ML используется в службах Azure.
• Рассмотреть возможности Azure ML Studio, рабочие пространства, эксперименты, проекты и модули.
• Создавать ML приложения.

В программе вебинара:

• Среда Azure ML
• Azure ML Studio
• Использование моделей Azure ML
• Разработка ML приложений

Своими знаниями и опытом поделится преподаватель «Сетевой Академии» Сергей Гущин, обладающий сертификациями MCP,MCSD,MCPD,MCTS,MCT.  Регистрация на вебинар 

Interested in checking out the upcoming capabilities in Windows Server 2019? Head on over to the Insiders program and sign up if you haven't already. Have a look at the post on the Windows Server Blog to get started, and then head on over to Windows Server community join the conversation.

Frequently asked questions

Q: When will Windows Server 2019 be generally available?

A: Windows Server 2019 will be generally available in the second half of calendar year 2018.

Q: Is Windows Server 2019 a Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release?

A: Windows Server 2019 will mark the next release in our Long-Term Servicing Channel. LTSC continues to be the recommended version of Windows Server for most of the infrastructure scenarios, including workloads like Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, and Windows Server Software-defined solutions.

Q: What are the installation options available for Windows Server 2019?

A: As an LTSC release Windows Server 2019 provides the Server with Desktop Experience and Server Core installation options – in contrast to the Semi-Annual Channel that provides only the Server Core installation option and Nano Server as a container image. This will ensure application compatibility for existing workloads.

Q: Will there be a Semi-Annual Channel release at the same time as Windows Server 2019?

A: Yes. The Semi-Annual Channel release scheduled to go at the same time as Windows Server 2019 will bring container innovations and will follow the regular support lifecycle for Semi-Annual Channel releases – 18 months.

Q: Does Windows Server 2019 have the same licensing model as Windows Server 2016?

A: Yes. Check more information on how to license Windows Server 2016 today in the Windows Server Pricing page. It is highly likely we will increase pricing for Windows Server Client Access Licensing (CAL). We will provide more details when available.

Today's tip...

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. In February 2018, 81 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live.

Reference: New offers in Azure Marketplace – February 2018 - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-offers-in-azure-marketplace-february-2018/

A partir da versão 1706 temos uma nova opção de Client Settings chamada Cloud Services onde podemos permitir que determinados dispositivos de uma collection tenham acesso ao Cloud Management Gateway. Abaixo um exemplo da Client Settings.
Configure para Yes e faça o deployment dessa Client Settings para uma collection onde tenha os dispositivos que irão receber a configuração do Cloud Management Gateway.

Após o cliente do System Center Configuration Manager receber a política permitindo acesso ao Cloud Management Gateway ele irá preencher o campo selecionado abaixo e quando o mesmo não estiver na rede local automaticamente irá tentar se conectar ao Cloud Management Gateway. Sendo assim, irá receber políticas, deployments e mais.

Verificado que o cliente recebeu a política corretamente vamos realizar um teste.
Note que o cliente abaixo está na intranet conforme abaixo.

Nos logs LocationServices.log e ClientLocation.log notamos que a conexão está sendo realizada totalmente na intranet utilizando o Management Point local.

A fins de teste podemos alterar no registro para que o cliente force a conexão via internet alterando o registro abaixo com o valor 1 e reiniciar o serviço SMS Agent Host.

Verificamos agora que o cliente já configurado para Always internet.

Ao consultar o log LocationServices.log já podemos notar a alteração para o Cloud Management Gateway.

Ao acessar o log CcmEval.log notamos o sucesso na conexão onde mostra que o Management Point foi alterado para o Cloud Management Gateway e o mesmo está acessível.

Finalizamos então os Posts referênte ao Cloud Management Gateway e agora certamente você já esta com o seu testado e funcional. Caso tenha dúvidas ou perdeu alguma parte, acesse abaixo as primeiras publicações sobre o Cloud Management Gateway.

The February release for Dynamics AX 2012 R3 version is now available in LCS on the updates tile inside your R3 project. This update represents a typical collection of smaller functional improvements and technical fixes. Bugs were fixed in all areas with enhancements found in Warehouse & Transportation, Master planning, Service Management, Procurement, Sales, Client, Server, SI, Project Accounting, Inventory, Retail, DIXF, APAC, Europe and LATAM localizations, Production, Cash and Bank, Expense, and Tax updates. Please see the full list of hotfixes below to search for your specific issue newly included in this release. This release is a cumulative package including all other fixes released in the prior CU13 update as well as the recent monthly updates. This release is intended to give visibility into fixes recently shipped for R3, including some features and design changes that are newly released in this month.

Here are a few details related to this release:
• Primary Build: 6.3.6000.4901
• Number of Application hotfixes: 121
• Number of Binary hotfixes: 16

Details of the install process can be found here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh538446.aspx#PackageR3

What is included in this month’s release?

Design Change Requests, Reg’F

Fixes Released

Pitched as Microsoft's partner event of the year, Microsoft Inspire brings value to thousands of partners across the globe. In my last post, I looked at why 2018 is set to be the most valuable year yet for partners attending the event.

But what does this really mean for you?

We've outlined below just some of the unrivalled opportunities Microsoft Inspire can bring to your business based on how you partner with us, including some UK partner insights on why Microsoft Inspire is top of their agenda for 2018.

Microsoft Inspire - What's the value for our channel distributors?

Apay Obang-Oyway from Ingram Micro, a Microsoft distributor, runs through his top three reasons for attending Microsoft Inspire.

Microsoft Inspire - What's the value for our channel partners?

A key priority of the event is to help our partners transform and grow; whether that's through introducing new market opportunities, helping define your business focus for the next year or providing insight into the latest technical innovations and programme updates. Microsoft Inspire will help fuel your growth and provide the contacts and insight needed to build out innovative solutions, services and business models.

Microsoft Inspire - What's the value a Microsoft Learning Partner?

Hollie Brown from Firebrand Training, an official Microsoft Learning Partner, explains the value that Microsoft Inspire brings to their business.

Microsoft Inspire - What's the value for a Managed Service Provider?

Microsoft Inspire will provide insight into key business initiatives and market opportunities to help you grow your business and deliver a more profitable managed service solution for your customers. You'll hear from industry leaders on why Microsoft offers the best cloud services and engagement experiences, along with the chance to meet with Microsoft execs and fellow partners to increase your co-sell opportunities.

Watch the video to hear James Soloman at C5 Alliance, a Microsoft Gold partner and Managed Service Provider, discuss what Microsoft Inspire means for their business.

Microsoft Inspire - What's the value for an Independent Software Vendor (ISV)?

Microsoft Inspire will provide unique insights into our FY19 programmes, opportunities and key initiatives to help grow your business, along with the chance to network with thousands of global partners and Microsoft execs. (You can read more about the unparalleled networking opportunities at Microsoft Inspire here). Through the event you'll gain deep intel into how you can build and develop innovative software solutions on the Microsoft platform, and how to translate key product releases into your application development.

You can find out more about Microsoft Inspire, including how to register, on the website.

We'd love to hear your experiences of Microsoft Inspire, and the reasons why you are attending this year's event. Comment below or tweet us @mspartnersuk with your feedback.

At some point, if you have configured alerts within OMS, you probably have struggled with missing, delayed or false heartbeat alerts. We are aware of these issues and on most of the cases, it was related with latency - for further details on ingestion delays and how it affects the alrt configuration refer to this link. Having heard the feedback and in our process of constant improvement, we are introducing a preview of a new alerting feature within Azure Monitor (present in the Azure Portal).

With this new solution, we will able to retrieve near real-time notifications of a machine's heartbeat (as well as other metric related alerts), connected to Log Analytics. Let me share with you some clarity on the configuration of this feature:

Azure Monitor - Heartbeat Alerts (OMS)

Now for the new feauture - the near real-time alerting (currently in limited public preview):

This brings down the time it takes to generate a log alert to under 5 minutes. The Metric Alerts on Logs, currently supports the following log types on OMS Log Analytics - heartbeat, perf counters (including those from SCOM), and update.

With this solution, logs are converted to metrics as they stream into Log Analytics, these metrics are then pumped into the metrics platform where they can be alerted on. This metric conversion, avoids the ingestion of logs and a bypass is possible, avoiding the described ingestion delays.
Alerting configuration with the goal of validating machine hearbeat can now be configured, and a more reliable and consistent monitorization can be achieved by this

The official article with the launch is here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/faster-metric-alerts-for-logs-now-in-limited-public-preview/

Configure Alerts

Before starting the configuration, you will need to sign up for the this feature: https://aka.ms/MetricLogPreview

Afterwards you should be receiving a PDF with the additional details that you need to proceed on doing to gain access to it.

After performing the above, here's the configuration needed:

1 - Head to the Azure Portal and find "Monitor"

2 - Then to "Alerts" and select "New Alert Rule"

3 - Now, start adding the configurations for the alert, let's begin with the target selection - Select your target - Subscription, Resource Group and OMS workspace:

4

 4 - Add a criteria - as soon as you select this option, you shall be present with all the available options including the metrics:

5 - For the purpose of this test, we will configure Heartbeat metric, after selecting it, you should be seeing something similar to this:

6 - You can configure the alert for your needs, by selecting the specific virtual machine, its OS, version, etc.
Also, configure the condition you wish to apply (in the example above, we have an alert for when the heartbeat is less than 3, to be checked over the period of the last 5 minutes, and with a frequency of 1 minute)

7 - Insert a name, description and severity for the alert, and check if you wish for it to become instantly enabled after creation:

8 - As final configuration, you need to define the action group, in order to notify specific individuals or teams, within a variety of channels (email, sms, runbooks, integration with third party ticketing software, etc):

You can create a new action group and select the method of your preference:

You are all set! From the moment you configure your alert you can manage it under Alerts in Manage Rules. You can delete, desable or enable your rules from there:

All of this process will provide a more closer experience to real-time monitorization, since the SLA's are incredibly low.

Feel free to reach out to me or my team, for further assistance on this.

Bruno Afonso - Microsoft Support Engineer in Azure Monitoring and Automation 

The Microsoft Products and Services Agreement (MPSA) is a transactional licensing agreement for commercial, government, and academic organizations with 250 or more users/devices.

MPSA works best for organizations that want to license Microsoft on-premises software, cloud services, or both as needed—with no organization-wide commitment under a single, non-expiring agreement.

MPSA Academy on Readiness Portals

Volume Licensing Partner Center (Sign In required)

FastTrack for Azure

FastTrack for Azure provides direct assistance from Azure engineers, working together with partners, to help customers build Azure solutions quickly and confidently. FastTrack brings best practices and tools from real customer experiences to guide customers from set up, configuration, and development to production of Azure solutions as indicated in the roadmap. FastTrack for Azure is now available to eligible customers located in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe*. Learn more at Azure.com/FastTrack.

*FastTrack for Azure is available English only in these countries within the Western Europe region: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Nordics, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland.

Azure security and operations management | Azure Alerts—GA

With Azure Monitoring Services, you can set up alerts to monitor the metrics and log data for the entire stack across your infrastructure, application, and Azure platform. We're excited to announce that new alerts are now generally available. Learn more about the new alerts capabilities in our blog post.

Backup and restore performance improvements and support for large disk backup

Support for backup of large disk virtual machines (VMs) and a new set of improvements aimed at reducing time taken for backup and restore are now available. These improvements and large disk support are based on a new VM backup stack, and are available for both managed and unmanaged disks. Seamlessly upgrade to this new stack without any impact to your ongoing backup jobs, and there's no change to how you set up backup or restore.

This announcement combines multiple feature improvements:

• Large disk support—Backup VMs with disk sizes up to 4 TB (4,095 GB), both managed and unmanaged.
• Instant recovery point—A recovery point is available as soon as the snapshot is done as part of the backup job. This eliminates the need to wait to trigger restore until the data transfer phase of the backup is completed. This is particularly useful in scenarios where you want to apply a patch.
• Backup and Restore performance improvements—As part of this new announcement, we're retaining the snapshots taken as part of the backup job for seven days. This will help us to compute the changes between two backup jobs in an efficient manner to reduce the backup time. These snapshots can also be used to trigger restore, and reduce the restore time from hours to minutes.
• Distribute the disks of restored VM—If you're using unmanaged VM, you might have noticed that all disks restore to the same storage account. We're adding a capability to tell us to distribute those disks to the same set of storage accounts as the original VM in order to reduce the reconfiguration needed post restore.

Portal:

You'll see a banner on the Recovery Services vault dashboard. Clicking on the banner will open a screen where you can upgrade the stack and get above feature improvements. You can upgrade the complete subscription from any of the vaults. Once upgraded, all VM backups in the subscription will get backed up using the new stack.

PowerShell:

Please execute following cmdlets from an elevated PowerShell terminal:

1. Sign in to your Azure Account.
   PS C:> Login-AzureRmAccount
2. Select the subscription you want to register for preview.
   PS C:> Get-AzureRmSubscription –SubscriptionName "Subscription Name" | Select-AzureRmSubscription
3. Register this subscription for private preview.
   PS C:> Register-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName “InstantBackupandRecovery” –ProviderNamespace Microsoft.RecoveryServices
   • Learn more about Azure Backup.
   • Check out Azure Backup documentation for more details.
   • Need help? Reach out to Azure Backup forum for support.
   • Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup by contributing new ideas and voting up existing ones.
   • Follow us on Twitter @AzureBackup for the latest news and updates.

Windows Server | Windows Server 2019 disclosure

On March 20th, 2018, Microsoft announced the availability of the preview builds for Windows Server 2019. Windows Server 2019 will mark the next release in our long-term servicing channel, which continues to be the recommended version of Windows Server for most scenarios, including workloads like Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, and Windows Server software-defined solutions.

The innovations in Windows Server 2019 are primarily driven by customer feedback, and you can expect to see new features and capabilities around Hybrid Cloud, Security, Application Platform with containers, and hyper-converged infrastructure.

Sign up for the Windows Insiders program today to download the preview build.

Azure security and operations management | Security Center is built into the virtual machine (VM) experience

Now in preview, Azure Security Center is built into the virtual machine experience, making it simpler for you to gain insight into the security posture of your virtual machines and take action.

Learn more about how you can secure your virtual machines.

Azure Traffic Manager Real User Measurements | GA

Azure Traffic Manager announces the general availability of Real User Measurements. This capability provides increased accuracy of routing decisions made by Azure Traffic Manager for queries against their profiles. It also ensures that Azure Traffic Manager’s existing network latency intelligence adequately spans the specific networks from where their users connect. Customers using this capability will run an Azure provided JavaScript code in their web properties to measure latency from their users’ networks to Azure regions. These measurements will be sent to the Azure Traffic Manager service where it will be used to enhance routing decisions. Customers needing to minimize network latency will be able to achieve that by using the Real User Measurements feature.

For more information, including pricing details, please visit the Real User Measurements overview page and the Azure Traffic Manager pricing page.

Azure Traffic Manager Traffic View | GA

Azure Traffic Manager announces the general availability of Traffic View. By using Traffic View, customers can understand where their user bases are located (up to a local DNS resolver level granularity), the volume of traffic originating from these regions, the representative latency experienced by these users. They can also deep dive into the specific traffic patterns from each of these user bases to Azure regions where the customer has presence. This information will be available in a geographic map in the Azure portal, and can be downloaded as raw data. This will give customers actionable intelligence on how to manage their capacity at existing Azure regions as well as new Azure regions to which they need to expand. For more information, including the pricing details, please visit the Traffic View overview page and the Azure Traffic Manager pricing page.

Power BI Desktop | GA

New features and updates are now available in Power BI Desktop.

Reporting: Report page tooltips is now in preview. Bookmarking is now generally available, as is display units and precision control for table and matrix columns. The ability to turn off the visual header in reading mode for a report, and improved default visual placement are both now available.

The following custom visuals are now available: Mapbox, User List by CloudScope, Timeline by CloudScope, KPI Chart by Akvelon, R DataTable, Outliers Detection, Data Insights by MAQ Software, Dumbbell Chart by MAQ Software, and Clustering using OPTICS by MAQ Software.

Data connectivity: New SAP HANA connector enhancements—DirectQuery multidimensional support and SSL certificate validation support—are now available. SAP BW DirectQuery and Azure Analysis Services connector are now generally available.

Error reporting: Improved error reporting and view previous errors you’ve encountered are now available.

For more information on these new features and others, read the March 2018 update feature summary on the Power BI Blog.

Power BI mobile and mixed reality apps | GA

New features and updates are now available in the Power BI mobile apps. These include report tooltip touch optimization, Power BI for Mixed Reality app (in preview), persistent filters, phone optimization for embedded reports, and external sharing.

For more information on these new features and others, visit the Power BI Blog and read the Power BI for Mixed Reality public preview announcement.

Power BI service | GA

New and most frequently requested Power BI features are now available to end users: Automatically install apps, P4 and P5 capacities on Premium, Organizational custom visuals (Preview), February update for On-premises data gateway. Sign in to powerbi.microsoft.com to experience the new features immediately. For more information on these new features and others, read the Power BI Service and Mobile February Feature Summary on the Power BI Blog.

Azure database services for MySQL and PostgreSQL GA

Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL are now generally available

Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MySQL are now generally available with an uptime SLA of 99.99 percent. These services bring the community versions of MySQL and PostgreSQL database engines together with built-in high availability, elastic scaling for performance, and industry leading security and compliance. Azure database services for MySQL and PostgreSQL enable flexibility for your apps—from your choice of framework and language to a rich ecosystem of tools and services, making it easier for you to build intelligent apps faster.

Learn more about regional availability on the Azure Services webpage.

Azure SQL Database | Columnstore—GA

Inclusion of columnstore technology in Standard SLO Azure SQL Database

We’re pleased to announce the momentum for a common programming surface area that started with SQL Server 2016 SP1 and will continue in Azure SQL Database with the inclusion of columnstore technology in some Standard SLO offerings. Beginning in March 2018, users with databases that are at or above the S3 level will be able to create columnstore indexes in their databases.

Learn more about this announcement.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse | Japan West, Australia East, and India West—GA

Azure SQL Data Warehouse in now generally available in three additional regions—Japan West, Australia East, and India West. SQL Data Warehouse is a fast, flexible, and secure analytics platform for the enterprise, and these additional locations bring the product worldwide availability count to all 33 regions—more than any other major cloud data warehouse provider.

Visual Studio Team Services | Release Management deployment groups—GA

Deployment groups are now generally available in Visual Studio Team Services Release Management. This now supports robust, in-the-box, multimachine deployments. Users can now orchestrate deployments across multiple machines and perform rolling updates while ensuring the high availability of applications throughout the deployment process.
Virtual Machines can be added to deployment groups by installing a Visual Studio Team Services agent or through the Continuous Delivery blade in the Azure portal (now in preview).

DevTest Labs | DevTest Labs in Azure Gov (Fairfax)—GA

Start your organization’s DevOps adoption with Azure Dev Test Labs

Azure DevTest Labs is coming to Azure Government cloud in Fairfax. Azure DevTest Labs is the self-service sandbox environment in Azure to quickly create Dev/Test environments while minimizing waste and controlling costs. With Azure DevTest Labs, you, the lab creator, select the settings for lab use, security, compliance, and governance. You define the VM bases available via Azure Marketplace images, custom images, or predefined formulas that users can create on demand. Authorized lab users can use reusable artifacts to run extensions and deploy applications once a VM is created. In this way, IT is not a bottleneck, and your software teams are empowered to work with agility and self-service—the DevOps way.

Public sector customers can use Azure DevTest Labs to address challenges like:

• Improving resource use and cost optimization.
• Modernizing legacy applications and IT infrastructure.
• Employing agile development and DevOps with minimal organizational structure change.
• Nurturing citizen developers in low-risk scenarios.

For more information on how commercial customers are using DevTest Labs, check out the stories of Daimler, Aurora Health Care, and RMS.

Stay connected with the latest announcements on DevTest Labs.

Azure Active Directory | Automated expiration for Office 365 groups—GA

Get rid of unused groups in your tenant with the automated expiration policy, now generally available, in Azure Active Directory. In this release, the owner can now see greater details on their groups in the My Apps portal, and can renew directly in the portal. The notification emails have also been redesigned to simplify the user workflow.

Learn more about the expiration policy announcement.

Wow things really do move quickly in the wonderful world of Microsoft Servers., no sooner have we managed to digest the Semi Annual Chanel (SAC 1709) changes Microsoft go and announce the availability of the ALL NEW Windows Server 2019 In Preview.

Erin Chapple the Director of Programme Managed wrote a blog article announcing the release. But what does this mean for the IT Pro and why have got so many editions, versions and changes.

Well. The Windows Server world has just caught up with what the Windows Client world has been doing for a couple of years.

There will be Windows Server (SAC) releases twice a year. identified by their date of release i.e the first SAC was 1709 (for September 2017). The Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) will be released every two to three years, this follows the previous Server release cycle of 2003 then R2, 2008 then R2, 2012 then R2. There will be no more R2 releases, and there will be two different focuses for the two different channels.

Listen very carefully I shall say this only once!

The LTSC will be available in all editions and deployment models (Core, GIU, Nano) Standard, Datacenter, Essentials etc.

The SAC will be only a core release and only in Standard and Datacenter. The focus of SAC is Container hosts and container technology as described by Erin in her article

The smaller Microsoft make the core image and the nano image the more effective they are as container images and container hosts.

Some of the other headline news

Honolulu will be included in the LTSC build as will Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection. Helping to create an even more secure platform fit to repel the modern threats we all face.