Strengthen your hybrid identity with these new Azure AD Connect releases

by | Jan 29, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Howdy folks,


 


We continue to hear from you that hybrid identity is as important as ever, even as more apps move to the cloud. In Azure AD, our key hybrid identity tool is Azure AD Connect. This comes in two flavors based on your use case needs: Azure AD Connect sync which lives on-premises, and Azure AD Connect cloud sync which is powered by the cloud. We are constantly improving these capabilities based on your feedback, to make it easier to deploy and configure while also improving security, scale and throughput. 


 


Today we’re announcing Azure AD Connect cloud sync is generally available! This was formerly known as Azure AD Connect cloud provisioning during its preview. We have also made significant updates to our classic Azure AD Connect sync tool with improved scale and performance.


 


 


Azure AD Connect cloud sync general availability


 


Azure AD Connect cloud sync is the future of our hybrid identity sync capabilities. It moves all the heavy-lifting of the transform logic to the cloud. It also reduces the on-premises footprint with light-weight agents that can be distributed for enterprise-grade availability. Customers can deploy this either standalone, or even alongside Azure AD connect sync. When deployed together, it allows you to connect disconnected AD forests that arise from merger and acquisition or remote office location scenarios. To see the differences in the sync capabilities within Azure AD Connect, check our comparison chart.


 


Since our public preview, we’ve introduced some additional capabilities:



  • Enhanced security with support for gMSA: Using the group Managed Service Account (gMSA), you no longer need to provide domain admin credentials to run the sync agent. You can either use your own custom gMSA account or the one defined by us.

  • Ability to sync large directories with up to 150,000 directory objects per configuration and large groups with up to 50,000 members.

  • Prevent accidental deletes by configuring a threshold for deletes beyond which you get notified to take action.

  • Health features that allow you to monitor your sync service and resolve common data issues such as duplicate attribute values.

  • Advanced troubleshooting tools that helps your organization easily find out if something goes wrong with your sync configuration.


To get up and running with Azure AD Connect cloud sync today, check out our documentation.


 


 


Azure AD Connect sync updates


 


Many of you have been using classic Azure AD Connect sync for years as the primary means to bridge your hybrid identity. We’ve heard that as your business and teams grow, you need higher throughput on syncs as well as be able to sync larger groups. With the general availability of our v2 end point and latest build of Azure AD Connect sync, you can now sync groups of up to 250,000 members and customers who previewed the new end point saw 3 to 10x improvement in performance on average on their sync times. One customer told us that this update “has resulted in dramatic performance improvements on our delta synchronizations. Before, during the work week, the average was constantly around 5 hours. This week it is 25 minutes.”


 


To try the v2 end point and make sure you’re using the latest build of Azure AD Connect sync, check out our documentation.


 


As always, we’d love to hear from you. Please let us know what you think in the comments below or on the Azure AD feedback forum.


 


Best regards,


Alex Simons (twitter: @alex_a_simons)


Corporate Vice President Program Management


Microsoft Identity Division


 


 

JDBC Driver 9.2 for SQL Server Released

by | Jan 29, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Version 9.2 of the Microsoft JDBC Driver for SQL Server has been released. Version 9.2.0 brings many added features, changes, and fixed issues over the previous production release.

 

Added

  • Added a connection property for maxResultBuffer 1431
  • Added support for Azure Active Directory Service Principal authentication 1456
  • Added support for Azure Active Directory Interactive (MFA) authentication 1464
  • Added support for already connected sockets when using a custom socket factory #1420
  • Added JAVA 15 support #1434
  • Added LocalDateTime and OffsetDateTime support in CallableStatement #1393
  • Added new endpoints to the list of trusted Azure Key Vault endpoints #1445

Changed

  • Enabled useBulkCopyForBatchInsert against any server, not just Azure Synapse Analytics #1465
  • Changed the visibility of SQLServerBulkBatchInsertRecord to package-private #1408 (Potential breaking change)
  • Upgraded to the latest Azure Key Vault libraries #1413
  • Updated the API version when using MSI authentication #1418
  • Updated the driver to remove clientKeyPassword from memory #1428
  • Updated SQLServerPreparedStatement.getMetaData() to retain exception details #1430
  • Made ADALGetAccessTokenForWindowsIntegrated thread-safe #1441

Fixed

  • Fixed an issue with high memory allocation during bulk copy #1475
  • Fixed an issue with column ordinal mapping not being sorted when using bulk copy #1406
  • Fixed an issue with bulk copy when inserting non-unicode multibyte strings #1421
  • Fixed an issue with SQLServerBulkCSVFileRecord ignoring empty trailing columns when using the setEscapeColumnDelimitersCSV() API #1438

 

Getting the latest release

The latest bits are available to download from Microsoft, from the GitHub repository, and via Maven Central.

Add the JDBC 9.2 RTW driver to your Maven project by adding the following code to your POM file to include it as a dependency in your project (choose .jre8, .jre11, or .jre15 for your required Java version).

 

 

<dependency> 
  <groupId>com.microsoft.sqlserver</groupId> 
  <artifactId>mssql-jdbc</artifactId> 
  <version>9.2.0.jre11</version> 
</dependency>

 

 

Help us improve the JDBC Driver by taking our survey, filing issues on GitHub or contributing to the project.


Please also check out our tutorials to get started with developing apps in your programming language of choice and SQL Server.


David Engel

Microsoft Drivers 5.9.0 for PHP for SQL Server Released

by | Jan 29, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

We have released Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server, version 5.9.0. This production release of the SQLSRV and PDO_SQLSRV drivers has been built with PHP 7.3, 7.4, and 8.0 and tested on all supported platforms.

 

Notable items about this release since the previous production release include:

 

Added

Removed

  • Dropped support for PHP 7.2
  • Dropped support for macOS High Sierra, Ubuntu 19.10 and Debian 8

Fixed

  • Pull Request #1127 – removed TSRMLS macros in preparation for PHP 8 by remicollet
  • Pull Request #1136 – improved performance when handling decimal numbers as inputs or outputs and removed unnecessary conversions for numeric values
  • Pull Request #1143 – if an exception occurs when executing a query, it will not change the output parameters
  • Pull Request #1144 – use the correct C types when binding output parameters with integer values
  • Pull Request #1146 – improved performance when fetching numbers using client buffers
  • Pull Request #1165 – set query timeout without using LOCK TIMEOUT, which saves an extra trip to the server
  • Issue #1170 – when fetching large data types such as ntext, check more than only the display size – pull request #1172
  • Pull Request #1205 – minimized compilation warnings on Linux and macOS
  • Pull Request #1209 – fixed a bug when fetching varbinary max fields as char or wide chars
  • Issue #1210 – switched from preview to beta terminology to enable Pickle support
  • Issue #1213 – the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET in config files caused linker errors in macOS Big Sur – Pull Request #1215
  • Pull Request #1226 – replaced the problematic strlen function
  • Pull Request #1227 – addressed static code analyis issues

Limitations

  • No support for inout / output params when using sql_variant type
  • No support for inout / output params when formatting decimal values
  • In Linux and macOS, setlocale() only takes effect if it is invoked before the first connection. Attempting to set the locale after connecting will not work
  • Always Encrypted requires MS ODBC Driver 17+
    • Only Windows Certificate Store and Azure Key Vault are supported. Custom Keystores are not yet supported
    • Issue #716 – With Always Encrypted enabled, named parameters in subqueries are not supported
    • Issue #1050 – With Always Encrypted enabled, insertion requires the column list for any tables with identity columns
    • Always Encrypted limitations

Known Issues

  • This release requires ODBC Driver 17.4.2 or above. Otherwise, a warning about failing to set an attribute may be suppressed when using an older ODBC driver.
  • Connection pooling on Linux or macOS is not recommended with unixODBC < 2.3.7
  • When pooling is enabled in Linux or macOS
    • unixODBC <= 2.3.4 (Linux and macOS) might not return proper diagnostic information, such as error messages, warnings and informative messages
    • due to this unixODBC bug, fetch large data (such as xml, binary) as streams as a workaround. See the examples here.

Survey

Let us know how we are doing and how you use our drivers by taking our pulse survey.

 

Install

  • On Linux and macOS run the commands below:

 

 

sudo pecl install sqlsrv
sudo pecl install pdo_sqlsrv

 

 

  • Windows DLLs for PHP 7.3 or above can be downloaded as a package from Microsoft, or from the PECL repository for SQLSRV or PDO_SQLSRV.
  • Direct downloads for released binaries can also be found at the Github release tag.

 

David Engel

ODBC Driver 17.7 for SQL Server Released

by | Jan 29, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Version 17.7 of the Microsoft ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server has been released. Version 17.7.1 brings several new features and fixes to the driver.

 

Features

  • Support Azure Active Directory Interactive authentication (Windows-only) against Azure Key Vault when using Always Encrypted
  • Support Azure Active Directory Service Principal authentication
  • Support for inserting into encrypted money and smallmoney columns
  • Support for Ubuntu 20.10
  • Support for Oracle Linux 7
  • Support for macOS 11 (Big Sur)
  • Support for Alpine Linux 3.12

Fixes

  • Fixed character encoding of VARIANT columns in BCP NATIVE mode
  • Fixed setting of SQL_ATTR_PARAMS_PROCESSED_PTR under specific conditions
  • Fixed SQLDescribeParam in FMTONLY mode for statements containing comments
  • Fixed an issue with federated authentication when using Okta
  • Fixed excessive memory usage on multi-processor systems
  • Fixed Azure AD authentication against some variants of Azure SQL Database

Next steps

For Windows installations, you can directly download the Microsoft ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server.

Linux and macOS packages are also available. For installation details see the online instructions.

 

Roadmap

We are committed to improving quality and bringing more feature support for connecting to SQL Server Azure SQL Database Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure SQL Managed Instance through regular driver releases. We invite you to explore the latest the Microsoft Data Platform has to offer via a trial of Microsoft Azure SQL Database or by evaluating Microsoft SQL Server.

David Engel

Enable digital selling with the sales accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales

Enable digital selling with the sales accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales

by | Jan 29, 2021 | Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

In the past, many sales organizations looked at customer relationship management applications simply as process-driven data repositories or systems of record. Sales reps spent hours manually entering data and had less time to build profitable relationships and actually sell. However, this approach has become increasingly untenable for businesses now that the norm is for savvy, modern buyers who expect sellers to engage with them in real time across almost every digital channel and platform.

Sales accelerator, a digital selling capability of Dynamics 365 Sales, helps sellers transform the way they work in today’s digital world. Instead of spending so much time on manual data input, sellers rely on the system to gather relevant information from multiple sources, create a prioritized pipeline, offer more context, and surface automated recommendations throughout the sales process. They’re also able to engage with customers on their preferred channels using integrated email and phone calling.

Screenshot showing sales accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales

Example screenshot showing the intelligent work list and ‘up next’ widget in sales accelerator

Focus on the right deals with an intelligent work list

A typical seller starts the day working on multiple leads and opportunities, with several important tasks competing for their attention at once. With the sales accelerator, all the tasks and activities for their leads and opportunities that are due today, plus upcoming activities, are prioritized and organized in a work queue, enabling these sellers to be more efficient:

  • Work from a prioritized list of customers. With a prioritized work list, sellers can identify the next best lead or opportunity to work on. The intelligent work list surfaces a sorted list of customers with associated next tasks due. Default sorting relies on a composite score, presenting the next best action based on organizational sales sequences.
  • Tailor the intelligent list to meet your needs. Sort, filter, or group by entity attributes (main fields) to meet your needs, like reaching out to customers from a specific source.
  • Identify new leads or opportunities in your pipeline. Identify whenever a new lead or opportunity enters the work list or is reassigned to you, so nothing is accidentally overlooked.

Learn more about how to prioritize the pipeline through work lists

Gain context on customers in one place

As sellers run through a long list of potential customers, they often struggle to gain a holistic view, including history of communications, customer needs, and special circumstances. However, having this type of view is necessary for crafting a relevant sales pitch that’s most likely to achieve a positive outcome. To address this issue, the sales accelerator helps sellers:

  • Get all relevant information in a single place. Benefit from a comprehensive entity form that collects and surfaces customer information and insights from related entities to help craft winning messages for every communication.
  • View historical context for every customer. See past and present activities via an “up next” widget, timeline, notes, and additional details through integrated data across the system, all available with tabs on the entity form.

Use sales sequences to ensure your sales team follows best practices

Consistent experiences and clear communications are a critical aspect of achieving successful outcomes. Best practices from sales enablement managers help to propagate and reinforce winning selling strategies. Infusing suggestions and insights throughout the sales motion helps to keep sellers on track, makes the most out of every customer interaction, and increases the likelihood of successful outcomes.

With sequences, sellers receive in-the-moment guidance toward the correct activity, on time, using an appropriate communication channel with the necessary content. Everyone on the team adheres to organizational best practices, while sales enablement managers are empowered to optimize sales practices for better outcomes through a frictionless cycle and can easily distribute sales strategies.

  • Build sales sequences. Build sales sequences that reflect organizational best practices and sales strategies to help sellers in the moment.
  • Guide sellers in the moment. Offer guidance to sellers toward the next step they need to take. Guidance includes recommending the most suitable channel to reach out to the customer and the best time.

Learn more about the “up next” widget for recommendations

Connect with customers across multiple channels

Sellers can communicate with contacts without leaving Dynamics 365 Sales, using integrated communications across multiple channels that leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework.

  • Connect with customers easily via email or phone. Benefit from multichannel communications, connecting with customers via email or phone with an integrated dialer, without switching context.
  • Compose emails with templates. Take advantage of email templates aligned with sales sequences to communicate simply and consistently with customers.
  • Call customers with real-time insights using Microsoft Teams. Sellers can place customer calls using an integrated dialer and receive real-time conversation intelligence insights that will boost their productivity on top of those calls.

What’s next

We’re working on some exciting capabilities to be released in public preview in the coming months:

  • Automatic assignment of leads
  • Adaptive sequences for non-linear scenarios
  • Monitoring sequence performance
  • Automated process of capturing call summary with conversation intelligence

Get started with sales accelerator

The sales accelerator is part of Dynamics 365 Sales Premium licenses. Sign up for a free trial and get started with just a few clicks.

Learn how to enable the sales accelerator

Next steps

If you have already tried the sales accelerator and have feedback, questions, or new needs, please share your feedback on our Ideas Portal.

The post Enable digital selling with the sales accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.