This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
With the rapid advance of Generative AI, as demonstrated by Microsoft, understandably folks are excited! Generative AI has tremendous promise in workload reduction in content creation. For folks working on company Intranets, organizational knowledge management, and more, the need for help is great. Oftentimes these are teams that have part-time roles and are often understaffed.
In this HLS Show Me How video I show how organizations can begin to leverage Microsoft Bing Generative AI with Microsoft Viva… today! Specifically, I show enhancing a Microsoft Viva Topics page with Generative AI content that can then be reviewed and edited. Although I show this action within Topics the same method is applicable in any aspect of Microsoft Viva, such as news in Connections, where content authoring is done.
*During the making of this video I show using the Developer Edition of Microsoft Edge. Literally as soon as I finished and went to post this using my production instance of the Microsoft Edge browser that edition was updated and now includes the Bing component with Generative AI!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
It’s the dawn of a new era in customer experience where AI is transforming the way businesses connect with their audiences. Microsoft is proud to be at the forefront of this shift, using Azure OpenAI Service to empower marketers with new levels of efficiency and effectiveness. With Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, marketers can now take advantage of the latest next-generation AI-powered tools to learn more about their customers, create targeted customer segments, and generate personalized content. These cutting-edge features increase productivity that could have taken hours or weeks to produce, empowering anyone on your team to uncover new data insights and create high-quality email content.
At Microsoft, we believe every business should have the ability to harness the power of next-generation AI. That’s why we’re excited about Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Azure OpenAI Service enabling our customers to do more with less by using these new technologies to be more productive. This is just the beginning, and we can’t wait to see where this technology will take us in the future. Here are just a few of the Copilot capabilities we will release in public preview in the coming weeks within Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights.
Discover more about your customers, faster
Today, customers expect hyper-personalization from the brands they interact with, which requires marketers to have a deep understanding of their customers. However, this knowledge is often locked away in data platforms and managed by data and analytics teams. Accessing this data and analyzing it using SQL queries can take weeks, delaying marketers from delivering the personalized experiences that customers demand.
The exciting new Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights allows data analysts and marketers to engage directly with customer data using natural language. This saves time for data analysts, allowing them to type the query in their own words instead of identifying the query in SQL. This feature democratizes access to insights, allowing marketers to ask questions using everyday language and receive instant answers, without needing to have the knowledge of SQL programming. With simple prompts, marketers can explore, understand, and predict customer preferences and needs in near real time, reducing the reliance on the data and analytics team to provide them with the customer insights they need.
Copilot enables marketers to create targeted customer experiences and interactions that are informed by data-driven decision making. With access to the natural language data discovery feature in Customer Insights, they can build confidence by validating and discovering customer insights for their marketing strategies. For example, a marketer can ask Copilot how many of their customers fit the profile of currently residing in Washington, DC, who are over the age of 25, who have also attended a promotional event in the last six months. With just a few clicks, Copilot will present the results of their query, including the number of customers that match the attributes or behaviors, as well as other useful information such as the customer lifetime value, product preferences, or average purchase price. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights removes the barrier of needing to craft queries in SQL to get a deeper understanding of customers, enabling marketers to speed and scale the delivery of hyper-personalized experiences that customers expect.
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But that’s not allthe work to target the right audience just got easier for marketers, as they can now bypass the time-consuming process of manually building customer segments. With query assist, a new Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can take the guesswork out of targeting the right audience by simply describing the segment in their own words. From there, query assist builds the segment that meets the marketers’ request and enables them to quickly review and modify the list before their next email campaign.
Previously, marketers had to rely on that one person in the company who understands data models and queries to create the target segment. With generative AI targeting, marketers can now quickly go from planning to execution.
Craft captivating content with ease
Finally, we are excited to share the release of our other Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing capability, content ideas, which harnesses next-generation AI to offer unparalleled assistance to marketers in their content creation efforts. Content ideas uses AI to generate content, allowing marketers to save time while still providing engaging and relevant emails for their target audience.
To create this powerful capability, we spent more than 10 months working with hundreds of preview customers, gathering and analyzing marketing emails from the public domain to tune our AI model. The result is a highly accurate and reliable content idea engine that uses Azure OpenAI Service to generate content ideas that marketers can easily edit, personalize, and send to their customers. With the Copilot content ideas feature, marketers can spend less time on copywriting and more time on strategic marketing efforts.
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The benefits of using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights are clearreduced time spent on marketing tasks, improved efficiency, and higher quality content that connect marketing teams with their customers. And let’s not forget the excitement of working with cutting-edge technology that’s paving the way for a new era of marketing.
Join the waiting list for the Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights preview today. And visit Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to learn more about our customer data platform and sign up for a free trial.
Finally, to learn more about the depth and breadth of all the new Copilot features that are bringing next-generation AI to every line of business across Dynamics 365, please check out our announcement blog.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today we are excited to announce the public preview of near real-time custom detections in Microsoft 365 Defender. This new frequency will allow you to respond to threats faster with automated responses and gain valuable time in stopping attacks and protecting your organization.
Automation is key to keeping up with attackers
While Microsoft’s eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) solution helps prioritize response activities and provides a unified experience that allows for more effective investigation at the incident level, the increasing volume and speed of sophisticated attacks remains challenging.
That’s why automation is becoming an increasingly important tool in optimizing the SOC process. Automating response actions for common alerts can help you stay on top of threats, protect your organization more effectively, and reduce response times. If you want to get started in Microsoft 365 Defender, check out this post.
For effective protection, most organizations have custom detection mechanisms in place that are unique to the requirements of their environment, but in order for these automations to be as effective as possible, the speed of detection is critical.
Detect in near real-time, respond in near real-time
To address the need for faster detections and response, we are thrilled to announce that you can now create custom detection rules that run in near real-time, in addition to existing frequencies ranging from every 24 hours to every hour. These detections can be integrated with the broad set of Microsoft 365 Defender across email, endpoint, and identity, leading to faster response times and faster mitigation of threats.
This means your custom logic will run and evaluate all available signals and alerts faster than ever before and will trigger your predefined response action immediately, once a match is detected.
This new frequency will be available in Microsoft 365 Defender as Continuous (NRT). Image 1 shows the configuration wizard for custom detection rules in Microsoft 365 Defender and the various frequency options you can choose from, including near real-time (NRT).
Image 1: Custom detection wizard with the frequency dropdown opened, new frequency of Continuous (NRT) is available.
When you configure a rule using the Continuous (NRT) frequency, the query is compared to every single event that gets into the service, and if there is a match, an alert is triggered. You can use the continuous frequency for queries referencing one table and using operators from the list of supported KQL operators.
Top use cases for custom detections and automated response actions
Monitoring for recent vulnerabilities
A common use case for a near real-time custom detection rule that we see with customers is monitoring for events that might indicate threat activity related to a recently disclosed vulnerability. For instance, you can use the DeviceProcessEvents table to look for the malicious string needed to exploit the Log4j vulnerability and configure remediation actions to run automatically on targeted devices, like initiating investigation on the device:
DeviceProcessEvents
| where ProcessCommandLine matches regex @'(?i)${jndi:(ldap|http|https|ldaps|dns|rmi|iiop)://(${([a-z]){1,20}:([a-z]){1,20}})?(([a-zA-Z0-9]|-){2,100})?(.([a-zA-Z0-9]|-){2,100})?.([a-zA-Z0-9]|-){2,100}.([a-z0-9]){2,20}(/).*}'
or InitiatingProcessCommandLine matches regex @'(?i)${jndi:(ldap|http|https|ldaps|dns|rmi|iiop)://(${([a-z]){1,20}:([a-z]){1,20}})?(([a-zA-Z0-9]|-){2,100})?(.([a-zA-Z0-9]|-){2,100})?.([a-zA-Z0-9]|-){2,100}.([a-z0-9]){2,20}(/).*}'
Detect and remove unwanted emails
Another use case is to look for unwanted emails, that may not necessarily be malicious but have been defined by the organization as unwanted and need to be automatically removed as soon as they are delivered. This empowers security admins to more easily manage mail flows from a security lens and can be done by configuring a Soft Delete remediation action:
EmailEvents
| where Subject contains "This account has been suspended!"
| where SenderFromAddress == "malicious@sender.com"
| where UrlCount > 0
An example of another scenario is to look for messages that spoof the recipient from a particular IP subnet and blocking this activity.
EmailEvents
| where SenderIPv4 startswith "xx.xx.xx." and SenderFromAddress == RecipientEmailAddress
Automation is critical to creating efficiencies in your SOC, but the speed of detection is fundamental to an effective response and keeping your organization safe.
The ability to define custom rules for near real-time detections is in public preview starting today and will enable your defenders to create effective response mechanisms with the breadth of Microsoft 365 Defender’s XDR signal across endpoints, email and more.
Learn more
Check out our documentation and explore how near real-time custom detections can enhance your SOC’s detection and response processes
Wondering which tables are supported by near real-time detections? Find them here.
Near real-time detections are available in public preview starting today. We would love to know what you think. Share your feedback with us in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal or by emailing AHfeedback@microsoft.com.
When:Wednesday, March 22, 2023, 9:30 AM – 2:00 PM (GMT+02:00)
Where:Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa
Microsoft Student Summit is an event designed for students and rising developers who are passionate about technology and eager to learn new skills and meet like-minded individuals. Attending the Microsoft Student Summit can provide students with a number of benefits, including:
Exposure to the Latest Technologies: The Microsoft Student Summit provides students with an opportunity to learn about and experience the latest Microsoft technologies, such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
Microsoft Learn: Microsoft Student Summit Cloud Skills Challenge are hands-on, allowing students to apply their knowledge and skills to real-world learning and challenges. This can be a valuable experience for students and rising developers who are looking to build their portfolios and demonstrate their abilities to future employers.
Career development: The Microsoft Student Summit can be a valuable resource for students who are interested in pursuing careers in technology. By attending the event, students can gain insights into the latest trends and innovations in the industry and connect with potential employers and recruiters.
Overall, the Microsoft Student Summit provides students and rising developers with a unique opportunity to learn and grow as individuals and technology professionals. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced technologist, the Microsoft Student Summit is a valuable investment in your future.
What is Student Summit?
Are you exploring a career in technology? Or looking to accelerate your technical career? Want to know what a “day in the life of” is really like before you dive in? Or get a jumpstart understanding the skills needed for success? Whether you are just starting your undergraduate degree or a seasoned professional curious about the tactical steps needed to accelerate your career, Microsoft Student Summit will help you discover how to gain expertise in today’s cutting-edge technology needed for your career.
What Will I Learn?
Tech Discover the cutting edge of Application Development and Developer Tools, Low Code/ No-Code / Fusion Development, and AI, Data and Machine Learning and how to build your expertise start your learning journey with our Student Summit Cloud Skills Challenge.
Community Tailored learning paths, upcoming networking events in your region, and invitations to join technical communities to help you deepen your technical expertise learn more at Microsoft Learn Student Hub.
Career Career advice about how to start and accelerate your technical career from industry experts.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Hello hello, everyone! Happy Friday!
Here’s a recap of what’s been going on in the MTC this week.
MTC Moments of the Week
To start things off, we want to first give a huge shoutout to this week’s MTC Member of the Week – @Kidd_Ip! Kidd is a MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) and full time IT pro who has made great contributions to a variety of Tech Community forums across Azure and M365. Way to go, Kidd!
Then on Thursday, we had our second AMA all about Windows Server – from upgrading older versions and the importance of regular updates, to the security features in the latest versions of Windows Server (2022). We received a lot of questions, which were answered by our panel of speakers from the Windows Servicing and Delivery team as well as Windows Server engineers and security product managers. Shout out to @Artem Pronichkin , @Rick Claus, @Scottmca, @Ned Pyle, @Rob Hindman, and the rest team for a great session!
And over on the Blogs, in honor of Women’s History Month, the Marketplace Community kicked off a series of interviews with women leaders in the ISV community. The first edition of this series features an interview between @justinroyal and Harmke Alkemade, AI Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft and Co-Founder at Friendly Flows. We love to see it!
Did you know that the concept of what we know today as “Spring Break” (in the US, at least) began in 1938, when a college swimming coach, Sam Ingram, brought his team down from New York to Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1936 to train? When the word got around to other swim coaches, they followed suit, and it began an annual pilgrimage for swimmers from across the US to enjoy the sun – and have some fun. The more you know!
Have a great weekend, everyone, and don’t forget to spring forward on Sunday!
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