This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As you may be aware, Azure Automation Agent-based User Hybrid Runbook Worker (Windows and Linux) was retired on 31 August 2024, and support has been discontinued.
Nonetheless, users might want to verify whether their runbooks and jobs are utilizing the extension or agent-based system when they transition. It’s worth noting that versions V1 and V2 of the same hybrid worker machine can be registered simultaneously with Azure Automation but will have different names.
If the V1 agent wasn’t uninstalled before the V2 extension was installed, this would lead Azure to detect both versions on the same machine.
The “last seen time” suggests V1 and V2 are communicating with Azure Automation if both exist.
It’s also worth noting that some automation tasks are still being performed by the V1 worker, which accounts for its continued activity. Runbook jobs can be executed on any machine within the Hybrid Worker Group. Currently, this group includes both V1 and V2 versions, so the tasks are distributed between them.
The installation of V2 does not mean that the Hybrid Worker Group will disregard V1 and exclusively use V2.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In my previous blog posts of containerising .NET apps and Function apps, I discussed how to containerise .NET apps and Azure Functions apps with and without Dockerfile. However, deploying these containerised apps to Azure Container Apps (ACA) is a different story.
Since its release in May 2023, Azure Developer CLI (azd) has evolved significantly. azd nowadays even automatically generates Bicep files for us to immediately provision and deploy applications to Azure. With this feature, you only need the azd up command for provisioning and deployment.
Throughout this post, I’m going to discuss how to provision and deploy .NET apps including Azure Functions to ACA through just one command, azd up.
Let’s make sure those apps running properly on your local machine. In order to run those apps locally, open three terminal windows and run the following commands on each terminal:
# Terminal 1 – ASP.NET Core Web API
dotnet run –project ./ApiApp
# Terminal 3 – Blazor app
dotnet run –project ./WebApp
Open your web browser and navigate to https://localhost:5001 to see the Blazor app running. Then navigate to https://localhost:5001/weather to see the weather data fetched from the ApiApp and the greetings populated from the FuncApp.
Now, let’s start using azd to provision and deploy these apps to ACA. Make sure that you’ve already logged in to Azure with the azd auth login command.
azd init – Initialisation
In order to provision and deploy the apps to ACA, you need to initialise the azd configuration. Run the following command:
azd init
You’ll be prompted to initialise the app. Choose the Use code in the current directory option.
azd automatically detects your three apps as shown below. In addition to that, it says it will use Azure Container Apps. Choose the Confirm and continue initializing my app option.
The function app asks the target port number. Enter 80.
And finally, it asks the environment name. Enter any name you want. I just entered aca0906 for now.
Now, you’ve got two directories and two files generated:
.azure directory
infra directory
next-steps.md file
azure.yaml file
Under the infra directory, there are bunch of Bicep files automatically generated through azd init.
As a result of running the command, azd init, you don’t have to write all necessary Bicep files. Instead, it generates them for you, which significantly reduces the time for infrastructure provisioning. Now, you’re ready to provision and deploy your apps to ACA. Let’s move on.
azd up – Provision and deployment
All you need to run at this stage is:
azd up
Then, it asks you to confirm the subscription and location to provision the resources. Choose the appropriate options and continue.
All apps are containerised and deployed to ACA. Once the deployment is done, you can see the output as shown below:
Click the web app URL and navigate to the /weather page. But you will see the error as shown below:
This is because each app doesn’t know where each other is. Therefore, you should update the Bicep files to let the web app know where the other apps are.
Update Bicep files – Service discovery
Open the infra/main.bicep file and update the webApp resource:
Then, open the infra/app/WebApp.bicep file and add both apiAppEndpoint and funcAppEndpoint parameters:
…
@secure()
param appDefinition object
// Add these two lines
param apiAppEndpoint string
param funcAppEndpoint string
…
In the same file, change the env variable:
// Before
var env = map(filter(appSettingsArray, i => i.?secret == null), i => {
name: i.name
value: i.value
})
// After
var env = union(map(filter(appSettingsArray, i => i.?secret == null), i => {
name: i.name
value: i.value
}), [
{
name: ‘API_ENDPOINT_URL’
value: apiAppEndpoint
}
{
name: ‘FUNC_ENDPOINT_URL’
value: funcAppEndpoint
}
])
This change passes the API and Function app endpoints to the web app as environment variables, so that the web app knows where the other apps are.
Once you’ve made the changes, run the azd up command again. It will update the resources in ACA. After that, go to the web app URL and navigate to the /weather page. You will see the weather data and greetings fetched from the API and Function apps.
So far, I’ve discussed how to provision and deploy .NET apps including Azure Functions to ACA with just one command, azd up. This is a very convenient way to deploy apps to Azure. However, to let the apps know each other, you should slightly tweak the auto-generated Bicep files. With this little tweak, all your .NET apps will be seamlessly provisioned and deployed to ACA.
One more thing I’d like to mention here, though, is that, if you use .NET Aspire, this sort of service discovery is automatically handled.
More about deploying .NET apps to ACA?
If you want to learn more options about deploying .NET apps to ACA, the following links might be helpful.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s digital era, where data breaches and cyber threats are increasingly sophisticated and pervasive, the need for robust data security measures has never been more critical. Traditional security approaches are proving insufficient against the complex and evolving nature of modern cyber threats. This has led to a growing consensus among security experts and industry leaders on the imperative to incorporate Generative AI (GenAI) into data security frameworks. GenAI’s ability to analyze vast amounts of data in real-time, identify patterns, and predict potential threats offers a transformative approach to safeguarding sensitive information. According to a recent report by Gartner, the use of AI in cybersecurity is expected to reduce the number of data breaches by up to 20% by 2025, underscoring the industry’s recognition of AI’s vital role in enhancing data security (Gartner, 2022). This blog explores how Microsoft is leveraging GenAI to revolutionize data security, providing organizations with the tools they need to protect their digital assets effectively.
Leverage the power of Copilot to secure your organization
Human ingenuity and expertise will always be an irreplaceable component of defense, so we need technology that can augment these unique capabilities with skill sets, processing speeds, and rapid learning of AI. Technology that can work alongside us, detect hidden patterns and behaviors, and inform response at machine speed with the latest and most advanced security practices.
In this scenario, Microsoft Copilot for Security helps professionals across the many cybersecurity disciplines to be more effective and efficient at all the roles they play. It helps you enhance and grow your capabilities and skills, while also supporting the workflows and teams you collaborate with to solve security challenges. Since Copilot for Security uses GenAI to analyze data from many sources, including other Microsoft Security solutions, it can also help analysts catch what they might have otherwise missed. Copilot for Security synthesizes data and detects those important signals better than ever before, all in a single pane of glass, without having to jump between different solutions to get additional context.
Boost your data protection efficiency with Copilot for Security embedded in Purview
An important application of Copilot for Security is to empower and strengthen data security and data compliance teams in securing data with more efficiency and agility. Data security admins are often challenged by the high volume and complexity of alerts, and the integration between Microsoft Purview and Copilot for Security enables these tools to work together to protect your data at machine speed.
The speed at which data security investigations are conducted is crucial to preventing data loss. However, the task of analyzing a vast array of sources can pose a significant challenge for analysts at any experience level. With Copilot-powered comprehensive summaries of Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) alerts, data security admins can identify, act on alerts and prevent data risks much faster and effectively. When an alert is summarized, it includes details such as policy rules, the source, and the files involved, as well as user risk level context pulled from Insider Risk Management (IRM).
Figure 1: embedded Copilot summarization into Data Loss Prevention
Your team can also leverage summaries in Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management alerts, which enables faster understanding of potentially risky activity, user context, behavior sequences. and intent present in an alert. Moreover, we’re excited to announce the public preview of the Copilot for Security-powered enhanced hunting in IRM, where admins will be able to use GenAI-driven analytics to deepen investigations and double-click into a user’s risk profile and activities, beyond the alert summary.
Figure 2: embedded Copilot summarization into Insider Risk Management
Compliance admins, forensic investigators, legal, and other teams can also strongly benefit from GenAI being incorporated into their workflows. Not only do they spend most of their time reviewing lengthy content and evidence; but admins need to invest time to learn complex technical capabilities like keyword query language to conduct a search, with 60% of admin time spent reviewing evidence collected in review sets.
Compliance teams are subject to regulatory obligations, like industry regulations or corporate policies related to business communications. This requires teams to review communication violations that contain lengthy content like meeting transcripts, group chats, long email threads and attachments. With concise and comprehensive contextual summaries on Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance, content can be evaluated against relevant compliance polices and investigators are able to get a summary of the policy match and better identify risky communication.
Figure 3: embedded Copilot summarization into Communication Compliance
These contextualized summaries are also invaluable in Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, where they help simplify the exploration of large about of evidence data, which can take hours, days, even weeks to do. This process often requires costly resources like an outside council to manually go through each document to determine relevancy to the case, and this embedded Copilot for Security capability enables reducing days of legal investigations into seconds, by allowing an investigator to use Copilot to summarize items in a review set.
Figure 4: embedded Copilot summarization into eDiscovery
Search is one of the most difficult and time-intensive workflows in an eDiscovery investigation. Now, you can simplify investigation by leveraging Copilot for Security to translate inquiries from natural to keywork query language. This feature allows organizations to take Natural Language and convert that into assertive evidence queries, in doing so this can correct possible errors, boost team expertise, and enable analysts at all levels to carry out advanced investigations.
Figure 5: embedded Copilot search with Natural Language on eDiscovery
All these recent developments are just the beginning of the Copilot for Security journey into Microsoft Purview, and we’ll continue to share new advancements and GenAI-powered capabilities that will take your data security program to the next level.
Learn more about Copilot for Security in Purview with Microsoft Documentation.
If you are a security partner interested in using Microsoft Security Copilot with your solutions, please sign up to join the Security Copilot Partner Ecosystem.
Learn more about these solutions in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal. Visit your Microsoft Purview compliance portal to activate your free trial and begin using our new features. An active Microsoft 365 E3 subscription is required as a prerequisite to activate the free trial.
Download Microsoft Data Security Index report to learn more about the trends and best practices for effective data security .
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
With the new semester just around the corner, we’re excited to introduce some fantastic new features in Forms to enhance your teaching and learning experience. Now, you can enjoy an improved data sync function to stay up to date, set rules to collect more accurate responses, pre-fill forms and quizzes, and easily manage response notifications. Let’s dive in and check more details. You can also try out from this template.
Let’s create a science club registration together to explore how we can make the most of these new features. Imagine you are a high school science teacher and trying to establish a science club where students from all grades can dive into fascinating topics beyond the curriculum and participate in fun, hands-on activities.
Improved Excel data sync function
You can start with Excel for the web to create the registration form, no need to visit Forms. This process will automatically generate a new form in Forms where you can add your questions. All the questions you add and responses you receive will seamlessly sync with Excel. (check more details: Forms data sync to Excel is now fully available with more functionality – Microsoft Community Hub)
Create forms from Excel for the web
Prefill answers for forms/quizzes
In this science club registration, you can use prefilled answers for fields like grade and class, creating unique links for each grade and class. This allows you to easily track and differentiate student distribution across different groups in the club. (check more details: Pre-fill Responses in Your Microsoft Forms – Microsoft Community Hub)
Set prefilled answer
Validation for open text question
To make sure students provide correct contact information and receive timely updates, you can set restriction for open text questions to only accept email formats. (Other types of restriction are also supported in Forms, check more details here: Validate open text responses in Microsoft Forms – Microsoft Community Hub)
Set validation on email address
Manage recipients of new response notification
You can set multiple key individuals to receive the notification when a new registration comes in, such as the club coordinator and an assistant. This allows them to quickly review and confirm new members, update the membership list, and prepare welcome materials. (check more details: Add or remove people from your form response notification emails – Microsoft Community Hub)
Add recipients for new response notification
Hope you find these new features useful for the new semester. If you’re interested in trying them out, simply start with this template.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
All in on AI is a series featuring interviews from Microsoft executives across the company about what transforming work with AI means to their teams. Through these conversations, we’ll highlight the challenges each industry faces and the lessons we learned that our customers can use in their own AI journeys. In this episode, Colette Stallbaumer, General Manager, Microsoft 365 and Future of Work sits down with Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft to explore the integration of AI in customer service.
According to the 2024 Work Trend Index, a study exploring into the global trends affecting employee work and wellness, employees are struggling to keep up with the pace and volume of work. Many employees report feeling burned out and as a result, staff turnover is on the rise.
These trends have profound implications, underscoring a crucial shift: employees are now prioritizing their health and well-being over work. This is a pressing concern for all business leaders, particularly in customer service.
At Microsoft, we recognize the vital role our customer service agents play in delivering world-class care. As the front line between our business and our customers, the quality of our customer care directly impacts customer satisfaction.
Recently, Colette Stallbaumer, General Manager, Microsoft 365 and Future of Work joined Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft to discuss how our customer service teams are using AI solutions like Microsoft Copilot to ensure our customer service employees are empowered to focus on the most meaningful parts of their jobs. Here’s what she had to say:
Adapting to the customer service surge with the power of AI
Since 2019, Microsoft’s customer service teams, like many in the industry, have been managing a rising surge in calls from customers with complex needs.
As a service industry veteran and leader of our customer service organization, Mala and her team realized that just adding more call-handling capacity wouldn’t suffice. Their goal was to help teams at scale—to empower them to manage more inquiries, address more complex customer needs, and to more rapidly onboard new employees to help with the surge. They also saw an opportunity to reduce case volumes by introducing self-service options for customers.
The team began exploring the use of generative AI to enable a more consistent and seamless experience. Already one of the world’s largest support organizations using Dynamics 365 Customer Service, harnessing new AI capabilities could help the organization to automate and augment common support scenarios. As customer zero for our products, turning to Microsoft Copilot and Dynamics 365 Customer Service would enable us to quickly adopt the transformative power of generative AI, and share those learnings with business leaders to implement and improve their own customer support experience at scale.
Reimagining the customer experience with the power of AI
Transforming the employee experience with generative AI
As Mala explains in the interview, adopting Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Copilot Studio created an opportunity to transform work across four key areas of Microsoft’s customer service landscape.
First, the Customer Service and Success team needed to speed up how quickly new hires could start helping existing customer service agents. Second, they wanted all support teams to access accurate information quickly and spend less time working across tools and data sources to collect customer and incident details. Third, they aimed to cut down on mundane tasks like data entry and paperwork so that customer service agents could focus more on complex issues that require empathy and judgment. Lastly, they aimed to improve self-help options for customers to handle their own questions, reducing the need for support requests.
AI has the potential to drive operational excellence, nurture customer loyalty, and grow value through the entire customer journey—making it one of the most valuable tools for enterprises to create a consistent, differentiated experience, build meaningful relationships, and deliver better customer care.
Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft
1. Supporting new hires with better onboarding
The Microsoft Customer Service team introduced Copilot’s case summarization feature to break down complex information into simple summaries, helping new hires understand customer issues more quickly. By surfacing relevant information from diverse sources such as internal documentation, knowledge bases, and websites, Copilot accelerates the learning curve, enabling agents to resolve customer queries faster and deliver superior service.
What’s more, Copilot supports new hires with ongoing learning and skill development by providing real-time assistance and insights. By using AI capabilities integrated into platforms like Dynamics 365 Customer Service, agents can more easily access tools and diagnostics and recommend optimal solutions. This empowers agents to deliver highly personalized customer experiences across all customer support needs, at a global scale.
2. Helping employees find the right information faster
With Copilot, agents can now find important information quickly, even if it was spread across different systems. Dynamics 365 Knowledge Assist helps agents zero in on the relevant information and articles faster than traditional search. It not only can suggest relevant information but provides context about the specific relevance of content and cites the source.
Having a more comprehensive and streamlined method to seek information not only helps agents solve issues more quickly—it gives them a more complete understanding of information relevant to the issue they’re trying to solve. Agents can now use this context, with Copilot, to craft a more thorough and accurate response to customers.
Before Copilot, creating detailed case summaries could take up to 30 to 40 minutes. Now, with Copilot, it’s done in 15 minutes or less. This not only speeds up how quickly customer service agents can handle customer requests but also lets them manage more cases without sacrificing quality.
Automating summaries and common email and communication tasks allows agents to spend much less time on repetitive tasks, giving them more time to focus on the more meaningful and often more rewarding aspects of their job.
Prioritizing self-service by integrating Copilot Studio into our customer-facing experiences is starting to make a big difference in how Microsoft handles customer service. Now, customers can use the power of generative AI in Copilot Studio to access self-help resources.
This change has reduced the amount of work customer service teams have to do and lets agents concentrate on more complex issues where customers require assistance. As a result, they’re getting things done more efficiently, working together better, and feeling more satisfied with their jobs.
Improved collaboration:Collaboration required among customer support agents decreased by 13%, making case resolution smoother and operations more efficient.
Enhancing efficiency: With Copilot, average chat case handling time reduced by up to 16%, giving agents better access to knowledge and improving overall efficiency.
Increasing productivity: Agents using Copilot became more productive, handling up to 12% more cases, which allowed them to serve more customers effectively.
And that’s just the start. Mala sees a future for Copilot that will revolutionize the customer services industry, making it more efficient, responsive, and customer-centric.
These include things like automatically connecting customers with appropriate experts, helping customers solve complex problems on their own, predicting issues before they happen, and personalizing interactions based on customer information and preferences.
Copilot learning hub
Learn how to use Microsoft Copilot based on your role
By automating routine tasks and helping teams find information faster, Copilot helps our employees focus on what really matters to them, allowing them to dive deeper into the parts of their jobs they love.
The speed at which AI is transforming business today is unprecedented, reimagining the way we work. We envision a future where AI alongside human expertise reduces and eliminates the seams in the support experience.
Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft
Today, the power of AI is revolutionizing how companies innovate and create large-scale impact in all areas. Leveraging generative AI throughout the customer journey enables businesses to foster enduring customer loyalty by improving the overall experience, adding value at each interaction.
This interview is part of our All in on AI series that explores how Microsoft is adopting AI across different areas of our business. Next, Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft Chief People Officer, sits down with Jared Spataro to share how AI is helping human resource teams do more with less and to share the transformative best practices she used to drive some of the highest, fastest AI adoption rates Microsoft has ever seen.
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