Windows 10

September 28, 2018 By PC Portal

Why and how you simplify IT with Microsoft 365

During this past week at Microsoft Ignite, it was an honor to spend time sitting with customers, listening to them explain what’s working and what’s not, and learning more about where they need our help.

In my session on Monday, I showed 75 minutes worth of examples of how we’ve applied a new philosophy to the way we build tools and services for IT pros. We refer to this approach to architecture, development, and end-user experience in Microsoft 365 as being “Integrated for Simplicity.” Our goal with this integrated simplicity is to make it as easy as possible for our customers to shift to a modern desktop and make their modern workplace a reality.

As part of my session on Monday, we made a series of announcements that align with this approach:

The shift to a modern desktop is an extension of what many organizations are already doing or are planning to do in the near future. There are many ways to start this process; for example, many tools and processes you’re using right now—like ConfigMgr and Active Directory—can easily be cloud-connected. Doing this not only reduces complexity—it also harnesses the power of Microsoft’s cloud-driven intelligence.

Modern desktop puts the power of the cloud in the hands of both end users and IT

The makeup of a modern desktop is simple: Windows 10 with Office 365 ProPlus—which are built in and driven by the cloud so that their scale, compute, automation, intelligence, and flexibility can simplify your IT. Supporting your end users with the Office ProPlus apps is a fundamental component of a modern desktop. These are the only apps with an artificial intelligence (AI) that can do the hard work of security while simultaneously improving and beautifying documents and presentations.

If you didn’t watch my session live, you can check it out in this recorded media stream. At the end of the session, I share three ways you can start using that cloud intelligence right now—and you can do these three things in minutes, not days.

1. Cloud-connect what you have today

A powerful way to begin cloud-connecting your existing infrastructure is to link your on-premises Active Directory with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). This process is simple and it adds significant flexibility, security, and mobility to your organization’s identity.

I also strongly encourage you to cloud-connect ConfigMgr with Intune. The process takes #Just4Clicks and, once enabled, reaps immediate rewards including superior visibility into device health, as well as access to actions such as remote wipe and security features like conditional access.

For more information, you can watch the #Just4Clicks video on our Microsoft Cloud channel.

You can also get your files up into the cloud with OneDrive Known Folder Move. This simple process immediately gives you protection from ransomware, and it improves real-time collaboration.

Find more information in our Tech Community blog, Migrate Your Files to OneDrive Easily with Known Folder Move.

2. Gain superior visibility and control

One of the many announcements we made at Ignite was the work we’ve done to merge 20+ separate web consoles into a single point of entry called the Microsoft 365 admin center. This consolidation is a part of our focus on integrated simplicity, and it features seven specialist workspaces for security, compliance, device management, and more.

I encourage you to check out the preview at admin.microsoft.com

Another simple action with big benefits is enabling conditional access so that you can better understand how corporate data is being accessed by personal devices. Configuring conditional access is easy and it dramatically increases your security posture while also reducing the risk of both intentional and accidental data leakage.

Learn more about how to enable conditional access.

In addition to support for Win32 app deployment in Intune, we also announced Intune security baselines. These baselines are pre-configured (but still customizable!) and published every month. I strongly encourage everyone using Intune to enable these as soon as possible.

More information is available in Using security baselines in your organization.

3. Shift to a modern desktop

For years, engineers at Microsoft have dreamed of building a service that learns from the millions of devices, billions of authentications, and trillions of signals in the Microsoft Cloud—and then applies that information to the estates of our customers in real-time. Desktop Analytics is the realization of that dream.

Desktop Analytics is one of the most powerful tools we have ever created—and it is custom built to give IT teams the insight and information they need to deploy, manage, and service apps and devices.

Desktop Analytics offers a tightly integrated, end-to-end solution that automates the mountain of work required to validate the compliance of your hardware, drivers, applications (both 3rd party and your own internally developed), as well as the Office add-ins. This doesn’t just eliminate hundreds of hours of work for IT teams, it wipes out thousands of hours otherwise spent on manual compliance checks which have chronically stolen your bandwidth at a time when you could be pursuing strategic projects that make a lasting impact on the way your company operates.

Desktop Analytics is currently in private preview (public preview will be announced soon), but you don’t need to wait to use it: The Windows Analytics service (which is part of Desktop Analytics) is available to use right now. I think you’ll be really surprised by how much Windows Analytics will simplify and improve your ability to manage devices and apps, as well as simplify the task of upgrading to Windows 10.

More information is available in Windows Analytics Overview: Device Health, Update Compliance, Upgrade Readiness.

I also want to highlight how simple and valuable it is to shift from Office perpetual to Office 365 ProPlus with the Office Customization Tool in ConfigMgr. This is proof of how easy it now is for your on-premises infrastructure and the cloud to work together to reduce the complexity of what would otherwise be arduous manual tasks—e.g., migrating from MSI deployments of Office perpetual editions in favor of Office 365 ProPlus Click-to-Run.

Only the Office ProPlus apps offer the AI required for these scenarios.

More information is available in Overview of the Office Customization Tool for Click-To-Run.

As you plan for the future of your organization, prioritize finishing Windows 10 upgrades before January 2020. Both Windows 7 and Office 2010 will reach the end of extended support in 2020, and based on our data, we can see that there are now more devices in the enterprise running Windows 10 than any other previous version of Windows.

If your Windows 10 deployment hasn’t also reached the halfway mark yet, now is a great time to reach out to our FastTrack team for help with upgrades, migrations, and (as of Ignite) application compatibility as part of the newly announced Desktop App Assure program.

More information is available in Helping customers shift to a modern desktop.

Make the shift today

I started Monday’s session talking about the past instead of the future.

This look backwards focused on the little-known story of John Napier. In the early 1600s, Napier was an eccentric inventor and treasure hunter who never left his home without a wooden box of spiders in his pocket or a black rooster he considered magical. From this very unlikely source came a project 20 years and 10 million calculations in the making.

In 1614, he published a 147-page book that ushered in the technical underpinnings of the modern world. With no advanced notice or fanfare, he introduced the concept of logarithms and how to use them.

Once logarithmic tables were available, the sciences and engineering professions surged. Almost overnight, a world full of equations that could not be solved by hand within the time limits of a normal lifespan could be unraveled in minutes. This made the world a dramatically simpler place, and the sciences surged with this new, user-friendly computational technology.

Logarithmic calculations offered the means for accurate measures of planetary orbits, which led to interstellar cartography, which led to satellites and moon landings. Trade routes could now be measured and planned across oceans instead of counties. Engineers could now build things bigger, safer, and stronger—which led to industrialization, internal combustion, and skyscrapers. In very short order mobility leapt from carts, to steam engines, to intercontinental flight, and human productivity took flight by moving from hand tools, to electricity, to the cloud.

I believe we’re at another pivotal moment in history. All hyperbole aside, I see the volume and quality of the new tools demonstrated at Ignite as a huge opportunity for IT. Not only do these tools work with and expand upon the elements you already have within your infrastructure, but they put the power of the cloud in the hands of every one of your end users. The integrated simplicity and functionality of what has been built for IT pros allows you to cloud-connect the work you are doing and use cloud-based intelligence to transform your organization.

Please evaluate and investigate all of our announcements—and don’t hesitate to share your feedback. I appreciate your partnership and I am grateful for the incredible work you do every day.

The post Why and how you simplify IT with Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

September 24, 2018 By PC Portal

Microsoft Search—cohesive search that intelligently helps you find, discover, command, and navigate

At Ignite last year, we introduced personalized search across Office 365, a way to bring intelligent search and discovery experiences directly to you. Today, we’re delighted to announce that we are expanding that vision to encompass search both inside and outside of Microsoft 365. By applying artificial intelligence (AI) technology from Bing to the deep personalized insights surfaced by the Microsoft Graph, we are able to make search in your organization even more effective.

With Microsoft Search, we’re introducing new organizational search experiences into the apps you use every day, including Bing.com and Windows, and our vision to connect across your organization’s network of data.

We’re also evolving the notion of what search means. Getting pages of results with hyperlinks to other information is simply not enough. Faced with ever decreasing attention spans, and an explosion of data, we recognize that the challenge is to find and deliver answers to your questions, suggest insights, and enable you to take action on your tasks. This makes search a powerful capability that stretches across your work to make you more productive and take advantage of the collective knowledge from your organization.

Our vision is a cohesive and coherent search capability, prominent in every experience, providing the way to search across all your organization’s data—both inside and outside of Microsoft 365.

Over the next few months, you’ll experience these first steps:

Search will move to a prominent, consistent place across the apps you work with every day. From Outlook to PowerPoint, Excel to Sway, OneNote to Microsoft Teams, Office.com to SharePoint, the search bar will be in the same place—across desktop, mobile, and web.
Personalized results as soon as you click in the search box, such as people you share with the most and documents you were working on recently. No query is required to get suggestions.
The search box itself will also command the application where you are working. For example, begin typing “acc” in Word to get list of suggested actions such as Accept Revision or Accessibility Checker. You no longer need to hunt through toolbars to look for a command.
Search results will include results from across your organization. For example, within Word, you can find not only other Word documents, but also a presentation you were working on. You can navigate straight to that presentation or you can choose to incorporate slides from that file directly into your document.
Extending that same organizational search experience wherever you are working—in Bing.com (when signed in with your Office 365 account), Edge or Windows. Search wherever you want to and get the same experience.
Unified administration of your organizational search results, including admin-curated results such as bookmarks.

Experience Microsoft Search today

Key to delivering the Microsoft Search capability is the ability to have consistent scope of results anywhere you are searching. Even if the interface looks different, the goal is to have the same experience, personalized and contextualized for that specific interaction point.

Microsoft Search in Bing.com

Over the last year, 180 companies participated in our private preview, with files, sites, people, locations, and groups based on Microsoft Graph data. Based on the private preview feedback, we’re announcing the ability to search across conversations in both Teams and Yammer simultaneously.

Searching in Bing returns both your organizational results and web results, making it an easy destination for broad searches to get the best of your work world and secure your web searches. Public preview begins rolling out today. Tenant admins must opt in to the experience for their organization. Visit bing.com/business/explore for details.

Microsoft Search in Office.com

Get back to your work faster with Office.com, surfacing the same search scope across Microsoft 365. Find documents you were recently working on, as well as recommended documents that your colleagues have mentioned you in, and keep up to date with what has been worked on since you last looked at it. Microsoft Search in Office.com goes into targeted release today.

Microsoft Search in SharePoint mobile app

The new version of the SharePoint mobile app includes search as the default experience when you enter the app. It lists common questions, personalized results, and frequent searches that organizations can curate. The new SharePoint mobile app is available for download today.

Microsoft Search in the Outlook mobile app

The Outlook mobile app also highlights search as an important element of the user experience, providing access to commands, content, and people. With “zero query search,” simply placing your cursor in the search box will bring up recommendations powered by AI and the Microsoft Graph. The Outlook mobile app for iOS and Android are available for download today.

Outlook will also bring zero query, fuzzy search, and top results based on intelligent technology to other endpoints as we drive towards coherence. Enhancements to search in Outlook for Windows, Mac, and on the web started to roll out to targeted release mid-September.

Connect and curate data across your organization’s systems

Boundary-less search is only as good as the sources it has access to. We recognize that organizations have a wealth of data in other third-party services and applications. In 2019, we will build native connectors for popular third-party applications that will surface search results inline with Microsoft data into all the search experiences you have, including Office, Windows, Edge, and Bing.com. Administrators will be able to select which connectors they wish to use for their organizations based on which investments they’ve already made in third-party applications. Further extensibility with APIs will also be possible. Organizations will be able customize the search sources and the display of search results with custom refiners and verticals, and control the display of how sources of information look in result pages.

Coming in the first half of 2019

Microsoft Search in Office

Our new suite-wide search in the ribbon offers the same consistent experience and results across your favorite Office apps—across desktop, mobile, and web. Find, command, navigate, and discover directly from the same search box.

Microsoft Search in Windows

Right from your taskbar, perform searches that include local and organizational search results; whether that is people, the location of an office, or your files, you can find it all in Windows.

What’s coming next?

The Microsoft Graph gleans insight from the people, sites, devices, and documents you work with and is the basis for consistent learning across your organization, wherever you and your colleagues work. Microsoft Graph ranks search results relevant to your needs. You can see all the results that satisfy your query, but personalized search prioritizes the results that are most likely to achieve your objective.

Supercharging the Microsoft Graph with advanced AI technology from Bing and its knowledge of the world, we can extend our vision for insightful technology to make it simple to ask natural language questions and get real answers, without manual intervention. For example, a question such as “Can my brother work for me at my company?” means that not only syntactic parsing of the question is necessary but semantic understanding. Your organization’s HR policy probably specifies “close family relationships,” so we use Bing’s knowledge of the world to expand and match “brother” and couple that with searching your organization’s intranet to derive the answer.

Using this machine reading comprehension technology is just one of the many ways we’ll be continuously improving Microsoft Search in the future.

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September 24, 2018 By PC Portal

Microsoft 365 adds modern desktop on Azure

Today, we are announcing Windows Virtual Desktop, the best virtualized Windows and Office experience delivered on Azure. Windows Virtual Desktop is the only cloud-based service that delivers a multi-user Windows 10 experience, optimized for Office 365 ProPlus, and includes free Windows 7 Extended Security Updates. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale Windows and Office on Azure in minutes, with built-in security and compliance.

For many companies, the specific needs of their business require a virtualized desktop experience. The reasons for virtualization vary. For example, for regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, a virtualized desktop experience ensures compliance regulations are met and access to sensitive data is securely managed. For mobile workforces and Firstline Workers, desktop virtualization makes managing and provisioning access to corporate data and apps easier. It also gives IT options in supporting scenarios such as giving access to specific apps to certain employees.

Introducing the Windows Virtual Desktop

While desktop virtualization helps in many business scenarios, it has historically been complex and expensive to deploy and manage. To solve some of these complexities, we have developed Windows Virtual Desktop with both IT and the user in mind.

Windows Virtual Desktop includes the following benefits:

The only service to enable a multi-user Windows 10 experience, including compatibility with Microsoft Store and existing Windows line-of-business apps while delivering cost advantages previously only possible with server-based virtualization.
The best service to virtualize Office 365 ProPlus running in multi-user virtual scenarios. Microsoft Office is the most virtualized app used, and we are committed to deliver the best possible virtual experience. In the months ahead, we will have more to share on our investments in the Office 365 virtualized experience for the Windows Virtual Desktop service.
The only service to provide Windows 7 virtual desktop with free Extended Security Updates, giving you more options to support legacy apps while you transition to Windows 10.
The most scalable service to deploy and manage Windows virtual machines, using Azure for compute, storage, rich diagnostics, advanced networking, connection brokering, and gateway. You no longer need to host, install, configure, and manage these components yourself—so you can deploy and scale in minutes.
The most flexible service allowing you to virtualize both desktops and apps, meaning you can choose between providing your users the entire desktop experience or delivering only specific apps. When you deliver virtual apps to a Windows 10 endpoint, they are integrated seamlessly into the user experience.
Deeply integrated with the security and management of Microsoft 365. The Microsoft 365 conditional access, data loss prevention, and integrated management are natively built in—providing the most secure and simplest solution for protecting and managing all your apps and data.

Windows Virtual Desktop ecosystem

Windows Virtual Desktop is a comprehensive virtualization solution. However, we recognize that there is a need for different capabilities to serve our broad set of customers. To accommodate this need, we have built Windows Virtual Desktop as a platform that can be easily extended and enriched by partners in the following ways:

We will have many partners that extend the service through the Azure marketplace and are already working with leading partners, including Citrix, CloudJumper, FSLogix, Lakeside Software, Liquidware, People Tech Group, and ThinPrint.
The extensive network of Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers will be able to offer Windows Virtual Desktop to their customers and offer additional value around the service.
We are also working with partners such as Citrix to deeply integrate and build upon the Windows Virtual Desktop capabilities.

We will have more to share on our ecosystem approach in the near future.

Access to Windows Virtual Desktop

We’re excited to offer this service to Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education customers. Once you sign up for Windows Virtual Desktop, you only need to set up or use an existing Azure subscription to quickly deploy and manage your virtual desktops and apps. The only additional cost to you is for the storage and compute consumption from the virtual machines themselves, which will live in your Azure subscription. You will be able to take advantage of any of your existing Azure compute commitments, including Azure Virtual Machine Reserved Instances (RI).

We are working hard to put the finishing touches on a public preview, which will be available later this year. If you would like to participate in the public preview, you can register your interest now. In the meantime, please visit the Windows Virtual Desktop website to learn more, or contact your Microsoft account team or Microsoft partner.

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