Microsoft has reached a milestone in text-to-speech synthesis with a production system that uses deep neural networks to make the voices of computers nearly indistinguishable from recordings of people. With the human-like natural prosody and clear articulation of words, Neural TTS has significantly reduced listening fatigue when you interact with AI systems.

Our team demonstrated our neural-network powered text-to-speech capability at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, this week. The capability is currently available in preview through Azure Cognitive Services Speech Services.

Neural text-to-speech can be used to make interactions with chatbots and virtual assistants more natural and engaging, convert digital texts such as e-books into audiobooks and enhance in-car navigation systems.

The milestone in text-to-speech joins a string of breakthroughs that our group has achieved over the past two years, including human parity in conversational speech recognition and human parity in machine translation.

Our text-to-speech capability uses deep neural networks to overcome the limits of traditional text-to-speech systems in matching the patterns of stress and intonation in spoken language, called prosody, and in synthesizing the units of speech into a computer voice.

Traditional text-to-speech systems break down prosody into separate linguistic analysis and acoustic prediction steps that are governed by independent models. That can result in muffled, buzzy voice synthesis. Our neural capability does prosody prediction and voice synthesis simultaneously. The result is a more fluid and natural-sounding voice.

Sentence	Recording	Neural TTS
The third type, a logarithm of the unsigned fold change, is undoubtedly the most tractable.
As the name suggests, the original submarines came from Yugoslavia.
This is easy enough if you have an unfinished attic directly above the bathroom.

By using the computational power of Azure, we can deliver real-time streaming, which is useful for situations such as interacting with a chatbot or virtual assistant. The capability is served in the Azure Kubernetes Service. This ensures high scalability and availability and gives customers the ability to use neural text-to-speech and traditional text-to-speech from a single endpoint.

The preview service is currently offering two pre-built neural text-to-speech voices in English – Jessa and Guy. More languages will be available soon, as well as customization services in 49 languages for customers who want to build branded voices optimized for their specific needs.

To learn more, visit us.

Hello Azure friends! Today we are proud to share a new set of improvements to the Azure user experience. The changes included in this blog post are only a subset of the multiple improvements that we are delivering in this release. All these changes have been motivated by the great feedback that you have been giving us so please keep the feedback coming!

Azure user experience refresh

We've introduced modern design updates to refresh the look and feel of the portal to increase productivity, improve accessibility, and make better use of your screen real estate.

These updates have been carefully designed to address the feedback that you have been giving us. Some key improvements include:

• Improved information density and better use of screen real estate (e.g. vertical menus fit more items).
• Simplified visuals that reduce clutter, remove unnecessary lines/decorations, and create better flow between different areas in the UI.
• More intuitive organization of information.
• Better highlighting of key navigational elements like global search and breadcrumbs.
• Improved accessibility, updated colors that improve contrast ratios, and subtle updates that align our fonts across the portal.
• Support for usage over long periods of time (avoid eye-strain).

We've made these design updates without changing our existing interaction model, so you don’t need to re-learn how to use the product. You can continue using the patterns and interactions that you already know and love with all the benefits mentioned above. Let me know what do you think!

Dashboard and Virtual Machine blade shown before and after the update

Account, subscription, and directory management improvements

Many of you manage multiple personal and professional Azure accounts. In this release we have a preview of an experience that allows you to switch between multiple accounts in the same browser instance, as can be seen in the image below:

Managing multiple accounts in the Azure Portal

This experience is only available in the preview environment. Try it out and let me know what you think!

In preparation for this experience we have moved the subscription filter to the top navigation bar:

Global subscription filter and directory selection

As part of this change we have improved existing capabilities and added features that you have been asking for:

• Global subscription filter in top navigation bar.
• Configure the default directory (top ask).
• Search and sort the list of directories.
• Set your favorite directories.

Subscription filter and directory selection panel with description of available functionality

Updates to resource creation and deployment experience

We are continuing with the simplification of resource creation started at Build 2018 with the AKS and IoT Hub create experiences. These experiences make better use of the screen real estate by reorganizing the create wizards from a vertical panel to horizontal tabs with meaningful names and descriptions. The new create experience has been designed with the following principles:

• Consistent experience across different resources, learn one and apply to all.
• Better use of the screen real estate.
• Provide a clear set of steps, each of which must have a clear explanation of expectations and link to docs to learn more.
• The first tab is always called Basic and also acts as Quick create: You can just fill out that tab and create your resource.
• Allow adding tags to the resource being created.

As a result, we expect:

• Simpler and easier to learn resource creation experiences.
• More and richer configuration options.
• Reduced time on task to create a resource. Our early iterative usability studies show a considerable increase in task completion and a decrease in time on task.

In this release we have applied these principles to Virtual Machine and Storage account creation experiences.

Let’s talk about virtual machines creation. In this case we not only did apply the principles mentioned above but also re-designed the flow and improved the options available when creating Virtual Machines in the portal such as multiple data disks, OS options, initialization, tagging, and more. All these new settings are optional so even though you have more control over the resource that you are creating you can also enjoy a very simple and fast experience if that is what you are looking for (quick create). The animated gif below shows how you can start deployment of a Virtual Machine in a few seconds!

Start deployment of a virtual machine in a few seconds!

Once the resources are created we introduced a deployment experience where we you can see status of the resources being created, useful information about the create operation that you are performing, and access the actual template being deployed:

Deployment in progress (automatically shown after creation)

When the creation experience succeeds we provide a button to go to the created resource to start managing it, in this case the VM.

Successful deployment (notice the button to directly navigate to the resource)

When the creation fails we present you with a consistent error experience to help you understand the cause of the error and take an action. In that experience you can see a pretty printed version of the error or just see the actual JSON coming from the backed to get every single detail about the failure.

Failed deployment - Clicking in the red banner at the top opens a panel with details about the error

The Storage create experience has also been updated to a similar experience. The image below shows the storage account screen:

Storage account creation experience

Notifications and Activity logs

The notifications panel has been updated to improve how data is displayed in terms of information density, available data, and interactions. In addition to these changes we started on a journey to connect Notifications and Activity Logs since many entries in both experiences come from the same data source. The first step is showing a link to the activity logs at the top of the notifications list or when the notifications list is empty.

Updated notifications experience

Azure Activity Log's UI has been also improved. For people that are not familiar with the Activity Log, it is log that provides insight into subscription-level events that have occurred in Azure. This includes a range of data, from Azure Resource Manager operational data to updates on Service Health events. The new experience has been designed for productivity, use of the screen real-estate, and performance.

Updated activity log experience

In addition to looking at the logs you also can download them as CSV and see Quick insights, which is a set of well-known queries (errors, deployments, and etc.) over the last 24 hours.

Storage explorer in Browse

Storage Explorer is now easier to find since it is available as a resource in Browse, available in the All Services list and via global search. You can now easily manage multiple storage accounts under different subscriptions in one view.

Storage explorer available in all services menu (and global search)!

Azure Advisor integration in the VM experience

Azure Advisor notifications have been directly integrated in the virtual machine overview page in the form of a status bar that when clicked takes you directly to Azure Advisor to see your recommendations and take action.

Azure Advisor in the Virtual Machine blade (blue banner at the top)

Azure Quickstart Center update

Quickstart Center is an experience that we launched as a preview for Build with the goal of helping customers that are new to the platform take their first steps in Azure. In this release we have simplified the experience based on your feedback:

QuickStartCenter goal selection

We have also extended the features of Quickstart Center by adding playbooks, which are sets of instructions to help you set up your Azure environment with Microsoft recommended best practices and governance guidelines. We help you with topics like managing access through RBAC, organizing and tagging your resources, securing your resources, enforcing compliance, and monitoring the health of your Azure environment.

Enterprise readiness playbook

Improvements to All Resources view (preview)

Azure Resource Graph (ARG) provides a fast and rich way to query through large sets of Azure Resources. In this release we will be previewing an experience that uses ARG in the All Resources blade, one of the most popular entry points in the popular.

This new experience is not only faster and design to work with a very large set of resources but also explores different ways of navigating the results set via facets. We have also integrated ARG in the global search, so you can enjoy a faster experience when using the search bar at the top of the portal.

Preview of the updated all resources experience. We are experimenting with several options and your feedback will be key to help us create the right experience!

Please note that the UI for this experience is evolving. We look forward to your feedback to help us design a great resource browsing experience for Azure, so please feel free to reach out after you try this new experience and let me know your thoughts.

Improvements to the Azure Mobile App

One of our top asks has been the ability to manage role-based access control from the Azure mobile app. Giving you access to this critical function while on the go is a powerful feature. While away from a computer, a user may not be able to take care of all mission critical scenarios—but by having the Azure mobile app, they will be able to give coworkers the authorizations they need to take care of any situations that may arise.

BAC in Mobile (iOS and Android)

Let us know what you think!

We’ve gone through a lot of new capabilities and still did not cover everything that is coming up in this release! The team is always hard at work focusing on improving the experience and is always eager to get your feedback and learn how can we make your experience better. Feel free to reach out directly to me at lwelicki@microsoft.com with your feedback or any thoughts about Azure user experience.

Let’s work together to build the best cloud experience!

Enterprises are accelerating their digital transformation. We have seen this momentum over the last year as evidenced by customers moving their mission critical SAP applications to Azure. This digital transformation is being powered by the adoption of SAP’s intelligent ERP, S/4HANA, running on the agile cloud infrastructure offered by Azure. For example, Daimler AG is transforming its mission critical procurement system with S/4HANA and chose Azure for its agility, cost savings, and speed of deployment.

Since last November, both Microsoft and SAP have been embarking on our own journeys to run internal SAP S/4HANA systems on Azure. We announced at SAP’s Sapphire NOW that Azure supports the largest scale and broadest choice for SAP HANA including our Azure M-series VMs and BareMetal offerings. In addition to this, we have launched a managed services option for customers with SAP’s HANA Enterprise Cloud with Azure and enabled SAP developer productivity with the general availability of SAP’s Cloud Platform on Azure.

Microsoft and SAP share a common goal of enabling customers to build secure and compliant solutions in this journey. Microsoft is a leader in protecting customer data in the cloud and Microsoft Azure offers a comprehensive set of security and compliance tools along with 85 compliance offerings, including tools and services to help customers meet GDPR compliance. SAP also has a long history of delivering Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) solutions.

Today, I’m excited to announce that SAP Data Custodian, a SaaS offering from SAP, will soon become available on Azure. SAP Data Custodian combines Azure’s built-in compliance controls and the deep expertise of SAP to provide customers end-to-end visibility of their SAP data on Azure and an easy to use set of data governance controls. This will help customers to fulfill their responsibility for data governance, segregation of oversight duties, and achieve independent verification.

If you would like to learn more about running SAP solutions on Azure and our partnership efforts with SAP, please attend these SAP on Azure sessions or stop by the SAP on Azure booth in the expo hall for a demo of SAP HANA and SAP Data Custodian on Azure.

Today we are excited to announce the limited public preview of Azure Premium Blob Storage, which introduces a new performance tier in Azure Blob Storage, complimenting the existing Hot, Cool, and Archive tiers. Data in Premium Blob Storage is stored on solid-state drives, which are known for lower latency and higher transactional rates compared to traditional hard drives.

Premium Blob Storage is ideal for workloads that require very fast access times. This includes most scenarios with a human in the loop, such as interactive video editing, static web content, online transactions, and more. It also works well for workloads that perform many relatively small transactions, such as capturing telemetry data, message passing, and data transformation.

Our internal testing shows that both average and 99th percentile server latency is significantly better than our Hot access tier, providing faster and more consistent response times for both read and write across a range of object sizes. Your application should be deployed to compute instances in the same Azure region as the storage account to realize low latency End-to-End.

Premium Blob Storage is available with Locally-Redundant Storage and comes with High-Throughput Block Blobs (HTBB), which provides a) improved write throughput when ingesting larger block blobs, b) instant write throughput, and c) container and blob names have no effect on throughput.

You can store block blobs and append blobs in Premium Blob Storage. To use Premium Blob Storage you provision a new ‘Block Blob’ storage account in your subscription and start creating containers and blobs using the existing Blob Service REST API and/or any existing tools such as AzCopy or Azure Storage Explorer.

Pricing

Premium Blob Storage has higher data storage cost, but lower transaction cost compared to data stored in the regular Hot tier. This makes it cost effective and can be less expensive for workloads with very high transaction rates. Check out the pricing page for more details.

Object tiering

At present data stored in Premium cannot be tiered to Hot, Cool or Archive access tiers. We are working on supporting object tiering in the future. To move data, you can synchronously copy blobs from using the new PutBlockFromURL API (sample code) or a version of AzCopy that supports this API. PutBlockFromURL synchronously copies data server side, which means that the data has finished copying when the call completes and all data movement happens inside Azure Storage.

Limited preview region availability

Premium Blob Storage preview will be available in US East 2, US Central and US West regions.

Azure Portal

The Azure Portal will not support Premium Blob Storage during the limited public preview. You will not be able to create and manage storage accounts for Premium Blob Storage using the portal. The portal will enumerate these accounts, but you will not be able to manage them using the portal.

How to sign-up

To enroll in limited public preview, you will need to submit a request to register this feature for your subscription. After your request is approved, you create a Premium Blob storage account (see below). As with most previews, this feature should not be used for production workloads until it reaches GA.

To submit a request, run the following PowerShell commands to login to your subscription and register the feature:

Connect-AzureRmAccount -SubscriptionId <subscriptionID>

Register-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName premiumblob -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Storage

It should take 24-48 hours to process the request. You can check the status of your request by running the following Powershell command:

Get-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName premiumblob -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Storage

How to create a storage account

Once your request has been approved, you can create block blob storage accounts.

To create a block blob account, you must first install the PowerShell AzureRm.Storage preview module.

Step 1: Ensure that you have the latest version of PowerShellGet installed

Install-Module PowerShellGet –Repository PSGallery –Force

Step 2:  Install the AzureRm.Storage module

Install-Module AzureRm.Storage –Repository PSGallery -RequiredVersion 6.0.0-preview –AllowPrerelease –AllowClobber –Force

Step 3: Open a new PowerShell console and login with your Azure account

Login-AzureRMAccount

Note: If you have an AzureRm.Storage module installed with a higher version, you need to manually import the AzureRm.Storage preview module:

Import-Module AzureRM.Storage -RequiredVersion 6.0.0

Once the PowerShell preview module is in place you can create a block blob storage account:

New-AzureRmStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName <resource group> -Name <accountname> -Location <region> -Kind "BlockBlobStorage" -SkuName "Premium_LRS"

Valid regions are: eastus2, centralus, and westus

Feedback

We would love to get your feedback at premiumblobfeedback@microsoft.com.

Conclusion

We are very excited about being able to deliver Azure Blob Storage with low and consistent latency with Premium Blob Storage and look forward to hearing your feedback. Also, feel free to follow my Twitter for more updates.

Cheers,

Claus

It’s been over a year since we introduced Microsoft 365, the complete, intelligent, and secure solution that empowers employees to drive their organizations to future growth. Customers are seeking to transform and support a workforce that is more diverse and mobile than ever before, and they are relying on latest advancements in technology to do so. Customers such as Goodyear, Eli Lilly, and Fruit of the Loom use Microsoft 365 to empower their employees.

Microsoft 365 is growing quickly, built on the strength of more than 135 million commercial monthly Office 365 users. Windows 10 has approximately 200 million commercial devices in use, and there is an install base of over 82 million for Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS). Today, at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Orlando, Florida, we are introducing new capabilities in Microsoft 365 that make it possible for every person to do their best work.

1. Microsoft Teams is the fastest growing business app in Microsoft history

After less than two years in market, more than 329,000 organizations worldwide use Microsoft Teams, including 87 of the Fortune 100 companies. In fact, 54 customers now have more than 10,000 active users of Teams, and Accenture just crossed the 100,000 active-user mark in Teams. Further growth has been spurred by the recently announced free version of Teams.

We continue to add powerful new capabilities to foster teamwork and collaboration. New artificial intelligence (AI) powered meeting features are now generally available—including background blur and meeting recording. Background blur uses facial detection to blur your background during video meetings, and meeting recording allows you to playback recorded meeting content at any time with captions and a searchable, timecoded transcript.

General availability of new live event capabilities will begin to roll out worldwide in Microsoft 365 later this year. These new tools allow customers to create and stream live and on-demand events in Teams, Yammer and Microsoft Stream to inform and engage customers and employees, wherever they are. Beginning in October, employees can watch videos on the go with the Stream mobile app for iOS and Android, with support for offline viewing. And we’re working with our ecosystem of device partners to deliver new devices optimized for Teams meetings and calling, including the new Surface Hub 2. Surface Hub 2 is perfect for dynamic teamwork and features a light, sleek, and intelligent design that’s easy to move around and fit in any workspace. The first phase of Surface Hub 2, Surface Hub 2 S, will start shipping in the second quarter of 2019.

Blur your background during meetings.

2. Extend the power of Teams to empower workers in all roles and across industries

As an example of how Teams can enable secure workflows for regulated industries, we’re delivering a new care coordination solution, now available in private preview, that gives healthcare teams a secure hub for coordinating care across multiple patients. It provides for integration with electronic health records (EHR) systems and enables care providers to communicate about patient care in real-time within Teams’ secure platform. We are also releasing two new secure messaging features with particular relevance in healthcare settings—image annotation, now generally available, and priority notifications, which will roll out by the end of this year to all Teams commercial customers. These capabilities support HIPAA compliance and enable doctors, nurses, and other clinicians to communicate about patients while avoiding the privacy risks that arise when healthcare professionals use consumer chat apps.

Easily swap shifts, request time off, and see who else is working.

3. Find what you need faster with Microsoft Search

Microsoft Search, a new cohesive search capability, makes it easier for you to find what you need without leaving the flow of your work. We’re putting the search box in a consistent, prominent place across Edge, Bing, Windows, and Office apps, so that search is always one click away. We’re also supercharging the search box so you can not only quickly find people and related content, but you can also access commands for apps and navigate to other content wherever you need to get work done—even before you start typing in the search box. Recognizing that you work in an ecosystem of information, we’re extending Microsoft Search to connect across your organization’s data, inside and outside of Microsoft 365. Learning from your everyday work patterns and acting as a brain for your organization, the Microsoft Graph personalizes your experiences everywhere. We’re pulling together the power of the Microsoft Graph and AI technology from Bing to deliver future experiences that are more relevant to what you are working on. This will include automatically answering questions such as “Can I bring my wife and kids on a work trip?” by using machine reading comprehension that takes knowledge of the world and pairs it with understanding of your organization’s documents. Preview the Microsoft Search capability it as it rolls out to Office.com, Bing.com, and in the SharePoint mobile app today, with many more experiences to come in Edge, Windows, and Office.

Find what you need faster with Microsoft Search.

4. Create content that stands out with Microsoft 365

Three new features in Microsoft 365 use the power of AI to help you create content that shines. Ideas is a new feature that follows along as you create a document and makes intelligent suggestions. In PowerPoint, Ideas recommends designs, layouts, and images. In Excel, Ideas recognizes trends, suggests charts, and identifies outliers in your data. Ideas is generally available in Excel today and will begin rolling out in preview to the other apps starting with PowerPoint Online. Additionally, new data types in Excel turn references to stocks and geographies into rich entities that can be used to build powerful, interactive spreadsheets. The Stocks and Geography data types are generally available today and make it easy to get updated stock prices, company information, population, area, and more. Finally, new image recognition capabilities in Excel take a picture of a hand-drawn or printed data table and turn it into an Excel spreadsheet, making data entry as easy as taking a picture.

In PowerPoint, Ideas recommends designs, layouts, and images for your presentation.

5. Office loves the Mac

Office empowers everyone to achieve more on any device. And Office loves the Mac. We’re committed to the Mac as a first-class endpoint and have made significant investments in the platform over the past year—including moving the Mac and Windows versions of the apps onto a single code base and releasing new features for the Mac every month. We also tailored new experiences for the Mac, like the new Touch Bar integration.

Today, we’re announcing OneDrive Files On-Demand for Mac, a way to access all your personal and work files from the cloud in Finder without using storage space and only download them when you need them. Files On-Demand gives the Mac an intelligent connection to the cloud and is just one more example of the power of Office on the Mac platform. Preview it before it rolls out to all Mac users.

OneDrive Files On-Demand for Mac displays all your OneDrive files in Finder but only downloads them when you need them.

6. Work together with your entire network with LinkedIn in Outlook and Office web apps

We’re announcing two new ways to use the power of the LinkedIn network within your daily workflow. Soon, when you connect your LinkedIn account to Office 365, you’ll be able to coauthor documents with people in your LinkedIn network in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and send emails to them directly from Outlook. This brings your corporate directory and your LinkedIn network together, so you never lose touch with the contacts who can help you succeed, inside or outside your organization. You’ll also see LinkedIn highlights about the people in your meeting invites, providing you with insights about attendees, so you can prep for important meetings quickly and easily. These features help you focus on what’s important by providing information and connections directly in your flow of work and will be coming soon in a staged rollout.

7. Deliver a modern desktop with Azure

For many companies, the specific needs of their business demand a virtualized desktop experience. Today, we are introducing Windows Virtual Desktop, the only cloud-based service that delivers a multi-user Windows 10 experience, which is 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. Sign up to be notified of the preview availability.

8. Manage your environment with the Microsoft 365 admin center

Following our recent release of the new Microsoft 365 admin center, we’re announcing new features to help you to monitor and manage applications, services, data, devices, and users across your Microsoft 365 subscriptions, including Office 365, Windows 10, and EMS. The Microsoft 365 admin center has several new capabilities to help you better manage your environment, including insight-based recommendations, a more consistent UI, and customized views for each of your admins. The public preview of these features is rolling out now to targeted release admins and soon to all admins. To get started, visit admin.microsoft.com.

Manage your environment more easily with the Microsoft 365 admin center.

9. Achieve modern compliance easily for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and more

In the world of complex regulations and evolving privacy standards, customers consistently tell us they need the built-in, intelligent capabilities of Microsoft 365 to proactively achieve compliance in their organizations. We’ve expanded Compliance Manager to now include 12 assessments across different industries. The unified labeling experience is also now available in the Security & Compliance Center as a single destination where you can create, configure, and automatically apply policies to ensure protection and governance of sensitive data.

Compliance Manager now includes 12 assessments across different industries.

10. Advancing security for IT professionals

The work we do in security at Microsoft gives us the broadest perspective on the challenges and a unique ability to help. We focus on three areas: running security operations that work for you, building enterprise-class technology, and driving partnerships for a heterogeneous world. Today, we’re announcing several new enterprise-class capabilities that leverage the Microsoft intelligent cloud and operational learnings to help organizations secure their people, devices, and data.

New support for passwordless sign-in via the Microsoft Authenticator app is now available for the hundreds of thousands of Azure Active Directory connected apps that businesses use every day. Nearly all data loss starts with compromised passwords. Today, we are declaring an end to the era of passwords. No company lets enterprises eliminate more passwords than Microsoft.

Microsoft Secure Score is the only enterprise-class dynamic report card for cybersecurity. By using it, organizations get assessments and recommendations that typically reduce their chance of a breach by 30-fold. It guides you to take steps like securing admin accounts with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), securing users accounts with MFA, and turning off client-side email forwarding rules. Starting today, we’re expanding Secure Score to cover all of Microsoft 365. We are also introducing Secure Score for your hybrid cloud workloads in the Azure Security Center, so you have full visibility across your estate.

Finally, we are announcing Microsoft Threat Protection, an integrated experience for detection, investigation, and remediation across endpoints, email, documents, identity, and infrastructure in the Microsoft 365 admin console. This will save analysts thousands of hours as they automate the more mundane security tasks.

Microsoft Secure Score is expanding to cover all of Microsoft 365.

We look forward to bringing you these new ways to achieve more from unlocking creativity to advancing security. You can learn more about our announcements, see all of our Microsoft Ignite sessions live streaming or on-demand, and connect with experts on the Microsoft Tech Community.

The post 10 new ways for everyone to achieve more in the modern workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Excel’s power comes from its simplicity. At its core, Excel is three things: cells of data laid out in rows and columns, a powerful calculation engine, and a set of tools for working with the data. The result is an incredibly flexible app that hundreds of millions of people use daily in a wide variety of jobs and industries around the world.

Today, we’re pleased to announce four new artificial intelligence (AI) features that make Excel even more powerful:

• Ideas
• New data types
• Insert Data from Picture
• Dynamic arrays

Introducing intelligent suggestions with Ideas

Ideas is an AI-powered insights service that helps people take advantage of the full power of Office. Proactively surfacing suggestions that are tailored to the task at hand, Ideas helps users create professional documents, presentations, and spreadsheets in less time. In Excel, for instance, Ideas helps identify trends, patterns, and outliers in a data set—helping customers analyze and understand their data in seconds. Ideas is generally available in Excel today and will begin rolling out in preview to other apps starting with PowerPoint Online. Simply click the lightning bolt icon in Excel or PowerPoint Online and Ideas will start making recommendations. Read more about Ideas in this support article.

Making new data types generally available today

Excel has always been great at helping people make the most of numbers. But now Excel can do even more: It can recognize real-world concepts, starting with Stocks and Geography. This new AI-powered capability turns a single, flat piece of text into an interactive entity containing layers of rich information. For instance, by converting a list of countries in a workbook to “Geography” entities, customers can weave location data into an analysis of their own data. And this new capability—though deceptively simple—opens a whole new world of possibilities. As we add new data types over time, Excel’s rows, columns, cells, logic engine, and tools can be used to organize, analyze, and reason over any combination of numbers and sophisticated entities. The Stocks and Geography data types are generally available today. Read more about data types in this support article.

Saying goodbye to manual data entry

With Insert Data from Picture, you can take a picture of a hand-drawn or printed data table with your Android device and convert that analog information into an Excel spreadsheet with a single click. New image recognition functionality automatically converts the picture to a fully editable table in Excel, eliminating the need for you to manually enter data. Insert Data from Picture will be available in preview for the Excel Android app soon.

Calculating with ease using dynamic arrays

With dynamic arrays, we continue to invest in making advanced formulas easier to use. Using dynamic arrays, any formula that returns an array of values will seamlessly “spill” into neighboring unoccupied cells, making it as easy to get an array of values returned as it is to work on a single cell. You can immediately harness the power of dynamic arrays by using one the new FILTER, UNIQUE, SORT, SORTBY, SEQUENCE, SINGLE, and RANDARRAY functions to build spreadsheets that would previously have been nearly impossible. So now, rather than writing many complex formulas to solve a multi-cell problem, you can write one simple formula and get an array of values returned.

Faster LOOKUP and MATCH

We’re not only adding new capabilities to Excel, we’re also continually improving the features customers already know and love. For example, we have invested in significant performance improvements for important lookup functions. We’re pleased to announce that VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, and MATCH functions operating on large data sets will now execute in seconds instead of minutes. We’ve also improved performance on many key operations like copy/paste, undo, conditional formatting, cell editing, cell selection, filtering, file open, and programmability.

We’re excited about these new features and hope you are, too. For us, Excel isn’t just a tool—it’s a way of life! And today’s announcements not only deliver incremental improvements in data handling and performance, they also push the app into new territory with new data types and AI-powered analysis services. We look forward to showing you more at Ignite this week and can’t wait to see what you do with it all. As always, we’d love to hear from you, so please send us your thoughts through UserVoice—and keep the conversation going by following Excel on Facebook and Twitter.

Availability

• Ideas will be available starting today.
• New data types are rolling out to users of Excel in Office 365, in the English language only starting today.
• Performance improvements are rolling out first to Excel in Office 365 starting today.
• Dynamic arrays is available in preview for users signed up for the Office 365 Insiders Program starting today.
• The Insert Data from Picture feature will be available in preview for users signed up for the Office 365 Insiders Program on the Android Excel app soon.

The post Bringing AI to Excel—4 new features announced today at Ignite appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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.

The post Microsoft 365 adds modern desktop on Azure appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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.

The post Microsoft Search—cohesive search that intelligently helps you find, discover, command, and navigate appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today’s post was written by Sherry Neubert, chief information officer at The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.

Goodyear has a 120-year history of being at the forefront of an ever-changing mobility industry. From bicycles, carriages, and the first Ford Model Ts off the production line, to blimps, airplanes, and even the first tire on the moon—Goodyear has always delivered innovative solutions that keep the world moving.

Today, our industry faces even more disruption through shifting consumer behaviors and expectations, digital transformation, and breakthroughs in technology that are accelerating change at speeds unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. This is creating a new mobility ecosystem shaped by shared mobility fleets, autonomous vehicles, connected vehicles, and electric vehicles.

Harnessing the power of our associates is key to competing—and continuing to lead—in this new world. With 64,000 associates selling products in around 150 countries, we need workplace productivity tools that enable innovation and bring together all of Goodyear’s diverse knowledge and capabilities. In 2014, we began to adopt Office 365 to modernize our workplace. Since then, we’ve empowered our associates worldwide with Microsoft 365 productivity and security tools and reached the halfway point in our global rollout of Windows 10. This cloud-connected modern desktop has given us the right tools to allow our teams to be as collaborative, agile, and productive as possible, while providing a highly secure digital environment.

Enhancing collaboration is crucial to us for improved decision making and to drive innovation, both in tires and beyond tires. Connecting associates via Microsoft 365 tools such as Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Yammer, and Skype for Business Online helps us take better advantage of our cross-functional and geographically dispersed teams. Our multigenerational and multicultural global workforce is now sharing perspectives and ideas more quickly and easily than ever.

Another focus for Goodyear is driving productivity and greater efficiencies so we can deliver the right products to the right place at the right time—faster than ever. With Microsoft 365, we stay connected and access shared content from anywhere, at any time, on any device, which allows us to innovate with greater speed. We also have an Internet of Things (IoT) proof of concept with Azure hosting big data from sensors in our factories. This allows us to use machine-learning capabilities to improve our predictive maintenance.

It is critically important for Goodyear to keep our information and systems safe so we can help protect our customers, associates, and the company and keep our focus on the changing needs of the marketplace. We safeguard our people, devices, data, and IP better with Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security. This has greatly improved our security capabilities, while at the same time continuously hardening our devices by providing updates as a service.

As our Microsoft 365 environment continues to mature, we’re evaluating the use of other Microsoft technologies. We’ve been using Microsoft HoloLens in exploration mode—it represents exciting possibilities for virtual tire modeling and design as well as remote knowledge transfer. We are also making strides advancing the AI infused in Microsoft 365, including Cortana, Azure-powered chatbots, and Focused Inbox, to amplify skills and democratize knowledge. The next big initiative on our horizon is adopting Microsoft Teams—we expect this to become our associates’ go-to social and collaboration platform.

The digital world is changing fast, and we must lead with digital innovation. For Goodyear, it’s all about how we can enable everyone in the company to put the customer at the center of everything we do and ensure that we maintain our leadership position in the new mobility ecosystem of tomorrow. When you find and deploy solutions that bring out the best in your people, the possibilities are endless.

—Sherry Neubert

The post Goodyear mobilizes with Microsoft 365 to lead in a new mobility ecosystem appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Office 2019 for Windows and Mac. Office 2019 is the next on-premises version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Project, Visio, Access, and Publisher.*

Office 365 ProPlus, the cloud-connected version of Office, delivers the most productive and most secure Office experience—with the lowest total cost of ownership for deployment and management. However, for customers who aren’t ready for the cloud, Office 2019 provides new features and updates to the on-premises apps for both users and IT professionals. Like Windows Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) releases, Office 2019 provides a set of valuable enhancements for customers who can’t be cloud-connected or receive regular updates.

The new enhancements in Office 2019 are a subset of a long list of features that have been added to Office 365 ProPlus over the last three years. Office 2019 is a one-time release and won’t receive future feature updates. However, we’ll continue to add new features to Office 365 ProPlus monthly, including innovations in collaboration, artificial intelligence (AI), security, and more.

Office 2019 delivers features across apps to help users create amazing content in less time. In PowerPoint 2019, you can create cinematic presentations with new features like Morph and Zoom. And improved inking features across the apps in Windows—like the roaming pencil case, pressure sensitivity, and tilt effects—allow you to naturally create documents.

Excel 2019 adds powerful new data analysis features, including new formulas and charts and enhancements to PowerPivot.

Word 2019 and Outlook 2019 help you focus on what matters most. Learning Tools, like Read Aloud and Text Spacing, make it easier to engage with your content. Focus Mode blocks out distractions and puts your content front and center. And Focused Inbox moves less important emails out of the way—so you can get straight to taking care of business. For a longer list of the new features in Office 2019, see our FAQs.

Office 2019 also includes new IT value for enhanced security and streamlined administration. We introduced Click-to-Run (C2R), a modern deployment technology, in Office 2013, and it’s now used to deploy and update Office across hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. With Office 2019, we’re moving the on-premises versions of Office to C2R to reduce costs and improve security. The advantages of C2R include predictable monthly security updates, up-to-date apps on installation, reduced network consumption through Windows 10 download optimization technology, and an easy upgrade path to Office 365 ProPlus. C2R offers the same enterprise-focused management capabilities as Microsoft Installer (MSI) based products and will also support an in-place upgrade when you move to Office 2019 from older MSI-based products. To learn more, refer to the Office 2019 Click-to-Run FAQ.

The 2019 release of Office products also includes updates to our servers, and in the coming weeks, we will release Exchange Server 2019, Skype for Business Server 2019, SharePoint Server 2019, and Project Server 2019.

Office 2019 is a valuable update for customers who aren’t yet ready for the cloud. And each time we release a new on-premises version of Office, customers ask us if this will be our last. We’re pleased to confirm that we’re committed to another on-premises release in the future. While the cloud offers real benefits in productivity, security, and total cost of ownership, we recognize that each customer is at a different point in their adoption of cloud services. We see the on-premises version of Office as an important part of our commitment to give customers the flexibility they need to move to the cloud at their own pace.

Availability

• Commercial volume license (trusted) customers can access Office 2019 starting today.
• Office 2019 will be available to all customers, consumer and commercial, in the next few weeks.

*Project 2019, Visio 2019, Access 2019, and Publisher 2019 are available for Windows only. Office 2019 customers will have access to OneNote. For more details, see Frequently asked questions about OneNote in Office 2019.

The post Office 2019 is now available for Windows and Mac appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today’s post was written by Mike Meadows, vice president and chief technology officer at Eli Lilly and Company.

We have an expression at Lilly that inspires our workforce every day: the patient is waiting. This mindset informs our culture, encourages us to work faster, and helps us deliver on the promise to make life better for patients everywhere. It’s behind everything we do at Lilly—from chasing a molecule in a lab to developing new ways to engage with patients, and even troubleshooting a server or network issue.

Our challenge continues to be the discovery of new therapies and accelerating their time-to-market. The process is too slow—and while clearly difficult and complex, our ability to get faster is key. We need to forge new partnerships, comply with a complex regulatory environment, keep quality and safety at the forefront, and reduce costs. All of these seemingly conflicting elements put significant pressure on how we fulfill our promise.

Lilly is responding to these challenges with new thinking across our business process cycle. Through discovery research, product development, manufacturing, and customer engagement, we are working on next-generation capabilities to improve our speed and productivity.

Our workplace environment, and how we interact with one another, is certainly not exempt from such transformation, and in part will be supported by Microsoft 365 cloud technologies. We could see that Microsoft has made great strides in its own transformation to better meet customer needs, and that certainly played a role in our interest in Microsoft technologies for our own workplace transformation goals.

Fostering seamless collaboration and creative teamwork globally is key as we need different ideas to come together to generate new capabilities and products. That’s basically the definition of innovation, and innovation is our lifeblood. With facilities around the world in research and development (R&D), manufacturing, and administrative services, our ability to collaborate across diverse cultures, ways of thinking, and languages has a huge impact on accelerating our product innovation workstreams and our promise to patients.

We’ve been using Microsoft Exchange Online and Office apps for years, but the enhanced interoperation between tools like Microsoft Teams and innovative devices such as Surface Hub and HoloLens has the potential to take collaboration to the next level.

In discovery research today, we have two primary working environments: the laboratory, where scientists in lab coats conduct their experiments in isolation from their colleagues; and the traditional office space occupied by administration and leadership. Not much collaboration happens in real time between these environments. If a scientist has a brilliant idea in the lab, to act on it or share it with colleagues requires them to stop what they’re doing, take off their gear, and return to the office to phone or email someone.

We envision dissolving these physical barriers through something we call “in-lab collaboration”—putting communication and collaboration tools inside our labs that empower scientists to share a creative spark with other scientists across the globe, or with the clinical development manager just upstairs. Using Surface Hubs to whiteboard ideas, making Office 365 video calls, and chatting in real-time through Teams foster innovation at scale and can help ensure that great ideas don’t get lost.

In today’s healthcare environment, we’re working more and more with innovators outside the company itself. We’re looking at new scenarios where Lilly might run experiments in a cost-effective arrangement called “lab-as-a-service,” where we can quickly and seamlessly leverage specialty labs in a lease-like manner from partners as needed, thus expediting R&D. Increasingly, as we follow the science to new experimental designs and new therapeutic technologies (CAR T-cell therapy, cancer vaccines, digital therapeutics, etc.), we are less focused on building durable, static labs. Instead, dynamically accessing elastic lab capabilities will empower our evolving R&D strategy. Our new cloud-based collaboration solutions will go a long way toward supporting virtual teamwork with providers outside our walls.

When we collaborate efficiently, it drives productivity by helping us to work faster. One of the most significant benefits of working faster at Lilly will revolve around effectively changing our workplace processes to use Teams day to day throughout the enterprise. We are conducting approximately 300 Teams pilot projects around the world within IT, research, and marketing departments. When communication channels are oriented to particular project workflows, documents are all in one place. We can add creative flows with team members around the world, opening up collaborative possibilities at Lilly. Teams also facilitates coauthoring—a significant benefit given the abundance of documentation this industry requires. Whenever we can spend less time redlining and passing around versions among people, there will be an efficiency gain in running the business.

As a technologist, I’m always seeking these opportunities for positive change in our work habits. Looking back to when we deployed Exchange Online, we migrated over 70,000 mailboxes for our employees and collaborators in less than nine months with a seamless transition—which also provided them with nearly unlimited storage to improve their work lives. I think we can generate more successes like that with Microsoft 365. We expect that Windows 10, with its ongoing updates and new capabilities, will be a case in point. Additionally, the AI capabilities that are built into Office 365, even for something as routine as automating how we schedule meetings, could be a boon to our culture.

And when it comes to regulatory compliance and security, I have believed for years that we have the opportunity to be more compliant and secure in the cloud, rather than less. The capabilities we see in the Microsoft Cloud environment are the latest confirmation of these instincts. Complying with the regulatory requirements in the life science industry is always a given at Lilly, but Microsoft 365 security features help improve how we meet data privacy and quality requirements. “Security and quality by design” is one of our IT strategy principles, and the Microsoft Cloud is clearly aligned.

A few years ago, Lilly went through a significant period of patent expiration that challenged our business like never before. Our CEO at the time inspired us to double down on innovation, and today we have a strong pipeline of new molecules to help deliver on our purpose. Our current CEO is inspiring an increased sense of teamwork, speed, and productivity. Using services within Microsoft 365 is one component of that drive and will help put us in an even better position to continue the innovation required to deliver on our promise to patients everywhere.

—Mike Meadows

The post Lilly envisions a workplace where internal and external collaboration help enable innovation and accelerate time-to-market for new medicines appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

As customer build their mission-critical analytics solutions using Azure SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW), Microsoft's fast, flexible and secure analytics platform, we want to ensure that we give them greater control over the management of their workloads.

Today we are excited to announce a preview of scheduled maintenance for Azure SQL DW. This new feature seamlessly integrates the Service Health Planned Maintenance Notifications, Resource Health Check Monitor and the Azure SQL Data Warehouse maintenance scheduling service. Customers can now choose a preferred maintenance window based on their business requirements, giving them the flexibility to select times when system maintenance is to be performed.

With the power of these combined services and the new functionality developed by the Azure SQL DW, the team provides a predictable and stable service upgrade and maintenance experience. Azure SQL Warehouse now gives you the tools you need to plan around this necessary service maintenance and minimize the impact on your day to day operations. You can learn more about how to use this function.

The new functionality can be accessed via your data warehouse overview blade and a new the resource menu option.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse maintenance scheduling is now available in the following regions:

• Brazil South
• West Central US
• Australia Central 1
• Australia Central 2
• East Asia
• India West
• Canada East
• Southeast Asia

Also, we are working to add this feature to the rest of Azure SQL DW regions. You can learn more about the Azure SQL DW innovations:

• Read how Azure SQL DW redefines data analytics with the latest service updates
• Read how customers get greater insights with Azure SQL DW integration and SQL Studio
• Read how you continuously monitor your Azure SQL DW workloads with SQL Vulnerability assessment

We are thrilled to announce that HDInsight 4.0 is now available in public preview. HDInsight 4.0 brings latest Apache Hadoop 3.0 innovations representing over 5 years of work from the open source community and our partner Hortonworks across key apache frameworks to solve ever-growing big data and advanced analytics challenges. With this release, we are bringing new enhancements to all big data open source frameworks on HDInsight.

This blog highlights new capabilities we are enabling for Apache Hive 3.0, Hive Spark Integration, Apache HBase and Apache Phoenix.

Apache Hive 3.0 improvements for fast queries and transactions

To date, driving comprehensive BI on historic and real-time data at scale remains a complex and challenging task. Many organizations have stitched together multiple open source and proprietary tools in order to build a workable BI solution. These solutions often require tedious data movement, complex pipeline management, or continuous manual data tearing to keep data hot. They are often complex to build, difficult to operate, and hard to scale.

Our customers are increasingly looking for simpler yet powerful, enterprise-grade solutions. We at Microsoft are obsessed with the idea of enabling real-time analytics directly on top of data lakes, reducing the need for data movement for analytics, BI dashboards or complex ad-hoc SQL queries.

Hive LLAP (Low Latency Analytical Processing known as Interactive Query in HDInsight) delivers ultra-fast SQL queries on data stored in a variety of data sources without sacrificing the scalability Hive and Hadoop are known for. With Hive LLAP, customers can drive analytics involving complex joins, subqueries, windowing functions transformations, sorting, UDFs, and complex aggregations. Hive LLAP enables data analysts to query data interactively in the same storage where data is prepared, eliminating the need for moving data from storage to another engine for analytics.

The performance and scalability of Hive LLAP is well established. BI users and data scientists can use the tools they love the most to work with Hive on LLAP.

Hive 3.0 brings additional performance improvements, allowing BI users to easily drive deeper analytics on data lakes.

Result caching

Caching query results allow a previously computed query result to be re-used in the event that the same query is processed by Hive. This feature dramatically speeds up frequently used queries. When result caching is enabled, your cluster is saving compute resources and returning the previously cached results much more quickly, improving the performance of common queries submitted by users.

Dynamic materialized views

Hive now supports dynamic materialized views. Pre-computation of summaries (materialized views) is a query speed-up technique in traditional data warehousing systems. Once created, materialized views can be stored natively in Hive or in an Apache Druid layer, and they can seamlessly use LLAP acceleration. Then the optimizer relies on Apache Calcite to automatically produce full and partial rewritings for a large set of query expressions comprising projections, filters, joins, and aggregation operations.

Better data quality and GDPR compliance enabled by Apache Hive transactions

While the previous version of ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) in Hive needed specialized configurations such as enabling transactions and implementing bucketing, ACID v2 in Hive 3.0 brings performance improvements in both the storage format and execution engine with either equal or better performance when compared to non-ACID tables. ACID on is enabled by default to allow full support for data updates.

With improved ACID capabilities, our customers can better handle data quality (update/delete) issues at row level as well as meet compliance requirements such as GDPR with the ability to erase the data at row level.

• ACID (is default in Hive 3.0)
• No performance overhead
• No bucketing required
• Spark can read and write to Hive ACID tables via Hive Warehouse Connector

Apache Hive LLAP + Druid = single tool for multiple SQL use cases

Druid is a high-performance, column-oriented, distributed data store, which is well suited for user-facing analytic applications and real-time architectures. Druid is optimized for sub-second queries to slice-and-dice, drill down, search, filter, and aggregate event streams. Druid is commonly used to power interactive applications where sub-second performance with thousands of concurrent users are expected.

While Hive LLAP is great for providing an interactive experience on complex queries, it is not built to be an OLAP system. To provide a singular solution for both complex SQL and OLAP type queries, we are bringing Apache Druid Integration with Hive LLAP to HDInsight.

By combining Druid with LLAP in a single stack, we are enabling a powerful BI solution for our customers. Users and applications can use a JDBC endpoint to submit a query and depending upon the nature of query, the query can be answered by the Druid layer or LLAP layer.

Simple queries can be answered directly from Druid and benefit from Druid’s extensive OLAP optimizations. More complex operations will push work down into Druid when it can, then run the remaining bits of the query in Hive LLAP.

*Druid LLAP integration is not enabled in HDInsight 4.0 preview. Coming soon!​

Apache Spark gets updatable tables and ACID transactions with Hive Warehouse Connector

The new integration between Apache Spark and Hive LLAP in HDInsight 4.0 delivers new capabilities for business analysts, data scientists, and data engineers. Business analysts get a performant SQL engine in the form of Hive LLAP (Interactive Query) while data scientists and data engineers get a great platform for ML experimentation and ETL with Apache Spark over transactional data in Hive tables. This integration closes one of the longstanding gaps in Apache Spark—the inability to perform table updates in a controlled transactional manner. While previously, the only functionality that was available was limited to table partition manipulation, now with Hive Warehouse Connector, users can register Hive transactional tables as external tables in Spark and get full transactional functionality on Spark.

Scenarios that can be enabled include:

• Want to run ML model training over the same transactional tables that business analysts use for reporting? You can do that now in Apache Spark on HDInsight 4.0.
• Want to add prediction scores or classification results from Spark ML as a column to the Hive table for business analysts to use? You can do that easily and with full guarantees of read consistency across concurrent users by initiating ACID transaction from Spark.
• Need to manage user data in accordance with GDPR in Apache Spark? Spark to Hive Warehouse Connector lets you do that as well.
• Want to run Spark Streaming jobs on the change feed from Hive Streaming tables? Even that is possible. Hive Warehouse Connector supports Streaming DataFrames for streaming reads and writes into transactional and streaming Hive tables from Spark.
• Need to create ORC files directly from Spark Structured Streaming job? This path is also possible thanks to the Hive compatible ORC writer available now in Apache Spark.

Under the covers, Hive Warehouse Connector is implemented as modern Apache Spark Data Source v2. It allows Spark executors to connect directly to Hive LLAP daemons to retrieve and update data in a transactional manner. This architecture is what allows the complete spectrum of Hive transactional features to be fully supported on the Spark side as it’s Hive that gets to keep control over the data in the end. The architecture prevents the typical issue of users accidentally trying to access Hive transactional tables directly from Spark, resulting in inconsistent results, duplicate data, or data corruption.

In the new world of HDInsight 4.0, Spark tables and Hive tables are kept in separate meta stores to avoid confusion of table types. The new architecture instead requires explicit registration of Hive transactional tables as Spark external tables through Hive Warehouse Connector. While it adds one extra step during configuration, this approach greatly increases the reliability of data access. Hive Warehouse Connector supports efficient predicate pushdown and Apache Arrow-based communication between Spark executors and Hive LLAP daemons. This results in overall small overhead of communication between two systems. With Hive Warehouse Connector, Apache Spark on HDInsight 4.0 gets mature transactional capabilities.

Apache HBase 2.0 and Apache Phoenix 5.0 gets new performance and stability features

We are introducing HBase 2.0 and Phoenix 5.0 in HDInsight 4.0 with several performance, stability, and integration improvements.

In-memory compactions improve performance. HBase 2.0 introduces in-memory compactions. In HBase, performance increases when data is kept in memory for a longer period of time and not flushed or read too often from remote cloud storage. Periodic reorganization of the data in the Memstore with in-memory compactions can result in a reduction of overall I/O as data is read and written less frequently from Azure Storage.

Faster performance with read/write path improvement. HBase 2.0 now implements fully off-heap read/write path. When data is written into HBase throughput operations, the cell objects do not enter JVM heap until the data is flushed to storage in an HFile. This helps to reduce total heap usage of a RegionServer and it copies less data, making it more efficient. Bucket cache can be configured as L1 or L2 cache.

Procedure V2. Procedure V2 is an updated framework for executing multi-step HBase administrative operations when there is a failure. You can use this framework to implement all the master operations using procedure v2 to remove the need for tools like hbck in the future.

Asynchronous Java client API. There is a new Java client API in HBase 2.0. This replaces the old Java NIO RPC server with a Netty RPC server. Netty RPC server provides you the ability to easily use an Asynchronous Java client API.

Apache Phoenix improvements. Phoenix 5.0 brings more visibility into queries with query log by introducing a new system table "SYSTEM.LOG" that captures information about queries that are being run against the cluster. Hive 3.0 is supported with Phoenix via updated phoenix-hive Storage Handler as well as Spark 2.3 is supported via the updated phoenix-spark driver.

Summary

HDInsight 4.0 is a significant release with many key enhancements. This blog post reviews just a subset of the capabilities we are enabling that will help our customers realize their big data visions. Please stay tuned for additional announcements about new capabilities we are bringing to HDInsight.

Try Azure HDInsight now

We are excited to see what you will build with Azure HDInsight. Read this developer guide and follow the quick start guide to learn more about implementing these pipelines and architectures on Azure HDInsight. Stay up-to-date on the latest Azure HDInsight news and features by following us on Twitter #HDInsight and @AzureHDInsight. For questions and feedback, please reach out to AskHDInsight@microsoft.com.

About Azure HDInsight

Azure HDInsight is an easy, cost-effective, enterprise-grade service for open source analytics that enables customers to easily run popular open source frameworks including Apache Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, and others. The service is available in 27 public regions and Azure Government Clouds in the US and Germany. Azure HDInsight powers mission-critical applications in a wide variety of sectors and enables a wide range of use cases including ETL, streaming, and interactive querying.

This blog post was co-authored by Maxim Lukiyanov (Principal Program Manager, Azure HDInsight)

Additional resources

• Ask HDInsight questions on MSDN forums
• Ask HDInsight questions on StackOverflow
• Open Source component guide on HDInsight
• Get started with HDInsight Interactive Query Cluster in Azure
• Azure HDInsight Performance Benchmarking: Interactive Query, Spark, and Presto
• Learn more about Azure HDInsight
• Use Hive on HDInsight
• HDInsight release notes

Earlier this year at our Build conference, we previewed Microsoft Azure Quickstart Center designed to help you quickly start your projects in Azure with step-by-step guidance. Today at Ignite, we’re excited to share enhancements to the Azure Quickstart Center experience helping you set up your Azure environment with best practices and guidance from Azure.

Let’s take a look:

You can access Quickstart Center either from the All services menu under the General category, or simply by typing Quickstart in the global search.

Launching Quickstart Center from the global search box

Azure Quickstart Center offers you two options to get started:

• Create an Azure Service – You can learn as you build new workloads in Azure and quickly identify which service is best for your project.
• Set up your environment – You can configure your cloud services with recommended best practices to secure, monitor and control your Azure environment.

Start a new project

Microsoft Azure Quickstart Center helps you quickly identify which service is best to get started for your specific scenario. For instance, if you’d like to build a web application in Azure but don’t know how to start or which services to choose from, Azure Quickstart Center helps you understand the options available for web apps, gives you a high-level architecture overview, explains any prerequisites and even provides the costs associated with these services.

You can get started with the following five most common scenarios:

• Web apps – Pick from simple web applications to container-based apps, or a DevOps projects with a CI/CD pipeline.
• Virtual Machines – Deploy your virtual machine (Linux or Windows), or start a migration from an on-premises virtual machine.
• Storage – Create file shares for hot or cold storage, backup a file server, or configure a disaster recovery strategy in Azure.
• Database – Host a database from a selection of database options (structured or non-structured) for transactional or analytical scenarios.
• Big data analytics – Build a big data analytics and AI project and enrich your app with cloud-powered cognitive services.

When you pick one of the options from these scenarios, it explains why you should use this option, what are the prerequisites, and even its cost. From here, you can simply click the Create button and Azure Quickstart Center will bring you to the create resource page.

Understand the options, prerequisites and cost

For this scenario, we picked a simple web app hosted on Azure. Note that the web apps may require other components as part of the project, such as a database. In that case, Azure Quickstart Center will offer you the option to create a database as well.

Azure Quickstart Center recommends related services

How to set up your Azure environment

After you’ve created your Azure services, it’s a good idea to understand how to stay in control of your new environment. Azure Quickstart Center guides you through configuring governance for your Azure environment following Microsoft guidelines by covering the following governance topics:

• Managing access – Learn how to assign who gets access to what resources. Understand how to use role-based access control in Azure (RBAC) to provide fine-grained access management to your resources.
• Organizing resources – Understand best practices to manage resources by grouping and tagging them so you can easily identify which resource belongs to which project.
• Securing and enforcing compliance – Understand how to apply policies to enforce corporate standards, and how to use Azure Security Center to not only protect your environment from external attacks, but also apply security recommendations.
• Monitoring and reporting – Learn how to monitor the health of your environment and metrics that help you understand the status of your Azure services. You can also set up alerts and actions that are triggered if certain conditions are met.

Try it today and let us know what you think

Our goal is to help you bring your projects to life quickly while benefiting from the Microsoft-recommended best practices and governance guidelines. Give Quickstart Center a try today and let us know what you think at our feedback forum. Follow us on Twitter @AzurePortal.

Red Hat and Microsoft expand partnership to offer complete combined hybrid cloud solutions - jointly supported and in market today.

This week at Ignite in Orlando, Microsoft and Red Hat demonstrated their solution for hybrid enterprise container platforms – OpenShift Container Platform for Microsoft Azure Stack. This solution has joint support from Microsoft and Red Hat and was first announced earlier this year in May.

Microsoft and Red Hat are both committed to customer solutions that span on-premises and public cloud.  Together, Azure and Azure Stack deliver the industry’s only truly consistent and comprehensive hybrid cloud platform, which enables a unified approach to application development. OpenShift Container Platform is Red Hat’s container application platform, bringing Docker and Kubernetes to the enterprise and creating consistent solutions both on-premises and in the cloud.

OpenShift and Azure Stack present exciting new options for customers who use Microsoft and Red Hat technologies and offer the greatest possible flexibility and consistency where these solutions are run and managed – whether its in the public cloud or on-premises with Azure Stack. OpenShift and Azure Stack enable a consistent application experience across Azure, Azure Stack, bare-metal, Windows and RHEL bringing together Microsoft’s and Red Hat’s developer frameworks and partner ecosystems.

This extends the partnership, which already includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Azure and Azure Stack, SQL Server running on RHEL, .NET Core on RHEL, and the development of OpenShift on Azure managed service.

Additionally, Microsoft SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be made available in a container and included in the OpenShift container catalog, making it easier to deploy, manage and leverage SQL Big Data Clusters.  SQL Big Data Clusters leverage Kubernetes operators compatible with OpenShift Container Platform.

If you didn’t catch today’s demonstration of OpenShift on Azure Stack, the recording will be available soon.  Stay tuned for updates, and meanwhile, learn how to deploy OpenShift Container Platform on Azure Stack today!

Azure Advisor is your free, personalized guide to Azure best practices. It analyzes your Azure usage and configurations and helps you optimize your resources for high availability, security, performance, and cost. We’re constantly adding more to Advisor and are excited to share a bundle of new recommendations and integrations so you can get more out of Azure.

Create or update table statistics in your SQL Data Warehouse tables

Table statistics are important for ensuring optimal query performance. The SQL Data Warehouse query optimizer uses up-to-date statistics to estimate the cardinality or number of rows in the query result, which generates a higher-quality query plan for faster performance.

Advisor now has recommendations to help you boost your SQL Data Warehouse query performance. It will identify tables with outdated or missing table statistics and recommend that you create or update them.

Remove data skew on your SQL Data Warehouse table

Data skew occurs when one distribution has more data than others and can cause unnecessary data movement or resource bottlenecks when running your workload, slowing your performance. Advisor will detect distribution data skew greater than 15 percent and recommend that you redistribute your data, and revisit your table distribution key selections.

Enable soft delete on your Azure Storage blobs

Enable soft delete on your storage account so that deleted Azure Storage blobs transition to a soft deleted state instead of being permanently deleted. When data is overwritten, a soft deleted snapshot is generated to save the state of the overwritten data. This allows you to recover in the event of accidental deletion or overwrites. Advisor now identifies Azure Storage accounts that don’t have soft delete enabled and suggests you enable it.

Migrate your Azure Storage account to Azure Resource Manager

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the most up-to-date way to manage Azure resources, with template deployments, additional security options, and the ability to upgrade to a GPv2 account for utilization of Azure Storage’s latest features. Azure will identify any stand-alone Storage accounts that are using the classic deployment model and recommend migrating to the ARM deployment model.

Create additional Azure ExpressRoute circuits for customers using Microsoft Peering for Office 365

Customers using Microsoft Peering for Office 365 should have at least two ExpressRoute circuits at different locations to avoid having a single point of failure. Advisor will identify when there is only one ExpressRoute circuit and recommend creating another.

Azure Advisor is now integrated into the Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) experience

When you are viewing your VM resources, you will now see a notification if you have Azure Advisor recommendations that are related to that resource. There will be a blue notification at the top of the experience that indicates the number of Advisor recommendations you have and the description of one of those recommendations. Clicking on the notification will take you to the full Advisor experience where you can see all the recommendations for that resource.

Azure Advisor recommendations are available in Azure Cost Management

Azure Advisor recommendations are now integrated in the new Azure Cost Management experience that is in public preview for Enterprise Agreement (EA) enrollments. Clicking on Advisor recommendations on the left menu will open Advisor to the cost tab. Integrating Advisor with Azure Cost Management creates a single location for cost recommendations. This allows you to have the same experience whether you are coming from Azure Cost Management or looking at cost recommendations directly from Azure Advisor.

Review your Azure Advisor recommendations

Learn more about Azure Advisor and review your Advisor recommendations in the Azure portal today to start optimizing your Azure resources for high availability, security, performance, and cost. For help getting started, visit the Advisor documentation.

When we talk to our customers about their cloud strategy, we continue to hear loud and clear from many of them that a hybrid approach to cloud makes the most sense for their business. Organizations choose a hybrid strategy for many reasons including to take advantage of the cloud while leveraging existing on-premises technology as an asset, to help them achieve greater flexibility, or to meet regulatory requirements.

Customers tell us they look for a cloud platform that enables choices, flexibility, and consistency of experience across their full environment. Microsoft deeply understands this reality. Based on our decades of enterprise experience, we designed Azure to be hybrid from day one, to offer true consistency across cloud and on-premises with the broadest set of hybrid capabilities in applications, data, identity, security, and management.

Customers choose Azure to power their hybrid cloud strategies

More than 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies trust their business on Azure today, and many of them take advantage of Azure hybrid capabilities to fuel innovation and deliver great business outcomes.

Running its $15 billion business on Azure using a hybrid cloud model, Smithfield Foods slashed datacenter costs by 60 percent, accelerated application delivery from two months to one day, and greatly improved network security. Smithfield tells us that, “Azure is a great hybrid enabler.”

Chevron takes a hybrid migration approach to move many applications to Azure while continuing to take advantage of existing infrastructure and technology. “Microsoft understands enterprises better than anyone. And they’ve been true partners with us on this journey,” says Victoria Harris, Public Cloud Manager at Chevron. 

Adopting a hybrid cloud infrastructure enabled by Azure allows J.B. Hunt to move workloads to the cloud that make sense and continue to run business on-premises. J.B. Hunt tells us that “Microsoft didn’t ask us to bend to their vision of a cloud. It was Microsoft meeting us where we are today.”

AllScripts strategically moves acquired applications, including Linux-based applications, to Azure to realize dramatic time-to-market gains. And, AllScripts takes advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefit to achieve significant cost savings migrating applications to Azure.

Continuous hybrid cloud innovation 

As the leader in hybrid cloud, we are committed to designing and delivering new capabilities that support our customers’ hybrid needs so they can run their business successfully on Azure.

This week at Ignite, we were pleased to announce many exciting new hybrid capabilities and continue the conversation about hybrid cloud with many of you. From Azure Stack momentum, to the launch of Azure DevOps, to data platform innovation, industry-leading security and management capabilities, and a new version of Windows Server coming soon – we have some amazing hybrid solutions to help you as you transform your business.

We’re proud to partner with you and bring our customers the ultimate consistent hybrid cloud, across the following key areas.

Consistent hybrid applications. Azure Stack has been a game changer for many companies since its debut at last year’s Ignite conference. It brings core Azure services into on-premises datacenters so developers can access one single platform to develop, test and deploy hybrid applications everywhere the business needs. A hybrid approach allows KPMG to meet constantly changing regulatory and customer requirements while keeping sensitive data secure and on-premises. “Azure Stack… gives us the same infrastructure components that are in Azure datacenters in local partner datacenters. There’s complete architectural consistency—the same portal, API, application model, and tooling,” says KPMG Chief Information Officer, Dag Jørgensen.

We continue to deliver innovation to Azure Stack and drive consistency with Azure. Yesterday, we made several announcements about Azure Stack that further enhance the developer experience across Azure and Azure Stack - like the availability of Kubernetes on Azure Stack, consistent blockchain deployment across Azure and Azure Stack, and expanded capacity of Azure Stack with some of our hardware partners.

Consistent hybrid DevOps. Running a successful hybrid cloud requires a consistent DevOps approach across environments. Earlier this month, we announced Azure DevOps, the most complete DevOps offering in the public cloud. With Azure DevOps services and on-premises Azure DevOps Server, customers get the same full suite of DevOps services and capabilities across hybrid cloud, enabling agile development and consistent software delivery by adopting the same CI/CD pipeline across cloud and on-premises. The result includes better products delivered faster.

Consistent hybrid data platform. Azure offers a full set of data services that enable customers to distribute, manage, and analyze data consistently across on-premises and the cloud, whether it's in SQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, or NoSQL. Yesterday we announced the general availability of Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, a service that allows organizations to move all their SQL workloads to the cloud and back again – with no code changes – regardless of what SQL Server they are currently running. KMD, a leading IT and software company, finds SQL Database Managed Instance invaluable because it allows them to migrate huge databases into Azure cloud, making a one-to-one transfer without changing any code. 

Consistent hybrid identity. Azure provides a common identity model with Azure Active Directory, giving users a secure, seamless single sign-on experience across applications and environments on-premises, in Azure and other clouds. Connect your on-premises Active Directory solutions to the cloud with Azure Active Directory and have one identity and access management strategy across your full estate.

Consistent hybrid security and management. Azure offers the broadest built-in security and management capabilities to ensure that Linux and Windows resources across cloud and on-premises are monitored, backed up, secure, and resilient in a unified way. Using Azure hybrid security and management capabilities, IHG (Intercontinental Hotels Group) gained a holistic and global view of the health of servers and services, both in the cloud and on-premises. IHG tells us that, “Microsoft allows us to have one world aggregated view…we are able to make better decisions. We are able to troubleshoot faster.”

Yesterday, we announced the public preview of Secure Score in Azure Security Center. Secure Score provides visibility and recommendations to improve security posture for both Azure and on-premises resources. Additionally, we announced Azure Monitor that now brings together our existing capabilities for monitoring infrastructure, applications, and networks into one unified offering, delivering full stack monitoring for applications across hybrid environments. The latest release of Windows Server 2019 will include features that enable customers to extend their on-premises Windows Server environments to Azure and use Azure services like Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery.

Built for a future powered by intelligent cloud and intelligent edge

Hybrid cloud is evolving from being the integration of a datacenter with the public cloud, to becoming units of computing available at the edge, including even the world’s most remote destinations, working in concert with public cloud. We call this new era intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. Many of the same patterns and principles of building hybrid applications apply to cloud/edge applications. The investments you make and the skillsets you develop from running Azure hybrid cloud position your organization to take advantage of edge computing in the future.

I hope you enjoy the rest of this week at Ignite! Learn more about Azure hybrid cloud.

This blog post was co-authored by Matthew Fuller Co-Founder & VP at Starburst

Microsoft and Starburst are excited to announce that Starburst Presto has been added to the Azure HDInsight Application Platform. With the Azure HDInsight Application Platform, Microsoft has enabled a broad set of big data and advanced analytics solutions so customers can deploy them with a single click.

Presto is a fast and scalable distributed SQL query engine. Architected for the separation of storage and compute, Presto can easily query data in Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage, SQL and NoSQL databases, and other data sources.

Adding Presto gives HDInsight users two things:

1. A fast, scalable, interactive SQL interface to data in Azure Blob and Azure Data Lake Storage.

2. An easy way to create queries that integrate data in Azure Blob and Azure Data Lake Storage with other sources by leveraging Presto’s vast portfolio of data connectors.

The new Presto option complements other existing open source components on HDInsight such as HBase, Storm, Spark, R, Kafka, and Interactive Query. This further enables customers to use the open source tools most suited for their workloads.

Starburst Presto distribution delivers fast performance (enabled via cost-based query optimization), enhanced security features, and integration with Azure and HDInsight services such as:

• Azure Blob Storage

• Azure Data Lake Storage

• External Hive Metastore

• Microsoft PowerBI

Starburst Presto on Azure HDInsight can be found on the Azure Marketplace. The rest of this post describes architecture concepts and how to get started with Starburst Presto on Azure HDInsight.

How it works

Presto is deployed as an application on Azure HDInsight and can be configured to immediately start querying data in Azure Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake Storage. Leveraging the external metastore feature on HDInsight, it allows Presto to share metadata with other clusters such as Hive and Spark.

Presto for HDInsight can be used with tools such as Microsoft’s PowerBI and Tableau. We’ve also packaged it in the open source Apache Superset for Business Intelligence which is installed and running automatically when choosing Presto on HDInsight. It’s an easy visual way to try out Presto for the first time.

The Presto Coordinator and Worker architecture is similar to HDInsight’s Head node and Worker nodes architecture. When deploying Presto as an application on HDInsight, the Presto coordinator is deployed to one of HDInsight’s head nodes and the Presto workers are deployed on HDInsight’s worker nodes. Additionally, an edge node that is deployed contains the Presto Command Line Interface (CLI) and Apache Superset.

One incredibly useful feature is the ability to connect to an external Hive Metastore. It shares metadata between different tools such as Presto, Hive, and Spark, and it’s independent of the Presto cluster lifecycle. This allows you to shutdown the Presto HDInsight cluster when not in use to save costs.

Another useful feature in HDInsight is the ability to manage clusters by scaling up or down. Presto was architected from the ground up for separation of storage and compute. This allows Presto to work seamlessly with HDInsight to elastically scale up or down depending on your business demands.

Starburst also provides a set of Script Actions for common operations such as updating the Presto configurations. For example, you may want to configure a new connector to query from Microsoft SQL Server. This allows you run federated queries between the RDBMS and Azure Blob storage. You can read more about the script actions in our documentation. Also refer to our GitHub for the current Script Actions, contributions are welcome!

Getting started with Presto on HDInsight

Starburst Presto can be selected as an application on Azure HDInsight. Simply choose Starburst Presto and continue with the HDInsight setup.

Additionally, Starburst Presto on Azure HDInsight can be found on the Azure Marketplace which redirects you to the Azure Portal with Presto for HDInsight specific parameters pre-filled, creating an even simpler setup experience for users.

Once HDInsight and Presto are deployed, you can view Presto as an installed application

Configuring Starburst Presto support for Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure blobs

Presto for HDInsight can be configured to query Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage. Azure Blobs are accessed via the Windows Azure Storage Blob (WASB). This layer is built on top of the HDFS APIs and allows for the separation of storage from the cluster. This is key for scaling Presto and HDInsight independently of storage. During setup, simply choose the desired storage account and we’ll configure it automatically for you.

If you were to do it manually your hive.properties, your Presto configuration file would look something like:

hive.azure.wasb-storage-account=<account-name>
hive.azure.wasb-access-key=<access-key>

Similarly, for Azure Data Lake Storage your hive.properties, your Presto configuration would look something like:

hive.azure.adl-client-id=<application-id>
hive.azure.adl-credential=<key>

hive.azure.adl-refresh-url=<token-endpoint>

Performance benchmark results

As part of the preparation for Presto on Azure HDInsight, Starburst revisited the previously published HDInsight benchmark Azure HDInsight Performance Benchmarking: Interactive Query, Spark and Presto. At the time, Presto did not support all of the TPC-DS queries nor did it have its Cost Based Optimizer. In our updated benchmarking, we’re using a much more recent version of Presto (0.203) that can run the entire TPC-DS query set. For our experiments, we used the same cluster size and data size as the original blog post:

We ran a benchmark derived from the TPC-DS benchmark with the default configuration and with the Cost Based Optimizer (CBO) enabled. When we ran the tests again with the CBO disabled, the first thing we noticed was that seven of the queries failed to complete. Without the CBO, Presto (or any other SQL engine) does not have enough information to create an efficient query plan. In the cases where the queries failed, Presto ran suboptimal plans resulting in an insufficient amount of resources.

This is still much better than in than in the original blog in which Presto could only run 45 queries. And now with the CBO, all queries complete.

Next, we looked at the total completion time of the benchmark. You’ll see that the CBO improves the performance on average by approximately 2.4 times.

Please note, that these are unaudited results and as such are not comparable with any officially published TPC-DS results.

We will examine results further for a closer look into Starburst Presto’s performance in a future post.

Conclusions and next steps

HDInsight provides a number of open source engines. Each tool has a specific fit depending on the use case. If interactive SQL analytics are needed, Presto is the best fit. Additionally, Presto has the unique ability to federate across different data sources in Azure.

In an upcoming release, Starburst will integrate with the HDInsight Enterprise Security Package to automatically secure and configure your Presto cluster out of the box. This will include Authentication and Authorization with Active Directory and Apache Ranger integration.

Additionally, we plan to integrate Presto with other Microsoft services in Azure, continuing to build more connectors such as for Azure Cosmos DB and SQL Data Warehouse.

At Starburst and Microsoft, we’re committed to advancing the open source Presto project forward. Give Presto a try today on Azure Marketplace!

Three years ago, we launched Outlook mobile with a mission to deliver the best on-the-go email and calendar app, one that combines delightful customer experiences with enterprise-grade security. To serve an ever more mobile and distributed workforce, today we are announcing new, advanced enterprise capabilities for Outlook mobile with support for Microsoft Information Protection native labeling, as well as improved mobile device management. We’re also helping our customers stay connected and on top of what’s important with new features including Favorite Notifications and Microsoft Teams integration in Outlook. We’re confident that these new capabilities, along with our continued commitment to a first-class user experience, will help make Outlook mobile the preferred choice for your organization.

Designed uniquely for a mobile-first experience, Outlook for iOS and Android introduced new ways to stay connected and organized all in one app while helping you focus on what’s truly important. Over the years, we’ve delivered deeper integration with Office 365 and added an array of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that help anticipate your needs. We also re-architected Outlook mobile on the Microsoft Cloud and added a broad range of enterprise and compliance capabilities, such as FedRAMP, Hybrid Modern Authentication, and support for app protection policies to help you protect and manage your organization’s confidential information.

Today, Outlook mobile is used on more than 100 million devices and includes customers like Adventist Health System and Razer:

“From a support perspective, Microsoft Intune and mobile email with Exchange Online have been tremendous timesavers. Employees had to unenroll and re-enroll devices in a previous email security program, and our infrastructure support team was inundated with support tickets around the need to resync mobile email accounts. But with Intune, employees download the Microsoft Outlook mobile app, we apply the correct policies, and they’re off and running.”
—Tony Qualls, director of Enterprise Technical Services at Adventist Health System

“With Outlook mobile and the Teams’ mobile app you have access to everything else that’s embedded within it, be it PowerPoint, or Excel, or your files in OneDrive, team conversations, or calendar events. So using these apps to do anything you need easily and conveniently from your phone makes things so much more efficient and quick.”
—Tom Moss, senior vice president of the Mobile Division at Razer

We’re delighted to receive continued high ratings for Outlook mobile from customers like you. As we further our vision with today’s announcements, we hope to keep earning your trust in Outlook mobile as the right choice for your business.

New enterprise information protection and deployment capabilities

We know that protecting confidential information is top of mind for our customers, so today we’re announcing new capabilities to help you secure sensitive information while making it easier to manage and deploy Outlook mobile. We’re committed to delivering best-in-class enterprise and security capabilities along with the ease of use and speed you love.

Easily apply sensitivity labels to emails

Customers will soon be able to classify and label Outlook mobile emails to help ensure that sensitive information is handled in compliance with your company policies. We are introducing Microsoft Information Protection native labeling in Outlook for iOS and Android to help enforce a common set of protection policies and actions across Microsoft 365 apps. For example, administrators could specify custom sensitivity labels such as “General” or “Company Confidential” with corresponding actions such as adding a footer to emails or encrypting emails, respectively. As a user, you will then be able to add a “Company Confidential” label to the email so that it can only be opened by recipients who are authorized to decrypt the message. Your administrator could also set up a policy to allow you to change a sensitivity email label if necessary but require a justification to do so for tracking and compliance purposes. Our goal is start rolling out this feature to commercial Outlook mobile customers by the end of the year, initially in preview.

New capabilities to simplify deployment and management of Outlook mobile

To enable organizations to get their employees quickly set up on their secure mobile email and calendar solution, we’re adding new app configuration capabilities for Outlook mobile.

• Ensure only corporate accounts are added to Outlook mobile—We recently rolled out a new experience to help ensure that adding only work accounts is straightforward and to help mitigate the risk of employees using personal accounts on company devices. For example, administrators can specify the corporate email and OneDrive for Business accounts that are allowed in Outlook mobile.

Administrators will be able to specify that only work accounts are added on company enrolled devices.

Additionally, we will be rolling out the capabilities listed below in the coming months to commercial Outlook mobile customers.

• Scale deployments and enforce consistency—Administrators will soon be able to push specific Outlook mobile app configuration settings such as the on/off state for syncing or saving contacts, biometrics such as Touch ID, block external images, and MailTips, as well mail options such as Focused Inbox settings to their users. Standardizing these settings will simplify and scale the deployment of Outlook mobile while helping ensure that users have a consistent experience.
• Enable faster account setup—Administrators will soon be able to push Outlook mobile account setup configurations for modern authentication capable accounts. This will ensure that employees use the correct work account setup information to get them up and running with Outlook mobile in no time. When setup is as simple as entering a password, there are fewer calls to your helpdesk and securing your mobile workforce is fast and easy. This feature is already available for Exchange on-premises customers for accounts that use basic authentication.
• A new app configuration policy interface in Microsoft Intune—A new app configuration policy interface in the Intune console will initially support the ability to push account setup details for Exchange on-premises customers using basic authentication. In the coming months, we plan to continue to enhance the policy settings in this interface to manage the Outlook mobile feature settings, such as the ability to save or sync contacts and other app configuration capabilities.

Designed for all day use—introducing new ways to connect and organize

To help you accomplish more on the go, Outlook mobile will soon get new capabilities through Microsoft Teams and additional Office Lens integration, Favorite Notifications, and improved calendar experiences, so you can easily connect and organize to stay on top of what’s important.

Create and join a Teams meeting in Outlook mobile

As customers continue to embrace Teams for collaboration, we are excited to integrate Teams meetings in Outlook. You will soon be able to add an online Teams Meeting option to your calendar events and join a Teams Meeting right from Outlook. Our goal is to introduce this capability to Outlook mobile early in 2019.

More Office Lens technology coming to Outlook mobile

Ever been to a conference and had to keep track of numerous business cards? In addition to using Office Lens intelligent technology for photos, documents, and whiteboard images in Outlook mobile, you will be able to simply snap a picture of the card, and the contact details will be automatically saved in Outlook. Customers also have the confidence that the images will be used in compliance with their company’s app protection policies and device camera settings will be respected. This feature will start rolling out to Outlook for Android customers in the coming months.

Favorite Notifications helps you stay connected with the people who are important to you

There are some people in our lives whose communication should take priority, such as your boss, your significant other, or your kid, and you may want to respond to them in a timely manner. You will soon have the option set your notifications to “Favorites,” so you’re only notified when they send you an email or calendar event. Favorite Notifications are expected to start rolling out to Outlook mobile customers in the coming months.

Calendar sharing and calendar search capabilities

• Improved calendar sharing—Today, we are making it easier to share schedules with coworkers and manage room reservations and delegated calendars. It’s as easy as adding a new calendar from the menu option in Outlook Calendar. Simply select Add Shared Calendars and search for people, rooms, or mailboxes. You will be able to add or view a coworker’s shared calendar or even a conference room that has a reservation calendar. We are rolling out this new Outlook mobile shared calendar experience to commercial customers now.

Easily add a shared calendar for your coworkers or even a conference room, right from Outlook mobile.

• Search in calendar—And if you need to find a specific calendar event, we’re extending search in Outlook mobile beyond contacts, special reservations, deliveries, and files and will soon be adding search to calendar events. The Outlook mobile search experience is designed to help you find what you need even faster. This feature will start rolling out to Outlook mobile customers in the coming months.

We are excited to bring these innovations to market. As we further our vision for Outlook mobile, we’re committed to listening and learning from you to bring you experiences that delight backed by the promise of enterprise capabilities. We hope to keep earning your trust and would love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

The post Your favorite email app, Outlook mobile, adds new enterprise information protection and mobile management capabilities appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.