Martina Grom

Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows to analyze large amount of data, even interpreting and indexing handwritten documents and learning key topics. In the Microsoft AI.Lab, engineers combined Azure Search and Cognitive Services to analyze more than 34,000 pages and scanned evidence photos related to the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy in 1963 that went public. Read more about burning questions and see the results online. Many secret JFK files have been released in 2017, but there were too much information and too much unstructured data to go through. So, modern technology helps to analyze the data and to deliver relevant details. The Microsoft AI.Lab project is using Cognitive Search that is powered by Azure Search with built in Cognitive Services: “It pulls data from almost any data source and applies a set of composable cognitive skills which extract knowledge”. This approach allows to get answers and relationships in context with the original documents. ...

Are you interested or already working with Microsoft Azure? Download the freshest and latest version of the free e-book “Inside Azure Management v3”. This preview release of “Inside Azure Management” is now available with more than 500 pages in 16 chapters covering topics like implementing solutions, containers, migrating workloads, hybrid, automation, backup, costs, governance, monitoring and alerting, analytics, and more. Check it out! The e-book already has about 30.000 downloads and is written by Microsoft MVP´s. “Inside Azure Management” can be downloaded at Free Book: Inside Azure Management v3. ...

Office 365 Groups bring a lot of advantages to a connected workspace within Office 365. For me they are like the glue between all different Office 365 Services. If you provision an Office 365 Group you get an Outlook Mailbox, a SharePoint TeamSite, Planner and much more. When you create a Microsoft Team, you create an Office 365 Group. So it is really important for anyone who is working in the Microsoft 365 space to understand how Office 365 Groups work and what impact they have. Together with Microsoft Graph and Azure Active Directory those are the fundamentals of Office 365 to understand. ...

In this multi-part series we show you how to handle the Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams governance toolkit. The next article cover the governance part of our Groups Governance Toolkit.Imagine your company policy requires at least 2 owners per Office 365 Group or per Microsoft Team. In this part, we want to monitor all groups that are ownerless (orphaned), or do not comply with our organization’s policies. The IT department shall get the information of all groups and teams where there are no owners or not enough owners and the possibility to fix that. Read below how this can be accomplished. ...

After the introduction of the Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams Governance Toolkit and with the necessary requirements we are now looking into Azure Functions. In our group and team provisioning scenario, we need a little code for provisioning of an Office 365 group and a Microsoft team. Serverless computing with an Azure Function provides the optimal solution for that. Follow these steps to create the function we need for our workflow. ...

In part 1 of this series we described the scenario for our Office 365 groups governance toolkit. In this part we will setup a workflow for the Office 365 and Microsoft Teams provisioning. Workflows help to follow specific processes for a successful collaboration. Offering self-services for users is a key to reduce workloads on the IT department and to allow users to cover their requirements quickly while the organization’s policies are enforced during the process. A frequently asked request is how to provision a new Microsoft Team in Office 365 in a secure and monitored way. See how this can be implemented here. ...

IT-Governance is an important topic, especially in large organizations. In an agile and evergreen world, as it can be found with Microsoft 365 services, Governance becomes an integral part which needs to be monitored and updated on a regular basis. At Microsoft Ignite conference, we showed the “Groups Governance Toolkit” with a bunch of useful tools to regulate and monitor for Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams. Everything we showed at Ignite is open source and built with out of the box tools within Microsoft 365 and Azure. ...

If you are working with Microsoft SharePoint, 2019 will be a great year! First of all, because SharePoint Server 2019 has been announced, and because SharePoint Conference North America 2019 will take place in May in Fabulous Las Vegas (again). We from atwork will be part of the conference and we are looking forward to it. The event registration is already open and there are reduced price packages available. Additionally, find a discount code here! ...

This session gives you insights from Microsoft IT about how they use their internal Teams Champion program to drive collaboration and communication using Microsoft Teams. The session was delivered by Sara Bush, Sr. Program Manager Microsoft Teams, Microsoft. Sara is a member of the Teams & Voice team in End User Services Engineering, Sara is driving Microsoft Teams adoption internally through the Art of Teamwork Tour training program, the Teamwork Champions program and the EUSE change management effort to bring all Microsoft users into a deep understanding of how Microsoft Teams supports day to day work, increasing collaboration and productivity. ...

Good to see that Microsoft is committed to sustainability in their data centers as seen in the session “Inside Azure Datacenter Architecture with Mark Russinovich” from the last BUILD conference. There are a lot of interesting facts to learn about the Microsoft Azure data centers, as e.g. “Microsoft signed the largest corporate deal on solar panels for Virginia in the US in history, good for 257 Megawatts”. The goal is to reach the 100% energy use from renewable energy. ...