Businesses are looking for more ways to reduce infrastructure costs without compromising service availability. This results in companies looking for newer cloud development architectures like serverless, giving rise to the need for event triggered integration across multiple third party services. Developers are turning to serverless solutions like Azure Logic Apps and Azure Functions to automate workflows and integrate systems, thereby accelerating application delivery and reducing costs. Logic Apps enables customers to quickly and easily build powerful integration solutions using a visual designer and a wide set of out-of-the-box connectors such as Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, Office 365 and many more.
Today I am excited to announce another important milestone in integration- the general availability of Enterprise Integration Pack within Logic Apps, which further simplifies business-to-business (B2B) communications in the cloud. It enables you to more easily process business transactions reliably, track and troubleshoot B2B events and leverage additional out-of-the-box connectors.
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions
With Enterprise Integration Pack, you can take advantage of a faster, more reliable and versatile B2B/EDI solution than traditional integration solutions. Integration accounts within Enterprise Integration Pack quickly create and manage cloud based B2B related artifacts such as maps, schemas, trading partners, agreements and certificates. With this release, electronic data interchange (EDI) has never been easier. You can send, receive and troubleshoot B2B transactions across a wide variety of protocols including AS2, EDIFACT and X12. Customers like Mission Linen Supply are already realizing the benefits of EDI capabilities in Logic Apps:
“Today, with our Azure Logic Apps solution, we can get suppliers onboarded within two weeks versus the two months or longer that the [Electronic Data Interchange] provider required. The faster we can integrate partners, the faster we can grow our business.”
– Dave Pattison, Director of IT, Mission Linen Supply
Below is a view of the new integration account within Enterprise Integration Pack:
Management capabilities
The ability to view and troubleshoot B2B events via system management solutions is as important as enabling comprehensive EDI capabilities. With the Enterprise Integration Pack, you can track B2B events in a number of flexible ways like built-in tracking which can be routed to Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) using the out-of-the-box tracking portal. You can easily view and troubleshoot B2B transactions over AS2 and X12 formats (with EDIFACT coming in the next few weeks). Additionally, a new RESTful tracking API enables you to send tracking events from both Logic App executions as well as other applications for end to end visibility. You can also add and correlate tracking data across your entire business process in Operations Management Suite.
Here is a view of tracking B2B events through the Operations Management Suite portal:
Enterprise connectors
We realize that many of our customers are often dealing with mission-critical applications and business processes that can lead to complex, time consuming connection configuration steps. With Logic Apps, we have added more enterprise connectors that make it simple and fast to establish connections with business applications. For instance, with the SAP connector, you can easily connect your on-premises SAP systems to cloud applications using Logic Apps without the need for complex coding required by other serverless products in the market. Today, the MQ Series and SAP ECC connectors are in preview, with more connectors coming in the next few months. For a full list of all currently available connectors, please visit the Logic Apps connectors reference.
Get started today!
With the general availability of Enterprise Integration Pack, you can now start using these services in production with full SLA and support. We are committed to continuous delivery of serverless compute and integration capabilities and will continue to share updates about investments and new releases. In the meanwhile, learn more and try our serverless offerings – Azure Logic Apps and Azure Functions.
Taking Office 365 to the College Campus
By Kelly Cronin
Before Office 365, I was using a $5 planner from Target, some Word documents, some Google Docs, a million Notes in my iPhone, and Five-Star Notebooks to take notes in class, stay "organized", and keep both my personal life and grades afloat. Although plenty of people had told me about cool note-taking tools, I was a stubborn college student that thought whatever I was doing was good enough. When I first started my internship with Managed Solution, I was taught how to use almost all of the Office 365 apps, which I never thought I would be using in my personal life. The more used to the apps I got, the more I realized how much they could help me outside of work too. Here's how Office 365 can be used for any college student looking to stay organized and productive:
Let's start with OneNote.
My boss was not exaggerating when she told me OneNote is life. I first used OneNote for school by keeping all my syllabi in one place. Before, I had to constantly re-download the syllabus for each class just to look at the class schedule, rules about assignments, and how to contact the professor. With OneNote, I keep all of this information in one place, both on my computer and my phone, so no matter where I am I can instantly check out the syllabus for any of my classes. OneNote lets you drag and drop files into a document, so you can click on the document, or you can choose to have the document uploaded as text, so you'll see exactly what comes from that document in your OneNote as text. I prefer to have both:
My study guides have gotten a major makeover thanks to OneNote. I re-type all my notes from class and any added points from lecture slides into OneNote to create the ultimate study guide, where I can easily bold, highlight, make tables, lists, and even add images into any of my notes. Since I can keep these in the same section as my other class notes and info, I don't have to keep track of a gazillion documents like with Google Drive. OneNote also has "tags" that can let me mark things as important, set up as a reminder, or create a check-box for a to-do list. The best part is while I'm walking over to my exam, I can pull up my study guide on my OneNote mobile app and do some last minute cramming.
Did I already mention you can take OneNote anywhere? When you need to print something, having a copy of your document wherever you go is pretty much every college student's life saver. For starters, almost none of us have an actual working printer (there are currently three broken printers sitting in my house), which I now consider a mythical creature at this point. This means we have to constantly send ourselves documents to print at the library right before class. When you already have a million things to do that week and you were up cramming all night for three exams, forgetting to send yourself your study guide is basically a given. Office 365 finally came up with the best solution to make sure your grades don't suffer from your brain overloads. OneNote can be accessed online with your Microsoft account. OneNote Online will automatically have all the notebooks and pages you have in your OneNote so you can access your notes and documents from any device. Instead of worrying about whether or not my file will open from my email, I have peace of mind knowing as long as I put something in my OneNote, I can access it from anywhere with OneNote Online.
Planner - Time to get organized.
Every college student knows the secrets to procrastination - pretend you're actually being productive even while putting off all of your assignments. One of the best is making lists of things you have to do (and then not actually do them until tomorrow). Planner in Office 365 gives you a simplified, satisfying way to keep up with all of your tasks. As the end of the semester gets busier and busier, I've been completely reliant on adding tasks into my Planner to make sure I keep track of absolutely every thing I have to do. To start, I set up different groups that organize what needs to be done:
As I create a new task, I can add notes about what needs to be done, set a date for when it needs to be done by, and make comments as I work on it. Adding details about all my tasks helps me look in one place and one place only for all I need to know about what to get done. For mass amounts of paperwork to fill out, I can add a checklist for each item, so I need what I've done already and how much more is left to do.
Ace presentations with Sway.
No matter what your major is, every semester you will create at least one presentation, typically with a group, to present to the class. Google slides are often the top choice for group projects, as just about everyone has a Gmail account to use and collaborate on the project with. But Google slides editing features are extremely limited. Minimal slide themes, limited font formatting options, and few visualization selections make each presentation seem almost, if not exactly, the same. Sway in Office 365 is an easy fix to sprucing up a presentation, and it is just as easy to use as Google slides or PowerPoint.
One of the best parts about Sway is it's complete customization. You can add different cards: Headers, Text, Image sliders, Image galleries (in multiple varieties), Videos, Tweets, Audio, and more. You can even embed a Sway within a Sway (yes that's Sway-ception). These can be grouped together by heading, so instead of having seven separate slides all relating to one topic, Sway can keep them all grouped together.
If you need a more eye catching color theme, or want to change the font and feel of the text throughout the presentation, use the Design feature:
Sway offers tutorials and guides on how to do just about anything the application has to offer. And since Sway can be used in Office 365 online, your presentation is automatically saved and can be accessed anywhere. Still not convinced? Check out one of my latest, interactive Sways:
Start getting professional on Word.
College isn't just about taking classes and passing exams (and beer pong). Starting your career often begins in college. With helpful professional templates on word, building a solid resume can be completely simplified. Choose from a variety of templates, from crisp and clean to creative and captivating. Inputting your information into the template is quick and easy, so you can worry more about what goes into your resume than how you need to format it.
If you're like me, you've probably applied to hundreds of part-time jobs and internships when you should be doing schoolwork. Needless to say, you need your resume on pretty much any device, whether it's to update your website link or to print from your friend's computer. When you use Word Online with Office 365, your work automatically saves as you make changes. This makes sure your documents don't get lost between sending yourself a million email attachments every time you switch devices. You can access your word files from anywhere, and make changes as needed. Update resumes and cover letters alike, without worrying about whether or not you've saved the latest version.
Making the most of Office 365.
Nobody says college will be easy, but Office 365 is here to help. When you start working on new classes, learn how to do your own laundry, and lose your voice at every Saturday football game, college can seem like a complete whirlwind. Use the Office 365 tools for education to keep track of everything going on in your life. Not only will you learn how to use tools for the modern workplace, Office 365 can help you stay on track to make sure college is the best four years of your life.
Happy Holidaysfrom Managed Solution
Happy Holidays from our team to yours! We hope you take this holiday to spend time away from work and with family and friends. Get any cool gadgets from Santa this year? Show us your new #tech by tagging us on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook!
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Solving global water challenges with Microsoft cloud technologies
We’ve been warned for decades to improve water management, and recent events such as the California drought are currently keeping the issue in the news. We take action at home by not watering our lawns and spending less time in the shower. But although personal conservation is a step forward, it’s only part of the solution. The morning cup of coffee after your three-minute shower took 55 gallons of water to produce. The shirt you’re wearing commanded another 700 gallons of water to create, and the car you drove to work required a staggering 39,090 gallons to build. Fortunately, Ecolab—a leading global provider of water, hygiene, and energy technologies and services—is on a mission to make changes that enable the goods and services we rely on every day to be produced and delivered with a lot less water.
Microsoft Azure and IoT services have helped us get much closer to our ambition to help customers operate at water-neutral. To get there, we need to collect massive amounts of information. Now, we can identify the opportunities and gaps, provide the right solution, and most importantly, manage our customers’ processes so that they can get closer to net-zero water usage.
Christophe Beck: Executive Vice President and President. Nalco Water, an Ecolab company.
We’ve been warned for decades to improve water management, and recent events such as the California drought are currently keeping the issue in the news. We take action at home by not watering our lawns and spending less time in the shower. But although personal conservation is a step forward, it’s only part of the solution. The morning cup of coffee after your three-minute shower took 55 gallons of water to produce. The shirt you’re wearing commanded another 700 gallons of water to create, and the car you drove to work required a staggering 39,090 gallons to build. Fortunately, Ecolab—a leading global provider of water, hygiene, and energy technologies and services—is on a mission to make changes that enable the goods and services we rely on every day to be produced and delivered with a lot less water.
Addressing the world’s water challenges
The United Nations’ 2015 World Water Development Report predicts that by 2030 demand will outpace supply by almost 40 percent and two-thirds of the world population could be under stress from lack of fresh water. Under pressure to operate more sustainably, governments and industries worldwide are turning to Ecolab for help. The company protects vital resources by helping companies achieve net-zero water usage—producing goods with infinitely recycled water—and providing access to fresh water for more people.
With more than 47,000 employees working across 170 countries and multiple industries, Ecolab needed better solutions to collect data from more than 36,000 water systems in customer operations to provide deeper insight and deliver more value. “Our goal of helping customers reduce water usage requires that we capture real-time information from processes anywhere around the world,” says Christophe Beck, President, Nalco Water, an Ecolab company. “We need to be able to control processes remotely and deliver the intelligence that enables our service personnel in the field to manage those processes for optimal performance results.”
Improving insights and management through the cloud
Ecolab chose the Microsoft cloud to enhance its ability to deliver personalized services and drive innovation. The company is taking full advantage of the Microsoft Azure platform, including the Azure IoT Suite, to accelerate water scarcity solutions for global industries. The cloud platform also includes Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Office 365 to provide a seamless solution for collecting, analyzing, and sharing information across multiple locations worldwide.
Ecolab and Microsoft worked closely together to deliver water management solutions on a much larger scale, and at a much deeper level, than previously possible. “We’re touching most of the vital operations within a plant from pretreatment to production processes through waste water,” Beck says. “And then you have all of the steps of cooling and boiling water. Connecting and controlling all those operations within a plant to reduce water as a whole is the real challenge. That’s why we needed to work closely with Microsoft to leverage the right portfolio of technology solutions.”
The company wanted to drive change from two directions: gathering and analyzing data to improve production processes, and then using the aggregated data to demonstrate to customers that its solutions make sound business sense.
In a recent scenario, a company with 262 plants worldwide and more than 250,000 employees wanted to become water-neutral—or in other words, they wanted to recycle all of the water coming out of their plants back into the production process. But to make a new conservation plan feasible, Ecolab needs to show potential customers that the investment will be financially as well as environmentally sustainable, with a 100 percent return on investment.
It all starts with data. Inside production facilities, equipment based on Ecolab’s Nalco 3D TRASAR™ Technology sends data to a highly secure analytics and storage platform on Azure. The technology monitors and controls streams for water-intensive processes and collects and analyzes the data in real time. “Microsoft Azure and Azure IoT Suite have helped us get much closer to our ambition to help customers operate at water-neutral,” says Beck. “To get there, we need to collect and analyze massive amounts of information. Now, we can identify opportunities and gaps, provide the right solutions, and most importantly, manage our customers’ process so that they can get closer to net-zero water usage.”
The information Ecolab collects from 36,000 water systems in more than 100 countries, spread across five continents, provides actionable intelligence that can be used to benchmark performance and drive continuous improvement. Shared through the cloud, the data is accessible to Ecolab service personnel through mobile devices such as Microsoft Surface Pro.
Ecolab associates use the information to engage customers more proactively and make informed recommendations to improve processes. The company’s field personnel also can use the Microsoft solution to effectively quantify and communicate the return on investment a customer achieved through its water management program—and recommend areas where additional investment in services might drive even greater reduction in water, energy, and operational costs. “It’s really a ‘virtuous cycle’ with less water, better results, and much lower operating costs, everyone wins,” Beck says. “Because ultimately, our customers want to be good corporate citizens.”
Working together for a better future
Beck believes that the company’s solutions are successful because they’re been tailored to address the unique challenges of water management and the specific needs of customers—and also because they reflect Ecolab’s emphasis on services delivered in person by experts in the field. “The new Microsoft cloud technology has helped us get much better data, on-site and in real time where our people need it most,” says Beck. “We have 47,000 people serving a million customers locations around the world, from nuclear plants to vaccine factories. The right data at the right time is absolutely essential.”
In Microsoft, Ecolab has found a collaborator with a shared vision. “What truly impressed me with our Microsoft collaboration was that it was not about selling us a product,” Beck says. “It was about building something and addressing the world’s water challenge together.”
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Accessibility in Office 365—enabling greater digital inclusion
By John Jendrezak as written on blogs.office.com
December 3rd, 2016 marks the 2016 International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD), and this year’s theme focuses on laying the foundation for a future of greater inclusion for persons with disabilities. In honor of IDPD, we invite all Office 365 customers to lay the foundation for a more inclusive digital environment by discovering and using accessibility capabilities built into Office 365.
Create accessible content with Office 365
Office 365 empowers you to communicate information to your colleagues and customers in a variety of ways: documents, presentations, spreadsheets, emails, chats, sways, notes, videos and more. As you communicate, it is important to meet the diverse needs of your audience. Making your content accessible ensures it can be used without barriers by people with varying levels of vision, hearing, cognition and mobility.
Noteworthy new capabilities built into Office 365 to help you with this include:
Accessible templates—When you create content starting with an online template in Word, Excel or PowerPoint for PC or Mac, you can now find templates tagged as “accessible.” These are structured to ensure ease of navigation with a screen reader and keyboard and use fonts and colors that are easy to read with low vision or color blindness. In the coming months, we will add more accessible templates not only for Office for PC and Mac, but also for Office Online and Office Mobile applications.
Hundreds of accessible templates are already available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint for PCs and Macs with more coming.
Image description controls—When you use visual objects to communicate information, you need to add alternative text descriptions (alt-text) to ensure this content can be understood by people with visual impairments. To make this process easier, we now offer you controls to add alt-text not only in Office for PC, Mac and Office Online, but also in several Office mobile applications. Furthermore, we are designing ways to make alt-text easier to discover and use. In the coming months, starting with Word and PowerPoint for PCs, we will merge the title and description fields in the alt-text control into a single field so you have no confusion about where to enter alt-text. Also, we will make this control discoverable via the right click menu and ribbon. Lastly, using the Microsoft Computer Vision Cognitive Service, we will offer you automatic suggestions for alt-text when you insert a photographic image that can be recognized with high confidence. Through machine learning, this service will keep improving as more people use it, saving you significant time to make media-rich presentations accessible.
Link display name controls—When you include links to webpages or documents, you need to add meaningful display names to ensure screen reader users find it easy to understand the purpose of the links. To make this process easier, we now offer you controls to add display names for links not only in Office for PC, Mac and Office Online, but also in several Office mobile applications. In the coming months, we are introducing a new control called Link Gallery in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook for PCs, as well as in several Office Mobile applications. This gallery will show you your most recently used files from SharePoint and OneDrive, as well as any webpage from your clipboard. When you insert a link by selecting it from this gallery, the file or webpage name will automatically be added as the display text, and you can build on this to make it more meaningful.
The Link Gallery is coming soon to help you efficiently insert links to recent items in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook for PCs. File names will automatically be added as display text for links inserted via this new control.
Accessibility checker—Before sharing content, you can run the accessibility checker to find and fix any issues that might make your content difficult for people with disabilities to use. The accessibility checker is now easily discoverable in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for PC applications via the Check Accessibility button under the Review tab. It is also available in Visio for PCs and several Office for Mac and Office Online applications. It not only finds accessibility errors and tells you how and why to fix them, but also links to detailed support articles on creating accessible documents, accessible spreadsheets, accessible presentations and accessible emails.
Now, let’s take a closer look at key updates releasing in the fourth quarter:
Usability with assistive technologies—If you use Office 365 with a screen reader and keyboard, you might have already noticed significant improvements such as the following:
In Skype for Business for PCs, we made it possible for screen readers to give automatic announcements of conversation invites, incoming instant messages and alerts, as well as changes to mute, video and screen sharing states. We also made it efficient to navigate through the main regions of the application using “F6” and take quick actions after selecting a contact by pressing Enter. Learn more about keyboard shortcuts in Skype for Business in this article.
In OneNote for Windows 10, Mac and iPad, we’re introducing an entirely new design to provide screen reader users a better navigation experience across notebooks, sections and pages. Currently available in preview, this can be enabled in the app settings by following the steps in this OneNote support page.
In Office Online, we made it possible to use access keys to navigate through the ribbon efficiently without a mouse. Read the article “Accessibility in Office Online” to learn more about keyboard shortcuts.
In Visio, we made it easier for screen reader and keyboard users to work with shapes and navigate diagrams. We also made it possible for diagram authors to define the keyboard navigation order of the diagram and to include alt-text for the following objects: shapes, illustrations, pages, masters, hyperlinks and data graphics.
In Project, we recently enhanced accessibility for the following views: Gantt Chart, sheet views, timeline, team planner, usage views and form views.
We’ve made hundreds of additional improvements, including making it possible for screen reader users to work effectively in documents with Math equations, comments and real-time co-authoring in Office for PCs. Learn more about these improvements in the following articles: What’s new in accessibility for Word, Accessibility for Excel and Accessibility for PowerPoint.
Built-in learning tools—If you have a learning disability such as dyslexia, you can now read content in Word documents more effectively by turning on settings built into Word for PCs in the View > Read Mode. These can read text aloud with simultaneous highlighting, increase text spacing and break words into syllables to promote concentration and comprehension. These controls are already having profound impact on students in classrooms with Learning Tools for OneNote and will be introduced in the coming months in OneNote Online and Word Online as well. We recently introduced them in the latest Office Lens app for iOS as well, enabling you to more effectively scan content in physical documents.
The Office 365 team is committed to empowering organizations to remove barriers faced by persons with disabilities when accessing digital resources. We are committed to building technology that helps enable equal opportunities for everyone to achieve their goals. We believe that empowerment begins with inclusion, and inclusion requires action from all. Stay tuned to our Office 365 accessibility blog series for more updates to enable greater digital inclusion.
Adobe Flash has been an integral part of the web for decades, enabling rich content and animations in browsers since before HTML5 was introduced. In modern browsers, web standards pioneered by Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Apple, Mozilla, and many others are now enabling sites to exceed those experiences without Flash and with improved performance and security. Starting in the Anniversary Edition of Windows 10, we began to give users more control over Flash by selectively pausing certain Flash content, like ads, that were not central to the page.
In our next release, we will extend this functionality and encourage the transition to HTML5 alternatives by providing additional user control over when Flash content loads. Windows Insiders will be able to try an early implementation of this feature soon in upcoming preview builds. The user experience will evolve as we move towards a stable release in the Windows 10 Creator’s Update next year.
Sites that support HTML5 will default to a clean HTML5 experience. In these cases, Flash will not even be loaded, improving performance, battery life, and security. For sites that still depend on Flash, users will have the opportunity to decide whether they want Flash to load and run, and this preference can be remembered for subsequent visits.
Sample of the user experience when the user clicks on a blocked Flash control.
We are deeply aware that Flash is an integral part of many web experiences today. To ease the transition to HTML5, these changes initially will not affect the most popular sites which rely on Flash today. In the coming months, we will actively monitor Flash consumption in Microsoft Edge and will gradually shorten the list of automatic exceptions. At the end of this process, users will remain in control, and will be able to choose Flash for any site they visit.
We advise web developers to migrate to standardized content delivery mechanisms like JavaScript and HTML5 Encrypted Media Extensions, Media Source Extensions, Canvas, Web Audio, and RTC in the coming months.
This change will provide all users improved performance, greater stability, and stronger security. These changes are similar to updates coming from our friends at Apple, Mozilla, and Google. We look forward to continued work with these partners, and with Adobe, to improve the capabilities and security of the web for all users.
Pay-As-You-Go Licensing
Paying your licensing on a per user, per month basis can save you money, time, and a whole lot of headache. Check out the infographic below to learn what Pay-As-You-Go Licensing is all about!
Want to know more on Pay-As-You-Go? Check out our Webinar Series!
Missed our first Webinar? You can still catch all the action - watch it on-demand here >>
Managed Solution is Fighting Against Hunger
San Diego, CA. This holiday season, Managed Solution is joining the fight against hunger with the San Diego Food Bank by hosting our own Hunger Games. We are donating food items, competing to receive company donations, and reaching out to friends and family to donate to the San Diego Food Bank online. Up until December 30th, Managed Solution will be accepting donations of food items, as well as donations online.
Why the Jacobs & Cushman San Diego Food Bank?
The Jacobs & Cushman San Diego Food Bank is the largest hunger-relief organization in San Diego County. The Food Bank serves approx. 400,000 people every month in communities throughout San Diego County. Last year, the Food Bank distributed 22 million pounds of food -- the equivalent of 18.3 million meals!
The Food Bank’s nonprofit partners collect food from its 80,000 sq. ft. warehouse in Miramar and distribute the food directly to people in need in their local communities. By acting as a central distribution point and through its own direct distributions the Food Bank and its nonprofit partners provide food to communities throughout the county’s 4,200 square mile radius.
