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.
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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.
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Road realities—how to support your road warriors with tech
The road warrior travels from city to city, meets with potential clients and attends conferences and industry events. And their travel requirements don’t seem to be slowing down. According to the Global Business Travel Association, spending on business travel reached record-breaking levels of $1.2 trillion in 2015, and is expected to rise to $1.6 trillion by 2020.
Your road warriors bring your products and services into new markets, diversify clientele and strengthen existing relationships. They’re helping your business grow—now more than ever.
Doing their jobs from the road, however, can prove very difficult without the right productivity tools. So, how do you know if they have what they need?
Start by understanding the common challenges they face. Whether it is hosting meetings, collaborating with colleagues or meeting deadlines, you can make sure they are set up for success.
Here are four productivity fears that often strike business travelers while they’re on the road:
Did I forget to save files from the company server before traveling?
Secure file access shouldn’t be a privilege for in-office employees only. Being able to tap into the company server to access important resources is a basic requirement for most jobs. For employees who are on the move, it’s critical to have such access anywhere, anytime. Whether in a hotel lobby or a cafe, they should be able to connect to Wi-Fi and get their work done. When company documents are secured in the cloud, your employees can continue with business as usual, from virtually anywhere.
Will time away impact day-to-day communication?
For road warriors, productivity is dependent on seamless communication and collaboration with in-office teams. Without face-to-face interaction with colleagues, employees can sometimes feel disconnected—and the ability to connect in multiple ways can make all the difference. Secure video conferencing and messaging tools can bridge the communication gap, allowing business travelers to chat with team members and conduct online meetings on the fly.
Can we successfully collaborate while I’m in another location?
Teamwork is essential to business, whether your employees are on the road or huddled in a conference room. Business leaders must consider the value of technology that lets business travelers create, co-author and share documents in real-time. These abilities enable teams to accomplish tasks and meet deadlines together, from virtually anywhere. Now, with technology for sharing and collaborating remotely, it’s easier than ever.
What happens if I lose my connection to the internet?
Travel often happens during business hours. While on a train or 30,000 miles in the air, your road warrior still needs to email, build sales decks and meet deadlines. But sometimes technology falters and they could lose internet connectivity for minutes or even hours. At times like these, they can rely most on tools that save their work (documents, presentations and even email files) onto a hard-drive while offline and upload upon reconnection. While they’re offline, they can continue to read emails, compose drafts, edit files—and keep making work happen.
The productivity of your traveling employees is only as good as the technology that supports them. As a business leader, you have the power to provide technology that helps them do their jobs while on the road.
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New Security Analytics Service: Finding and Fixing Risk in Office 365
Microsoft is pleased to announce the preview availability of a new security analytics service called the Office 365 Secure Score. The Secure Score is a security analytics tool that will help you understand what you have done to reduce the risk to your data in Office 365, and show you what you can do to further reduce that risk. We think of it as a credit score for security. Our approach to this experience was very simple. First, we created a full inventory of all the security configurations and behaviors that our customers can do to mitigate risks to their data in Office 365 (there are about 77 total things that we identified). Then, we evaluated the extent to which each of those controls mitigated a specific set of risks and awarded the control some points. More points means a more effective control for that risk. Lastly, we measure the extent to which your service has adopted the recommended controls, add up your points, and present it as a single score.
The core idea is that it is useful to rationalize and contextualize all of your cloud security configuration and behavioral options into one simple, analytical framework, and to make it very easy for you to take incremental action to improve your score over time. Rather than constructing a model with findings slotted into critical, moderate, or low severity, we wanted to give you a non-reactive way to evaluate your risk and make incremental changes over time that add up to a very effective risk mitigation plan.
The Office 365 Secure Score is a preview experience, so you may find issues, and you will note that not all of the controls are being measured. Please share any issues on the Office Network Group for Security. You can access the Secure Score at https://securescore.office.com.
The Secure Score does not express an absolute measure of how likely you are to get breached. It expresses the extent to which you have adopted controls which can offset the risk of being breached. No service can guarantee that you will not be breached, and the Secure Score should not be interpreted as a guarantee in any way.
Your Secure Score Summary
The first, most important piece of the Secure Score experience is the Score Summary. This panel gives you your current Secure Score, and the total number of points that are available to you, given your subscription level, the date that your score was measured, as well as a simple pie chart of your score. The denominator of your score is not intended to be a goal number to achieve. The full set of controls includes several that are very aggressive and will potentially have an adverse impact on your users’ productivity. Your goal should be to optimize your action to take every possible risk mitigating action while preserving your users’ productivity.
Risk Assessment
While the Secure Score is framed as a ‘gamification’ of your security, it is important to recognize that every action you take will mitigate a real world threat. This panel shows you the top threats for your tenancy, given your particular configuration and behaviors. Make sure you read about and understand the risks you are mitigating every time you take an action.
Compare Your Score
The Office 365 Average Secure Score is calculated from every Office 365 customer’s Secure Score. You can use this panel to get a better sense of how your score stacks up against the average. The specific controls that are passed by any given customer are not exposed in the average, and your Secure Score is private. Note that the Average Secure Score only includes the numerator of the score, not the denominator. So, the average points may be higher than you can achieve because there are points in controls associated with services that you have not purchased.
Take Action
Helping you figure out which actions to take to improve your score is the purpose of the Secure Score. There are three basic parts to the experience:
First, there is the modeler. Use the slider to figure out how many actions you want to review. Sliding to the left will reduce the number of actions in your list below, sliding to the right will increase the number. Each tick of the slider will add one control to the list. The target score shows you how much your score will increase if you take all the actions in the queue.
Second is the action pane. When you open this, you will see a description of the control, explaining why we think it is an effective mitigation, and what we observed about your configuration. We’ll also show you some details about the control such as the category (account, device, data), what the user impact of the action is (low or moderate) as well as your measured score. Clicking Learn More will open a fly-out pane that will walk you through taking the desired action.
Thirdly, you will see a remediation pane fly-out that explains exactly what you are about to change, and how it will affect your users. Eventually, the Launch Now link (which takes you to a separate security center now) will allow you to make the desired change right from the Secure Score experience.
Score Analyzer
Since the Secure Score experience is restricted to users that have been designated a Global Tenant Administrator, we wanted to make it easy for admins to analyze and report to their executives and stakeholders their progress on risk mitigation over time. The Score Analyzer experience allows you to review a line graph of your score over time, to export the audit of your control measurements for the selected day to either a PDF or a CSV, and to review what controls you have earned points for, and which ones you could take action on.
What’s Next
As mentioned, the Office 365 Secure Score is in a preview release. Over the coming months you will see us continue to add new controls, new measurements, and improvements to the remediation experiences. If you like what you see, please share with your network. If you see something we can improve, please share it with us on the Office Network Group for Security. We’re looking forward to seeing your scores go up, and making the Secure Score experience as useful, simple, and easy as it can be.
Office 365 Case Study
MIKE Program: Serving youth with a grown-up IT system
MIKE Program, a small nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon, uses mentorships to empower youth to make better health choices, but its makeshift IT system took up scarce staff time and bogged down workflow.Office 365 has revolutionized the nonprofit’s day-to-day work. The free, cloud-based suite now enables them to
write more competitive grant applications,
streamline board relations,
work with more volunteers,
increase their productivity, and
communicate with stakeholders from anywhere.
“It would not be possible to operate as we do now without it,” says Sherry Harbert, MIKE Program’s communications director and de-facto IT help desk. The cloud's easy-to-use features help the health nonprofit MIKE Program better communicate with the board, volunteers and staff.
"Office 365 allowed a central collaboration point for documents and tasks assigned to committee meetings, and it allowed everyone to see the calendar and updates in real time"-Dave Chapman, MIKE Program Board Member
Making a difference with better technology:
Grant writing in the cloud
Like most nonprofits, MIKE Program’s budget relies heavily on winning private grants. Collaborating on applications saved in the cloud helps them write stronger submissions, Harbert says.
With Office 365’s secure file sharing, edits made to documents are saved in real time, eliminating the confusion of emailing different versions back and forth—and the frustration of bounced attachment-heavy messages.
Communicating 24/7
“Like most nonprofits, we operate 24 hours a day because people expect communication in the evenings, mornings and weekends,” Harbert says. Office 365’s tools allow staff and volunteers to seamlessly stay in touch from a computer, tablet or mobile phone.
“If we’re out of the office or something is wrong with the IT host, we still have access to everything. We’re never shut down.”
Managing volunteers
Volunteers aren’t based at the nonprofit’s central office; more than 20 MIKE Program mentors travel city-wide as they lead health education programs and shepherd students to job shadow opportunities across Portland.
Office 365 emailing and cloud document sharing connects on-the-go volunteers to staff, regardless of what mobile device they use: They can view updates of schedules, participant rosters and curricula that can change at the drop of a hat—anywhere.
Bringing on the board
The board’s ability to work efficiently, make quick decisions and communicate is central to running a nonprofit, and MIKE Program streamlined its board work with Office 365. Instead of sending email after email of agendas, meeting notes, tasks and updates, board members use SharePoint, one of the suite’s most popular features, to sync projects.
“Office 365 allowed a central collaboration point for documents and tasks assigned to committee meetings, and it allowed everyone to see the calendar and updates as we go,” explains board member Dave Chapman. “It’s real time collaboration.”
Maximizing resources
Volunteer, time and financial resources are always tight at nonprofits, and the tools within Office 365 allowed MIKE Program to do more with less. “Switching to Office 365 freed up my time so I’m not struggling to do basic operations,” Harbert says. “I can now focus more on deliverables, the program itself, our mission, communications and getting the word out on our program.”
Becoming more efficient helped the staff nearly double its pool of volunteers, who logged 760 more hours per year after the transition to Office 365.
Building organizational capacity
“This technology’s help is both immediate for what we need day to day but also in the long term,” Harbert says. Because it allows staff to direct their energy to helping more students lead healthy lives—instead of wrestling with makeshift IT systems—the cloud-based suite sets up MIKE Program for a robust future.
Have you seen the announcement about Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365? Check it out!
Groups in Power BI are built on Office 365 groups, too, so now you can add and interact with Power BI groups in your Microsoft Teams groups.
If you're an admin for a Power BI group, when you create a team in Microsoft Teams, the app suggests that you add Microsoft Teams functionality to your existing group.
In your Microsoft Teams channel, you just tap the + sign, then add Power BI as a tab in your channel.
Microsoft Teams automatically detects all the reports in your Power BI groups and in My Workspace. You can choose which ones to show in the Power BI tab in your channel.
Now your Power BI report is handsomely displayed in your Microsoft Teams channel.
If your team isn't taking advantage of groups in Power BI yet, now is a great time to try them. They're a great way to share your dashboards, reports, and datasets with your coworkers. Read more about groups in Power BI.
Then see how you can leverage your Power BI groups in Microsoft Teams!
5 keys to simplified mobile protection
Businesses today are reaping the benefits of mobile, like increased productivity, lower overhead, and happier employees. However, mobility can bring added risk, requiring greater focus on protecting data, enabling secure employee access, and managing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) as personal devices are used for work. With the right tools, managing this risk doesn’t have to be complicated.
Here are five components of your business that Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), in conjunction with Office 365 addresses.
People - Give employees the access they need, when and where they need it
Mobile devices - Manage your company resources, regardless of device
Apps - A single platform to manage every app
Data - Protect data wherever it goes
Infrastructure - The foundation that enables mobility
Productivity is the goal of mobility. Security is the requirement. Enabling secure mobile productivity doesn’t need to be overly complicated or expensive. With Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) and Office 365 working together, you ensure employee productivity while keeping your company protected in a mobile world.
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Achieve IT infrastructure cost savings of at least 50%
Call Southern California’s most trusted name in cloud at 800-208-3617 for real time pricing and a cost benefit analysis for Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS.
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UK Ministry of Defence on the frontline of cloud-based data protection with Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection
Today, providing security on any front requires a willingness to adopt leading-edge technologies. So it’s great to see the Ministry of Defence (MOD) in the United Kingdom assume a leadership role in their decision to adopt the Microsoft Cloud, as well as Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection and Customer Lockbox from a Microsoft U.K. data center.
According to Mike Stone, chief digital and information officer (CDIO) at the Ministry of Defence, Microsoft cloud services bring world-class reliability and performance to its operations in a way that fits perfectly with its digital transformation agenda:
“The MOD chose Microsoft cloud technologies to support our transition to a more cost-effective, modern and agile organisation. Microsoft offers the security, privacy, control and transparency that meets our stringent criteria for cloud services—all available from data centres in the U.K. Additional cloud-based services such as Advanced Threat Protection provide us with complementary capabilities to keep our employees productive and our network secure.”
Mike’s statement resonates with any highly regulated government entity that must find the right balance between enabling employees with anytime, anywhere data access while ensuring security.
Now that MOD mailboxes will be protected with Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, staff will stay productive and secure around the clock. That’s because, despite the escalating severity and complexity of today’s malware, Advanced Threat Protection offers better protection and control. Additionally, with Customer Lockbox, the MOD gets full visibility and control of their customer data during service operations, which can help them meet compliance obligations.
Aligning its vision for digital transformation with the Microsoft Cloud, the MOD gets the best of both worlds—productivity-enhancing agility in a highly secure online environment. I’m happy to see that by empowering staff to achieve its goals in our rapidly evolving digital world, the MOD is entering a new era of heightened performance—at home and abroad.
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Road realities—how to support your road warriors with tech
