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Here’s what’s new in the latest update to Skype on Windows 10

By Vicky Gkiza as written on blogs.windows.com

With the new update, you can easily share your files to Skype, react to messages, and get to your calls and conversations faster than ever. Let’s take a look at what’s new in this update:

Get to your calls and conversations faster

In the first in a set of updates we’ll be making, the new look helps you get to your calls and conversations faster – you can now start new conversations, see your profile and visit the dial pad from the top of your recent conversations.

Share photos, videos and more directly to Skype

Now you can easily share files, videos, photos, links and more directly to Skype from your Windows 10 PC – just click on the Windows share charm, and select Skype.

New message reactions

By simply tapping on the reaction icon next to any message or video call, you can now easily express how you feel at any time.

We’re excited to share these new features to make it easier than ever for you to stay in touch with friends from your Windows 10 devices. To learn more about the new Skype, check out the Skype blog!

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Managed Solution is in the top 1% of Microsoft Cloud Service Providers worldwide, and a premier partner aligned with Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Download our Cloud Comparison Calculator to receive access to the latest in cloud pricing aggregation, your all up cost of on premises vs. a cloud hosted solution

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Last week, the Managed Solution team joined thousands of other Microsoft partners for Inspire – Microsoft’s annual world partner conference in Washington D.C. As a premier partner, Managed Solution is in the top 1% of Microsoft Cloud Service Providers worldwide and fully aligned with Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

It is the one time of year when Microsoft invites partners from around the world to celebrate this past year’s successes, unveil changes with insights, and offer best practices with advice for how to empower customers and enhance end user experience in a digital world.

The week is composed of a daily keynote by a Microsoft executive, followed by hundreds of learning sessions. Several topics are discussed, such as: How do you bring out critical thinking and creativity in the workplace? How do we create dynamic teams that come together to service a customer in different ways?

Major announcements at Microsoft Inspire answered these questions with the launch of Microsoft 365 and enhanced resources to help customers address the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Microsoft 365

As a complete, secure, and intelligent solution to empower employees, Microsoft 365 now rolls together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security into a single secure package to help end users be more productive while increasing protection. 

With more than 100 million commercial monthly active users of Office 365, and more than 500 million Windows 10 devices in use, Microsoft is in a unique position to empower employees to be creative and work together, securely.  To address the commercial needs from the largest enterprise to the smallest business, Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Business were introduced.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Meeting the requirements of the European Union’s landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by May 25, 2018 is a pressing topic for many organizations worldwide. In Microsoft’s effort to provide customers with helpful GDPR compliance resources, they have been hosting webinars and discussions around how the Microsoft Cloud, including Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, and Azure data services, Enterprise Mobility + Security, and Windows 10 can help customers on their GDPR compliance journey. They have backed up their commitments through their contracts and by sharing their experience, as well as other partners’ experiences, with their audiences along the way.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, discussed the advent of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. It is his belief that soon everything will become multi-device and AI will be intrinsic in every application built. Nadella spoke about the four main goals of digital transformation: the empowerment of employees, the engagement of customers, the optimization of operations, and the transformation of products.

“We’ve just skimmed the surface of how much support – sales tools, product training, case studies, sales teams, etc. – Microsoft has created to help its partners succeed. Today, MSPs around the globe are struggling with some of the same issues that we do. Addressing those issues is precisely why SNAP & Stratogator have such a bright future, not just in the U.S.” - Susan Kuruvilla, CEO, Managed Solution

Two New Tools to Optimize Cloud Spend & Operational Efficiency

With Microsoft's “all-in” strategy to help customers move to the cloud, the Microsoft Inspire conference was the perfect opportunity for Managed Solution to launch two new tools that empower MSPs to govern their cloud adoption, as we move towards digital transformation, and ensure their customers are receiving the best price for these cloud instances. Chairman and Founder of Managed Solution, Sean Ferrel, launched and demoed these tools at Booth #103 on the exhibit floor at the conference.

1. SNAP: Cloud Service Marketplace that evolves with the market and offers new services, bundles, and SKUs for your cloud sales organization. Customize and offer the selection of cloud services that your team needs to drive customer sales.

2. StratoGator/AzureGator: Cloud Service Brokerage Platform where aggregation of top tier cloud providers in the Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) space will be compared against one another based on three pillars: cost, management, and reporting. Providing a user friendly centralized marketplace for Channel Partners allowing them to reduce overhead by 30-40%.

Ferrel also shared how these tools provide the customization MSPs need to support and sell to their customers both within and outside the cloud. These tools finally give the managed services provider the control they need and their customers want over their Microsoft products, streamlining their ability to align with the changes and vision of the tech giant.

“Microsoft is super-successful right now, yet still changing. That's an indication that they're future-focused and have a vision for where this is all headed. They're not complacent which inspires us to continue to innovate.” - Tina Rountree, Director of Sales, Managed Solution

Transformed Through Digital Technology

During Microsoft Inspire, partners shared stories around the ways that they are using Microsoft solutions to improve their communities as well as bring about positive change in the world. Working closely together allows us to build and go-to-market with innovative solutions for the long-term journey for our customers – as Nadella stated in his remarks, we create a strong local impact that ultimately has a profound global impact.

“With increasing digitization, where every part of our society and economy is being fundamentally transformed because of digital technology, the opportunity is greater than ever before," Nadella said, relating his vision back to his partner audience. "Being in this industry, being in this [Microsoft partner] ecosystem, the opportunity is tremendous.” -Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

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By Barry Briggs as written on blogs.microsoft.com

When a disaster occurs, you’ve entered a “new reality,” says Lewis Curtis, director of Microsoft Services Disaster Response. It won’t be enough to simply restore your systems and applications to where they were before – disasters change everything, irrevocably and permanently.

But new computing technologies like the cloud are making it possible to quickly respond to a disaster, coordinate the response by governments and aid organizations, provide analytics to better understand and track its impact, and manage the aftermath. All of the same technologies and innovations that enable businesses to quickly respond to new opportunities and changing market conditions make the cloud an essential part of any disaster response.

Using technology to ease suffering

Disasters often wipe out the very systems that are desperately needed to cope with them.

Michael G. Manning, president and CEO of the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank in Louisiana, understands this well. In August 2016, Baton Rouge, the state’s capital, was inundated by record rains. Four feet of flood water destroyed not only a million pounds of food held in reserve, but all of the food bank’s computer systems, the very ones that tracked the food bank’s supplies and who received them, and that ensured that hungry people were getting the food they needed.

Quickly moving their office and warehouse management applications to the cloud guaranteed that those applications would always be available, and that the loss of their systems “would never happen again,” Manning says. With cloud-based applications, the food bank could “operate anywhere, at any time, in any future disaster.”

Only months before, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake ravaged western Ecuador, and the government needed a basic software application to register those affected by the quake, and to ensure that shelter, food and medical supplies reached the 2,300 families left homeless by the disaster.

Neighboring Colombia had such an application. But how to quickly move it to Ecuador and get it running? In fact, within a week it was redeployed –  to the Azure cloud. The Ecuadorian Red Cross also used the cloud to manage volunteers and blood bank data across the country.

In other cases, disasters bring new demands on applications –  in both scale and load – that were never anticipated.

On March 22, 2014, a hillside saturated by heavy rains collapsed on the small Northwest town of Oso, Washington, flattening homes and killing 43 people. In the aftermath, nearly 200 government and aid agencies, including the Red Cross, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Washington National Guard and the U.S. Navy’s search and rescue team, as well as thousands of representatives of the media, descended upon Oso.

The local government’s record-keeping and coordination systems were quickly overwhelmed so Microsoft Services Disaster Response, with help from the Azure product team, migrated Oso’s records to the cloud. With its nearly limitless capacity, the cloud made it possible for everyone who needed access to the records to retrieve – and search – them quickly and efficiently. Using Office 365 they also quickly deployed an Incident Command Collaboration System that enabled incident commanders and emergency liaisons from the various agencies to connect with one another.

A year later, a massive earthquake leveled some 600,000 buildings and killed thousands of people in Nepal, leaving the remote, mountainous country faced with the massive task of rebuilding. “Disaster relief is always overwhelming,” Dan Strode, project manager for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), said at the time. “There’s too much to do, too many people that need help, and never enough time or resources.”

The daunting task of rebuilding began with mapping where the original structures had stood. In the past, such records were maintained on paper. However, in order to expedite reconstruction, the Microsoft Innovation Center in Nepal built a mobile phone application that used a device’s GPS to help workers record the outline of a damaged home and store it in the cloud before clearing the debris. And to help restart the economy, the app also managed daily cash payments to the workers. Cloud applications like Office 365 and the data visualization tool Power BI helped them to coordinate and track progress.

Using artificial intelligence and the cloud to provide early warning

We can use modern technologies to respond to disasters, but could we someday use them to predict, or even prevent, these natural catastrophes?

Perhaps! A statistical algorithm known as M8 attempts to predict larger earthquakes from the appearance of smaller ones. A number of efforts in different regions around the world are applying neural networks (an artificial intelligence approach that simulates the activity of the human brain) in attempts to predict the occurrence and the magnitude. (Here’s an example from India.)

In Texas, Project “SHEM” (streamflow hydrology estimate using machine learning) uses artificial intelligence to predict floods even when the physical gauges that measure water levels fail; a computer model is “trained” using historical data to look for patterns that signify the water is rising.

And the cloud may well give new hope to solving the age-old problem of predicting the weather. One prototype application (written, by the way, by your own intrepid author) uses several hundred processors in the cloud to load and analyze a century’s worth of weather data from reporting stations around the world. The hope is that the capacious data set can be analyzed to identify long-term trends and answer some of our most troubling “what ifs” about weather events.

Rely on the cloud for scale, resilience and rapid response

Aside from the wonderful humanitarian nature of these stories, what is it that is so compelling and relevant about using technology for disaster recovery?

What aid agencies and governments are finding so useful about the cloud, machine learning and other emerging technologies – resilience, time to market, scale, agility – are all qualities that are essential in today’s rapidly changing business world.

Need to get the word out? You might take a page from the government of Alberta, Canada. To keep its citizens informed during the great wildfires of 2016, the government partnered with Microsoft and geographical information systems (GIS) partner ESRI to create a cloud-based mapping application of the fires.

Need new capabilities but don’t want to add IT overhead? The same lessons learned by the governments in Baton Rouge and Nepal can be applied to public and private companies. A sudden imperative to scale? Use the cloud, as they did for the Oso landslide.

New technologies are often proven in the crucible of disasters, and they drive new innovations that promise to keep us safer, long after the crisis has ended.

A 40-year veteran of the software industry, Barry Briggs previously served as CTO for Microsoft’s own IT organization, where he helped lead the company’s transition to the cloud. The Microsoft Services Disaster Response team in the last few years has operated more than 154 missions in over 30 countries, at no cost to the agencies or communities who ask for help.

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San Diego, CA. - On Thursday, June 29th, Managed Solution's Founder, Sean Ferrel, presented at AITP San Diego's 8th annual Cloud Conference. The "Cloud Computing and Beyond" conference held at Town and Country Mission Valley featured 400+ of IT professionals who are passionate about the professional growth and education of the SoCal IT community. Speakers throughout the day included thought leaders as well as peer use-cases on cloud, innovative technologies and Big Data/IoT.

Sean Ferrel talked about cloud marketplaces, brokerage and the long term effects of managing your customers cloud strategy. The public cloud offers a whole new world of reoccurring revenue for all of us!

Over the next several years’ public cloud management will be key to the success of both distributors and integrators alike. Cost management, brokerage, and overall management will be at the center of how we manage our customers and automation will allow us to quickly make informed decisions when working with providers.

Large Public Cloud Providers are just starting to gain maturity and most organizations are taking a deeper look at these utility models. While we all have our favorite cloud partners so do our customers and it’s important we look at cloud much like we look at purchasing airline tickets; compare all brands and make sure getting from point A to B is seamless and cost effective.

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My excellent cloud adventure: first steps, first mistakes

By Brad Wright as written on microsoft.com

Early in my career, I gave up photojournalism for computing. I worked in a small town, and across the square from my newspaper office was a computer center. They had a mainframe computer and five customers – banks, all of them. The guy who ran it was ancient: a grizzled, chain-smoking veteran who’d worked in computing since its dawn 30 years earlier. He offered me a 50 percent raise and all the free sodas I could drink if I learned how to run the bank processing every night.

I did.

This was 1985, and it was for me the beginning of an itinerant journey from one bleeding edge of the business to another. Fast forward approximately 30 years, and I am at Microsoft, stepping once again onto new terrain. As a Principal Software Engineering manager in Microsoft IT, I’ve spent the past three years immersed in the most interesting and unexpected ride of my career: helping Microsoft move our entire IT footprint to the cloud.

We’re making solid progress. Along the way, we’ve unearthed a lot of hard-earned wisdom. Our lessons are frequently the results of unforeseen problems, gnarly issues, and flat-out mistakes. Not surprisingly, our customers are quite curious to hear about this stuff in order to avoid experiencing the same pains themselves.

For today, let me share one of the first great lessons we learned.

As we built the strategy to move as fast as we could, one of the first and seemingly obvious things to do was to “lift and shift” our virtual machines (VMs) into the cloud. At that point, we had about 60,000 VMs running in on-premises servers across the company. It seemed rather logical that we could just “lift” them off our resident hardware and “shift” them onto the Azure IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud platform. Pick ‘em up, move ‘em on, shut down the hardware, and it’s all good, right?

Wrong.

It wasn’t long before we discovered that “lift and shift” in and of itself doesn’t work out too well. First off, it can increase your costs if you don’t know what you’re doing. VMs aren’t simple and nor do they operate independent of other factors. All that complexity can lead to a lot of unforeseen expenses. Your apps use data – a lot of which might remain on premises for some time in-house – and that can require expensive ExpressRoute connections to ensure security and compliance. Subscription costs, management challenges, and the many moving parts associated with a move to the cloud all represent potential problems that not only threaten to add costs but also to send you in unwanted directions.

After a couple years of wrestling with these problems, we finally came up with the right strategy.

Todd Himple, one of the senior engineering leaders on the team, and I managed to get it all onto one single slide, with the simple headline of “Microsoft IT’s Cloud Strategy.” We literally drew it on a whiteboard one day. And it’s probably one of the most viral slides in the company over the past couple years. It’s basically an inverted funnel:

You proceed from the top down, starting with “Retire it, right-size, eliminate environments.” In other words, just kill off as much as you can. Typically, this is more than 25 percent of everything in your datacenter – just garbage. Toss it out.

Going down the funnel, you move through the processes of using Software as a Service (SaaS), converting to Platform as a Service (PaaS), optimizing IaaS, and at the bottom, remaining on-premises. Literally, the last step in the roadmap is “lift and shift” – ironically, one of the first things we did when we started our cloud journey. There’s a place for it, but it should be done in the context of a comprehensive approach.

If this piques your interest or you’d like to know more, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your local Microsoft representative to arrange a visit to our Executive Briefing Center. And of course, we’re happy to share a whole universe of knowledge with you on IT Showcase.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!

To Learn More about Professional Services, contact us at 800-208-3617

Mediterranean Shipping Company builds a global productivity network with Office 365

By Fabio Catassi as written on blogs.office.com

The Mediterranean Shipping Company has been under the same family leadership since its inception 43 years ago, and while the company now manages its fleet of 480 vessels from offices in 150 countries, it’s fair to say that its caring, corporate culture is as strong today as it ever was. But while we all feel connected to a large corporate family, unfortunately, our IT systems did not support that connectivity, or the global communications that we needed to compete in today’s digital economy.

Container shipping has evolved over the years to become a commodity-based business. Today, we are facing an era of shrinking profit margins and a growing pressure on the revenue side. Yet we were able to ensure that IT played its part in minimizing operational expenses, while improving our business services to employees. That’s because Office 365 delivers a cost-effective, cloud-based solution to bring everybody up to the same level of mobility and productivity across our global operations.

When I became CTO in 2005, we wanted to replace the disparate business productivity solutions we had running in 480 offices around the world with a single digital workplace for everyone. After evaluating other web-based solutions, including Google Apps for Business (now G Suite) and Amazon Web Services, we chose Office 365 cloud-based communication and collaboration services to empower all employees with the same leading-edge, yet familiar business tools. Security also played into this decision: we had various security solutions in place across our global offices, and it took a tremendous effort to ensure that everyone achieved an acceptable standard of security practices. The beauty of Office 365 is that we are deploying Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection as a single security control for all our offices. This service addresses the latest attacks that can invade a network through email attachments or embedded links. In the end, we benefit from the Office 365 constant update model and uniformity of service, plus the added bonus that Microsoft takes care of running the service in the cloud on dedicated hardware.

Today, we use Office 365 to boost mobility and productivity to differentiate our personal service from that of our competitors. The faster we share information and collaborate on behalf of our customers, the more responsive our service. This was a significant challenge before, with so many different solutions in place around the world. Now our employees access their files anywhere from online storage, IM colleagues for quick answers to questions, or spontaneously invite their team members to a video conference. When we have the same easy connectivity across the hall, or around the world, we can make good on our promise to provide global service with local knowledge. And now that regional managers are benefitting from easy-to-use data analytics and dashboard tools to decide what’s best for their customers, we can provide more informed local service.

Mobility is especially important to enable the flexible service our customers have come to expect. Today, our employees are no longer bound to a specific device. Now that people can be more productive on their own terms, we expect efficient turnaround of information among colleagues and with our customers.

Microsoft Consulting Services was invaluable in the deployment of Office 365—it complemented our small, yet nimble IT team and helped us transform how the company works on a daily basis. Despite the variety of legacy environments in place across our offices, we achieved the migration in just nine months. And with our recent subscription to add 17,000 seats of Office 365 E5, we expect a similar rapid adoption of the latest advances in cloud telephony and Office Delve, which delivers personalized content from all your Office 365 apps. At the end of the day, providing a rewarding workplace with a state-of-the-art business productivity platform reaffirms our corporate culture of encouraging long-term employees in a supportive environment—and also gives us a competitive edge where we can work leaner and more efficiently to preserve our profit margins. That’s great business value!

 

6 Reasons Team Collaboration Should Be at the Top of Your 2017 To-Do List

 

By Anita Campbell as written on enterprise.microsoft.com

According to a recent informal poll on Twitter, 41% of business owners think that team collaboration is the top benefit of the cloud.

While it may be an informal poll, it helps demonstrate the importance other business owners place on team collaboration.

But what’s behind that belief?  Lots of good reasons.

Here are six reasons you should make team collaboration a major priority.

Drive More Efficiency

Team collaboration can help your business achieve more in less time by working from anywhere allowing you to be mobile while still having access to important tools and files. For example, say you’re at the airport on your way to an important meeting.

Without the proper tools, catching up with that extra work you had back at the office is out of the question and sitting around at the airport is just wasted time.

But what if you could access all those important files and work on them from your smartphone or tablet? They’re not sitting on your office computer. They’re in the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere.

Or say you’re filling in for a co-worker who’s out on vacation. You’re helping a few of her clients and without the cloud might not have access to their files. But with cloud technology those files are all available to anyone in your company, which makes jumping in a breeze.

Manage Employees

Hiring remote workers can help your business find the best employees because you’re not bound by geography. It also gives team members a level of flexibility many employees are looking for in a workplace today.

But if you’re not in the same office as someone on a day-to-day basis, managing and working together can be difficult.

Cloud collaboration tools can be absolutely vital with distributed teams — or even for people who work down the hall.

With team collaboration tools in the cloud like Microsoft Teams, the chat-based workspace for Office 365 and others, you can work on projects together, communicate back and forth, assign different tasks and check on your team’s progress.

Increase Profit for the Business

Team collaboration also allows you to potentially increase your business’s profits. Think about it – if you’re able to cut down on inefficiencies around your office and allow each of your team members to focus on what they do best, your business is likely to get more done. And when you’re not spending all that extra time on those tasks, you can focus on things that actually move your business forward.

For example, David Smith, Microsoft’s VP of worldwide SMB sales shared a case study about Holwick Constructors in a recent Twitter chat. According to Smith, the company was spending about 12 unnecessary hours on IT each week. But when it began utilizing the cloud for team collaboration, all that recouped time led to an estimated $2 million in additional business.

Improve Customer Satisfaction

When you’re able to increase efficiency among your employees, it can also lead to an improved experience for your customers. For example, if you have just a few employees who are in charge of customer service, they might not be able to dedicate as much time as they’d like to each customer or situation. However, if you have a team collaboration system in place like Outlook Customer Manager, it can streamline your team’s communication and spread out some of the tasks necessary in order to provide great service to every customer.

In fact, many businesses have already found that technology like cloud-based collaboration tools have helped them improve customer satisfaction. According to another tweet from Smith, 44 percent of small business owners surveyed said that cloud and mobile technology has led to increased satisfaction among their customers.

Streamline Your Communications

With a team collaboration system in place, your team members never have to wonder about how they should go about contacting you or another member of the team. In other cases, an employee with a question or idea might have to consider whether they should email you, set up an appointment or share their concerns in another way.

But if you have a system like Skype for Business in place, where everyone on your team can work together and stay in contact, it can make sharing ideas or concerns a lot easier for everyone. This can save everyone on your team time, both when they have questions or concerns and when they have to answer questions or concerns from others.

Make Employees More Satisfied

When your employees are able to work together seamlessly and do work that is well suited to their particular set of skills, it can make the whole experience a lot more enjoyable. And that can lead to increased job satisfaction throughout your team.

There are many tangible benefits to having happier employees. Those who are satisfied with their jobs are likely to be more productive and engaged at work. And they’re also likely to stick around for longer periods of time, meaning you can potentially even reduce employee turnover and save on HR costs. It’s a win-win!

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Milliman chooses Power BI Embedded for their Integrate application

As written on microsoft.com

Today, we’re excited to share how Milliman, a global market-leader in actuarial-products and services, has integrated Power BI Embedded into its solutions. Saptarshi Mukherjee, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Microsoft Power BI, met up with Paul Maher, Principal and Chief Technology Officer of the Life Technology Solutions Practice at Milliman, to welcome him and talk more about their solutions.

Saptarshi: Can you tell us more about Milliman and your market-leading cloud solution, Integrate™?

Paul:  Milliman is among the world’s largest actuarial and consulting firms, with offices in major cities around the globe. The Life Technology Solutions practice provides products and services to the actuarial community. Powered by the Microsoft Azure Cloud, Integrate is the first solution to effectively tear down silos and replace old tools and protocols with a state-of-the-art platform that improves financial and risk management, maximizes operational efficiency, and enables strategic allocation of human capital. Insurance companies can now access unlimited computing resources with Microsoft Azure to perform compute-intensive, mission-critical work.

Saptarshi: How are you using Power BI Embedded in Integrate?

Paul: Power BI Embedded enables Integrate users to quickly create and share data through interactive dashboards and reports, all in the cloud. Power BI Embedded provides a rich immersive experience that allows Integrate users to visualize and analyze data in one place, simply and intuitively. Using Power BI Embedded, Integrate delivers a scalable and cost-effective solution that meets the ever-growing BI demands of users.

The ability to embed Power BI in Integrate was key to ensuring that the end-user experience was seamless for all dynamic BI requirements.

Saptarshi: Why did you choose Power BI Embedded?

Paul: After extensive research on so-called “best of breed” offerings in the market today, it was clear that Power BI Embedded was the right choice for Integrate. In summary, some of the key capabilities that made Power BI Embedded so compelling are:

• Cloud-scale analytics service that could be embedded in our solution

• Ability to visualize and analyze data in one place, simply and intuitively

• Unlimited data visualization possibilities through open-source custom data visualizations

• Scalable and cost-effective, and able to meet ever-growing BI demands of our customers, in a pay-as-you-use pricing model

• Power BI Embedded is a cloud service, which allows the user to constantly take advantage of new features and improvements as they are rolled out

Saptarshi: Data security is obviously very important in your industry and at your company.  Can you tell us more about the security details implemented in Integrate?

Paul: All access to Integrate by our customers, end-users, and by our Milliman team, is governed through industry-standard security processes.  These include customer-managed authentication through SAML 2.0+ and ADFS 2.0+ single sign-on, and role-based access control.

With the establishment of single sign-on, all authentication and role assignment responsibilities are given to our customers, allowing them full control over assigning and configuring access for their personnel. The role-based access control allows customers to craft custom roles based on their needs, using a robust set of granular permissions.

This ensures that each user is only allowed to perform the specific role they have been assigned, and controls what data they have access to. The app-token based authentication and row-level security in Power BI Embedded allowed us to continue using our existing security methods and make it transparent for the end-users.

Saptarshi: What are your customers saying?

Paul: The reaction has been extremely positive from our customers. The addition of dynamic BI in Integrate by leveraging Power BI Embedded and Azure Cloud Services gives users access to data, and the ability to interpret data in ways that have never before been possible! Being able to do all of this in a secure and cost-effective way was a key requirement. Other capabilities include:

• The ability to secure data in a multi-tenant application using Power BI Embedded, with row-level security. Users can create one set of reports and datasets, and then use them with multiple users and customers. Each customer can view the same reports, but only see the data that they are allowed to see.

• The simple billing model, which uses report sessions, has been well received by end users.

Integrate provides business insights and real-time information to help decision makers react quickly to known and unknown risks, and to help them make decisions to protect their company.

Saptarshi: Those are all great insights on Integrate and Power BI Embedded. Thank you, Paul, for taking the time to talk with us. It’s been great to hear how Milliman has been able to fully leverage Power BI Embedded. We look forward to staying in touch with the work you’re doing.

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