Azure & Office 365

Noise Suppression in Reading Progress

Reading Progress is a Learning Accelerator that helps students practice their reading skills by recording themselves reading out loud. However, sometimes the classroom environment can be too noisy and affect the quality of the recordings. To solve this problem, Reading Progress has a new feature called Noise Suppression, which can filter out the background noise and improve the accuracy of the results. When you turn on Noise Suppression, Reading Progress uses AI to remove any extra noise when analyzing the student reading and auto-marking the accuracy scores. You can enable Noise Suppression for each student individually, depending on their needs and preferences.

Insights in Search Progress

Search Progress is another Learning Accelerator that helps educators teach information literacy skills to their students. It allows educators to create research assignments on any subject and track how students search for information online. Now, Search Progress has a new feature called Insights, which shows you how your students are doing in their search habits. You can see new clickable cards in the grading view for each Search Progress assignment, which let you compare your class’s search performance with the Compare to Class button. You can also explore other useful metrics, such as the number of searches, the time spent, the sources used, and the keywords entered. Insights help you to identify which students are performing well, which students need more guidance, and which students need more challenge. You can also use Insights to have conversations with your students about their search strategies and to adjust your future assignments according to your class’s needs.

Microsoft Reflect is a Learning Accelerator that supports students in developing essential social, emotional, and academic skills. Reflect provides a platform for creating meaningful check-ins to gain insights into students’ wellbeing and learning needs. It also includes a variety of ready-to-use activities, such as brain breaks and breathing exercises, that can help students to relax and focus. One of the newest brain breaks is mindful coloring, which can be a powerful way to foster student wellbeing and engagement. Mindful coloring features the Feelings Monster, a friendly character that expresses different emotions, and allows students to explore their own feelings through art. By using digital coloring pages in Reflect, students can have a creative and therapeutic outlet that can enhance their mood and motivation. You can try the mindful coloring activities in Reflect and see how they can benefit your students and your classroom!

Reading Progress is a Learning Accelerator that automatically records and evaluates how students are progressing in their reading skills. It helps educators to provide individualized support and feedback to each student based on their reading strengths and areas for improvement. Reading Progress can measure students’ reading speed, accuracy, and prosody across different reading assignments and levels. Now, you can access new clickable cards in the Reading Progress grading view, which allow you to see a summary of each student’s reading performance and growth. You can also compare the progress of your whole class and identify patterns and trends. The clickable cards make it easy and convenient for you to monitor and track your students’ reading fluency and comprehension.

• Adobe Sign and DocuSign, prominent electronic signature providers, have seamlessly integrated their solutions with SharePoint. This web-based platform facilitates document and data collaboration, management, and sharing across organizations.
• Within SharePoint, users can leverage Adobe Sign and DocuSign to create, share, and sign PDF documents, while also tracking the status and history of signature requests.
• Furthermore, these solutions offer robust security, compliance, and control features to safeguard data, documents, and organizations from unauthorized access and manipulation.
• Notably, Adobe Sign and DocuSign are compatible with the Approvals app in Microsoft Teams, enabling the creation and management of approval workflows within the collaboration platform.
• Selected as our SharePoint eSignature launch partners, Adobe Sign and DocuSign deliver exceptional value, performance, and user experience for customers requiring electronic document signing and sending from SharePoint.
• These solutions, designed for straightforward installation and use, seamlessly integrate with both SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2013.
• Moreover, boasting a strong track record of customer satisfaction, innovation, and reliability, Adobe Sign and DocuSign are trusted by millions of users and organizations globally.

Business Documents app in Teams is a new app that allows you to create, edit, and share business documents with your team members and external partners in Microsoft Teams. Business Documents app in Teams is powered by SharePoint Syntex, a new service that uses advanced AI and machine learning to automate content processing and transform your content into knowledge. With Business Documents app in Teams, you can:

• Choose from a diverse array of templates to craft essential business documents, including proposals, contracts, invoices, and reports. Additionally, the option to devise personalized templates for future utilization is at your disposal.
• Within Teams, leverage the Microsoft 365 suite encompassing Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Visio to modify your business documents. Engage in real-time collaboration, enabling concurrent editing, commenting, and effortless tracking of revisions and versions alongside your team members.
• Empower secure dissemination of business documents to both internal collaborators and external associates through Teams. Exercise meticulous control over access and permissions, employing encryption and Azure Information Protection to safeguard sensitive data and avert potential leaks.
• Harness SharePoint Syntex to systematically capture and standardize crucial metadata for your business documents, encompassing document type, status, ownership, and more. This empowers seamless filtering, sorting, and retrieval of documents, and facilitates the application of compliance labels and retention policies.
• Utilize SharePoint Syntex to extract invaluable insights from your business documents, including dates, monetary figures, names, and other pertinent information, enhancing the efficiency and efficacy of information retrieval.
• Extract valuable information from business documents: You can use SharePoint Syntex to extract valuable information from your business documents, such as dates, amounts, names, and more. You can also use this information to create custom views, reports, and dashboards, and to trigger workflows and actions with Power Automate.

SharePoint Premium enables you to create, manage, and share content across your organization with ease. You can access and share files securely from anywhere with 1 TB of cloud storage per user on OneDrive, coauthor and edit documents in real time with Microsoft 365 apps, and create team sites to share information, content, and files throughout your intranet with SharePoint. You can also search and discover relevant people and important content when you need it most with SharePoint, and move and manage files between OneDrive and SharePoint with ease.

SharePoint Premium also leverages the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance your content management and experiences. Some of the AI features that SharePoint Premium offers are:

• Introducing SharePoint Syntex, an innovative service harnessing cutting-edge AI and machine learning technologies to revolutionize content processing. By automating this procedure, it seamlessly converts raw content into valuable knowledge. This multifaceted tool allows users to efficiently capture and standardize metadata, extract pertinent insights, and apply compliance labels to their content. Furthermore, organizations can create bespoke models tailored to their distinct business requirements and scenarios.
• Enter SharePoint Spaces, an avant-garde capability enabling the creation of immersive 3D environments that can be experienced through web browsers or virtual reality headsets. Utilize this feature to showcase products, services, or concepts in a captivating manner, captivating audiences with 360° images, dynamic videos, and interactive 3D models. Enhance these spaces with web parts, text, and links to deliver a richer and more engaging experience.
• Embracing the SharePoint Home Sites feature empowers organizations to construct personalized and dynamic landing pages. These tailored pages effectively convey an organization’s vision, mission, and values, while providing facile access to news, events, resources, and applications. Leveraging the AI-driven Microsoft Graph, it is feasible to deliver pertinent and personalized content based on user roles, preferences, and activities, effectively enriching the user experience.

While engaging with SharePoint, I happened upon a discovery that caught my attention. Within the Change the Look menu, I stumbled upon two novel themes. Dubbed as Black and Cerulean, these newly introduced themes provide fresh avenues for customizing the visual identity of your SharePoint sites.

Black, an alluring dark theme, employs a palette of black, gray, and white to craft a suave and sophisticated aesthetic. It caters to sites aspiring to exude a professional and refined ambiance. Moreover, Black serves the purpose of mitigating ocular strain and amplifying contrast, a boon for users operating in dimly lit surroundings.

On the other hand, Cerulean boasts a luminous theme, harnessing hues of blue, green, and white to yield a serene and invigorating semblance. Ideal for sites seeking to radiate an aura of expansiveness and inventiveness. In addition, Cerulean bolsters legibility and inclusivity for users laboring in brightly lit settings.

• On your site, click Settings and then click Change the Look > Theme
• Under the “Personalize your background” setting, select the Picture option.
• Click the Browse photos button and select the background image that matches the theme you want to use. For example, if you want to use the Black theme, select the image named “Black.jpg”.
• Click the Choose picture button.
• Under the “Choose a color” setting, select the color palette that matches the theme you want to use. For example, if you want to use the Black theme, select the palette named “Black”.
• Click the Save button to apply the theme to your site.

Here is a screenshot of how the Black theme looks like:

And here is a screenshot of how the Cerulean theme looks like:

By using these themes, you can enhance your site customization options and make your sites look more attractive and engaging.

A recent enhancement in Microsoft Forms provides a seamless migration path from Google Forms to Microsoft Forms through the Microsoft 365 admin center. This augmentation is a component of the comprehensive Google Workspace migration service, empowering administrators to transfer Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides to Microsoft 365. To leverage this functionality, admins must adhere to a specific set of steps.

To use this feature, admins need to follow these steps:

• Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center with an account that has global admin or SharePoint admin permissions.
• Go to Settings > Migration > Google Workspace migration.
• Connect to Google by signing in with a Google account that has read access to the Google Forms that need to be migrated.
• Add the Microsoft 365 migration app to the Google Workspace account custom apps.
• Select the users whose Google Forms need to be migrated and add them to the migration list.
• Review the destination paths for each user and modify them if needed. The destination paths are automatically mapped to match the source paths in Google Drive.
• Map the identities of the users and groups in Google Drive to their corresponding accounts in Microsoft 365. This will help migrate the permissions and sharing settings of the Google Forms.
• Start the migration and monitor the progress. The migration status will be shown in the admin center and in the Migration Manager app in SharePoint.

Once the migration is completed, users can access their migrated Google Forms in Microsoft Forms. They can also view and edit their forms in OneDrive or SharePoint, where they are stored as Excel files. Users can also share their forms with others, collect responses, and analyze the results using Microsoft Forms’ built-in features.

The migration feature supports most of the question types, settings, and features of Google Forms, such as multiple choice, short answer, linear scale, date, time, file upload, required questions, shuffle options, response validation, confirmation message, and more. However, some features are not supported or have some limitations, such as:

• Images and videos embedded in Google Forms are not migrated. Users need to manually add them to their Microsoft Forms after migration.
• Sections and page breaks in Google Forms are not migrated. Users need to manually add them to their Microsoft Forms after migration.
• Logic branching and conditional questions in Google Forms are not migrated. Users need to manually add them to their Microsoft Forms after migration.
• Quizzes and scoring settings in Google Forms are not migrated. Users need to manually enable them in their Microsoft Forms after migration.
• Response data and summary reports in Google Forms are not migrated. Users need to collect new responses and generate new reports in Microsoft Forms after migration.

By using this feature, users can easily switch from Google Forms to Microsoft Forms without losing their existing forms or data. They can also enjoy the benefits of Microsoft Forms’ integration with other Microsoft 365 apps and services, such as Teams, Outlook, PowerPoint, Stream, Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Automate, and more.

Today, I got a very unique requirement to push a group policy for Google Chrome which I did long time back. So 1st I searched for link to download the Google Chrome group policies. It took me sometime to hunt it so I have shared direct links below:

https://chromeenterprise.google/intl/en_ca/browser/download/thank-you/?platform=ADMADMX&channel=stable&usagestats=0#

https://chromeenterprise.google/browser/download/?sjid=6066941226709070174-NA#download

Once download the zip file, we have extracted the folder, and we see 3 folders.

Now, we need to open the Group Policy editor window, Expand Computer configuration > Administrative Templates > Add/Remove Templates

Now select Add > browse to Windows > Adm > En-US > Select Chrome.adm file and select Open

You will see the Name, Size and date of the policy, Click Close

Now when we expand Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Classic Administrative Templates(ADM) > Google > Google Chrome

Here we can see all the Google Chrome policies

Microsoft Purview, a family of data governance, risk, and compliance solutions, is introducing new features to enhance its visibility and control over cloud security activity events for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint. These events are generated by the Purview Audit service, which monitors and records user and system actions across various Microsoft 365 workloads.

Previously, Purview Audit offered two types of licenses: Audit Standard and Audit Premium. Audit Standard provided basic auditing capabilities for common events, while Audit Premium offered advanced auditing features for more granular and sensitive events. However, some customers requested access to certain events that were only available for Audit Premium users, even though they did not need the full functionality of the premium license.

To address this feedback, Purview Audit is expanding its event coverage for Audit Standard users by adding four new events that were previously exclusive to Audit Premium users. These events are related to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint activities, and they are:

• MailItemsAccessed: This event occurs when a user or a delegate accesses one or more mail items in a mailbox. This event can help detect unauthorized or suspicious access to email messages.
• Send: This event occurs when a user sends an email message from their mailbox or on behalf of another user. This event can help track the source and destination of email communications.
• SearchQueryInitiatedExchange: This event occurs when a user performs a search query in Exchange Online. This event can help monitor the search activities and keywords used by users.
• SearchQueryInitiatedSharepoint: This event occurs when a user performs a search query in SharePoint Online.

These events will now be available for all Audit Standard users, regardless of their license type.

This implies that clients with only an Audit Standard license can attend these events without needing to upgrade to an Audit Premium license.
Nevertheless, clients holding an Audit Premium license will still receive added advantages over Audit Standard users.
One of these perks is the capability to access a greater number of metadata fields for specific events.
For instance, for the MailItemsAccessed event, Audit Premium users will have visibility into the SensitivityLabel field, indicating the sensitivity level of the accessed mail item.
This feature aids in identifying and safeguarding sensitive or confidential information in email messages.
Another benefit includes access to additional events not accessible to Audit Standard users.
For instance, Audit Premium users can monitor events connected to eDiscovery activities, such as eDiscoveryCaseCreated, eDiscoveryCaseUpdated, eDiscoveryHoldApplied, and eDiscoverySearchStarted.
These events assist in tracking and auditing the legal discovery procedures and activities carried out by users.
By broadening its event coverage for Audit Standard users, Purview Audit seeks to offer more flexibility and value to its clients seeking increased visibility and control over their cloud security activity events for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint.

By expanding its event coverage for Audit Standard users, Purview Audit aims to provide more flexibility and value for its customers who want to gain more visibility and control over their cloud security activity events for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint. Customers can choose the license type that best suits their needs and budget, while still enjoying the benefits of Purview Audit’s comprehensive and integrated auditing capabilities.

Today I encountered an error message which says below error.

• The resource operation completed with terminal provisioning state ‘Failed’.

• Details : There is an active shared access signature outstanding for disk Veeam DataDisk Call EndGets before in the disk. Leam more here: akams/evokeaccessapi Target VM: /subscriptionresourceGroupproviders/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachinesredoopt providers/Microsoft.Compute/disks/VeeamVM_DataDisk0″. Learn moreabout common virtual machine.error.codes,

After some research I found it because I was trying to download the disk of this VM and I never revoked the access. Ran below command and the VM started normally.
Revoke-AzDiskAccess -ResourceGroupName ‘ResourceGroup01’ -DiskName ‘Disk01’

If you are using a Azure CLI prompt you need to use below command

az disk revoke-access –name MyManagedDisk –resource-group MyResourceGroup