Month: April 2024

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Introducing the new Surface IT Toolkit

The new Surface IT Toolkit which was officially released on April 25th 2024, promises to be a significant tool to help IT managing and optimise their coporate fleet of Surface devices.

We are excited to announce the Surface IT Toolkit, a modern desktop application that compiles essential commercial tools and streamlines the Surface device management experience for IT admins – all in a single application.

Microsoft.

Replacing an older mixture of admin tools, the refresh and centralising of these essential tools into a one application should simplify the deployment and management process, addressing the common challenge of using disparate tools across various locations and versions. This should greatly enhance efficiency and ease of use for IT admins.

What is in the Surface IT Toolkit?

The Surface Tool kit contains a number of new and updated apps. These are:

  • Data Eraser – Which is a NIST [Special Publication 800-88 Revision 1 NVM Express] compliant data erasure tool that also includes the ability to create certificates of sanitization for compliance and auditing. This is beneficial when repurposing, recycling, or retiring a device to guarantee that no sensitive data is left on it.
  • UEFI Configurator – enables IT to implement Surface Enterprise Management Mode (SEMM) UEFI configurations on Surface devices and peripherals such as Surface docks and other accessories. The UEFI configurator allows IT to efficiently and consistently manage and disable components at the firmware level. This enhances security and compliance by safeguarding against unauthorized modifications to device settings. For example it could be used to prevent the camera being used to comply with privacy in schools, or block USB ports being used to connect to external disks for data compliance.
  • Recovery Tool – This feature enables a full device reset, reverting it to its factory state for troubleshooting and re-building purposes. It also manages previously downloaded factory images for reuse, helping to resolve common issues and restore the device’s original performance. The latest update provides a new guided process and no longer requires the serial number to be entered. It also includes ability to build from new or build from an existing image.
  • Tool Library – The updated Tool Library houses the most recent versions of supplementary tools and installers for deployment to end users, offering IT descriptions of their functions and links to the most up-to-date documentation. This tools here include the Surface Asset Tag Tool, Surface Diagnostic Toolkit for Business, Surface Brightness Control Tool, among others.

Video: Install and using the Surface IT Toolkit

Here’s little video that shows the relevant webpages, installing the toolkit and first run experience and tools available.

Usng the Surface Tool Kit.

For more information from Microsoft on this – use the following link

How do I get the Surface IT Toolkit?

You can grab the IT Toolkit from Microsoft > here <.

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Cisco Hyper Shield: Data Centre security redefined.

Cisco has introduced a new product called Hypershield, which they claim is one of the most significant security products in Cisco’s history. It is expected to be generally available starting from July 2024.

What is Hyper Shield?

Hypershield is a cloud-native, AI-powered system designed to enhance the security of AI-scale data centers. Unlike traditional security products, hyper shield is integrated directly into the network’s fabric, offering a revolutionary approach to protecting digital infrastructure services in data centres, protecting applications, devices, and data across public and private data centers, clouds, and physical locations.

This is the Most Consequential security  announcement In Cisco’s 40-Year History

Cisco.

The holistic system promises to bring the security advantages of a hyperscale model to enterprises, allowing security to be embedded in every software component of every application running on the network, on every server, and in both public and private cloud deployments.

How Hyper Shield is different.

Hypershield is different to traditional security “bolt ons” because it not just a new security product or the next version of something that already exists. What makes this different and unique, is that Hyper Shield represents a brand-new security architecture model built from the ground. It uses an open-source technology called eBPF that hyperscalers use to automate patching and other time-consuming jobs. It has the ability to transform every network port into a high-performance security enforcement point and works by blocks application exploits in minutes while preventing  lateral movement of attacks.

Innovation from within

I think Hypershield is exciting because it represents a significant shift in how security is approached within the data centre fabric.

“Why we think this is the most consequential is we’re taking what used to be a firewall, an appliance, and we’re like melting into the network. It’s not a separate thing that you add on. It’s like magic. It writes its own rules, it tests its own rules, it qualifies its own rules, deploys its own rules, and then overnight it upgrades itself”

Tom Gillis | VP Security | Cisco

It is built with technology originally developed for hyperscale public clouds Cisco are making this technology available for enterprise IT teams of all sizes regardless of how big their data centre foot print is. It works by enabling security enforcement to be placed everywhere it needs to be, at the application and data layer, which is a major shift and change in how traditional data centre security works. Cisco say that it’s expected to have a significant impact on how businesses protect their digital assets.

With this innovation … we have actually been able to deliver something that’s unlike anything we’ve done in the last 40 years at Cisco. And I will say that we’re just getting started.

Jeetu Patel | Cisco’s EVP

Rather than relying on traditional network and application level firewalls in the datacentre, Hypershield works by essentially providing security boundaries around every application and service. It naturally uses artificial intelligence to learn and adapt, so it gets better at detecting and understand normal activity from attack attempts. 

I look forward to learning more about this.

Read more from Cisco

Cisco Hypershield: Security reimagined.
Cisco Reimagines Security for Data Centers & Clouds in Era of AI.

CRN Report:

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Prompt-a-long with Copilot in Word

Goal: Perfecting Prompting in Word

The goal of this blog post is to provide some field experience tips and coaching to help you get the best out of using Copilot in Word. For this you need to have either a Copilot Pro license or a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license and be signed into Word (or Word Online).

In this example, our Goal is to take a Marketing Analysis document we have been sent, and to draw out key information we can use in a “sales meeting” that we have coming up. The document contains lots of information relevant to different parts of the business.

I have provided a link to the document I used (courtesty of Microsoft) so you can either follow along or reference the videos included in this post. Welcome your comments – so please let me know how you get on.

Scenario: Using Copilot to pull key info from a Marketing Report

Instructions:

To work on this example with me, speak to your marketing team and obtain a Market Analysis Report for other similar document. For this example, I am using a public sample document Microsoft have shared called “Mystic Spice Premium Chai Tea.docx” which you can access here. The password for the link is “Copilot”. Once you have done that, save the file to your OneDrive so you can use it to test out and experiment with these prompts.

  1. Open the document you obtained (or use my link above) in Word and then
  2. Open the Copilot pane by selecting the Copilot icon in the top right of the “ribbon”
  3. Enter the prompts below and follow along.

The Starting Prompt

Enter the Starting prompt “Summarise this Word Document” or click the suggested prompt to do the same thing…

In this simple prompt, we have started with what I call the “Alexa Prompt” – we are asking a simple question with a basic goal “to summarise the Word document”.

Using a standard/simple Copilot prompt to Summarise a Doc in Word.

This has done we asked but since we gave no context or information about what we wanted and why we needed it, Copilot has just read throught the document a pilled out key bits of information from each section.

The “better” prompt

To improve on this, we are going to repeat the prompt, but this time, we will add some more context to help Copilot understand the purpose of the summary and tailor the response for us accordingly.

Write a new prompt: “Summarise this document and create a brief overview of the main points to discuss with my team during the tomorrow’s Sales meeting“.

Here we are giving Copilot some more context specific about what information we want. It now knows why we need the information (for a sales meeting) and it knows to keep the ouput brief.

Using a more specific Copilot prompt to Summarise a Doc in Word.

If you run the prompt yourself (or check the video above) you will see that this time Copilot has pulled out specific around Market Trends and Demand inluding stats around CAGR. It has told us about the key competitiors, distribution and sales channels and also Sales Strategy, Outcomes and the Challenges in selling.

The Super Prompt

For the final prompt (I call it the “super prompt”), we are going to be even more specific with the ask to get just the information we need.

Use this prompt “Summarise this word document but focus on the Competitive Analysis section only. Provide a brief overview of the main points to discuss with my team during the tomorrow’s Sales meeting. Please keep the summary to 5 key points and use simple language.”

If you compare the output of this prompt to the previous ones, you will see that since we have been specific about where we want Copilot to focus, the response we get is specific to what we have asked. It’s still a summary, but it is focussed on the just the Competitor Analysis section and we have kept the response concise and in simple language. It knows to keep this simple and make it relevant to sales…

Follow along – or check out the video below where I run the prompt.

Our “Crafted” Super-Prompt in Copilot in Word

So there you go – we have started with a simple prompt and I have hopefully shown you that by thinking about what and why we want the information and also the audience the response is indended for, Copilot can produce information just the way we need it.

Summary and Lesson

So, I am pretty happy with that result. To recap – here is what we did to perfect our prompt…

  1. We started with our Goal (which was to summarise the document)
  2. Added some Context (that we want the information for a sales meeting)
  3. Specified the Source of the information (we asked to focus on competitive analysis), and
  4. Set clear Expectations, (we asked for five key points using simple language). 
Our Final Prompt: 

"Summarise this word document but focus on the Competitive Analysis section only. Provide a brief overview of the main points to discuss with my team during the tomorrow's Sales meeting. Please keep the summary to 5 key points and use simple language".

This prompt has all the details it needs to give us the results we need. It has a Goal, Context, Source, and Expectations.

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Cisco and Splunk – For Security and Observability.

With the $28B aquisition now complete between Cisco and Splunk, both vendors will soon be in heavy marketing mode as they position their new combined offerings (under Cisco) to “unify the full power of network and endpoint data with leading Security and Observability solutions, all underpinned by our highly scalable, AI-powered data platform“.

The combination of Cisco and Splunk will provide truly comprehensive visibility and insights across an organization’s entire digital footprint, delivering an unprecedented level of resilience through the most extensive and powerful security and observability product portfolio on the market.

Gary Steele| VP Splunk.

So what does that mean?

Unification and Choice

According to the new Splunk website and publicly facing collateral, the combining of forces is destined to offer the following value and connected experiences to their combined customer base.

  • Power the SOC of the Future, by
    • improving the efficacy, efficiency, and economics of defending organisations and service providers against modern security threats, offering what they claim will be the  “most comprehensive security solutions for threat prevention, detection, investigation and response.”
    • Continuing to deliver Splunk’s existing  security and monitoring platforms, while adding Splunk technology to Cisco’s existing portfolio with enhanced network, endpoint and cloud data for” unparalleled insights and faster remediation“.
    • Enhancing Cisco’s security offerings across the board to help organisations secure users, protect infrastructure, and improve prevention, detection and remediation with Cisco’s User Protection, Breach Protection, and Cloud Protection suites which is fed from Cisco’s Talos data intelligence platform.
  • Enrich Observability across all and any environment by:
    • Offering a comprehensive full-stack observability solution, enhancing customers’ ability to deliver seamless digital experiences and prevent downtime across any environment, combining and joining Cisco Thousand Eyes and App Dymanics with Splunk’s portfolio of products.
    • Continue to offer choice to customers, by offering unified solutions as well as the individual Cisco and Splunk whilst providing unified management and insights.
    • Create a world leading observability platform through the Integration of the best of Cisco and Splunk technology leading to an holistic ability ability to detect and remediate incidents, empowering IT Teams to focus on enablement, security and digital transformation rather than troubleshooting performance and issues.

What about AI?

Yes… Cisco and Splunk also talk alot about AI empowerment and execution. After all, AI workloads are intense, drive traffic into different places and have a profound impact on how people use and access data and applications.

Aimed more at organisations who build and operate on their own data, rather than consume SaaS, the fuel of AI and its ability to provide information and serve requests is reliant on fast and secure access to models trained on huge volumes of the data.

Cisco beleive that their combined forces will bring an unmatched breadth of data through allowing organisations to build, scale and tune, highly scalable data platforms while ensuring performace and security at scale.

The competition?

The race to empower and secure both traditional and AI powered workloads continues up pace. Cisco have a great history of building arguably the best networking technologies in the world, have one of best SaaS performance monitoring platforms and now with the added arsenal of products from Splunk, puts them in a great position to win over customers, partners and MSPs with a unified offering.

Cisco have struggled to win hearts and minds with security for years but this combining of forces gives them an ACE card to play. Whether they will get this right (from a hearts and minds, price and integration) is yet to be seen, but Cisco have a great track record of integrating technologies from vendors their aquire.

More information

More information around the combined entity of Cisco and Splunk are coming in fast and late last week, Cisco ran a customer and partner briefing which is now available on demand here.

Continue reading “Cisco and Splunk – For Security and Observability.”
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Can you restrict what Copilot can search across for in SharePoint?

Starting later this month (April 2024) , Microsoft will rollout an configuration setting called Restricted SharePoint Search (RSS) that will allow Global/Tenant and SharePoint Admins to disable organisation-wide search and instead select a set of curated/specific  SharePoint sites.

“YES YOU CAN”

This feature will work by allowing admins disable organisation-wide search, and instead to enable/restrict both specific sites impacting the scope of what Enterprise Search and Copilot can seek out and index when using search or Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365.

With this configuration in place, only these specific libraries along with the users’ OneDrive files and content, will be accessible in search and within the Copilot experiences.

This means that whether your organisation has Enterprise Search or Restricted SharePoint Search enabled, users in your organisation will still be able to interact with their OneDrive information in Copilot but there will be more control over excluding old/legacy or restricted SharePoint areas.

Why do we need to Restrict Search?

Is this not against the pricipals of Copilot and Microsoft Search?

Well.. Kinda. Restricted SharePoint Search has been provided to give organisations time to review and audit their data and SharePoint site permissions. Microsoft say that…

“It is designed to help you maintain momentum with your Copilot deployment while you implement robust data security solutions from Microsoft Purview and manage content lifecycle with SharePoint Advanced Management. Combined, these two solutions offer a complete solution for data discovery, protection, and governance. “

Restricted SharePoint Search capability

Once Enterprise Search is disabled, Admins are the able be to tune which content will be indexed for search from an allowed list of up to 100 SharePoint sites. This will honor sites’ existing permissions.

Once configured, content from these areas will be searchable and accessible by Copilot as well as…

  • Content stored in the the curated list of SharePoint sites as specific by the admin.
  • Other frequently accessed SharePoint sites that the user accesses.
  • Content from users OneDrive, Teams chat, email, calendars.
  • Files directly shared with the user.

Copilot users in your organisation will see this message in their Copilot experiences.


“Your organization’s admin has restricted Copilot from accessing certain SharePoint sites. This limits the content Copilot can search and reference when responding to your prompts“

For more information and rollout timeline check out Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID: MC726119

Does this mean Copilot can’t access files outside of the search scope?

No… Users can still directly reference a file in Copilot and access the file via manual search or navigation. This is because, restrictive search does not alter the permissions for user access, it just instead, is designed to help minimise the risk of overexposure of overshared content by reducing what they can discover in search and Copilot.

With Restricted Search configured, search results and Copilot search results will be limited but users will still able to navigate (as before) or directly link to a file to open or to “use Copilot” with.

Configuring Restricted Search

Restricted SharePoint Search is off by default.

Whilst this will be coming to the SharePoint admin pages soon… It will, at release be configurable via Power Shell only and will of course require admin privileges.

There is also an ‘allow’ limit of just 100 sites initially though I hear this will soon be expanded following early feedback from customer… Phew!

More information can be found here.

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Microsoft to open new AI Hub in London

Microsoft has announced plans for a new artificial intelligence (AI) hub in London, which will be focused on leading edge product development and research. This will be led Microsoft AI Lead Mustafa Suleyman (confounder of DeepMind) who Microsoft hired last month.

This annoucement comes less than a month since Microsoft unveiled a new consumer AI division.

There is an enormous pool of AI talent and expertise in the UK, and Microsoft AI plans to make a significant, long-term investment in the region. (London).

Mustafa Suleyman

This is great for the UK and for London and will help both Microsoft and the UK become an AI  and technology superpower leveraging the hub of tech talent, access to leading and world class universities and research centres with ability to attract the best talent for the next generation of development of AI.

Microsofts AI Future in the UK

This announcement builds on Microsoft’s recent commitment to invest 2.5 Billion into data centre infrastructure and improving AI skills across the UK.

Microsoft’s AI investment in the UK includes building a major new data centre in West London and installing 20,000 high-powered processors in the UK by 2026.

Microsoft’s new UK hub will be run by Jordan Hoffmann,  (another former employee from DeepMind) and will collaborate closely with OpenAI which powers Microsoft’s AI driven Copilot System framework.

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Microsoft Teams to be “split” from new Office 365 subscriptions.

Microsoft is separating Teams from Office 365 globally after agreeing to split this in EMEA to after EU competition regulators started to investigate Microsoft’s market share growth (since teams was bundled with Office 365), following a complaint from one of their rivals – Slack in 2020.

Microsoft said that the unified move to make the change global will “ensure clarity for customers“.

This will impact all new customers and give existing customers the option to split Teams or keep it in their subscription should they wish!

When does this change take effect?

This change came into affect (1st April) and affects how new customers buy Microsoft 365/Office 365 and Teams moving forwards for net new customers. In short, this means that net new M365 or O365 subscriptions will no longer include Teams and this application will need to be added on separately. The new skus are being created as we speak and will be available shortly.

Note: I have been told that while this was announced from 1st April, the hard stop will be actually be 30th June which is end of Microsoft FY24 Fiscal.

Why are Microsoft making this change?

Microsoft have issued a full brief on this which you can access here, but in short, they have said the following:

"Last year Microsoft updated the way Microsoft 365, Office 365, and Teams were licensed in the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland in response to concerns raised with the European Commission. Now we're announcing our plan to extend that approach worldwide as globally consistent licensing reduces customer confusion and streamlines decision making.
 
...Microsoft is introducing a new lineup of commercial Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites that don't include Teams in regions outside the EEA and Switzerland, and a new standalone Teams offering for Enterprise customers in those regions.
 
We're also ending the sale of net-new subscriptions to existing Microsoft 365 E3/E5 and Office 365 E1/E3/E5 Enterprise SKUs with Teams across all channels: volume licensing (VL), Cloud Solution Provider (CSP), and Web Direct. All new Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Enterprise customers in regions outside the EEA and Switzerland will need to choose from new offers for that region. Existing customers in these regions who wish to continue using suites to which they have already subscribed can do so (including renewal, upsell, and license adds.

What about existing customers?

Microsoft have said they are stopping the new sale of subscriptions to existing Microsoft 365 E3/E5 and Office 365 E1/E3/E5 Enterprise SKUs with Teams across all channels: volume licensing (VL), Cloud Solution Provider (CSP), and Web Direct.

This means that all new Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Enterprise customers in regions outside the EEA and Switzerland will need to choose from new offers for that region.

Existing customers in these regions who wish to continue using suites to which they have already subscribed can do so (including renewal, upsell, and license adds).

How will prices be affected?

Microsoft will be publishing updated SKUs and pricing in the coming few days which you’ll be able to get from you Microsoft licensing partner.

There will also be a net price increase in pricing as a result for new customers (I see this as a stealth tax) due to the separation, but for existing customers (renewing) there is no price change.

Pricing example..

  • Microsoft 365 E3 (with Teams): £33.10 RRP
  • Microsoft 365 E3 + Teams Enterprise: £31.10 + 4.30 = £35.30

So here you can see an increase of £2.20pupm, which is circa £26k (RRP) for a 1,000 seat organisation.

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