Category: Business

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Who’s the Gartner Leaders in Analytics and BI?

It appears there’s nothing stopping Microsoft run at being the clear leaders across its cloud and data services.

Just announced, and for the 13th consecutive year, #Microsoft has been positioned as leader in the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms.

For the 2nd year running Microsoft is positioned furthest to the right for completeness of vision and furthest up in the ability to execute within the leaders’ Quadrant. Beating Salesforce, IBM Tableau, Oracle and SAP to the top right spot buy more than just a bit! #PowerBI #microsoft365

Gartner Quadrant for Analytics and BI

Microsoft and Gartner put this leading position down to the following:

Many of the strengths of Power BI come directly from our customer feedback such as:

  • Power BI insights and Office 365 productivity. Power BI looks and feels exactly like the rest of the familiar Office application making every user instantly productive.
  • Find answers fast with industry-leading AI. Power BI incorporates many of the latest advances in Microsoft AI to help non-data scientists prepare data, build machine learning models, and find insights quickly from both structured and unstructured data, including text and images.
  • Meet the most demanding enterprise needs. Power BI works together with Azure Synapse Analytics to enable fast, interactive analysis across petabytes of data.
  • Comprehensive data protection. Power BI is the only BI product that claims to be able to secures customer data through Microsoft Information Protection and Microsoft Cloud App Security, even when data is exported out of Power BI.
  • Turning insights into action. Users can go straight from data to insights and insights to action with the Microsoft Power Platform, combining Power BI with Power Apps and Power Automate to easily build business applications.
PowerBI dashboard

Click here to get the full Gartner Report

Do you use PowerBI?

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What Microsoft announced at the 2020 RSA Conference.

The annual RSA Conference brings together 50,000 cybersecurity professionals to connect with peers from around the world to uncover new and better ways to keep the digital world safe. Most of the leading Security vendors are there as you expect. As is becoming the annual norm, Microsoft used this opportunity to being more exciting announcements around its ever expanding offerings and capabilities in security.

Inside Risk Management

Insider Risk Management which has been in preview for a couple of months is now widely available.

The world we work in today with Internet everywhere, multiple devices being carried by employees and a work from anywhere culture means corporate data is likely to be stored or accessed on laptops, tablets phones, and even watches. Where blocking access is not an option, IT need ways to identify, take action on, and prevent insider risks to keep their busienss data safe.

New Insider Risk Management in Microsoft365

Insider Risk Management (part of Microsoft 365) helps tackle this challenge by gathering signals from across Microsoft 365 and other third-party systems, and then leverages the Intelligent Security Graph Insider Risk and machine learning to identify anomalies in user behavior and flag high-risk activities – enabling businesses to more effectively protect and govern their data.

Communication Compliance

Communication Compliance, which extends the existing complaince services within Microsoft 365 can be tuned to leverage machine learning to quickly identify and take action on code of conduct policy violations within all company communications channels. This has also just been generally released.

Microsoft Threat Protection

Over the past year Microsoft has been busy consolidating and harmonising all the various theat protection services and standardising the signalling, risk profile and events. In a world where multiple vendor solutions are no longer the recommended approach to provide end to end security, Microsoft Threat Protection helps simply whilst strengthening protection for the enterprise.


Traditionally, Security and IT have an endless list of alerts coming in from multiple monitoring systems and across their network, cloud, data centre and devices , making it almost impossible to link those at speed, recognise an attack, prioritise, and act quickly on the most critical threats or risks.

The unification of Microsoft’s Threat Protection services means that security/IT teams can now get a correlated, incident-level view of threats rather than having to manage and investigate multiple individual alerts from multiple systems.

The key capabilities in Microsoft Threat Protection include:

  • Investigating threats, automatically (or semi automatically) responding to them, and restoring affected assets to a secured state automatically, while simplifying hunting across the landscape for other signs of attack.
  • Self-healing compromised user identities, endpoints, and mailboxes, allowing security and IT teams to spend more time focussing on projects and policies by using AI and ML to automate remediation.
  • Sharing critical threat insights in real time to help stop the progression of an attack.
  • Azure Sentinel enhancements which are covered below.

Updates to Azure Sentinal

Microsoft Azure Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) solution which allows business of any size to keep pace with the exponential growth in security data, improve security outcomes, and reduce hardware and operational costs.

New enhancements have been announced this week at RSA in San Francisco designed to deliver instant value and increased efficiency for security operations teams. These include

  • New community rewards (bounty program) for contributions to develop dashboards, orchestration, playbooks etc
  • New developer guides and APIs along with GitHub code and data collections
  • Ability to import AWS CloudTrail logs at no cost until June 2020
  • New security campaign views which gives security teams an all-encompassing view of email attack campaigns targeted at their organisation
  • New connectors for easier data collection from a wider range of security appliances and services

Security Campaign Views

Campaign views and compromise detection and response has also been made generally available following a short preview.

This feature gives security teams an all-encompassing view of email attack campaigns targeted at their organisation, along with making it easy to spot vulnerable users or configuration issues that enabled the attack or breach to succeed in the first place.

Early detection and response to compromised users is critical to ensuring that attacks are detected and actioned/remiated as early as possible so that the impact of a breach is minimised.

New Security Awareness Training

Through a partnership with Terranova, a market leader in computer-based training, Microsoft will be including Terranova’s entire phishing-related training set for free for organisations that use or are licensed for Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection Plan 2 (including in Microsoft 365 E5).

This security awareness training, coupled with Microsoft security solutions and risk analytics, will enable and extend Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection to provide a complete solution, encompassing customised user learning paths that enable IT and your compliance teams to create governance around organisational risk and maintain a stronger security posture.

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Microsoft FY20Q2 results exceed Wall Street estimates.

Highlight; Revenues of $36.9 billion for the quarter, with profit at $11.6 billion, up 38% year-over-year.

FY20 Q2 results summary

As always theres lots to read into these and some of the number lows and highs are always due to time of year and aligned with commercial, public sector and consumer buying cycles. Here are the main highlights as I’ve digested them.

  • Commercial cloud business (Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics) and other cloud services reached $12.5 billion in Q2, up 39% year over year.
  • Azure revenue itself grew 62%, but Microsoft doesn’t report revenue figures specific to Azure.
  • “Productivity and Business Processes” which includes Office products for businesses and customers, LinkedIn revenue and Dynamics products and cloud services, increased 17% to $11.8 billion with Dynamics 365 up 43%
  • 9.5% increase in the number of Office 365 consumer subscribers, which is now at 35.6 million customers
  • Enterprise Mobility and Security was up to 120 million seats, a 36% increase year-over-year.
  • “More Personal Computing,” including Windows, search, Xbox and Surface, was $13.2 billion, up 2% from this time last year with Xbox dragging these numbers down 11% percent compared to the same quarter last year.

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Need a New Year Resolution? How about improving your Productivity Score?

Happy new year everyone…

Like many, we are thinking about what things to give up, things to start doing and things we want to do better in 2020. When it comes to our work and the things we do how about thinking about how we can work more efficiently when we return to work this week or next…

You see, people are seen to be as collaborating if one person edits and shares a document (or presentation, spreadsheet, onenote etc), and then at least one other person accesses it or collaborates on the same version of that document.

So what – why are you telling me this?

The more people collaborate, the more they’ll invest in each other’s ideas, which in turn leads to efficient authoring, easier interaction, faster response and more agile decision making. It can also be more secure since access to these documents is controlled, the files don’t end up being shared all over the place (un trackable) via email and everyone is “on the same page”.

Since we are all part of multiple teams within our roles at work, taking these simple steps will help you to save time ever day while increasing your content collaboration, improving security and compliance within the organisation and making it more efficient and effective to work on or update files together rather than emailing multiple versions backwards and forward via email like we did in the 90s (and many still do today).

Here’s some tips to get you more productive

1. Encourage yourself and others to collaborate better

It’s a proven fact that we work more effectively when we collaborate better. Many of is though, still save our files locally or use VPNs (yes they are still a thing apparently for remote access) and then share files (which we expect people to comment and collaborate on via email attachments).

Let’s be honest, no one likes trying to merge all the changes from the many reply to all emails you get back with multiple versions of the same file (especially when everyone has different ideas or responds to an out of date version).

Improve your collaboration posture, your security ying and yang and be more productive… Heres a short little video to introduce (ok hopefully remind you) of the benefits of saving and sharing files in the cloud, co-authoring in real time, and collaborating with comments and @ mentions.

2. Learn about and adopt the benefits of cloud storage

Hopefully your not still storing stuff on your un protected (not backed up) desktop or using old school file shares.

Using OneDrive (thereby storing files in the cloud) means they’re always backed up, available from other devices, and set up for real-time collaboration and secure file sharing. Watch this quick video to understand the benefits using OneDrive has for you.

3. Replace those email attachments with “shared links”

Rather than sending files via attachments, it far more effective to share a link to your file (assuming you’ve saved it in OneDrive, Teams or SharePoint) within your email message. This way everyone (you decide) can view and update (if you give them permission) the file and see changes and collaborate in real time. This is also far more secure as you prevent recipients downloading or editing the file plus you can always revoke permissions if you wish.

For a quick video on how to do watch this short video clip..

You mentioned the word score? How is productivity measured?

That’s right. It’s now (well it’s in Public Preview right now) to measure how productive your organisation is through a new service within Office 365 called “Productivity Score”.

Productivity Score provides insights that help transform how work gets done.  It aims to provide your organisation visibility into how your organisation works, insights that identify where you can enable improved experiences so people can reach their goals, and actions to update skills and systems so everyone can do their best work. 

Productivity Score Summary

There are two categories that your (organisation) score is built from, the employee experience and the technology experience and both include a benchmark that helps you compare how you are doing compared to organisation similar to yours (based on size, geography and sector). 

The employee experience shows how Microsoft 365 is helping to create a productive and engaged workforce by quantifying how people collaborate on content, work from anywhere, understanding communication styles, and developing a meeting culture.

The technology experience helps you ensure the technology isn’t getting in the way by assisting you optimise your device experiences such as proactively remediating common helpdesk issues and improving PC startup times, and your network to ensure your apps work well.

Available today (registration/sign up request required until it releases formally in early 2020) in the Office 365 Admin Centre.

For more information from Microsoft on this as it develops read the following blog.

That’s it from me. Welcome any feedback and comments and in the mean time Happy Xmas and all the best for 2020!

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How Microsoft is further advancing its Unified Threat Protection

Microsoft Threat Protection now unifies your incident response process by integrating key capabilities across Microsoft Defender ATP, Office 365 ATP, Microsoft Cloud App Security, and Azure ATP which is powered by the #IntelligentSecurityGraph processing and responding to over 6.5 Trillion threat signals per day!

Learn more about the Intelligent Security Graph

This is just the latest in an ongoing list of updates and features being rolled out across Microsoft 365 and Azure to protect organisations on premises and cloud environment and is a result of their $1billion investment in security each year.

If you have Microsoft 365 E5 you can take a Sneak peak at the new public preview (you need to be an admin or sec admin of course)!

This unified experience now adds powerful new features that can be accessed from the Microsoft 365 security Centre #intelligentsecurity #microsoft365

Microsoft is now top right in the Gartner Magic Quadrant in 6 areas including Cloud App Security Broker, Unified end point management, information protection, data archiving and Endpoint threat protection. 

You can try it out today.. https://security.microsoft.com/hunting

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<40p a day gets you Microsoft Teams Voice

Microsoft 365 Business Voice

….is a cloud-based phone system built and priced specifically for small and medium businesses which was announced at Ignite earlier this month and is available now.

Microsoft Business Voice enables users to make, receive, and transfer calls to and from landlines and mobile phones on the public switched telephone network (PSTN) directly into Microsoft Teams and/or on Teams certified desk phones, meeting room technology of course corporate or user owned smartphones (which can be protected and data governed by Microsoft Intune and Conditional Access naturally).

Microsoft Cloud Voice extends the functionality of Microsoft Teams bringing together all your calling, chat, and meetings in a single app across any platform, browser or mobile device removing the need for separate/third party web and audio conferencing services and IP Phone/PBX. 

This is the same service (complete with SLAs) that Microsoft has provided with Teams (and Skype for Business Online before that) in Office 365 Enterprise, but much more attractively priced for organisations up to three hundred users.  (these plans can also be mixed between plans).

This new plan/add-on provides:-

  • Unified calling & voicemail with chat and meetings in Microsoft Teams
  • 1,200 minutes per use and ability to migrate existing numbers
  • Global dial-in conferencing capabilities for up to 250 participants
  • Extend voice services into meeting rooms with Teams Room Systems
  • Full IVR and auto-attendant services
  • Support Teams desk phones or break free with soft-client and mobile

What does it cost?
Licensing for Microsoft 365 Business Voice Is limited to a maximum of 300 users and Is add-on service and Is available for any customers who have Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 E3, A3 and Microsoft 365 Business, and Microsoft F1, E1, A3, & E3.

The Business Voice add-on license is available for just £12 per user per month via web-direct or via your CSP Partner

This is excellent value
When you think this removes the need to use addition phone system (and charges) or 3rd party web / audio conferencing services like Zoom or WebEx (which is ~£25 pupm alone) – you get a hell of lot of bang for your buck (or pound).

Existing organisations already using Microsoft Cloud Voice, can leverage this discounted bundle for up to three hundred users also, so you could save some good money!

 

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#Ignite2019 Day 1 – Key Announcements

Today saw Day 1 of Microsoft’s Annual Ignite conference in Orlando.

As expected there was a lot of hot (mainly Teams and Azure) news announced first thing and after reading many of the blogs, tweets and linked in posts, I’ve tried to summarise and include all the main (and my favourite) highlights (so far) in this one post.

This will likely be out of date before I finishing writing it, as there will be other “smaller” announcements through the day and into the rest of the week. We have also seen some other key big announcements from Microsoft partners and even their “competition” all Microsoft focused of course. 

1. Microsoft Teams: Wealth of new features and integrations from Cisco and Zoom. 

As expected, Microsoft Teams got some big announcements today, with the much anticipated roll out (this week) of secure private channels. Also announced was early 2020 roll out of pinned channels, multi-window chats and meetings. Microsoft also announced new integrations with To Do, Microsoft Planner, Project, Outlook, Yammer and the newly updated Power Platform. 

2. Breaking down the vendor wars with improved meeting room and interop between Cisco and Zoom

Microsoft and Cisco have announced a partnership to work together to simplify the interop between Microsoft Teams Rooms and Phone System with Cisco Webex Room devices and IP voice gateways respectively and includes three new initiatives to help customers to get more out of their current investments.

  1. Cloud Video Interop (CVI):  Cisco Webex will introduce an interop solution that will be certified as a Microsoft Cloud Video Interop (CVI) solution and will allow Cisco Webex Room devices and SIP video conferencing devices to join Microsoft Teams meetings with a reliable interop experience.  Coming early FY20.

  2. Direct guest join, for meeting room devices: Cisco and Microsoft are also working together on a new approach that enables meeting room devices to connect to meeting services from other vendors via embedded web technologies.  They announced a new “direct guest join” capability from their respective video conferencing device to the web app for the video meeting service.

  3. Direct Routing for Phone System:  At the heart of Microsoft Teams Direct Routing are Session Border Controllers (SBC). Since many customers also use Cisco Networking technology including SBCs and want both companies to provide joint solutions that do not require replacement of key infrastructure. Support for Cisco as a certified SBC is due in CY2020.

Zoom and Microsoft also announced that they have worked together to enhance conference room interoperability and simplify how users connect to third-party meetings.

This Zoom and Microsoft collaboration provides interoperability between the Zoom conference room solutions to provide streamlined meeting experiences. This will mean Zoom Rooms will be able to join Microsoft Teams meetings and Microsoft Teams Rooms will be able to join Zoom meetings, all without the purchase of additional licenses or third-party services. This is coming early CY2020.

 

3. Microsoft Flow is renamed to “Power Automate”

So this might take some time to grow on me, but Microsoft Flow, is being renamed to Power Automate. The name change was announced to allow the platform to “better align” with the wider Power Platform. Microsoft Flow (Sorry Automate) is also getting new a bunch of new features including Robotic process automation (RPA) for automating complex processes that span legacy and modern applications.

 

4. New: Microsoft Endpoint Manager

Microsoft Endpoint Manager is an integrated solution that promised to centrally and securely manage all of the endpoints across an organisation.  This the next major milestone for Intune and will bring together Microsoft Intune and System Center Configuration Manager functionality while also adding a new intelligent actions and analytics.

Endpoint Manager will deliver a unified, seamless, end-to-end management for Windows, Android and Apple devices, apps, and policies without the complexity of a migration or disruption to productivity.

Expected in Q1 of 2020, Microsoft have also said they will be making Intune available to all existing SCCM customers for Windows PC management, meaning that Starting on 1st December 2019, customers can start to co-manage these devices in Microsoft Endpoint Manager, and start using cloud-powered features like Autopilot and Desktop Analytics.

 

5. New Chromium-based Edge: Jan 15 2020 Release

Actually one of my favourite #Geekouts right now – Microsoft has said that January 15, 2020 will be be for official release date of their new Chromium-based Edge browser for Windows and Mac. Microsoft announced that a “release candidate” build is available to download today in more than 90 languages which can be installed alongside the Canary, Dev, or Beta builds you may already be running or testing.

If you are a big Google Chrome fan, I urge you to try this out – its a really great browser and has loads of enterprise features built right in including native integration with your Office 365 environment.

https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/ 

 

6. New: Office Mobile app for iOS and Android

I’ve been using this for a while (well a week or so) and today Microsoft is making this generally available for preview. The new Office Mobile app for iOS and Android combines Word, Excel, and PowerPoint functionality into a a simple single mobile app, similar to the old Office Hub on Windows Phone for those that remember it!. The new app has a really useful comes with an “Actions” pane, with easy access to common tasks, including scanning documents.

 

7. New: Project Cortex – a Microsoft 365 application that leverages AI to help better organise company data 

Microsoft today, announced Project Cortex, the first new Microsoft 365 app since the announcement of Microsoft Teams that uses AI to analyse business data and in turn create a kind of neuro-knowledge network. The app will be able to organise data into different projects and customers, and make it easier for employees to find important info that can be buried in documents, conversations, or videos across their hybrid IT environment. This to me sounds a bit like Delve on steroids and one I need to read a bit more on (as I’m sure you will too), but it seems to be able to recognise data in documents and pull them together into actionable and useful information.

The follow video is quite an easy watch and shows some of the work they have done with early adopter customers https://youtu.be/K0Y15WKXuws

More in-depth info can be found here: 

 

Hope you found this useful – please share your favourite announcements, small or large…. 

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Did you know there’s a “Business” version of the SurfaceProX

With all the news and media about Surface Pro X, it’s easy to miss that Microsoft have also released a dedicated business version called… Well Surface Pro X for Business which has one core feature aimed at business rather the consumer.

What’s the Difference

On the surface (ok dad joke) the business version isn’t much different from the consumer version. It’s the same spec, same processor, same pen and battery etc, but where it differs is in its security, which is unique to the new Surface business line up in this latest generation.

The Surface Pro X for Business is what Microsoft are calling a “Secured-core PC.”

What’s a Secured-core PC?

In short, this new technology is powered by Windows Defender System Guard and protects the Surface Pro X from firmware hacking such as LoJax

With Secured-core, your organisation can now prevent hackers from tampering or altering with the UEFI (or BIOS) which in the future I think will be a pre req for IoT type devices as well as business decides of all types.

There are 3 levels of protection provided by Secured-Core which make the Surface Pro X ultra secure and essentially shields Windows 10 from attacks and unauthorised access which target the device before Windows has booted or during shutdown.

  • Firmware attacks
  • Kernel attacks and
  • System integrity attacks

Who’s Secured-core ideal for?

Microsoft claim that the target market are people that work in the most data-sensitive industries such as government, financial services, and healthcare but really this is suited to any organisation that ultra concerned with security.

Just Surface?

No… This is by no means limited to just Microsoft decides. Lenovo, Panasonic, Dynabook, Dell, HP etc are all behind this new approach

Find out more

  • Microsoft have published the following information about Secured-core here
  • Thurrot have published this information
  • Computing have this to say

What do you think about Secured-core? Needed? or Over kill?

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New AI capabilities promise to transform the physical retail space

OK so a short blog this time and about something I don’t usually write much about… Dynamics

Microsoft have announced 2 major and significant new features coming to its #Dynamics 365 platform which will essentially bring Dynamics 365 AI into real stores.. Which is actually really really cool..

Aimed at bringing AI driven insights to physical retail stores

These two new retail-focused apps named are called “Dynamics 365 Commerce” and “Dynamics 365 Connected Store”.

  • Dynamics 365 Commerce is a solution that will unifiy back office, in-store, call center and digital experiences all within a single interface with “intelligent” features.
  • Dynamics 365 Connected Store will help companies improve the physical retail experience by analysing data from video cameras and IoT sensors to help show traffic flow, dwell zones, dead areas etc allowing retail spaces to better visualise and plan their store front layouts and adjust based on where people foot fall and grouping occurs.

Dynamics 365 Connected Store will help companies improve the physical retail experience by analysing data from video cameras and IoT sensors to help show traffic flow, dwell zones, dead areas etc allowing retail spaces to better visualise and plan their store front layouts and adjust based on where people foot fall and grouping occurs.

This could add real competitive edge to Dynamics retail customers

This release wave will also see a new Dynamics 365 Product Insights, a new application with Dynamics 365 which will use product telemetry to help companies “build richer relationships and improve engagement.”

Learn More – There is a free Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event on the 10th October in which the world will learn more.

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What are Flow and Power Apps all about ?

I was in a client meeting earlier today and we were talking about process automation, their journey to Microsoft 365 and shifting workloads from on-premise to cloud. During the meeting, the words “Microsoft Flow”, Microsoft PowerApps and “Power Platform” came up a handful of times until one of my customers said “Sorry, don’t mean to sound dumb, but what is Flow and PowerApps?”

Now then…I am not an expert in either of these (well yet anyway), but I have been playing around with these for a little while and just wanted to summarise (in-case there are others that simply don’t know) what these are and why you might/should care.

In Summary, Microsoft’s PowerPlatform is made up of a handful of core services, including Flow, PowerApps, Power BI and Dynamics 365

Microsoft Flow

Microsoft Flow is a cloud based services that can helps you (yes the user not just admins) automate almost any process. Flow is accessed from the Office 365 App Launcher and it does indeed look and feel like it is part of Microsoft Office 365 but actually it is more part of the Business Apps products group and more aligned, in essence to more to Power BI and Dynamics 365.

With Microsoft Flow you can easily build a set of steps that link together to form a process (a bit like If this then that) that start when a certain event happens or is trigger. These events can be a scheduled time, the update or creation of data (for example a file, record or an email) or they can be triggered manually (there’s even Flow buttons you can create). .

All the processes developed in Microsoft Flow use a browser based Flow Designer tool and enable users to create Flows without the need to do any coding (though you can so think “No or Low Code”.

There are loads (hundreds in fact) of template Flows to get you started and i was amazed how quickly it was to set-up a simple “trigger” flow that would detect an email containing a simple string (from a particular sender), send me an alert and add the email body to a Microsoft OneNote page.

Example Flow

I’m not going to go in to “how to create and use” Flows here as the links below will help get you started quickly…definitely worth a play around with one lunchtime!

Power Apps

PowerApps is also part of this “No or Low Code” Power Platform and really they shouldn’t be seen as separate products since they tie in and work really well together.

PowerApps essentially helps people create the interface into the business processes (Flow) that they would like to implement. PowerApps are often used by organisations to replace paper based processes – its similar in nature, if you are familiar with the kinds of apps and forms that Lotus Notes used to offer….

Who’s experts in this space.

There are quite a few dedicated Microsoft Partners in this space, but a couple of good sites and references to learn more (ones i am using anyway) are listed below

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