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Microsoft has announced a public preview of Azure Boost for enterprise customers this week. The new offering is designed to offload virtualization processes onto dedicated hardware and software. The new Azure Boost service enables customers to access experimental SKUs. This release should make it easier to test integrations with their existing virtual machines (VMs) ahead…

SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio 2022 (SSDT) is the modern replacement for Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS), which was introduced with SQL Server 2005. SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio 2022 is now delivered as a part of Visual Studio 2022, and it enables you to create and modify new projects for…

Microsoft-owned GitHub has announced the limited public beta release of GitHub Copilot Chat for enterprise customers and organizations. This release brings a context-aware conversational coding assistant into Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code development environments. GitHub launched the chatbot as a part of the Copilot X initiative to extend its code completion tool to more…

Every system administrator dreams of building the perfect Rube Goldberg machine of IT automation to manage the employee IT lifecycle, end to end, including IT offboarding. A new hire joins the company, HR files a ticket, and BAM! In an instant, all of the birthright accounts, access, and permissions are granted in a glorious cascade…

Splunk Inc. announced this week a new strategic partnership with Microsoft. The new deal will enable both companies to build Splunk’s enterprise security and observability solutions on Microsoft Azure. Splunk is a popular platform that enables customers to search, analyze, and visualize machine-generated data in real-time. It collects and processes data coming from a wide…

Microsoft unveiled a couple of new additions to the Microsoft 365 ecosystem at its Inspire 2023 conference this week. The company plans to introduce Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Achieve solutions to help enterprise customers to protect and manage large volumes of data. Microsoft 365 Backup is a new service that will let organizations…

Microsoft announced yesterday that it will provide organizations access to expanded cloud logging data at no additional cost to prevent potential cyberattacks. The announcement comes in response to criticism the company faced regarding the lack of security logs for select cloud licenses. Last week, Microsoft confirmed a series of attacks from a Chinese hacking group…

In this episode of First Ring Daily, Brad Sams and Paul Thurrott discuss Microsoft’s pricing model for the Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as how Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard will impact the company financially.

Microsoft has announced the general availability of its Sales Copilot at Inspire 2023 conference. The company is also bringing new AI-powered features to the Dynamics 365 customer insights platform to help organizations enhance customer engagement and sales. Microsoft Sales Copilot is an AI-based digital assistant designed for sales teams. The new service can generate content,…

Microsoft has announced that hotpatch support is now generally available for Windows Server Azure Edition VMs running the Desktop experience. This release enables organizations to patch and install updates to Windows Server virtual machines on Azure without rebooting. The Hotpatch feature accomplishes this goal by applying the patch in-memory code of running processes without restarting…

Encountering the “User profile service failed sign-in” error message can be frustrating and prevent you from accessing your logon user account on Windows. This error typically occurs due to issues with the user profile, and it can affect both local and domain accounts. In this article, I will provide a comprehensive troubleshooting guide to help…

Microsoft announced at its Inspire conference yesterday that it’s expanding its AI partnership with Meta to accelerate innovation in that field. Microsoft will be Meta’s preferred partner to distribute Llama 2, the company’s next-gen and open-source large language model (LLM) designed for commercial use.  Over the past couple of months, the AI conversation has mostly…