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Looking at a recently-announced product called “Microsoft Endpoint Manager”. While the product name and management interface may be shiny and new, you’ll probably recognize the underlying products as some of the same familiar products that device administrators have known for years. We’ll break down what’s included and some changes that may benefit and impact current and future deployments.

The Office 365 Substrate is a poorly understood part of Microsoft’s Cloud Office system. The substrate is a critical part of enabling services that run across different applications like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams, and so on. Functionality like search, information protection, data governance, and eDiscovery is a lot harder when you have multiple moving parts. The substrate gives cohesion and coherence to what could otherwise be a tangled mess.

This month you can read about some of the coolest stuff from Ignite, Microsoft Forms getting a great new feature, AI learning to read for me, and more.

Microsoft Ignite 2019 has passed, and as one would expect, there were many Azure announcements. I’m not going to do my usual and list every announcement in this article – I would still be writing this article in 2020!

The Windows 10 November 2019 Update is released for download and on Windows Update, Microsoft confirms that Win32 apps are coming to Windows 10X, Chromium-Based Edge gets a release date and new PWA integration features, and an early preview of WinUI 3.0 is released to help developers bridge the divide between Win32 and UWP apps.

Microsoft’s enterprise application packaging technology, MSIX, is being partially ported to down-level Windows clients and there are some interesting new features due in Windows 10 20H1.

Microsoft announced Azure Arc at Ignite 2019 providing a cross-platform hybrid management system to manage all servers anywhere. In this article, you’ll learn how to onboard your on-premises servers to Azure Arc Servers.

Cloudy attachments are an excellent way of sharing documents through email without attaching files. Behind the scenes, an anonymous link to the document is sent to recipients, who can then use the link to open, edit, or download the document (depending on the assigned permission). Office 365 tenant administrators don’t have great visibility into what kind of anonymous sharing happens, but they can with a little bit of PowerShell and the contents of the Office 365 audit log.

Because millennials always have the answers, this week’s edition of Short Takes looks at Slack’s response to a Microsoft rip-off, Amazon suing over Microsoft’s JEDI contract, Salesforce’s unlikely Microsoft partnership, and so much more.

Microsoft is delaying the release of its Surface EarBuds until the spring but the company isn’t saying why or when exactly they will be released.

A new Azure-managed version of Microsoft Connected Cache enters private preview to help reduce Internet bandwidth for updates.

Microsoft has declared some undefined period, perhaps starting at the Ignite conference, to be the “Year of Yammer.” Cynics might say “What! Yet again?” as Microsoft tries to position its enterprise networking app within Office 365 collaboration as it certainly feels like we have been down this path before. On the upside, this attempt seems to focus on what Yammer is good at instead of mimicking other apps. Time will tell.