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Microsoft is pushing out a new service into preview that will finally bring location-based services to the cloud platform.

Some observers say that Teams will replace email. Well, Teams won’t because email still has so many advantages over what Teams offers. But Teams has its own capabilities that will lead it to take some of the traffic currently carried by email. Because of its internal focus, the traffic that moves to Teams is in-house chats, and Teams is a good place for those conversations to be.

In this Ask the Admin, Russell Smith explains how Windows Defender System Guard reorganizes existing security defenses.

An effective DR plan has a big ROI in a number of different ways but only if you construct it correctly.

VMware is upset with Microsoft over its new Azure service and will not provide support for the platform.

Aidan Finn explains the role of web app deployment slots in Azure and how to use them.

In this Ask the Admin, Russell Smith outlines some of the security features in Windows Server that can be used to help keep sensitive accounts safe.

Because I am thankful for a short work week, this edition of Short Takes looks at Microsoft’s portable gaming acumen, a Skype disaster in China, Meg Whitman’s exit from HP Enterprise, Belgium vs. in-game gambling, and much more.

In this Ask the Admin, Russell Smith shows you how to be sure the source media you use to install software in your business hasn’t been tampered with.

Microsoft’s Compliance Manager is intended to help cloud tenants cope with regulations like ISO 27001 and GDPR. The Compliance Manager has a nice dashboard, but it is passive and offers very weak options in terms of organizing the work needed to achieve compliance. But Office 365 has Planner and Teams, and it is easy to create the necessary collaboration structure to allow people to work on GDPR controls.

Microsoft released Compliance Manager Preview, after initially announcing the new service during Ignite 2017 in late September. It is, for now at least, a free service for existing Office 365 customers, that aims to provide a management interface for organization’s compliance management activities.

Google recently announced the general availability of their BigQuery Data Transfer Service, which can be used to automate the transfer of data from SaaS applications into Google’s cloud-based BigQuery data warehouse service.