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In this post, I’ll detail five essential principles for successful cloud adoption. Note that while I am biased towards Microsoft Azure, these essentials are the same for cloud projects targeting Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and so on. Cloud adoption experience I have had the opportunity to work with public and private sector clients…

The idle session timeout feature, which the company announced for its Microsoft 365 web apps back in March, is now generally available for customers. The new capability lets IT admins configure a policy to automatically sign out inactive employees from Microsoft 365 web apps. Previously, the idle session timeout setting was only available for Outlook…

Microsoft announced a big update for Teams on the web that’s aimed at small and medium businesses. The latest release brings some much-anticipated features that are already available in the desktop versions of Microsoft Teams. First of all, Microsoft has announced that custom backgrounds support is now available for all web users. Microsoft Teams first…

Microsoft has finally launched the first native ARM64 version of Visual Studio for Windows 11 devices. The Visual Studio 2022 17.3 Preview 2 release prioritizes the most popular workloads for developers who want to test their apps on Arm64 devices. Microsoft first unveiled its plans to launch an Arm native version of Visual Studio 2022…

Microsoft has announced that it’s expanding its Windows Customer Connection Program (WCCP) to IT admins. This WCCP program is designed to collect feedback and promote collaboration to build better products and services for customers. According to Microsoft, IT Pros will get exclusive access to the private previews of its existing and upcoming software products. Participants…

Microsoft Teams on Mac and iOS has finally added support for real-time noise suppression. The AI-powered tool first debuted on Windows 10 as an optional feature back in 2020, which allows the app to automatically suppress unwanted background noise during video calls and meetings. The noise suppression capability is enabled by default for all Mac…

Microsoft claims that it has optimized its Teams desktop app to boost performance during resource-intensive scenarios such as messaging, video calls, and meetings. These changes complement ongoing efforts to make the app more power-efficient during meetings. The Teams desktop app has received several performance enhancements to improve the “overall interaction responsiveness time” since August 2021….

DevOps Pipelines help you to deliver new features in your apps fast! In this article, I will explain what DevOps pipelines are, phases in a pipeline, and the different components. I’ll also cover what you need to understand before building a DevOps pipeline of your own, along with the build process. DevOps has revolutionized the contemporary IT…

Microsoft has announced new initiatives to decrease the licensing costs and restrictions for small cloud vendors. The Redmond giant plans to make some changes to its restrictive cloud-licensing policies in response to complaints from rival European cloud vendors. Back in 2019, Microsoft changed the terms of its outsourcing license agreement that increased the cost of…

Last month, Microsoft announced its plans to move the Quick Assist app to the Microsoft Store. The Redmond giant is dropping support for the existing built-in Quick Assist app for Windows 10 and Windows 11 on May 23, 2022. For those unfamiliar, Quick Assist is a remote assistance tool available for Windows PCs. The app…

Microsoft announced this morning Viva Goals, a new Teams module that helps employees keep track of their progress on key business goals. Viva Goals is the result of Microsoft’s acquisition of Ally.io back in October 2021, a Seattle-based start-up specializing in an approach called objectives and key results (OKR). OKR is a performance management tool…

Microsoft has added re-authentication support in Azure AD Conditional Access. The company says that it’s one of the top-requested features from customers, who will now be able to configure policies to require authentication by end-users. Microsoft defines sign-in frequency as the time period before a user is required to log in again when accessing a…