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Microsoft is planning to roll out a new immersive layout called “front row” on Teams Rooms devices in January 2022. The new meeting layout was originally announced back in June this year, and it aims to make the meeting experience more engaging between in-room participants as well as virtual attendees. The front row layout for…

Microsoft Teams has started rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support for one-to-one calls. The feature has been available in public preview since October, and it’s now available in the Teams desktop app for Windows and macOS. The end-to-end encryption (E2EE) feature encrypts Microsoft Teams calls at the source and then decrypts the information at the…

Microsoft has announced a slew of updates coming to Excel on the web this month. The company says that these new capabilities should make the web version of Excel “a more effective app for your daily work.” First of all, Excel on the Web now supports a new feature called “Searchable data validation list,” which…

In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees; some will be IT pros. We will be tackling various subject areas in the form of 30-minute audio interviews. I will be asking the questions, the…

November 30th, 2022 will see Microsoft end availability for its Desktop Analytics solution. Microsoft said in a blog post dated November 5th: “To align our investments with this goal and the shift we have been seeing, we are announcing that we will retire Desktop Analytics on November 30, 2022. Over the next year, we will…

There are a lot of compliance-based services across Microsoft 365’s licensing options. At the highest level, a Microsoft 365 E5 subscription for a tenant gives administrators a ton of toys to play with. The naming, marketing, and placement of the capabilities you get can be fuzzy. In this article, we’ll tackle Microsoft Information Protection (MIP),…

Teams is one of the fastest growing products Microsoft has ever released, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there was a big focus on Teams at the November edition of Ignite. In this article, I’m going to cover all the important news in brief. New Microsoft Teams chat features Microsoft Teams chat recently…

This past October 20th, 2021 Amazon announced the general availability of their new AWS Panorama appliance. Adding to their ever increasing number of on-premises solutions, AWS Panorama shows exactly how seriously AWS takes the hybrid cloud market. What is AWS Panorama? The AWS Panorama appliance is a computer vision (CV) appliance that uses Machine Learning (ML) to…

Test Base for Microsoft 365 is a platform which allows you to script and automate your application compatibility testing. Hosted in Azure, and based on Azure virtual machines, this service allows the easy onboarding of applications through a dedicated area of the Azure portal. To validate apps in Test Base, you should: Sign up for…

Welcome to my third post discussing all things Windows Insider Program (WIP). My first post went over the business angle. My second described more of the history and various Channels available to ‘Insiders.’ This post will walk you through joining the Windows Insider Program on a device, and the distinct options you have in joining…

Have you ever been scrolling through a large Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and stopped because you came across some cells with important data and it whips right past you? Well, Microsoft Excel engineers have been working to enhance this aspect of Excel for a long time. When they set out to ‘put the idea to code’…

Yes, it’s new! And there are a LOT of new features in the new Microsoft Whiteboard app, which reached general availability at the end of September. For starters, Microsoft is rolling the new Whiteboard interface experience out to the web, Teams, and Android platforms. The last 18 months have seen the evolution of hybrid work…