I will be speaking at Manchester Tech UG (a Virtual event) on Thursday on how delivering Zscaler for Confused.com is helping to modernise and secure their working environment.
It was another successful conference at Microsoft
Ignite 2019 in Orlando last week. The scale has somewhat changed since my last
Ignite visit in 2011, the Orlando Convention centre is enormous, and it needed
to be hosting ~30,000 attendees. Satya Nadella’s opening Keynote focussed on
Tech Intensity at a Global Level across these key areas:
Microsoft 365
Dynamics 365
Power Platform
Developer Tools
Trust
Azure
With over ~1700 Ignite sessions to choose from it
was a busy week ending with a conference party evening hosted in Universal
Studios exclusively for Ignite Attendees, superb!
As ever the event was full of technical sessions and included an expo hall where I had the opportunity to target some of my product related questions directly to the engineering teams. I’ve listed some of my key take away’s from the event including answers to my product related questions below.
Microsoft Endpoint
Manager
This rebrand encompasses
the convergence of Intune and SCCM aimed at bringing together all endpoints
through a single management plane
Intune Device Firmware
Configuration Interface (DFCI) is now in public preview providing the ability
to remotely configure device firmware
Microsoft Security
Baselines for Edge and Office will be made GA 2020 H1
Azure Arc
This is the new
control plane for multi-cloud, multi-edge
Provides management
functionality for Azure Stack appliances which extend your Azure environment
on-premise
Azure Synapse (Data
Layer)
This is a service
which brings together Data Lake and Big Data solutions and can deliver quite
advanced predictive analytical capabilities
Project Silica
This is an impressive femtosecond
laser etched glass storage solution which will be used by Warner Brothers to
satisfy their requirement for storing mass amounts of media data
Power Platform
This marks the
introduction of Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) and Power Virtual
Agents
I attended a few
sessions on this throughout the week and the chat bot capabilities provided by
Power Virtual Agents provides an interesting solution to optimise some of the
repetitive tasks undertaken within an organisation without the need to write
code
This product also
provides a wizard that can automate processes executed by legacy Win32 apps!
Teams
There was a lot of
focus on Microsoft Teams this week through Satya’s keynote, extensive
workshops, in-depth sessions, and a wide range of Microsoft Partner
demonstrations in the Expo hall
Microsoft Teams
Content cameras are now available which make people translucent so the so
meeting participants can always see the content of the whiteboard
Private Channels are
now GA
Proximity Join capabilities
will be introduced for Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) through “Bluetooth Beaconing”
Direct Guest Join
for 3rd Party meetings will be introduced in 2020 H1 to enable Teams
meeting interoperability with Cisco WebEx and Zoom clients
In 2020 H2 Microsoft
will release a Device Management console within the Teams Management portal.
This will list all shared office spaces, the equipment within those spaces and
their health status
Users will have the
ability to reset MTR devices
This technology
will also assist in understanding how shared spaces are used by users based on
their usage activity
This console will
provide the ability to audit changes made to shared space equipment
Eventually this functionality
will be integrated into the Microsoft Endpoint Management tool (MEM)
Support for
emergency dial features on Teams phone lock screens will be made available in 2020
Q1
Automatic pairing
and unlocking (sign-in) of Teams phones from the Desktop App will be introduced
in 2020 Q1
Advanced
collaboration features where you can share content from your Desktop Teams app
and use a Teams phone for voice will be introduced 2020 Q2.
Project Cortex
This is an AI
initiative to provide Data insights into Teams channels by creating a knowledge
network based on relationships among topics, content, and people
Known topics
identified within Teams conversations are automatically highlighted and when
clicked open knowledge centre pages showing an aggregation of related content
Microsoft Edge (Chromium)
Edge Chromium will be in
GA January 2020.
A significant
announcement was the new Microsoft Edge includes Internet Explorer mode and Microsoft
have committed to fix legacy IE application issues in Edge Chromium for free!
Increased security
capabilities simplified into 3 security lockdown modes; Basic, Balanced and Strict
A new InPrivate mode
across your entire web experience, so your online searches and browsing are not
attributed to you
Bing search through
Edge Chromium will provide unified search results from Internet and Intranet
content
Windows Virtual
Desktop (WVD)
It was great to see a
sneak peak of the WVD User Interface scheduled to be available before the end
of the year
Although this
interface will be limited to managing host pools and User access I am pleased
to see Group based user management included
MSI-X App attach
This will
significantly enhance WVD capabilities enabling applications to be layered dynamically
onto the virtual Desktop through FSLogix
Microsoft intends
on integrating MSIX App Attach into the WVD portal
MSIX App Attach
capabilities will be built natively into the OS which will be GA 2020 H1
Office 365 Groups
An “Access package” can
be created per business unit role which provides a method of consolidating all
Office 365 Group memberships. This will create an Access Portal link URL which
can be emailed to employees or provided through a SharePoint Site
This can be used to
accelerate the process of onboarding new users
Azure B2C
Identity Protection
and Conditional Access will be made available in 2020 H1 as premium features
Azure File Shares
A new Azure File
Shares tiering system will be introduced to enable the storage Tier to be
changed dynamically without downtime
Hybrid AD domain join
file share support will remove the need for AADS which will be GA 2020 H1
NFS 4.1 Support for
Azure File Shares (currently in Preview)
This enables File
Share mounting on Linux
Product Centric Q&A
Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD)
When will Shadowing be introduced into the WVD Portal?
This is on the roadmap scheduled for April 2020
When will Auto Scale functionality be introduced into the WVD Portal?
This is on the roadmap scheduled for April 2020
When will B2B capabilities be added to WVD?
This is currently a backlog item and not featured on the product roadmap
When will we be able to perform native Intune Management for WVD?
This is on the roadmap scheduled for 2020 H1
When can we join WVD desktops natively to Azure AD?
This is on the roadmap scheduled for 2020 H1
When will native remote control functionality be introduced into Intune (now Windows Endpoint Manager)?
This is on the roadmap for 2020
When will self-service password Reset be able to be subjected to Conditional Access policies?
This is currently a backlog item and not featured on the product roadmap
When will we be able to assign Privileged Identity Management (PIM) roles to Azure AD Groups?
PIM Group based role assignment is currently available in private preview
When will Teams and Skype (Consumer) integration become available?
This functionality will become available in December 2020.
When will Azure Files support Conditional Access?
At present Microsoft are focussing on direct storage functionality and performance and Conditional Access support is on the backlog potentially as late as 2021
I will be speaking at the next Tech UG event in Cardiff on how to deliver End User Compute in a “Cloud first” era. I will demonstrate how organisations can deploy, secure and manage Windows 10 and Windows Virtual Desktop. #Windows10 #Office365 #WVD #Intune
It was a great afternoon at the Citrix and Microsoft Cloud Seminar last week. Pontec and Network Jigsaw delivered a joint presentation on our experiences delivering an Azure hosted VDI environment brokered by the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Cloud Service for one of the largest public sector organisations in Wales.
Citrix opened the event presenting their latest workspace and SD-Wan capabilities. Microsoft also presented their latest innovations in Cloud computing and Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD). Microsoft also emphasised how the Microsoft and Citrix Partnership is stronger than ever with Citrix providing a unified experience between Azure hosted WVD and On-Premise published apps/ desktops.
Speaking with public
and private sector organisations after our presentation it became apparent that
most companies are excited by Microsoft’s recent FSLogix acquisition and WVD
announcements. It was also interesting to learn how so many organisations find
it challenging to prioritise which Cloud services to focus their attention on
first; Office 365, Azure VDI, or Cloud datacentre transformation. I think this
is the area where Citrix Cloud services can add real value, allowing customers
to decouple Line of Business applications from their critical path and deliver
them as published applications from anywhere, often mitigating the
“Proximity to Data” challenge.
After spending a couple of days at Microsoft Ignite these are some of my key points of note.
Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD)
Microsoft’s recent WVD announcements makes VDI a cost effective option for SME aswell as large enterprises
WVD combined with Azure AD Conditional Access could offer an effective solution to provide external suppliers access to a secure desktop from outside your organisation removing the cost of additional physical devices
WVD is due to be available through Public Preview next month and made Generally Available in the Summer
WVD can be used to publish applications and/or desktops
Windows Server only supports Win32 and Office perpetual apps, whereas WVD will support Office 365 ProPlus and UWP apps
There will be two modes of connecting to a WVD:
Microsoft Remote Desktop Client
HTML5 Browser
WVD is licensed on a subscription basis and so will not require RDS CALs!
Intune
OOBE Profile enhancements
Computer Name templates now allow you to configure devices to use %serialNumber% as the computername, instead of random names
New security features will provide the ability to ensure only auto pilot enrolled devices can be registered in Intune
Office 365
A new Office App Suite (for Office Pro Plus) deployment options have been introduced further simplifying Office deployment
A new set of servicing options for Office 365 Pro Plus (Insider and Monthly)
New features to be introduced in the Windows 10 v1903 release
Windows Auto Pilot “White Glove”
A process where the device is fully configured in readiness for the End User logon
The device will complete the full device setup – install user/ device assigned apps, configure settings and user account setup (user assignment)
Cortana voiceover will be disabled by default in OOBE
Self-updating Auto Pilot
The AutoPilot client will be updated at OOBE without requiring the Device image/OS to be updated to the next version of Windows
Dependency / Sequential Deployment
Application Dependency capabilities will be introduced into Intune this Summer
Sequential application and configuration deployment will be introduced through Intune towards the end of the year
Identity and Access Management
Information Protection
Now integrated into the Security and Compliance Centre
Unified Labelling (still in preview) will allow organisations to configure Information Protection Policies using on labels to identify sensitive data types (e.g. National Insurance Number) which can be automatically identified in documents and will prompt the user to save the document (or send emails) with a pre-defined protective marking (Natively in Office ProPlus)
An AIP Scanner function can be used to scan all existing documents and either audit or enforce Information Protection policies
Email protection policies can be configured to enforce mail encryption and prevent mail forwarding
Microsoft Teams
Files can now be shared (and restricted to) users within a Teams channel
Transcription Services – Caption Recording
In addition a new search feature will be introduced to allow channel users to search for words/ topics captured
Share content from a partner device, i.e. The MS Teams App running on an iPhone can be used to share video content from your phone whilst you are logged into Teams on the phone and desktop
New RBAC Roles introduced
Integration with LoB Apps that can be added to the Teams Store