Windows 10: Build 2019: Developing people-centered experiences with Microsoft 365

Brink · May 6, 2019

Today at Microsoft Build 2019, Rajesh Jha and I will have the opportunity to share how developers can connect with customers in new ways and build people-centric experiences using the Microsoft 365 platform. I’ll focus on the two most ubiquitous canvases for developers – Windows and Microsoft Edge.

Windows as a canvas for moving the world forward

With over 800 million active devices on the Windows 10 platform, Windows is the canvas people use when they want to move the world forward. The opportunity is even greater when we consider the 1 billion+ people across work, life, and school using Microsoft 365 services, like Office and Windows combined. When people are at the center of the experience, it frees us to dream about the most optimal experiences for our employees or customers – allowing us to choose the right device with the right capabilities for any given task.

With this in mind, we made the following enhancements to support your innovation:

The Ink Recognizer Cognitive Service provides accurate recognition of digital ink content made possible by the power of the Cloud. You can now provide your users with consistent experiences wherever they are – Android, iOS, and the Web. The upcoming support for diagram recognition and guided handwriting recognition adds even more options for developers to create unique experiences for their users. You can start using the Ink Recognizer Cognitive Service today.

With XAML Islands you can create people centric experiences and connect your existing WPF, WinForms, or native Win32 codebase to new rich UI. The full release of XAML Islands is included in the Windows 10 May update, and even more UI capabilities will be available later this year as we continue to invest in the open-source WinUI Library.

For writing cross-platform code in JavaScript with a native feel, developers can use an updated, high-performance React Native for Windows implementation to rapidly build native UX components using a React/web skillset. Developers who prefer C# and XAML can of course continue to use Xamarin & Xamarin.Forms for a similar high-performance implementation.

Optimize your full development workflow with Windows and Microsoft Edge

We will take a closer look at the next version of Microsoft Edge, built on the Chromium open source project. Microsoft Edge will provide robust compatibility with the latest web standards across all your devices. It introduces powerful, consistent developer tools to inspect and debug your web content in the browser and in web apps across platforms. We will also announce new features that will simplify life for web developers and IT pros, while embracing the best of the modern web across platforms.

One browser for all web experiences. IE mode allows you to browse all your enterprise sites that target Internet Explorer and the modern web in a single browser. IE mode is coming to preview builds of Microsoft Edge later this year.

Consistent web platform and tools. Developers want a consistent set of powerful tools that work across websites, Microsoft Edge based web apps, and WebViews.

Making the web better for everyone. As a member of the Chromium community, our default position will be to contribute all web platform enhancements back to the project so that we are helping to further evolve web standards.

Beyond just the web, we are committed to optimizing developers’ end to end workflow so that Windows is the best OS for all development tasks. To achieve this, we made the following improvements to Windows and Visual Studio Code to address key requests from the development community:

New Windows Terminal with theming

A new Windows Terminal application that features a beautiful modern UI with tabs; tear away windows and shortcuts; full Unicode support including East Asian fonts, emojis and ligatures; and support for themes and extensions. A preview of the new Windows Terminal is available now.

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) is the next version of WSL and is based on a Linux 4.19 kernel shipping in Windows. This same kernel is technology built used for Azure and in both cases helps to reduce Linux boot time and streamline memory use. WSL 2 also improves filesystem I/O performance, Linux compatibility, and can run Docker containers natively so that a VM is no longer needed for containers on Windows. The first WSL 2 preview will be available later this year.

The new Visual Studio Code Remote extension enables seamless remote development in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, containers, and virtual machines. This extension brings the best of local development and remote development together – allowing developers to enable scenarios on their local instance of Visual Studio Code. The Remote extension is available today.

Innovating people-centric experiences with you

As a member of and contributor to the developer community, I’m very excited by how Microsoft continues to embrace and expand our participation in the open source community. Working in the open helps us build better dev tools and frameworks because of the continuous feedback. And, you’ve told us that you would like us to continue to decouple many parts of the Universal Windows Platform so that you can adopt them incrementally such as WinUI, MSIX, and Windows Terminal. Allowing you to use our platform and tools to meet you where your customers are going – empowering you to deliver rich, intelligent experiences that put people at the center. We hope you will continue to work with us and give us your feedback. I can’t wait to see what we can build together.

Microsoft Edge

Windows Terminal

MSIX Core

Calculator

Microsoft Graph Toolkit

Xamarin

Adaptive Cards

Lottie-Windows

Windows UI Library (WinUI)

WPF

Windows Forms

React Native for Windows

XAML Islands

Windows Community Toolkit

WebRTC

ORTC

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Source: Developing people-centered experiences with Microsoft 365 - Windows Developer Blog

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Guest1 · May 6, 2019

#MSBuild - Microsoft 365 empowers developers to build intelligent apps

Today, at our annual Build conference, Satya Nadella and Scott Guthrie talked about the vision and strategy of rationalizing Microsoft’s platform into an intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, enlightened by AI and mixed reality and architected for the modern computing landscape. Tomorrow, we will share with you, our developer community, the unique opportunities with Microsoft 365 in today’s multi-sense, multi-device world.

For years, we have been at Build talking about the huge opportunity with Windows and Office as developer platforms. In fact, today we have 135 million commercial monthly active users of Office 365 and nearly 700 million Windows 10–connected devices.

But Microsoft’s mission is fundamentally dependent on how well we TOGETHER can harness the power of both Windows and Office in the Microsoft 365 platform.

Microsoft 365 brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) as a complete, intelligent, and secure solution to empower employees.

In case you’re not already familiar, Microsoft 365 brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) as a complete, intelligent, and secure solution to empower employees. As the largest productivity platform in the world, it’s a vital part of the intelligent edge—and it enables developers to create beneficial experiences that work elegantly across many different device types and many different computing “senses”—including vision and voice.

Today, many of you would consider yourselves Windows or Office developers. Or web developers who target Windows and Office users. Or even mobile developers asking how you might align a mobile experience with other devices. When you leave Build 2018 this week, we hope you consider yourselves Microsoft 365 developers.

New Microsoft 365 experiences empower customers to achieve more

This week, we’re introducing a set of features and updates across a variety of devices and platforms and a better blending between web and application environments for users and developers. Last year at Build, you heard us talk about our commitment to meeting our customers where they are—across platforms. We’re expanding this work to not only bring more Microsoft 365 services across platforms and into applications, but to better connect customers’ existing PC experiences with their phones, helping to increase engagement for developers. These announcements include:

A new way to connect your phone to your PC with Windows 10 that enables instant access to text messages, photos, and notifications. Imagine being able to quickly drag and drop your phone’s photos into a document on your PC in one swift movement—without having to take your phone out of your pocket. This new experience will begin to roll out in the Windows Insider Program soon.

A new way to connect your phone to your PC with Windows 10 that enables instant access to text messages, photos, and notifications.

The updated Microsoft Launcher application on Android that will support Enterprise customers with easy access to line of business applications via Microsoft Intune. Microsoft Launcher on Android will also support Timeline for cross-device application launching. Today, your Microsoft Edge browsing sessions on your iPhone or iPad are included in the Timeline experience on your Windows 10 PC. Tomorrow, we’ll show how later this year you’ll be able to access that same timeline on your iPhone with Microsoft Edge.

The updated Microsoft Launcher application on Android will support Enterprise customers with easy access to line of business applications via Microsoft Intune.

Timeline is coming to Microsoft Launcher on Android and to Microsoft Edge on iPhone and iPad.

Updates to Sets, an easier way to organize your stuff and get back to what you were doing. With Sets, what belongs together stays together, making it easier and faster to create and be productive. As developers, your Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application will work with Sets from the start, helping to keep your customers engaged. And with a few simple changes, your Win32 or web applications are supported within Sets as well.

Updates to Sets, an easier way to organize your stuff and get back to what you were doing.

Microsoft 365 support of Adaptive Cards, helping developers create rich interactive content within conversations. As a result, end users can approve expense reports or comment on an issue in GitHub directly within an Outlook email or Teams chat. Building on Adaptive Cards, we’re also bringing payments to Outlook. With Microsoft Pay, you’ll be able to quickly and securely pay bills and invoices right from your inbox. Several Microsoft partners will announce support for Microsoft Pay at Build.

Microsoft 365 support of Adaptive Cards helps developers create rich interactive content within conversations.

New opportunities for developers with Microsoft 365

Core to the Microsoft 365 platform is the Microsoft Graph. It helps developers connect the dots between people, conversations, schedules, and content within the Microsoft Cloud. We encourage you to tap into the power of the Microsoft Graph to gain unprecedented context and insights to build smarter apps. Tomorrow, we will talk about new opportunities with the Microsoft Graph and new tools with Microsoft 365 that give you the flexibility to design and create in the languages and frameworks of your choice, empowering you to create smarter ways for people to work. These announcements include:

New and updated Microsoft Teams APIs in the Microsoft Graph and support for organization-specific applications in Teams, allowing developers to create tailored, intelligent experiences based on the unique needs of a business or industry. Companies can also publish custom apps to the Teams app store.

Deeper SharePoint integration into Microsoft Teams, enabling people to pin a SharePoint page directly into a Teams channel to enable deeper collaboration. Developers can use modern script-based frameworks like React within your projects to add more pieces that can be added and organized within SharePoint pages.

Updates helping you support the Fluent Design System, so you can create immersive, deeply engaging experiences with Microsoft’s updated design language. Now every organization can make beautiful solutions that empower your customers to do more. With UWP XAML Islands, you can access the more capable, flexible, powerful XAML controls regardless which UI stack you use—whether it’s Windows Forms, WPF, or native Win32.

.NET Core 3.0, which allows developers to use the latest version of .NET and have your application run in a standalone .NET environment, so you can build amazing app experiences that don’t impact your broader organizational infrastructure. This allows desktop developers to take advantage of side-by-side install of their applications. That means that system-wide updates of .NET will not impact running applications.

MSIX, a complete containerization solution providing a simple way to convert large catalogs of applications. It inherits all the great features from UWP, including reliable, robust installation and updating, as well as a managed security model and support for both enterprise management and the Microsoft Store.

New Azure Machine Learning and JavaScript custom functions that let developers and organizations create your own powerful additions to Excel’s catalog of formulas.

Windows Machine Learning, a new platform, which enables developers to easily develop Machine Learning models in the intelligent cloud—and then deploy them offline and in high-performance to the PC platform.

If you are a developer maintaining Windows desktop applications, you can now use all of these modern tools with your existing investment across Win32, WPF, and Windows Forms applications. I’ll also share tomorrow our commitment to maximize your opportunity with Microsoft Store by providing up to 95 percent share of the revenue for your consumer apps, excluding games. For more details on the updates to Microsoft Store, check out this blog post. For more detail on the developer opportunities I’ve mentioned here, check out Kevin Gallo’s blog post.

Some of the things we’re talking about at Build this week are available for developers to use and try out now, while other experiences will come during the next year.

All of the things we’re talking about give you the power to build applications the way you want, with the most flexibility to make the right choices for your end users. This is an exciting time: Microsoft 365 enables you to achieve more with your current skillset and your current tools. And that in turn empowers you to help your users achieve more.

Thank you for building with us. I can’t wait to see what you’ll build in 2019!
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Source: Microsoft 365 empowers developers to build intelligent apps for where and how the world works - Microsoft 365 Blog

Brink · May 6, 2019

Microsoft System Center 2019 will be generally available in March 2019

As customers grow their deployments in the public cloud and on-premises data centers, management tools are evolving to meet customer needs. System Center suite continues to play an important role in managing the on-premises data center and the evolving IT needs with the adoption of the public cloud.

Today, I am excited to announce that Microsoft System Center 2019 will be generally available in March 2019. System Center 2019 enables deployment and management of Windows Server 2019 at a larger scale to meet your data center needs.

System Center 2019 has been in private preview through the Windows Server Technical Adoption Program (TAP) customers since December 2018. A big thank you to everyone who have given us feedback so far.

I would like to take a moment and give you an overview about the new release. System Center 2019 has the following areas of focus:

First-class tools to monitor and manage data centers

Support and manage capabilities in the latest versions of Windows Server

Enable hybrid management and monitoring capabilities with Azure

System Center 2019 is our LTSC (Long Term Servicing Channel) release and provides the 5 years of standard and 5 years of extended support that customers can rely on. Subsequent to the GA of System Center 2019, the suite will continue to accrue value through the Update Rollup releases every six months over the mainstream support window of 5 years.

System Center 2019 is designed to deliver value in the following areas:

Hybrid

As enterprise environments now span on-premises to the cloud, customers look to leverage the innovation in Azure services using their on-premises tools. To enable this, we have integrated System Center with a set of management services in Azure to augment the on-premises tools.

With Service Map integration with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), you can automatically create distributed application diagrams in Operations Manager (OM) that are based on the dynamic dependency maps in Service Map.

With Azure Management Pack, you can now view perf and alert metrics in SCOM, integrate with web application monitoring in Application Insights, and monitor more PaaS services, such as Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Factory, etc.

Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2019 enables simplified patching of VMs by integrating with Azure Update Management.

Dashboard for Azure resources in SCOM web console

Security

With the security threats growing in number and sophistication, security continues to be top priority for customers.

System Center products now support service logon and shun the dependency on interactive logon aligning with security best practice.

VMM 2019 now includes a new role, VM administrator, which provides just enough permissions for read-only visibility into the fabric of the data center, but prevents escalation of privilege to fabric administration.

VM Administrator Role in VMM

Software defined data center

Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is a significant trend in on-premises data centers today. Customers see lowered costs by using their servers with high performant local disks to run compute and storage needs at the same time.

With VMM 2019, you can manage and monitor HCI deployment more efficiently – from upgrading or patching Storage Spaces Direct clusters without downtime to monitoring the health of disks.

VMM 2019 storage optimization enables you to optimize placement of VHDs across cluster shared volumes and prevents VM outages caused when the storage runs full.

Storage Health in VMM

Modernizing operations and monitoring

Customers have come to rely on SCOM for its extensibility and the ecosystem of management packs to monitor Microsoft and third-party workloads.

With HTML5 dashboards and drill down experiences in the SCOM web console, you will now be able to use a simplified layout and extend the monitoring console using custom widget and SCOM REST API.

Taking modernization a step further, email notifications in SCOM have been modernized as well with support for HTML-email in SCOM 2019.

SCOM 2019 brings a new alerts experience for monitor-based alerts whereby alerts have to be attended to and cannot be simply closed by operators when the respective underlying monitors are in unhealthy state.

SCOM has enhanced your Linux monitoring by leveraging Fluentd; and now is resilient to management server failovers in your Linux environments.

All the SCOM management packs will now support Windows Server 2019 roles and features.

SCOM web console

Faster backups with Data Protection Manager 2019

Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2019 will provide backups optimized in time (faster) and space (consumes less storage).

DPM improves performance of your backups with a 75 percent increase in speed and enables monitoring experience for key backup parameters via Log Analytics.

DPM further supports backup of VMware VMs to tape. In addition to Windows Server 2019, DPM now provides backups for new workloads such as SharePoint 2019 and Exchange 2019.

DPM alerts and reports using Log Analytics

Orchestrator 2019 and Service Manager 2019

Orchestrator 2019 supports PowerShell V 4.0 and above, enabling you to run 64-bit cmdlets. Service Manager 2019 will ship with an improved Active Directory (AD) connector that is now capable of synchronizing with a specific domain controller.

Changes to release cadence

Finally, we are making changes to System Center release cadence to optimize the way we are delivering new features. System Center has two release trains today – LTSC and SAC. There is also a release train called Update Rollups (URs).

Most of our customers use Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) like System Center 2016 to run their data center infrastructures. LTSC provides five years of mainstream support and five years of extended support – with Update Rollups (UR) providing the incremental fixes and updates. From talking to customers, we learned that LTSC works better for most System Center deployments as the update cycles are longer and more stable.

Based on the learnings, we will start to focus our resources on innovation plans for System Center in LTSC releases and stop SAC releases. System Center 2019 will support upgrades from two prior SAC releases so customers running System Center 1801 or System Center 1807 will be able to upgrade to System Center 2019; just as System Center 2016 can be upgraded to System Center 2019.

System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) is not impacted by the 2019 release change and will continue current branch release cadence of three times per year as noted in the documentation, “Support for Configuration Manager current branch versions.”

Call to action

In March, customers will have access to System Center 2019 through all the channels! We will publish a blog post to mark the availability of System Center 2019 soon. As always, we would love to hear what capabilities and enhancements you’d like to see in our future releases. Please share your suggestions, and vote on submitted ideas, through our UserVoice channels.

Frequently asked questions

Q: When will I be able to download the System Center 2019?
A: System Center 2019 will be generally available in March 2019. We will update this blog to inform that the build is available for download through the Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC).

Q: Is there any change in pricing for System Center 2019?
A: No.

Q: Will there be a new Semi-Annual Channel release along with System Center 2019?
A: No. There will not be Semi-Annual Channel releases, but new features before the next Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release will be delivered through Update Rollups.
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Source: Coming soon: Microsoft System Center 2019! - Windows Server Blog

Brink · May 6, 2019

Introducing new Microsoft 365 security center and compliance center

In the past few years, we have been heavily investing in the security and compliance areas to help organizations safeguard their digital estate and achieve compliance. According to recent customer research, we heard that while security and compliance are both top of mind areas in data protection, most organizations have different teams working in these two spaces. To empower your security and compliance professionals to work more efficiently in dedicated platforms, we are excited to announce the availability of Microsoft 365 security center (security.microsoft.com) and Microsoft 365 compliance center (compliance.microsoft.com).

The new specialized workspaces enable your security and compliance teams to have centralized management across your Microsoft 365 services, bringing together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), with several Azure capabilities.

In both specialized centers, you can easily find actionable insights, alerts, and scores to help you understand your security and compliance risks and leverage artificial intelligence to strengthen your security and compliance posture. You can find more details about each center in the following paragraphs.

Microsoft 365 security center

The new Microsoft 365 security center provides security administrators and other risk management professionals with a centralized hub and specialized workspace that enables them to manage and take full advantage of Microsoft 365 intelligent security solutions for identity and access management, threat protection, information protection, and security management. With it they’ll gain the visibility, control, and guidance necessary to understand and act on the threats that their organization is facing today, have faced in the past, and may face in the future.

This new workspace is organized around the products that make up Microsoft Threat Protection by rendering them in a completely new way, one that’s focused on the entities that our customers must secure across their entire digital estate. We have consolidated the experience across Microsoft 365 products and designed around the concepts of Identity, Endpoints, User Data, Cloud App and Infrastructure, and not the underlying products that help secure them. This enables end-to-end security insights and management and paves the way for a comprehensive Microsoft 365 security solution.

In addition, the Microsoft 365 security center enables organizations to reduce security risks by providing them with the tools necessary to assess their current and historical security postures and to determine the appropriate set of actions to take to mitigate future risks. These tools consist of rich dashboards, reports, and interactive experiences like Microsoft Secure Score, each of which are designed to provide security administrators with the visibility, controls, and guidance they need to drive maximum security posture improvements. Microsoft 365 security center also provides experiences for security operators (SecOps) through the integration of incident response capabilities such as a centralized alerts view and hunting capabilities which can be used to perform ad-hoc investigations.

Microsoft 365 compliance center

The new Microsoft 365 compliance center is a specialized workspace for your compliance, privacy, and risk management professionals. In the new center, you can assess your compliance risks through Compliance Manager, protect and govern your data with sensitivity and retention labels, respond to regulatory requests like Data Subject Requests, and access to more other compliance and privacy solutions.

The new experience helps you reduce compliance risks and protect your digital estate more easily and effectively with three new insights:

With the Compliance Manager integration, Microsoft 365 compliance center provides you with visibility into your compliance posture against key regulations and standards like the GDPR, ISO 27001, NIST 800-53, and more on the homepage. You can then perform risk assessments and follow step-by-step guidance to enhance your compliance and privacy controls.

Additionally, to help you label data more accurately, the new Microsoft 365 Label Analytics preview can enable you to analyze and validate how sensitivity and retention labels are being used beyond your Office 365 workloads.

We also brought in the Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) insights into Microsoft 365 compliance center to help you identify compliance risks across applications, discover shadow IT, and monitor employees’ non-compliant behaviors.

We will be gradually rolling out the new experience from the end of January, and the rollout will be completed worldwide by the end of March. Once this new experience is rolled out, you can access it by visiting security.microsoft.com or compliance.microsoft.com or from the Microsoft 365 admin center.

You can learn more about the new Microsoft 365 security center and Microsoft 365 compliance center in our technical supporting document.
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Source: Introducing the new Microsoft 365 security center and Microsoft 365 compliance center - Microsoft Tech Community - 326959

Windows 10: Build 2019: Developing people-centered experiences with Microsoft 365

Build 2019: Developing people-centered experiences with Microsoft 365

Build 2019: Developing people-centered experiences with Microsoft 365

Build 2019: Developing people-centered experiences with Microsoft 365

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