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CRN’s annual Solution Provider 500 list recognizes North America’s largest solution providers by revenue, and serves as a prominent benchmark for many of the channel’s most successful companies. This year’s list of companies represents a combined revenue of more than $501.2 billion, and the honorees are among the top influencers driving momentum in the IT industry and the global technology supply chain.
“We’re proud to accept the CRN SP500 award for the 12th year in a row! This recognition underscores our commitment to innovation, client satisfaction, and industry leadership. It’s a testament to the hard work and dedication of our team, whose persistent pursuit of excellence continues to drive our success. This accolade inspires us to push boundaries further and set new standards in technology solutions, ensuring our clients thrive in the digital landscape.” Christa Anderson – VP of Alliance, Marketing, and Sales Development
Secure Firewall now integrates into Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN)! Starting with the 7.4.1 update, Secure Firewall Virtual (fka FTDv) now integrates with Azure vWAN to simplify firewall deployment in Azure. Key benefits include built-in availability and resiliency, quick provisioning, simplified routing, and integrated support. This integration enhances security and consistent policy enforcement across hybrid cloud environments, thus elevating the cloud security posture for Azure customers.
Bookmark Recommendation: Always looking for the latest recommended releases for Cisco Nexus 9K or Catalyst 9K’s? Bookmark these!
Have you upgraded to 6.8.2 yet? With CentOS reaching its end of life on June 30th, 2024, Cohesity is migrating the baseOS platform from CentOS 7.9 to RHEL 7.9. This upgrade is low-risk, since CentOS 7.9 and RHEL 7.9 are binary compatible. Update Cohesity clusters to remain supported!
Self-Service upgrades for FlashArray, sign us up! Pure Storage has announced that customers now have access to self-service upgrades for their FlashArray through the Pure1 portal. Previously, customers would open a ticket with Pure Support to have the upgrades performed requiring schedule alignment between Customers and Pure engineers. This new method is more user-friendly, involving automated health checks, downloading the necessary upgrade packages, and executing the upgrade once the array is onboarded through Pure1 and the new Edge Service. Don’t fret; support-led upgrades are still available.
In a recent blog post, Rubrik discusses how their system engineers ensure software reliability and customer confidence. Key elements include high-quality observability, maintaining stable infrastructure, shifting left in the development process, and providing tailored solutions. They emphasize robust monitoring, stress testing, and proactive issue resolution. The post highlights the importance of reliability, scale, stress handling, resiliency, and longevity in their systems, using a detailed case study to illustrate these principles in action.
It’s great to see VMware and Microsoft’s relationship continue to foster as it relates to Azure VMware Solution. This week’s joint announcement now allows customers with eligible VMware Cloud Foundation (“VCF”) entitlements to enable mobility to and from on-premises environments to Azure VMware Solution. This flexibility, on top of the VMware Rapid Migration Plan, allows customers to take advantage of flexible licensing AND reduce the cost and time it takes to migrate to Azure VMware Solution.
Microsoft Build took place in late May. You can find a short recap HERE from our VP of Solutions and Success, Christine Dillard.
Save on Azure compute charges with the Azure Savings Plan. Designed for businesses that need flexibility in terms of where and what consumes their hourly compute across regions.
ICYMI: Information about Migration Incentives, Bring Your Own Licensing (BYOL), discounts, and Azure Credits to support your migration to Azure VMware Solution.
ClipChamp’s new AI feature, silence removal, automatically deletes pauses over 3 seconds in videos and is free in preview. Rollout is by late July.
Users will be able to use Draft with Copilot in Microsoft Word with the on-canvas Copilot menu when selecting text, a list, or a table to generate new content starting in August. Today those formats are unable to be processed.
Users can select a language of choice during a Teams meeting even without activating transcripts or captions. This feature, available when ‘Allow Copilot’ is set to ‘Only During the Meeting,’ will ensure responses are in the chosen language. Rollout begins mid-June.
Relevance Tuning for Graph connectors for Microsoft Search and Copilot for Microsoft 365 will let admins apply importance weights to properties of Graph connections. The ranking model will consider the property weight when finding relevant content, prioritizing the properties that are most important for the organization and ensure that relevant content is returned for the given query.
Organizations will automatically be added to the Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps public preview on July 7, 2024, unless they update their preview features settings by July 1, 2024. Failure to act implies consent to the changes.
A new feature will automatically remove allow list entries 45 days after their last use, starting late June. This applies to customers with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection and Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 or 2. Users are advised to update their allow entries to utilize this new feature.
New details on who or what is responsible for releasing a message from quarantine will be available. The Release by field will be propagated with the email address of the user or admin responsible for the release. This will be available in the email summary flyout panel accessible from the Quarantine page.
New details are coming about who or what is responsible for releasing a message from quarantine. The “Release by Feld” will be propagated with the email address of the user or admin responsible for the release and be available in July.
Improve authentication strength by using passkeys stored on devices. Users will see new registration options in My Security Info. The rollout will complete by early August.
Users can now sign in with their phone without a password for multiple accounts in the Authenticator App on any Android device that supports it. They can add several accounts in Microsoft Entra to Microsoft Authenticator and use phone sign-in for all of them from one Android device. The Microsoft Entra accounts can belong to the same or different tenants.
Platform SSO for macOS is available in public preview. Platform SSO is an enhancement to the Microsoft Enterprise SSO plug-in for Apple Devices that makes usage and management of Mac devices more seamless and secure. At the start of public preview, Platform SSO works with Microsoft Intune.
External authentication methods enable you to use your preferred MFA solution with Entra ID.
Beginning January 2025, Exchange Online will enforce a new External Recipient Rate limit of 2000 recipients per 24 hours, introduced in two phases for new and existing tenants.
The classic Exchange admin center is retired, and the “View Another Mailbox” feature is now in the modern EAC, which admins can access.
Contributors will be able to deploy workspace content between stages using Microsoft Fabric Deployment Pipelines starting late July 2024. The update will be completed by early August 2024, and admins should review roles to comply with organizational policies.
Starting now, Intune MAM service updates will require the latest versions of iOS wrapped apps, iOS SDK integrated apps, and the Company Portal for Android. Users will be blocked from launching outdated apps. iOS LOB apps must be on Intune Wrapper/SDK version 17.7.0 or later.
Struggling to keep up to date with the latest features and bundles with Microsoft 365? Use this interactive click-through to compare and learn the various capabilities you can unlock at each licensing level.
Delve Web will retire on December 16, 2024. Most features are available in other Microsoft 365 experiences, with Profile Cards being the main alternative.
Microsoft 365 is reducing support for Natural Language-Based Search in favor of keyword-based searches, starting early July. Affected products include Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Search on Bing and office.com.
“Catch up” is a new feature in Microsoft Copilot, that requires a license and provides updates and action prompts on a tab, rolling out from late June to July.
Connection statistics for admins in Microsoft Graph Connector will provide insights into crawled and indexed items, and will be available in Public Preview along with General Availability by early July.
The Microsoft Copilot app will be available in classic Outlook for Windows by mid-June.
Microsoft Copilot introduced the ability to create PowerPoint presentations from PDF files.
OneDrive for Business is simplifying web URLs for easier navigation, rolling out mid-June to mid-July 2024. The new format is “tenant-my.sharepoint.com” with no impact on existing scenarios. Old URLs will redirect, and no preparation is needed from users. Automation and scripts remain unaffected.
OneDrive has a feature for annotating PDFs with text boxes, rolling out by late June. Users can edit PDFs in OneDrive and SharePoint by opening the file and using the ‘Edit’ and ‘Add Text’ commands.
OneDrive for Web will soon enable “Offline Mode” for Windows and macOS devices running the OneDrive sync app, allowing users to continue working with OneDrive even when offline.
Users can edit PDFs in OneDrive and SharePoint by opening the file and using the ‘Edit’ and ‘Add Text’ commands.
CLASSIC: Users with a Copilot license will see a new Copilot icon, providing access to various Copilot for Microsoft 365 features in classic Outlook for Windows. Copilot chat experience in Outlook is expected to finish by late June. Summarize by Copilot and Coaching by Copilot are already available, as is draft by Copilot.
The tenant setting “disableShareWithEveryone” that was previously set to “off” by default, will now be set to “on” by default. This means that makers will not be able to share their canvas apps with the “Everyone” group without changing this setting. This aligns with Microsoft’s recent security recommendations of being “Secure by Default.” Preventing sharing with this group aligns with this security posture due to the overexposure of data.
Starting in early June, a new feature allows end users to sort, filter, and search their canvas app galleries with Copilot. When working with a gallery, users will be able to quickly filter, sort, and search for the items in the gallery using natural language. This is a net-new functionality, as the current gallery does not support filtering unless the maker manually implements the capability.
Stream (Classic) retired on April 15, 2024, with all content being deleted on August 20, 2024.
New video page templates are coming to SharePoint Online and Stream, with a rollout in June. Users will be able to create video pages and news posts directly from the Stream web app.
Restricted SharePoint Search for Copilot will allow admins to limit search to selected SharePoint sites. Rollout will complete by late June. The feature is off by default and requires admin roles to enable. Users can access content from allowed sites and personal files.
Videos uploaded to SharePoint Online, Yammer, and Office.com will soon have automatic transcriptions. The feature is enabled by default but can be disabled via PowerShell. No preparation is needed, but informing users is suggested.
Channel cards will provide an overview of a channel, including description, activity, team name, and membership, and appear on desktop and web by hovering over channel names. Rollout is expected to be complete by late July 2024.
The support for Microsoft Teams Live Events has been extended beyond the initial retirement date of September 30th, 2024. Customers can continue using it and upgrade to town hall, the new event solution, at their convenience.
Teams will automatically share a recap message after a meeting, including links to the meeting recap page and meeting artifacts such as the transcript, recording, files shared, and meeting notes. The rollout is expected to complete by mid-June.
Hybrid meetings will get speaker recognition technology for all Teams Rooms, using voiceprints to identify participants. This feature will roll out worldwide by late July, and organizations can prepare by setting up voice profiles and enabling the feature for supported hardware.
Meeting experiences for web users on Safari and Firefox will receive performance enhancements and a modern UI, starting early July. The update improves the experience for guests and aligning the UI with Chrome.
A new meeting option allows organizers to control who can admit participants from the lobby. This update provides two choices: only organizers and co-organizers, or including presenters. The feature will roll out in July.
An Explicit Consent policy for user content in meetings is coming, requiring participant agreement for audio and video use in transcription, recording, or Microsoft Copilot. Organizations can enable this policy through the Teams Admin Center. Rollout completes by late June.
Meeting organizers can soon manage access to recordings, transcripts, AI recaps, and Copilot features. This will roll out in June 2024, with settings accessible under the ‘Recording and Transcript’ tab. Options include access for everyone, organizers only, or specific people. The default setting is ‘Everyone.’
Teams introduced the ability to duplicate existing webinars to simplify event creation, allowing organizers to replicate webinar details, presenters, theming, and more.
Meeting organizers of recurring meetings will be prompted to create a Microsoft Loop workspace for sharing and collaborating on meeting content. This feature will support meetings with 3-50 invitees.
Teams for Windows and Mac will display meeting details such as the title, start and end time, and number of participants on the pre-join screen for in-tenant participants, but external guests will not see these details.
Introducing Intelligent Call recap, providing AI-generated notes and action items from calls within the Calls app. This feature, available for VoIP and PSTN calls with transcription enabled, will roll out in early June 2024 for Teams Premium or Microsoft Copilot users.
VBScript is being deprecated, and will be replaced with JavaScript, PowerShell, and other alternatives. Deprecation starts in the second half of 2024, in which VBScript will be available as features on demand (FODs). This will continue until sometime around 2027.
A PC for the AI era—the Copilot+ PC—was announced. They utilize new silicon with a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of more than 40 trillion operations per second.
Copilot in Windows is evolving into a standalone application. With this change, users of Copilot will get the benefits of a traditional app experience such as resizing, snapping, and moving the window. In addition, Copilot will appear at the center of the Windows taskbar, offering a familiar chat experience to help users search, create, and collaborate.
If any of these updates or changes are concerning to you, or pose as a challenge for your team, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team! We will be happy to work with you and navigate the changes with you. Feel free to fill out the form below to get in contact with our team.
Like any good partner, we’re listening! Since the latest advancements and announcements are coming in quickly, we’ve separated the list into subcategories below. Let us know what you’d like to see more of!
Contact our team today to get help with any of the changes mentioned above!
