Episode 176 – April Showers Bring May Microsoft 365 Updates

In Episode 176, Ben and Scott dive into the April announcements around feature updates to Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Threat Protection, and Azure Active Directory. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to Episode 176 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast, recorded live on May 1, 2020. This is the show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users. Where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Scott and Ben discuss some of the recent news from the month of April, including some upcoming conferences, Azure AD Security, and Microsoft Teams. - I feel like April was never going to end. - Well, it has, I mean, it's still might not have, but officially on the calendar it has. In our brains and collective consciousness it may have not. - Yes, but the good news is, at least here in Florida, we are slowly starting to open back up. The question is, are you going to go out and do anything, now that it's opened back up? - Well, we chose to open on our day of highest deaths. So my personal approach is to stay home a little bit while longer. - You've already had it, you're immune. - We'll see, I'm thinking about paying the 120 bucks to get the test, just to find out. - Are you just to find out if you had it or not? - Yeah, some of the labs are starting to get it. So Quest has one. - Got it, interesting. - And less little antibody test. - I saw the mall, town center is going to open Monday, I think is what I saw. So yeah, stores, restaurants, I think they said are gonna open, but they have to be at 20% capacity. I think it was or 25% capacity. - Yep, 25 here. - So, we'll see. We haven't gone out and done a whole lot. We've started to see a few more people. I'm getting kind of stir-crazy and I don't know, like, I feel like we've flattened the curve and we don't need to talk about this too long 'cause we have other topics to talk about. But it's like at what point in time do you just have to start going out? Because obviously vaccines are gonna be a long way off. It feel like the curve is starting to flatten out. So I'm kind of getting close to that approach of, "All right, it's time to start getting out, "seeing some people doing some normal activities again." So yeah, my two cents. - Slowly but surely, like get back out, see family, things like that, where you can and where it makes sense. - And that's what we did. My wife's family came over the other day and they didn't even come inside. We actually just sat outside at the picnic tables, in the park next to our house. And it was her sister's birthday, so it was fun. It was fun to see them, we hadn't seen them in like a month. So all good, but there's some other events coming up now too, that are free. So there's some silver lining in all of this. There are some free events coming up that people can participate in. - Nice, what type of free events are coming? - Yes, what type of free events? So as an IT pro and as an IT pro-ish podcast, one may or may not appeal to a bunch of our audience, but Build, I have never been to a Build. This year I'm going to Build Scott, virtually because it's free and it's virtual. So that is one of the events coming up. I think you registered for it the other day. I registered for it last night. So I am going to try to keep some of the sessions. Sometimes there's some interesting things that come out of Build, especially around late Visual Studio Code or some of the PowerShell or source control stuff that I use with my PowerShell. There's always stuff that comes out around Azure and things that, well, we may not go Build applications. They still can be applicable to IT pros in terms of how you manage what developers may try to do to your environment based on new capabilities being released. So even though I'm not a developer, I still try to keep track of some of those developer-ish type conferences. - Yeah, so I think there's some exciting things that they have planned this year, if anything, just in the delivery model that they're going to use for it. So not only is registration open and certainly you should go register because it is a free event. I think there's some constraints there for a lot of us. Like one of the things I love about, you know, going to conferences, isn't just the networking. Like that's certainly valuable. But if you are going to go to sessions, you're there and it's much easier to go and not be distracted by work. So I think lots of people are gonna be potentially competing for work over May 19 and 20 while this goes on, but it's gonna be a 48-hour event and it's gonna be running for 48 hours straight, which means you're going to have coverage in geographies, which would typically feel like they would have to miss out on an event like this, just due to time of day. So if you think about folks over in Australia, and APAC, and certainly Europe and things like that, everybody is going to be able to get in on the fun. - Yeah, it should be good. And there's another one coming up that will be short. Let me think, it'll be the day after this recording goes live. Office 365 Nashville is doing a virtual one. So Daniel Glenn is kinda spearheading that one and that one is going to be on May 8. So this episode should come out May 7. I think registration will still be open, but it's a free virtual event that you can go sign up for. I'm actually speaking at that one because it was virtual and enabled me to speak at that one. So that one's coming up, we'll put a link in that one, if you wanna go register there. And then there's also one that Joel Oleson is doing. I can't remember the name of it right now, but we'll put it in the show notes. - Yeah, My 365 something or on there. - Yeah, it was gonna be like the virtual Olympics and then they ran into like some trademark issues because apparently Olympics is trademarked. Imagine that, who saw that one coming? Marathon, Virtual Marathon, I think is what it is. But it's another Microsoft 365 free Virtual Marathon. I think that one's like 36 hours straight. And I've seen like, he's trying to get 900 live sessions over the course of 36 hours. - That's gonna be quite a bit. - Yes, we will find the link for that and put that in the show notes as well. - Outlook add-ins are a great way to improve productivity and save time in the workplace. 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So if anybody did miss the 2020 Azure Virtual Bootcamp, just hop on YouTube and search around for some of those videos and things that came out from all the wonderful speakers who put their time into it. - All right, sounds good. Yeah, we didn't do much here because it was all virtual. So who knows if they do kind of an in person one later this year, maybe we'll try to jump on, maybe we'll just have to wait for round two and come back to it in 2021. - It'll still be there. - Yep, it will, hopefully I'll in person again. So there was also some news that came out these past few weeks, different things around Azure, some office 365 stuff, some Azure AD stuff, some that spans all of them like Windows Virtual Desktop. So we decided we'd just dive into some of these news articles that have our news announcements that have come out over the last few days. Take your pick. Which one would you like to start with? - Let's see, I always like the identity stuff. I think they've done some good things there for customers, especially as some of the licensing has opened up like bringing Azure AD Premium P1 to the Microsoft 365 business here and things like that. And they're starting to open up the platform more and more for all customers. Which is always nice to see, especially in these times when everyone is working at home or remotely, or if anything, just on the go more than they are. I think that whole Zero Trust Model around identity and securing your identities and gating your access to all these resources, is super important. So one of the things they've done there is they've extended the ability to use Azure AD single sign-on for an unlimited number of cloud apps at no extra cost. And that's across every SKUs. So now in the past, you would have been limited in the number of cloud apps that you could add to a user. And then also the number that you could potentially perform SSO against your Azure Active Directory with. So this is using SSO with Azure AD, whether you're federated or unfederated. And like I said, it's available across all of the pricing tiers or SKUs of Azure AD, even Azure Active Directory free. - Perfect, 'cause this used to be, I think the limit used to be 10, right? I think it was 10 apps. - 10 apps, yeah but you were even limited within SKUs by how many apps you could have and some could have 10 cloud apps, but not SSO. And others could have 10 cloud apps with SSO. So now it's just open across the board, which is much nicer. I mean, it's more consumable. So you make those things more readily available and hopefully people actually use them. You know, that would be the next step is going out and get