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Lots to share in the world of Microsoft services this week. News includes Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center's new inventory & monthly servicing feature currently in preview, Azure Cognitive Services has achieved human parity in image captioning, Azure Site Recovery TLS Certificate Changes, Static Web App PR Workflow for Azure App Service using Azure DevOps, and of course the Microsoft Learn Module of the week.
Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center's new inventory & monthly servicing feature currently in preview
Microsoft has released in preview tools and services that provide insights, automation, and control to help manage monthly Office app updates. Some of the features offered include: Servicing profiles, Office Apps and Add-in Inventory, and Security Currency reports. Access to these services will require that each of the Office Apps are currently on version 2007 or higher and will require a passthrough of a simple onboarding process. More details can be found here: Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center
Azure Cognitive Services reaches human parity in image captioning
Artificial intelligence researchers at Microsoft have successfully created a solution that can generate caption for images that are more accurate than the descriptions provided by people as measured by the NOCAPS benchmark. This achievement milestone brings Microsoft one step closer in the making products and services accessible to everyone. This Computer Vision service is now commercially available and further details can be found here: Computer Vision Services
TLS Certificate changes for Azure Site Recovery
As Producer Pierre reported last week, Microsoft has updated the Azure services to use Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates from a different set of Root Certificate Authorities (CAs). As reported, the changes were made because the current CA certificates don't comply with one of the CA/Browser Forum Baseline requirements. This change also effects Azure Site Recovery service endpoints which will be updated in a phased transition across all public regions beginning on October 16 2020, completed by October 26, 2020. This change affects connectivity from on-premises configuration server/process servers (for physical/VMware VM replication), and from Hyper-V host servers/System Center VMM servers connected to the Azure Site Recovery service. Additional details regarding the change can be found here: Azure Site Recovery TLS Certificate changes
Static Web App PR Workflow for Azure App Service using Azure DevOps
Fellow Cloud Advocate, Abel Wang, has shared an amazing pull request workflow built right out of the box for use with Static Web Apps. Abel highlights how Static Web Apps uses GitHub Actions for CI/CD and when a user issues a pull request to perform certain tasks and shares steps on how to harness it. Further information can be found here: Static Web App PR Workflow
MS Learn Module of the Week
Building applications with Azure DevOps
As stated earlier, Azure DevOps enables you to build, test, and deploy any application to any cloud or on premises. Learn how to configure build pipelines that continuously build, test, and verify your applications. Complete this module here: Azure DevOps Learn Module
Let us know in the comments below if there are any news items you would like to see covered in next week show. Az Update streams live every Friday so be sure to catch the next episode and join us in the live chat.