Digital transformation in organizations has gone from being an opportunity to a necessity. However, companies often encounter barriers, such as lack of resources, system complexity or dependence on developers.

In this article we will talk about Power Platform, the Microsoft platform that allows you to create customized business solutions, analyze data and automate processes without writing a single line of code.

What is Power Platform?

Reducing repetitive work, minimizing human error and streamlining task tracking and control are just some of the challenges companies face on their path to digitization. To remain competitive, companies need agile and intelligent solutions that help them address new challenges in a secure manner.

Power Platform is a Microsoft platform that allows you to create customized business solutions without writing code. With Power Platform you can analyze data, optimize processes, create applications and chatbots with artificial intelligence, and connect them with other Microsoft and third-party services.

In addition, being a low-code development platform, it requires little technical knowledge to implement powerful solutions that help your teams work effectively and securely.

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What tools does Power Platform include?

• Power Apps: It is an application creation tool with which you can design and publish mobile and web applications for different scenarios, such as forms, surveys, inventories, etc.
• Power Automate: It is a process automation tool used to create workflows that connect different actions and services, such as sending e-mails, updating records, synchronizing files, etc.
• Power BI: It is a data analysis tool that allows you to create interactive reports and dashboards to visualize and share information relevant to your business to make more informed and, consequently, smarter decisions.
• Power Virtual Agents: It is a chatbots creation tool that allows you to design and deploy virtual agents that can interact with your customers or employees through different channels, such as web, mobile, Teams, etc.
• Power Pages: A Web site creation tool with which you can design, configure and publish modern, outward-facing commercial Web sites that connect to Microsoft Dataverse data and other Microsoft and third-party services.

Microsoft offers Power Platform within its cloud platform for productivity, Microsoft 365. It is also integrated with Dynamics 365 and Azure.

Benefits that companies can obtain by maximizing the potential of Power Platform in their digitization journey:

• 
  Concentrate and locate information and processes:
  It is vital that information be shared in an agile and unified manner. Using Power Platform’s specialized tools, you can concentrate knowledge in a single location instead of having it scattered in user mailboxes, files on network drives, hard disks and even in the head of the manager.
• 
  Reduce repetitive work:
  When information and processes are not properly organized it is customary to add repetitive work that can be frustrating and error inducing. Power Platform allows you to automate repetitive tasks so that people can spend their time on more valuable tasks.
• 
  Minimize human error:
  When performing routine tasks, more errors can be made due to, among other factors, loss of attention by repeating the same process over and over again. By automating them, we reduce human errors, which are the most obvious consequence of poorly defined processes.
• 
  Homogenize internal procedures:
  This ensures that each person always uses the same process to work avoiding having several different processes for the same purpose.
• Streamline the monitoring and control of tasks: By using a standardized process, we will be able to see where we are and have control over the execution of tasks.

The five Power Platform tools are powerful on their own, but together they maximize their power. Below we explain each one in detail:

Power Apps: Create and share applications quickly

PowerApps allows you to create business applications that easily connect to data, use logical expressions such as Excel and work on most web browsers and mobile platforms (Android, iOS and Windows).

With PowerApps, business people can create their own applications autonomously and according to their needs through simple visual forms that allow them to display and enter data from different information sources, both inside and outside Microsoft 365.

Through PowerApps data query and creation, organizations have a way to homogenize and standardize the collection of information, so that all employees can incorporate and consume valid, up-to-date and accessible company information.

Power Automate: Simplifies repetitive tasks and processes

Power Automate is a service that allows you to create workflows to automate business processes of different types quickly and securely. The main characteristic of these flows is that they are based on the model of “when one thing happens, perform this series of actions”, known as “if this then that“.

This model allows you to create flows that are triggered by multiple reasons, for example, when a new record is inserted from an application of PowerAppsor someone uploads a document to a library of SharePoint Onlineor something happens in one of the services accessible from the hundreds of data connectors offered by the tool. The system then allows for everything from sending notification emails, to initiating approval processes, to altering data in other data sources.

Creating these workflows is really easy through its designer that allows you to compose the processes by dragging boxes and linking them in a simple way to provide the necessary data to each step of the implemented procedure. Business users will be able to create everything from the simplest flows to processes with complex conditions and multiple branches, all without programming a single line of code.

With the implementation of business processes through Power Automate, organizations can process information in a fast, continuous, controlled and, above all, homogeneous manner.The organization’s procedures do not depend exclusively on the workload and motivation of one or more people.

With Power Automate you can automate repetitive, routine or complex tasks that previously required manual intervention.

Power BI: Discover hidden knowledge in your data

With data entered through PowerApps and processed with Power Automate, organizations need to visualize this information in an aggregated way to better understand how the business is performing.

With Power BI you can make sense of your data and make fast, appropriate business decisions by providing everyone involved with data-driven insights for immediate answers. The solution helps us to incorporate information from all our systems, unify it and visualize it in an interesting, relevant and, above all, real-time way, which helps us to make better decisions in an agile and faster way.

We can easily connect our databases to Power BI to perform business analysis quickly and independently. The application connects to many databases, both locally and in the cloud. In collaboration with other applications such as, among others, Dynamics 365, Azure SQL Database, Salesforce, Excel and SharePoint, it allows the creation of detailed summaries that will help make many critical decisions in your company.

Power Virtual Agents: Quickly respond to the needs of your customers and employees

Power Virtual Agents makes it easy to create chatbots to converse with customers or employees without the need for programming or knowledge of Artificial Intelligence, helping companies to solve problems of slowness in human chains.

Bots allow you to interact with your customers and employees in any conversation and easily resolve day-to-day issues so your team can focus on complex issues.

This solution also includes the possibility of extending its capabilities through Power Automate, which expands its capabilities by allowing the creation of much more powerful conversational agents.

Power Pages: Create your own websites

Power Platform’s latest tool is Power Pages, with which you can design and publish fast, secure and easy-to-use web pages for different purposes, such as displaying information, collecting data, offering services or interacting with users.

Your Power Pages web pages can adapt to different devices and integrate with other Power Platform tools, such as Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI or Power Virtual Agents.

Power Platform cross-cutting solutions

Microsoft offers a number of solutions that help extend the capabilities of Power Platform:

• 
  Data connectors:
  All the solutions that make up Power Platform have a very special common feature, the data connectors. These connectors allow, in the context of each service, access to the information and functionalities of other cloud tools (including hundreds of non-Microsoft services) allowing to query, modify and collect data from a wide variety of sources and incorporate them into the organization’s business processes.
• 
  Microsoft Dataverse:
  Microsoft Dataverse enables secure storage and management of data used by solutions deployed with Power Platform.
• 
  AI Builder:
  AI Builder is a solution that allows you to easily add artificial intelligence to workflows and Power Apps, as well as predict outcomes to help improve business performance without writing code.
• 
  Power Fx:
  A low-code programming language used to create formulas and expressions in Power Apps. It is based on Excel and has a simple and familiar syntax.
• 
  Managed Environments:
  These are isolated spaces where you can create and manage your Power Platform applications, flows and data. They allow you to control access, security and the lifecycle of your solutions.

Don’t miss our on-demand event in which our experts experts explain how to maximize the potential of Dynamics 365 by creating your own applications with Power Platform. Access it here!

In this article we share with you the latest news from Stream, Teams and Office that we have considered most interesting to take advantage of the maximum potential that they offer us:

Microsoft Teams

Additional filters for the approvals view

The Approvals app provides an easy way to bring audit, compliance, accountability, and workflows to structured and unstructured approvals in Teams.

The Microsoft Teams approval list within the personal app includes additional filters to filter the list of approvals that we as users must approve or reject. Now, you can search for keywords in the approval title or filter by requested or custom approvals. Microsoft is expected to add more filters in the future.

Microsoft Stream

Create video playlists with Microsoft Lists

Users will be able to organize OneDrive and SharePoint videos into playlists for easy consumption and distribution. People with access to the playlist and the files in it can view/listen to the video/audio files in order or skip back and forth between playlist items.

Stream playlists are created and accessed through Microsoft Lists, and can use other Lists features. Playlists can be created directly from Stream and through the List creation flows in Office , SharePoint , and Microsoft Lists . Users can add any video and audio file to a playlist to which they have access. Playlists can be accessed from stream.office.com or from the Microsoft Lists home page.

Search the transcript of the videos

This feature allows users who are watching a video to search for keywords contained in the video transcript. This feature is available on video files that have transcripts and are stored on OneDrive or SharePoint and consumed with Microsoft Stream.

Users can browse the search results and click on a part of the transcript to go to the corresponding point in the video. To do so, they’ll need view or edit permissions on a file to search the transcript.

Note: This function is for searching the transcript of a single video. Users also have the option to search the transcripts of all videos they have permission to view using Microsoft 365 search.

 Check the views analytics

Microsoft Stream launches the Analytics section within the web player experience. Users can now see the total count of views and viewers for the video for the past 7, 30, and 90 days, as well as a historical count using line charts in the plugin dashboard. Video owners and publishers can disable the plugin for users with “view only” permissions.

Office applications

New Office look in preview

Microsoft has announced the new look and feel of Office for the web and installed Office apps. The visual elements have been changed to give it a clean and modern look that helps users to focus, keeping the location of the commands or the icons or the name of any function.

Process automation helps us to simplify and standardize processes, making them more efficient and much more robust. In addition, thanks to technology, each of the automated processes provides us with a lot of valuable information to better understand what we do and how we work.

Therefore, automation is not something isolated, but must be treated as part of a gear that works together with data analysis, the creation of solutions and business applications, etc. But what is the next level?

The sophistication of automation to reinvent processes that learn, anticipate and act efficiently

When we take process automation to the next level, we no longer just talk about automating repetitive tasks, but go further by combining automation itself with advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning or RPA (Robotic Process Automation), among others, to design, automate, supervise, measure and analyze each process in order to maximize its potential. We are talking about hyperautomation.

As Gartner predicted, hyperautomation has been a growing strategic trend during 2021, and will continue to be so for the next few years, mainly due to the search for more efficient ways to manage business processes in an increasingly changing and competitive environment. . Thus, it is not surprising that in those companies that are already in an advanced digitization process and understand the cloud and innovation as levers for progress, the hyper-automation of processes is one of their priorities.

Microsoft Power Platform tools help us transform and enrich our data – which would otherwise have to be mechanically and repetitively fed by a person – in order to achieve operational excellence, with greater optimization, quality and cost savings.

You want to know more?

Do not miss the digital event that we will celebrate on Thursday, May 5, in which you will be able to see the creation of a digital business process enriched with artificial intelligence.

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The consolidation of the hybrid work environment together with the sophistication of cyber threats has put security in the focus of companies, where CISOs and IT managers, in general, have a key role.

IDC Research Spain predicts that during this 2022 the trend of adopting security as a service will be confirmed, at least in 38% of companies, since the massive migration to the cloud demands intrinsic security to protect company assets .

We share with you the 3 essential challenges that the CISO must face and their keys to better understand them, in order to successfully address and accelerate cybersecurity.

1. The complexity of security

Each of the surfaces to be protected brings with it different complexities and casuistry. Having the know-how to effectively manage and control everything that cybersecurity entails is a high added value, which companies prefer to cover with a specialist partner .

Specifically, we highlight these three factors that make security such a complex labyrinth when it comes to detecting, preventing and responding to vulnerabilities, threats and attacks : perimeter opening, threat sophistication, the human factor and a multitude of products different.

2. Budget investment

According to one of IDC Research Spain ‘s key predictions, by 2023 55% of organizations will allocate half of their security budgets to cross-technology ecosystems/platforms designed for rapid consumption and unified security to drive agile innovation.

The economic impact of a security breach and its repercussions on the business is usually greater than what it would have cost to avoid it. Here, the saying: “prevention is better than cure” must be a maxim. The risks of an attack are already well known: operational stoppage with its consequent irreversible economic loss, reputational crisis, loss of clients, leak of confidential data, etc.

Of course, a company can recover from a cyberattack, but with total certainty it will mark a before and after, leaving a scar in its history, which could have been avoided.

3. The risks underlying the hybrid work environment

How to protect the company by guaranteeing connectivity and access to the corporate network in a decentralized environment and with employees working with personal devices (BYOD)?

In a hybrid work model, connectivity needs are continually changing because employees can connect whenever and wherever they are , ensuring their productivity. However, in this context, any user and device can easily become an attack surface, opening the door to security risks due, precisely, to the opening of the perimeter beyond the office environment.

Connectivity and security . Two challenges in one to guarantee connection and secure access to the corporate network and centralize the orchestration of all devices, according to the needs of each user. To do this, organizations must educate employees , deploy solutions that allow them to work from personal computers (BYOD) with the same security as if they were corporate computers managed by IT, and establish controls that protect the different attack surfaces to guarantee security.

Effectively addressing digital security requires a unified approach, and Microsoft’s cloud security solutions platform is clearly a competitive advantage over other alternatives.

We recommend you:

How to get out of the cybersecurity maze

We share four factors that make security so complex when it comes to detecting, preventing and responding to vulnerabilities, threats and attacks, and how to address them to successfully exit the labyrinth of cybersecurity.

Why should your company adopt a Zero Trust security strategy?

Cyber attacks are increasing day by day with more virulence than ever. Do not take anything for granted, do not trust anything or anyone; This is the slogan of Zero Trust or zero trust, a cybersecurity model that consists of completely eliminating trust from the equation. What can we do in this increasingly complex situation?

On March 14, 2022, Microsoft Teams celebrated its fifth anniversary . Since its inception, the star tool for communication and collaboration used by most companies in the world , has significantly improved the way teams work and, consequently, the productivity of companies.

During these first months of 2022, Teams has offered its clients a good repertoire of new features. From Softeng, we have selected the 7 most outstanding that will allow us to improve collaboration and productivity on a day-to-day basis. We detail them in this article.

1. What’s new in Teams meetings: Who raised their hand first?

One of the features that has helped us the most in our meetings with Microsoft Teams has been, without a doubt, the ability to raise your hand to ask a question, without it becoming a chicken coop, especially in meetings with many participants. However, there may have been a situation where you were the first to pick it up, but the last to put it down to ask your question.

Thanks to a new functionality, we can see the participants who raised their hands in an orderly manner, in order to establish an order of preference.

2. Conduct a new type of survey

Since the possibility of incorporating surveys into meetings was added, surveys have been carried out that have been very useful to increase productivity and the inclusion of the participants. But the lack of flexibility when creating polls forced us to offer the possible answers that attendees could select, thus limiting creativity.

That’s why we can now create open-ended polls, allowing us to brainstorm ideas and empowering our peers’ creativity.

When a new poll is added to the meeting, attendees will be able to access it from the same meeting chat to contribute their bit and collaborate with their ideas.

All the answers sent will be shown in a very visual panel, where we can see how many votes each proposal has had and its total percentage. And once we have the results, we can close the survey and export all the answers in Excel format.

3. Automatic recording and expiration for meetings

This new feature will free us from many headaches. Sometimes it may happen that we start an important meeting that we want to record in the future to be able to make inquiries, but for one reason or another we do not hit the button to start the recording.

Thanks to this feature, we will be able to configure in advance whether the meeting should be recorded automatically, allowing us to be more agile when starting the meeting and prevent a mistake from costing us dearly.

Along with the above, we highlight that now all recordings will automatically expire after 60 days. This policy applies by default to the entire organization, both for recordings stored in OneDrive and in SharePoint.

But does this mean that I will lose content that I need to review in the future? No, you don’t have to. As administrators of Microsoft Teams, we will be able to change the expiration period of the recordings for the entire company, even allowing us to extend it for a period so long that they never expire.

If, on the contrary, we wish to maintain this policy globally, meeting organizers can update the expiration date of the recording to avoid losing it in a timely manner. To do this, they only need to access the video file generated on their OneDrive or on the SharePoint site of the Teams channel where the meeting took place and update that property.

4. Variable playback speed and playback with transcription

Continuing with the novelties in the recordings of the meetings, new functionalities have been added to the reproduction of these that will help us save time.

In the last year, the possibility of reproducing Teams voice messages by varying the speed of the audio was incorporated, as if it were applications such as WhatsApp, because now we will have this same feature for the reproduction of the recordings of our meetings. Doing this is as simple as opening the recording in the player and selecting the speed at which we want to view its content.

Another feature that will allow us to get the most out of our recordings is the possibility of viewing the transcript along with the video. To do this, it is as easy as selecting “Transcription” in the recording player itself.

5. What’s new in Chat: Reply to a message  

When you’re in a group chat, it often happens that you want to reply to a specific message, but this functionality was only available in the mobile version of Teams. Now we have this feature available in our desktop application. In order to do so, we only have to select “Reply” for the message we want to quote. The marked message will automatically appear in our editor so that we can insert our response.

6. New Feature: Compact View

From now on, it is possible to fit more messages on the screen thanks to the new compact view of Teams messages, which will allow you to see up to 50% more content.

We can activate this functionality from the “General” option. When you activate it, you will see how the messages are compressed, saving a lot of space on the screen.

7. New feature: Mindfulness in the Ideas Viva app

The integrated Teams “Ideas Viva” application is renewed with a new functionality designed to improve our well-being at work and enjoy more with the tasks we do. It is a mindfulness functionality developed with the collaboration of Headspace, one of the companies with the most experience in the world of mindfulness. They are short sessions of 10 minutes maximum that will help us to better carry out our day-to-day work.

Want to know more about what’s new in Teams? Contact us!

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As we have overcome most of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, we see the emergence of a new work model in which organizations are shifting towards a hybrid work environment , with employees returning to the office and others continuing to work from home changing location as needed, adding the advantages of remote work and face-to-face activity.

In a study conducted internally at Microsoft on the job trend, it was found that 73 percent of workers want flexible remote work options, but at the same time, 67 percent say they also want more in-person collaboration after the job. pandemic. These figures can be applied to any organization in the world and highlight the need to establish hybrid work in all companies as a reconciliation opportunity to provide greater added value to the people who form it. However, this new scenario poses new challenges for companies.

The hybrid work challenge for companies

Providing workers access to organizational resources at home, office and everywhere in between, as well as giving them the flexibility to be able to stay home for a day, sometimes unexpectedly or unplanned, poses a new challenge. for IT departments and company security. Many users tend to connect from personal computers, which are neither protected nor managed by IT, which means that if a cybercriminal managed to enter any of these computers, it would have consequences for the entire organization.

But in this new work environment, it is not just about allowing and securing remote access. Now the user experience is more important than ever to attract and retain talent, improve productivity and ensure safety.

The solution

Microsoft offers a cloud solution that adapts to the new hybrid work environments that are needed in the current context, while solving the challenges that companies face, its name is: Windows 365 .

Windows 365 is first and foremost a PC in the cloud. A service that offers a new way to experience Windows 10 or Windows 11, transmitting your personalized applications, settings and content from the Microsoft cloud to any device so you can work with it from anywhere. This approach creates a completely new and unique category in the world: the cloud PC .

One of the main benefits of Windows 365 is simplicity. Businesses can create a cloud PC in minutes and assign it to their employees quickly and easily, choosing the size of the cloud PC that best meets the performance needs of the user, with a fixed price per user /month.

“Windows 365 combines the power and security of the Microsoft cloud with the versatility and simplicity of the PC.”

Windows 365 was announced in early July this year at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft defined it this way: – “In the same way that applications were brought to the cloud with SaaS, we now upload the operating system to the cloud, providing organizations with greater flexibility and a secure way to empower your workers to be more productive and connected, regardless of their location. “-

Such has been the success of Windows 365 since its launch that Microsoft had to suspend free trials due to high demand.

A solution adapted to the new hybrid work environments.

The evolution of Windows to an operating system that can also be in the cloud offers new possibilities to organizations of all sizes, helping them choose the best option for a particular user or role and facilitating a variety of scenarios for the new world of work.

Windows 365 is designed for organizations that need agile solutions, easy to maintain and above all secure so that any worker can always have the same corporate computer with everything they need, without having to take it anywhere.

Here are some of the scenarios in which Windows 365 is the ideal choice:

• Staff with flexibility to work in the office or at home.
• Staff working remotely using their personal (non-corporate) device.
• Personnel in mobility.
• Companies with temporary workers or a lot of staff turnover.
• Need to work with powerful PCs that do not allow easy transport (for example, CAD equipment).
• Contingency plan to have a PC (or hundreds) in minutes, in case of any event that may have been triggered.

Security and control for IT

Windows 365 is safe by design by protecting and storing information in the cloud, without the user being able to download it to their personal device as they did before. In addition, in its Enterprise version, all the policies and security measures that the company has deployed for the rest of the physical corporate teams are automatically applied to it. Finally, by having the team in the cloud, IT does not have to worry about users requiring and using a VPN from their personal computers or for their security.

The administration for IT is similar to that of the physical devices of the organization since a Windows 365 Enterprise computer not only applies corporate security policies but also IT manages them from the Microsoft EndPoint Manager console (Intune).

Windows 365 or Azure Virtual Desktop?

Windows 365 is based on Azure Virtual Desktop. However, while Azure Virtual Desktop is designed for business environments where full control, flexibility and optimization capacity is required to adjust computing and storage, Windows 365 simplifies IT’s work by eliminating the need to manage any infrastructure behind, in exchange for a fixed price per user according to the desired power.

Although from a user experience point of view, they are practically the same, there are aspects that differentiate the two Microsoft solutions:

Windows 365

• PC dedicated per user, with persistent data.
• Optimized to simplify IT management.
• Desktop with Windows 10 or Windows 11.
• It is managed from Microsoft Endpoint Manager, like the rest of the PCs.
• Does not require advanced knowledge
• Predictable price, pay per user / month (SaaS)

Azure Virtual Desktop

• Persistent, dedicated non-persistent, or shared desktop for n users.
• Optimized for flexibility (requires advanced technical knowledge).
• Windows 10/11 desktop, multisession option and Remote App
• Full control over the configuration and environment of VMs (management from Azure)
• Requires advanced knowledge
• Pay per use of the platform in Azure (consumption) + user license

It should be noted that both Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop are solutions that adapt to the hybrid workplace and in case more customization and flexibility are required, especially if your company has experience in virtualization, Azure Virtual Desktop may be the best option.

conclusion

By leveraging the power of the Windows operating system and the potential of the cloud, Windows 365 offers any organization greater peace of mind in three key ways: Power, simplicity, and security.

Do you want to see a demo and learn more about the advantages and the scenarios in which Windows 365 can help you?

Next Thursday, October 28, we will tell you about it in a digital event in which you will be able to learn about all the possibilities of the solution and how it facilitates productivity and safety in the new era of hybrid work.

Yes i want to know more

The problems of companies when enabling remote work

The arrival of COVID-19 has implied significant challenges of all kinds for companies, including those that entail adapting to a culture of decentralized collaboration and remote working that is here to stay.

Organizations that already use cloud services such as Office 365, among many other advantages, have the possibility for their users to work from anywhere and from any device, but … only with Office 365 applications. However, what about the security? What if users need to remotely access a corporate desktop application? (for example, a management application). What if they need to access files located on the company network from home?

Until now, having a solution for employees to work from anywhere using company applications and accessing corporate information also sought to reduce the workload for IT, although in reality … it entailed great complexity and assuming risks. in terms of cybersecurity among many other problems.

Some of these complications that companies run into when implementing a “classic” solution (such as allowing users to remotely connect to physical office computers or enable a desktop infrastructure within their Datacenter), are:

• Complex maintenance : If you have opted for a classic remote desktop solution, IT ends up suffering tedious maintenance due to the complexity of the infrastructure to be managed.
• Insufficient infrastructures : The deployment gradually leads to discovering the physical limit of the organization’s IT infrastructures, therefore having to acquire and deploy more assets (either personal computers or servers for the desktop service).
• Need to deploy and maintain VPNs : The headache of deploying and maintaining VPNs was necessary to offer users a way to connect to the corporate network and access their physical computer (or virtual desktop).
• Poor performance due to saturation of the corporate network : Not only because they receive more connection requests from outside the organization but because, once users are connected (either to the virtual desktop or to the computer they have in the company), they end up accessing data that is actually in the cloud (such as Microsoft 365), generating latencies and more saturation due to the comings and goings of traffic between the virtual desktop (datacenter), application data (cloud) and the computer since it is connecting the user (home or other locations).
• Significant security risks : Even assuming that the company has its IT infrastructures well protected with adequate security measures (not always the case), allowing users to access them through a VPN connection puts the entire organization at risk . This is because users usually connect from personal computers, which are neither protected nor managed by IT, which implies that if a cybercriminal managed to enter any of these computers (much easier), it would have consequences for the entire organization .

And then … What do companies really need to telecommute?

Undoubtedly, companies need to enable teleworking, but they must do it safely and by solving all the problems mentioned above ( or avoiding them , if they have not yet implemented any classic solution).

The solution that we present in this article complies with the above and also allows you to obtain the following benefits :

• To the people of an organization : Working remotely in the most productive and safe way that we have seen so far, as if they were in the office.
• To IT departments : Simplify the complexity that existed at the IT level, also offering simple management of the solution, both of the infrastructure itself and of the deployed applications, also improving the performance and security of access to applications and data.
• To the company in general : Improve the productivity of the organization and the security of its assets, optimizing costs and guaranteeing the availability of the service.

The solution that we present is called Azure Virtual Desktop

To enable teleworking to meet the aforementioned needs, Microsoft offers a new approach through a series of cloud capabilities packaged in the “Azure Virtual Desktop” solution (previously called Windows Virtual Desktop), which improves the user experience , security and at the same time reduces complexity and costs .

Azure Virtual Desktop (hereinafter AVD), is Microsoft’s virtual desktop infrastructure, in English Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), based on the Azure cloud, through which we can connect to a Windows 10 desktop remotely (or directly to one of the applications on that desktop), without having to use a VPN. In other words, the operating system, applications or corporate data runs on a remote server without having to reside on our personal device.

In this way, we allow users to use corporate applications and data from any place and device safely, always accessing their usual personalized work environment.

And all this, with relief for IT, since the solution is much simpler to manage and the applications much easier to deploy and maintain. For example, it is not necessary to acquire or maintain physical equipment, or VPN networks, or worry about performance problems, or from which device the user connects, or that the user leaves sensitive data on their personal devices or that ends up compromising the company-wide infrastructure in case your personal device is attacked by a cybercriminal.

An outstanding user experience

From a user perspective, the productivity experience is very similar to using Windows 10 on a physical computer, with the benefit that it is actually in the cloud. This implies that you can access it from anywhere and on any device, but also that the virtual machine is “close” to the apps and services that are also in the cloud.

Multi-device access (multi operating system)

And is that Microsoft has made it possible for us to connect to the virtual desktop from any operating system. Specifically, we can connect through the application created for iOS, Android, Windows or MacOS, and even from other operating systems through any modern web browser. And in any case, safely.

Optimized for Office Apps (formerly Office 365 ProPlus)

In traditional solutions, accessing information from applications such as Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, OneNote, File Explorer, requires a significant load time, because the data is not in the user’s virtual machine / desktop.

However, now, with Azure Virtual Desktop (and FSLogic technology), the user when connecting to their virtual desktop immediately has all the information of their Office 365 session as if it were on their own local disk, even if the virtual machine that is assigned to you when you connect is different.

Windows 10 experience

With WVD, the usability of the remote desktop is the same as what we find when we use Windows 10 on our physical computer, highlighting that:

• We have our files, applications and sessions available.
• Optimize Microsoft Teams audio and video so that it reaches the user’s device directly without going through their desktop (virtual machine).
• Any application designed for Windows 10 works perfectly.
• The user will only notice that he is on the virtual desktop (or using a virtual application), by the badge on the application icon of the device’s taskbar from the moment he connects.

In summary, visually and in terms of use, the environment is identical to a Windows 10.

Security and comprehensive control of corporate information

In this new approach with AVD, the operating system, data and applications reside in virtual desktops in the cloud to which the policies and security settings defined by IT are applied (as to any physical machine in the company). In addition, the infrastructure offered by the desktops (a PaaS service) is transparently protected by the security capabilities of Azure.

In this way, it is possible to obtain levels of security in terms of identity, device, applications and data that in other scenarios would be impossible to achieve, reducing the risks of data leaks and cyberattacks (including ransomware and identity theft):

• Identity protection through Azure Active Directory and multi-factor authentication, so only the right people access the desktop.
• Greater control through conditional access, allowing you to define rules to automatically authorize or deny access.
• Prevent users who connect to the remote desktop through personal devices from downloading sensitive information to their device, with the consequent security risk. From which device users connect, IT will not care.

Cost savings in infrastructure and licenses

The simplification of infrastructure requirements coupled with Azure’s elastic ability to add or shut down virtual machines in real time as needed and the potential leverage of access licenses offer huge savings for businesses. Let’s see how:

Less infrastructure resources

Until now, to implement classic solutions and obtain good performance, companies had to invest in hardware, storage and bandwidth (more powerful routers and firewalls, additional servers and cabinets, greater bandwidths to the internet, VPNs, etc.) and later , the cost of maintaining them.

On the other hand, with a cloud solution such as AVD, the need to invest (and maintain) all these assets disappears to move to a more efficient model based on pay per use according to the capacity that each company requires, the number of hours the day you need the infrastructure and how we want to optimize it through these two features:

• Machine sharing : Classic remote desktop solutions, in order to offer native Windows 10, must associate a virtual machine with each user. However, having as many virtual machines as users and also even oversized (surely they will not use all their power for most of their time), makes this model inefficient and very expensive. Instead, Azure Virtual Desktop allows you to share a Windows 10 virtual machine for multiple users simultaneously, so that it is no longer necessary to have one for each person, thus reducing the number of virtual machines required (technically, this is called multisession capacity).
• Balance cost / performance : When a user connects to their desktop in the AVD infrastructure, it can be configured to maximize performance (randomly allocating users among a predetermined number of already operational machines), or to further optimize the cost (lifting new machines only when the capacity of the existing ones is already being fully used).

Use of licenses

Apart from the consumption of Azure resources that each company needs according to their needs, each user that connects requires a subscription that contains Windows 10. However, many organizations already have some type of subscription that includes it, so if so outside, they would not have any added licensing costs.

In addition, that users have their files in OneDrive, implies that they will not really take up space on their desktops / virtual machines, with all the savings that this entails (up to 1 TB per user).

These are the subscriptions that cover access to Azure Virtual Desktop:

• Microsoft 365 E3 / E5
• Microsoft 365 F3
• Microsoft 365 Business Premium
• Windows 10 Enterprise E3 / E5

Less hassle for IT

As mentioned at the beginning, before, to have a remote desktop service (VDI) a complex infrastructure was required. For example, apart from the machines to which users connect to access their information and applications, it was necessary to have many other servers to support the service (gateways to establish connections, broker for interactions between clients and some more to guarantee access, security, system performance and redundancy for high availability). All of this made deployment and maintenance arduous, complex and very expensive.

Now, with AVD, all that complexity is reduced to a minimum, as these services are hosted in Azure and are transparent to users and administrators. In this way, Microsoft offers all the management of the service (PaaS), with which IT is limited to managing the configuration centrally and from the same Azure portal along with the rest of the services. In addition, IT can very easily manage the applications that users use, in a totally centralized way (in fact, instead of using the typical templates, the applications can reside in a common repository and not in the virtual machine).

Therefore, with AVD, given that Microsoft takes over the management and maintenance of a part of the infrastructure, IT focuses only on the part of the users, applications and operating system, managing these in a very simple way.

summarizing

Azure Virtual Desktop eliminates all the inconveniences, complexities and inefficiencies that classic solutions presented when working remotely. It offers a simplification to the maximum in IT management, cost savings by adjusting the system to suit the client in real time and a secure remote productivity environment, accessible from any device and always available (SLA 99.9%).

From Softeng, as specialists in Azure Virtual Desktop, we offer you our experience in this area, advising you and helping you get it up and running in a matter of days.

Do you want to know more about our service around Azure Virtual Desktop and how we can help you? Contact us!

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Microsoft Teams is the flagship collaboration tool used by most companies in the world, having achieved unprecedented success. However, Microsoft is not satisfied “only” with that and in recent months has accelerated the evolution of Teams relentlessly including many capabilities that allow companies to offer a more modern and secure workplace for their employees and integrating, thanks to rest of the products included in Microsoft 365, possibilities such as digitization and automation of processes, thus improving the productivity and efficiency of the entire organization. In short, Teams together with Microsoft 365, have become a platform that simplifies the complex machinery of any organization, thus promoting the digital transformation of companies . In this article, we show you a very summarized and updated photo of what Microsoft Teams allows today, as an introduction and appetizer to the next webinar in which we will show you in detail the most interesting news that it brings us!

As most of you know, Microsoft Teams is a Microsoft 365 chat-based workspace designed to improve communication and collaboration of work teams in organizations, reinforcing the collaborative functions of the Microsoft cloud platform. Since its launch to the general public more than 3 years ago, about 155 million users for more than 600,000 companies have discovered teamwork thanks to Teams.

Teams is naturally integrated with Microsoft 365 and based on Microsoft 365 Groups, the transversal service for collaboration between users. The tool brings together in a common space the collaboration applications necessary to work as a team and with which you can work with: individual and group chats, team conversations, videoconferences, notes, access to shared content, Office Online, Planner and other features that we review in this article.

An extensible and customizable work center for teams

Microsoft Teams offers the possibility of using Microsoft 365 applications by customizing the environment according to the needs of your team. With Teams, team users can:

• Conduct group or private chats to have group conversations with few members.
• Create work teams to hold conversations with specific groups of people on specific topics, as well as to share information and files.
• View content and chat history from the beginning of the conversation and at any time.
• Start video and / or voice meetings with up to 300 people simultaneously.
• Conduct live streaming events for audiences of up to 10,000 people.
• Get instant access to all shared content, collaboration tools, users, and conversations across teams’ channels and their tabs.
• Add shortcuts to frequently used documents, websites, and applications, both for yourself and for work teams.
• Access to notes and documents thanks to integration with OneNote and SharePoint Online.
• Work with Office Online documents directly from Teams.
• Plan tasks thanks to the integration with Planner, the Microsoft 365 task manager.
• Add Power BI reports.
• Enjoy a common workspace with a web interface and for mobile devices.
• Being group-based, it allows the user to move from one collaboration platform to another easily.
• Add platform-specific applications, such as Yammer, and third-party services, such as RSS feeds, Bing News Feed, or Twitter.

Organizational and business processes hub

Microsoft Teams, among other functionalities, also allows the organization’s business processes to be integrated into work teams thanks to the additional task management and approval tools offered by Microsoft Teams.

Approvals in Microsoft Teams allow everyone from frontline workers to corporate headquarters employees to easily create, manage, and share approvals from one place.

On the other hand, the Teams service allows integrating the organization’s own applications, whether they are developed in code and deployed by the company itself, or implemented with the Power Platform tools.

Guest access

Since its launch more than 3 years ago, Microsoft has continued to work to improve the tool and respond to user requests. One of the most applauded is access to guests and external collaborators. With this functionality, Office 365 users can add people from outside their organization to the team so they can participate in team conversations, join meetings, or collaborate on documents within the organization’s Teams environment, among many other functions. .

Guest accounts are added and managed through Azure AD through B2B collaboration, offering businesses the highest level of security and granularity.

A safe workspace

Microsoft Teams provides the business security and compliance features that Microsoft 365 offers its customers:

• Wide compatibility with compliance standards.
• Data encryption at all times, at rest and in transit.
• Multi-factor authentication for improved identity protection.
• Detection of confidential information and conflicting conversations.

Teams is included in the Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Business plans.

As we already advanced when we published the first article on Microsoft Teams, this communication and collaboration tool has significantly improved the way teams work and, consequently, their productivity.

The journey of Microsoft Teams is still long and the wide variety of innovations that are incorporated each month to the service offer a new world of possibilities for the digitization of organizations.

Get the most out of Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 tools with Minerva

At Softeng we want to help people boost their digital skills by improving their abilities in the use of modern and efficient tools such as Microsoft Teams, for this reason we have created Minerva.

Minerva is an application developed by Softeng, and integrated into Microsoft Teams, aimed at self-learning the services and functionalities of Microsoft 365, as well as some tips and recommendations to be more productive and work more safely in your day-to-day.

The application offers content prepared by Softeng with a high production quality and made with professional tools. The materials are mostly videos of very short duration (3 minutes on average) and oriented to very practical and simple use cases so that the user can quickly learn the most important functionalities of each of the Microsoft 365 tools.

As we told you at the beginning of this article, we are working on a digital event in which we will show you in detail the most interesting news of Microsoft Teams. In a few days we will announce the date so stay tuned to our social networks ?

Do you want to know more about Teams and our Minerva training portal? Contact us!

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E-mail and messaging applications are one of the preferred avenues for cybercriminals to introduce malware onto computers through attachments or links to malicious websites. These threats are masked in emails of false job offers, notifications of fines, alerts of payments due and even come from affected senders that we trust. In short, falling into the trap of these attacks is very simple .

Advanced protection with Microsoft Defender for Office 365

Office 365 already provides businesses with basic security measures that protect email from known spam, malware, and viruses. However, as hackers launch increasingly sophisticated and damaging attacks, companies need new tools capable of neutralizing them. For this, Microsoft offers us Microsoft Defender for Office 365 , formerly Office 365 ATP, a tool that enriches the security of the platform by providing protection against advanced threats.

What is Microsoft Defender for Office 365?

Defender for Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud-based service that protects against phishing, spoofing, and other sophisticated malware attacks through malicious links delivered through email and Office collaboration tools. 365, including SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. It offers comprehensive protection by offering surveillance throughout the entire life cycle of an attack:

• Prevention , filtering targeted attacks against corporate email, credential spoofing, ransomware, and advanced malware.
• Detection of malicious and suspicious content through artificial intelligence, correlating attack patterns to identify danger.
• Threat analysis through a control panel, to track attacks on the environment.
• Response and correction , allowing to automate responses to incidents that occur.

In this article, we are going to discuss each of the capabilities included in this powerful Office 365 security solution.

Protection against insecure attachments
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 includes two protection capabilities, Safe Attachments and Dynamic Delivery. With Safe Attachments , attachments are subjected to real-time malware behavior analysis that uses machine learning techniques to evaluate them for suspicious activity. If no suspicious activity is detected, the file is released for delivery with minimal delay time.

Dynamic Delivery , allows the user to read and respond to the mail while its attachment is being scanned, thus avoiding the penalty in user productivity. The service delivers the mail to the recipient with a message indicating that the attached file is being scanned and its progress.

Additionally, Dynamic Delivery displays a preview of the file it is scanning, further minimizing work interruptions for the user.

Protection against malicious links
Office 365 security tools scan messages in transit, blocking any malicious hyperlinks before the user can click. However, in the most advanced attacks these malicious urls are hidden in seemingly safe links that reach the recipient and in which even the most discerning user can fall victim to them.

Generic mail that includes various malicious links hidden in apparently safe links.

To deal with these malicious techniques, Defender for Office 365 has two functionalities, Safe Links and Url detonation , which act when the user clicks on the link, performing a reputation check and analysis of the link in real time, blocking the link in case it’s malicious.

When the user clicks on a malicious URL, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 automatically begins the scan, showing the user screens reporting the situation. The protection of that link remains, blocking it every time the user clicks.

Microsoft has taken a big step in the protection coverage of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 by adding the Internal Safe Links functionality. This ability protects users from malicious links sent between people in the same organization.

Internal Safe Link acts the same as Safe Link ; When a user clicks on a link, the tool analyzes it in real time and blocks it if it is malicious. This functionality deals with the scenarios in which someone impersonates the identity of a person in our organization, also preventing emails from leaving it.

Protection against identity theft (Anti-Phishing)
This functionality that protects us from phishing attacks that come from people we know a priori but in reality they are not the ones who have sent us the mail (this is what is called an attack based on impersonation). These types of phishing attacks are extremely dangerous because the recipient, when the mail “theoretically” comes from someone who seems to be a member of your organization, tends to trust and easily fall into deception. If our domains are correctly configured, an impersonation using exactly our domain should not be possible, but Microsoft Defender for Office 365 intercepts as impersonation attempts also those senders that, being incorrect, confuse because they are very similar (For example, we received an email from a sender “zperez@softegn.es”, when in reality, if this user existed, it would be “zperez@softeng.es”.

Once this new advanced functionality is activated (the policy is not activated by default ), automatically the system gradually learns how each user communicates with others inside and outside the organization, applying predictive artificial intelligence and finally protecting all users. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 licensed users.

Protection against spoofed emails from external domains (Anti-Spoofing)
This ability helps detect and block spoofed emails from external domains . Spoofing is a malicious spoofing technique that occurs when an email message originates from someone who is not who they claim to be.

To combat this type of attack, Defender for Office 365 includes a system capable of detecting spoofed emails through:

• Detection of the security settings of the source domain: By activating this functionality, Office 365 will only accept emails that come from domains that are not vulnerable to being spoofed. Specifically, for each new email that arrives at our company, check that the sender’s domain has the correct security settings *, guaranteeing that it has been sent from an account that really belongs to that domain. Otherwise, if we receive emails that come from domains without these well-configured protocols, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 blocks these emails, preventing them from reaching our users.

  * SPF, DMARC, and DKIM are the standard email authentication protocols that help protect against spam and phishing

• Reputation filters: Check the safe sender lists and the history of previous submissions from that domain.
• Anomaly Patterns: Checks for pattern anomalies by comparing with previous submissions from that domain.

  Get advanced reports and track links in messages
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 offers extensive reporting and tracking capabilities that provide administrators with insight into the type of attacks that are occurring in the organization with information from who is the target in your company, malware and spam sent or received in the company and the category of attacks you face.

Advanced reports allow you to investigate messages that were blocked due to an unknown virus or malware:

The URL tracking function allows an analysis of the links that users have clicked, also showing the blocked ones:

Collaborates safer

The ability of advanced protection for files that are shared from SharePoint Online, OneDrive for the company and Microsoft Teams offers companies a safer way to work, I m asking users to open or download malicious files.

How to acquire Microsoft Defender for Office 365?

Defender for Office 365 offers us two plans:

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 1: It is included in the Office 365 Enterprise E5 version and can be added in the following Office 365 plans that have a mail license, specifically:

• Exchange Online Plan 1 and Plan 2
• Exchange Online Kiosk
• Exchange Online Protection
• Microsoft 365 Business Basic
• Microsoft 365 Business Standard

• Office 365 Enterprise F3

• Office 365 Enterprise E1 and E3

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2: This plan combines all the capabilities of Plan 1 plus the Office 365 Threat Intelligence threat intelligence solution, it is included in Microsoft 365 Enterprise E5 and Office 365 Enterprise E5 .

From Softeng we offer you our experience and our services to help you draw up and agree on the most appropriate strategy to implement security solutions in the cloud that ensure the continuity of your business .

You want to know more? Contact us to find out how to protect your company!

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