Cloud Weekly Digest – Week of February 21-27, 2016

Take a look at last week’s news on Microsoft Cloud and miscellaneous.

WEBINARS & EVENTS 
US ONLY - Ask The Expert Session - Intro to Azure Machine Learning: Predict Who Survives the Titanic | March 15th at 9:00 am PST
Interested in doing machine learning in the cloud? In this demo-heavy talk, I will set the stage with some information on the different types of machine learning (clustering, classification, regression, and anomaly detection) supported by Azure Machine Learning and when to use each. Join webcast here.


Azure OMS TECH Friday Skype sessions | Every other Friday starting March 4th
One hour sessions focused on technical information regarding Microsoft’s business continuity and disaster recovery solutions including Azure Site Recovery (ASR), Azure Backup (AB), Operational Insights (OI), Azure Automation (AA), and related technologies. Recordings will be posted here.


Azure Active Directory Premium Customer Training Webinars | March
Join us and learn how to get up and running on Azure AD Premium quickly and easily!

REMINDER: Office 365 – FastTrack webinars | Multiple dates
Learn how to do more, together. Ask questions, learn shortcuts and find out how Office 365 can make you and your team more productive. Select one of the webinars available, register, and attend a live presentation with demos and Q&A. Webinar selection range from using Office 365 to working like a network.

REMINDER: SME roundtable on mobility at Microsoft Webinar | March 31st at 10:00 am PST
IT subject matter experts (SMEs) from our Mobility at Microsoft IT Showcase course will answer your questions about how Microsoft IT designs, develops, deploys, and supports mobility at Microsoft. Get candid answers from our experts as they share their insights and best practices.

REMINDER: Data Driven Summit - NYC | March 10, 10:00 am PST
Get help building the strategy that you need. Learn about the latest SQL Server, Hadoop, and much more at Data Driven!

REMINDER: Drive Business Results with Intelligent Tools Series | All webinars will take place on Thursday at 10am PST
Moving to the cloud is no longer a question of “if,” it’s a question of “when.” In this series you will get to see the exciting innovations enabling best-in-class, cross-platform mobile productivity, intelligent tools that can anticipate your needs to deliver timely solutions, collaboration tools built for the modern workforce and how Microsoft has delivered on its commitment to trustworthy computing across security, privacy and compliance. 

LAST REMINDER: TechNet Virtual - Conference 2016 | March 1-3, 2016
3 days of technology, inspiration and fun. To attend the event, visit the event landing page https://aka.ms/technetvc 

OFFICE 365
Office Video – First release - Choose Your Own Thumbnail
With this feature you can choose an automatically generated thumbnail from throughout the video or upload your own custom image.

Accessibility in Office 365—progress in 2015 and plans for 2016
Two weeks ago, Jenny Lay-Flurrie, chief accessibility officer for Microsoft, outlined our company-wide guiding principles and goals to improve accessibility across our products, services and websites. To support this company priority, the Office 365 team has increased its investments in accessibility to a historical high and is committed to delivering inclusive productivity experiences to empower the 1 billion+ people with disabilities on this planet to achieve more.


US ONLY - Turbocharge your productivity with CIE webcasts! | March 9th and 10th
In a race against the clock? Check out how you can help your business cross the finish line with time to spare using Windows 10 and Office 2016. 

Be more productive with new Office 365 training
The Office training team is developing tutorials to support five core Office 365 scenarios, including: “Get it done from anywhere,” “Content collaboration,” “Run more effective meetings,” “Email and Calendar on the go” and “Work like a network.”


New security management and transparency capabilities coming to Office 365
Last week, Bret Arsenault, chief information security officer for Microsoft, announced Microsoft Cloud App Security, a comprehensive cloud access security broker (CASB) solution, based on Microsoft’s acquisition of cloud security innovator Adallom. It will also power new advanced security management capabilities for Office 365 that will improve IT visibility and control. Please take a closer look at the new security management capabilities coming to Office 365: advanced security alerts, cloud app discovery, and app permissions.

February Office 365 updates
February has been another busy month for releases across our Office clients on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. There are a number of exciting new capabilities in Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In addition, we released the first cumulative feature update since the initial September release of the Office 2016 apps—otherwise known as the “Deferred Channel” build—for our commercial customers. Read on for the details.


DEV - Optimizing Office web apps and add-ins for release with Gulp
Using a Gulp task, you can optimize your Office web application or add-in by: prebuilding the Angular template cache, merging and minifying CSS and JavaScript files (both specific to your application and from external libraries), and minifying HTML files.

DEV - CRUD with the Microsoft Graph
Microsoft Graph API has full CRUD support. This post shows you a sample of that capability.

Episode 086 panel at SPTechCon—Office 365 Developer Podcast
In this episode, Jeremy Thake sits on an Office 365/SharePoint user group panel discussion with Ben Niaulin, Todd Klindt, Sue Hanley and David Feldman.

AZURE
Cloud Foundry on Azure support for Diego and open source service brokers
We introduced new Cloud Foundry capabilities on Azure. Read the post to learn more!

Logic Apps Preview Refresh released
The public release of our Logic Apps Preview Refresh brings a number of major improvements to the platform, design, deploy, and manage experiences based on feedback we've received from users.


Introducing the Visual Studio Connected Service for Azure IoT Hub
Connect your device to Azure IoT Hub in seconds with the new Visual Studio Connected Service for Azure IoT Hub!

Resize virtual machines One of the great benefits of Azure VMs is the ability to change the size of your VM based on the needs for CPU, Network or disk performance. Learn how to change the size of a virtual machine using either Azure Classic Compute VMs or the newer Azure Resource Manager VMs.

Azure Security Center adds new partners, detections, and more
We made some exciting enhancements to Azure Security Center, including more partners, detections, and security management capabilities. | Azure Security Center – Microsoft Mechanics

Application Insights: Powershell script available for creating Release Annotations
In an effort to support our user base that does not currently use VSTS, we’d like to bring you a Powershell script you can use to create Release Annotations from anywhere.

MISCELLANEOUS
Microsoft to acquire Xamarin and empower more developers to build apps on any device
In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices – including iOS, Android, and Windows.

Intelligent heating à la Aarhus
Read how Danish city Aarhus is bringing District Heating into the 21st century through cloud, IoT and Machine Learning technologies.


Welcome to Windows Holographic
Get the latest info, join forums, and start developing. Windows Dev Center is here with everything you need to know about HoloLens.


Brad Smith Addresses Apple Case
Brad Smith, Microsoft president and chief legal officer, responds to a question regarding a legal case between Apple and the U.S. government as part of testimony before a U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing titled International Conflicts of Law Concerning Cross Border Data Flow and Law Enforcement Requests.

Introducing first ever experiences for the Microsoft HoloLens Development Edition
The lie detector, cobbled together from algorithms and a 14-pronged headset that measures brain waves, is a kind of party trick Marsman (MSFT Evangelist) deploys to show software developers how to use Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning tools. If interested in learning more, please read the entire article.

DevIntersection Spring 2016 CountDown Show #2 with Scott Guthrie
Richard Campbell chats with Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie about his plans for DevIntersection Spring, April 16-22 2016 at the Swan Hotel in Orlando, Florida. Scott talks about the on-going evolution of the public cloud and Microsoft's efforts to make Azure the most effective platform for building your cloud applications. The span of technology available in Azure continues to expand rapidly and you can expect Scott to give you insight into the latest at his keynote at DevIntersection. Register today at www.devintersection.com.

Java on Microsoft Azure
On-Demand | Curious about what Microsoft has to offer the Java community? You might be surprised! Join us to explore the latest tools and technologies to help Java developers get in the cloud with Microsoft Azure, like plug-ins for Eclipse and IntelliJ, along with a look at options in Windows and Linux for authentication, security, and continuous integration (CI).

Thanks,
Bea