Free access to Microsoft Azure Cloud services, Office 365, EMS, SharePoint & more!!

Microsoft IT Pro Cloud Essentials is a free annual subscription which includes cloud services, education, and support benefits. IT Pro Cloud Essentials provides IT Implementers with hands-on experience, targeted educational opportunities, and access to experts in areas that matter most to increase knowledge and create a path to career advancement.

With this you can,
– Get in the cloud with Azure and extended trials of Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility Suite.
– Increase your cloud knowledge and get certified with training courses
– Get a free support incident and priority support in TechNet forums to help you succeed.

With IT Pro Cloud Essentials, you get exclusive access to extended trials, both Office 365 for 60 days and Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) for 90 days. Part of evaluating the cloud is also testing out your infrastructure—like SharePoint, hosted Office apps and more—in the cloud. Sign up before September 30, 2016 and for three months you will get $100 per month of Azure credits.

So what are you waiting for? Let we get started by signup your profile here.

Happy cloud computing!!

Use Microsoft IT Pro Cloud Essentials & get access to cloud services, education, support, for free!!

Microsoft IT Pro Cloud Essentials is a free annual subscription which includes cloud services, education, and support benefits. IT Pro Cloud Essentials provides IT Implementers with hands-on experience, targeted educational opportunities, and access to experts in areas that matter most to increase knowledge and create a path to career advancement.With IT Pro Cloud Essentials, you get exclusive access to extended trials, both Office 365 for 60 days and Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) for 90 days. Part of evaluating the cloud is also testing out your infrastructure—like SharePoint, hosted Office apps and more—in the cloud. Sign up before September 30, 2016 and for three months you will get $100 per month of Azure credits.

With this you can,
– Get in the cloud with Azure and extended trials of Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility Suite.
– Increase your cloud knowledge and get certified with training courses
– Get a free support incident and priority support in TechNet forums to help you succeed.

With IT Pro Cloud Essentials, you get exclusive access to extended trials, both Office 365 for 60 days and Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) for 90 days. Part of evaluating the cloud is also testing out your infrastructure—like SharePoint, hosted Office apps and more—in the cloud. Sign up before September 30, 2016 and for three months we give you $100 per month of Azure credits.

So what are you waiting for? Let we get started by signup your profile here.

Happy cloud computing!!

Understand Analytics in-detail with Application Insights

Application Insights is an extensible analytics service that monitors your live application. It helps you detect and diagnose performance issues, and understand what users actually do with your app. It’s designed for developers, to help you continuously improve the performance and usability of your app. Simply, you install a small SDK in your application, and set up an account in the Application Insights portal. The SDK monitors your app and sends telemetry data to the portal. The portal shows you statistical charts and provides powerful search tools to help you diagnose any problems. For more info, you can refer: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-insights-overview/

In order to learn more on this, I will suggest you to have a quick look at this video; you will learn advanced querying concepts with Analytics.  It provides an overview of the telemetry data that Application Insights collect and how you can you use interactive querying to get instant answers to your questions.

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/P591/player

Hope this helps.

FYI: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 & end of support next year…

Yes you heard it right, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is approaching the end of support by next year; you can refer the Support lifecycle for it.

Customers who are using Exchange Server 2007 for any of their email and calendar services should begin planning to move the associated mailbox data and resources to Office 365 or update their infrastructure to a newer version of Exchange, such as Exchange Server 2016. If you’re using Exchange Server 2007 then you may want to use this opportunity to migrate your email/calendar infrastructure to Office 365 can take advantage of Microsoft FastTrack as well.

For more info you can refer: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2016/04/11/exchange-server-2007-t-1-year-and-counting.aspx

Improving Office 365 End user adoption with FastTrack

Microsoft FastTrack lets you discover what’s possible with Office 365, plan for successful rollouts and enable new users and capabilities at your own pace. Now you can understand more by looking at the following the video…

Microsoft FastTrack, the customer success service for Office 365, is designed to help you move to the cloud and realize business value faster. It has rapidly evolved over the past year from a one-time onboarding benefit for our largest customers to an ongoing customer benefit available for free to customers with 50 seats or more of eligible Office 365 plans. It already helped thousands of organizations—of various sizes and complexity—move to the cloud and accelerate time to value. In all cases, successful rollouts are about more than making a new technology available to your users—it’s about helping your organization achieve business goals.

Want to get engage? Then you can visit fasttrack.microsoft.com to:

• Sign in to create your personalized success plan.
• Download free Office 365 user adoption resources.
• Request assistance from the FastTrack Center.

It will help you get it started.

GA: Azure Stream Analytics, Power BI general availability

Today we announced the general availability (GA) of the integration between Azure Stream Analytics and Power BI. With this capability you can create interactive real-time dashboards for streaming data from devices, sensors, infrastructure and even your business applications.

– Azure Stream Analytics lets you rapidly develop and deploy low-cost solutions to gain real-time insights from devices, sensors, infrastructure, and applications. Use it for Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, such as real-time remote management and monitoring or gaining insights from devices like mobile phones and connected cars.

– Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed, cost effective Azure Service that enables you to do real-time stream processing on data in-motion using a simple SQL like language. Stream Analytics provides a number of input connectors, such as Azure Event Hubs and Azure IoT Hubs, which allow you to easily ingest data at scale. Using a Stream Analytics job you can then do aggregations, filtering, and grouping of the streaming data on temporal windows. You can then connect a number of downstream databases and systems, such as SQL DB and DocumentDB to persist the results of your analytic computations.

– With today’s announcement you will see another output connector, the Power BI connector, which allows you to stream data directly to a live dashboard. This will dramatically reduce the latency and time to action on your most important business metrics.

Hope this helps.

Download: Azure Architecture poster

Now you can download Azure Architecture poster here. It provides an overview of Azure features, services and common uses.

Hope this helps.

Azure Developer: Corrupted cache files causing the service fabric to broke in Visual Studio

Recently I worked with one of the Azure developer customer and he reported that the latest version of Service Fabric from Web Platform Installer throws error/broke Service Fabric support in Visual Studio. He notice the following error:

They see this error when creating a new service fabric project. He tried uninstalling and reinstalling the SDK but it did not help. He tried running VS2015 Update 2 and still failed to repro the issue.
We worked together, followed the below steps and resolved the issue.

– The above error we see is usually caused by the corrupted cache files.
– To overcome this, go to %localappdata%MicrosoftVisualStudio14.0
– Delete the folders: Extensions, ComponentModelCache.
– We made sure that he has all the Visual Studio instances closed before we delete the folders. Then he restarted Visual Studio, it will rebuild the cache files and now he can see the service fabric templates too.

Viola, it worked and he is good to go!!

Fix: Use autodiscover service to receive connection settings during OpenMsgStore() call

Today we released the hotfix which provides the ability for non-Outlook MAPI applications to use the Autodiscover service to receive connection settings during IMAPISession::OpenMsgStore, when the target is an Exchange mailbox.

To enable this ability, install April 5, 2016, update for Outlook 2013 (KB3114941), and then follow these steps described at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3114974

Hope this helps.

Now JSON Support is available in Azure SQL Database (preview)

JSON functionalities are available in Azure SQL Database (preview). You can use new JSON functionalities to integrate Azure SQL Database with other services that exchange data in the JSON format. For more info, you can refer the related documentation.

With the new JSON functionalities, you can do the following:

• Read data from JSON text by using JSON_VALUE/JSON_QUERY functions.
• Modify JSON text by using the JSON_MODIFY function.
• Transform JSON text into a relational format by using the OPENJSON function.
• Easily query or import JSON data into tables.
• Query relational and JSON data stored in any relational table.
• Format the results of SQL queries as JSON text and send it to any service or framework that uses JSON (for example, JavaScript/jQuery components and AngularJS/ReactJS frameworks).

To do this, you don’t need any special setup to start using JSON. If you have apps that are sending JSON text to SQL Server or if you use JSON text that is already stored in your tables, simply write a query that gets the values from your JSON documents.

Hope this helps.

Best practices – Naming conventions for Azure resources

Please refer this wonderful article which provides a summary of the naming rules and restrictions for Azure resources, as well as providing a baseline set of recommendations for naming conventions. You can use these recommendations as a starting point for your own conventions specific to your needs. The key to success with naming conventions is establishing and following them across your applications and organizations, adapting them as you deploy more applications and services across the Azure platform.

Hope this helps.

Participate with Microsoft database team is hosting Ask Me Anything (AMA) session

The Microsoft database teams will host a special Ask Me Anything session on /r/Azure, Friday, April 8, 2016 from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm PDT. You’ll have folks from across all our database engineering teams – Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL VM, SQL Server, Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure DocumentDB – available to answer any questions you have. You can ask anything about the products, services or even about teams! If you have any questions about the following topics? Bring them to the AMA session.

• SQL Server 2016
• Azure SQL Database
• SQL Server in an Azure Virtual Machine
• Azure SQL Data Warehouse
• Azure DocumentDB

Go ahead, ask us anything about our public products or the team. Hope this helps.