AZ-120 helper - Planning and Administering Microsoft Azure for SAP Workloads Updated: 2023

Over the next 14 months, more than two billion people around the world will have the opportunity to vote in nationwide elections. From India to the European Union, to the United Kingdom and United States, the world’s democracies will be shaped by citizens exercising one of their most fundamental rights. But while voters exercise this right, another force is also at work to influence and possibly interfere with the outcomes of these consequential contests.

As detailed in a new threat intelligence assessment published today by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center (MTAC), the next year may bring unprecedented challenges for the protection of elections. As described in this report, “Protecting Election 2024 from Foreign Malign Influence,” the world in 2024 may see multiple authoritarian nation states seek to interfere in electoral processes. And they may combine traditional techniques with AI and other new technologies to threaten the integrity of electoral systems.

Given the technology-based nature of the threats involved, it’s important for governments, technology companies, the business community, and civil society to adopt new initiatives, including by building on each other’s work. That’s why today we are announcing five new steps to protect electoral processes in the United States and other countries where critical elections will take place in 2024.

We are grounding Microsoft’s Election Protection Commitments in a set of principles to help safeguard voters, candidates and campaigns, and election authorities worldwide. These principles are:

• Voters have a right to transparent and authoritative information regarding elections.
• Candidates should be able to assert when content originates from their campaign and have recourse when their likeness or content is distorted by AI for the purpose of deceiving the public during the course of an election.
• Political campaigns should protect themselves from cyber threats and be able to navigate AI with access to affordable and easily deployed tools, trainings, and support.
• Election authorities should be able to ensure a secure and resilient election process and have access to tools and services that enable this process.

Staying ahead and responding to threats against voters, candidates, political campaigns, and election authorities will require a combination of steps, including a range of tools and tactics.

First, Microsoft will help candidates and campaigns maintain greater control over their content and likeness by launching Content Credentials as a Service. This new tool enables users to digitally sign and authenticate media using the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity’s (C2PA) digital watermarking credentials, a set of metadata that encode details about the content’s provenance using cryptography. Users can attach Content Credentials to their images or videos to show how, when, and by whom the content was created or edited, including if it was generated by AI. These credentials become part of the content’s history and travel with it, creating a permanent record and context wherever it’s published. When a user encounters an image or video that contains Content Credentials, they can learn about its creator and origin by clicking on an embedded pin that reveals the asset’s history.

These watermarking credentials empower an individual or organization to assert that an image or video came from them while protecting against tampering by showing if content was altered after its credentials were created. Built by Azure engineering, this service will launch in the spring as a private preview, which will first be made available to political campaigns.

Second, Microsoft will help political campaigns navigate cybersecurity challenges and the new world of AI by deploying a newly formed “Campaign Success Team” within Microsoft Philanthropies’ Tech for Social Impact organization. This team will advise and support campaigns as they navigate the world of AI, combat the spread of cyber influence campaigns, and protect the authenticity of their own content and images. The Campaign Success Team will also continue to promote existing cyber protection programs such as M365 for Campaigns and AccountGuard.

Third, Microsoft will create and provide access to a new “Election Communications Hub” to support democratic governments around the world as they build secure and resilient election processes. This hub will provide election authorities with access to Microsoft security and support teams in the days and weeks leading up to their election, allowing them to reach out and get swift support if they run into any major security challenges. This new offering builds on existing security programs such as the Azure for Elections offering available to state and local election agencies and their partners in the U.S.

Fourth, we will use our voice as a company to support legislative and legal changes that will add to the protection of campaigns and electoral processes from deepfakes and other harmful uses of new technologies. We’re starting today by endorsing in the United States the bi-partisan bill “Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act” introduced by Senators Klobuchar, Collins, Hawley, and Coons. This important piece of legislation prohibits the use of artificial intelligence to generate materially deceptive content falsely depicting federal candidates in political ads to influence federal elections, with important exceptions for parody, satire, and the use of AI-generated content by newsrooms.

Fifth, Microsoft will empower voters with authoritative election information on Bing. We will do this in partnership with organizations that provide information on authoritative sources, ensuring that queries about election administration will surface reputable sites. Bing will join forces with the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), leading Spanish news agency EFE, and Reporters Without Borders to proactively promote trusted sources of news around the world. These partnerships build on existing collaborations such as with NewsGuard and ClaimReview. Microsoft will also publish regular reports on foreign malign influence researched and reported by the company’s MTAC team. The first report, “Protecting Election 2024 from Foreign Malign Influence” is being released today, providing a baseline for the upcoming election season, including reflections on previous election influence efforts as we set the stage for the year ahead.

No one person, institution, or company can guarantee elections are free and fair. But, by stepping up and working together, we can make meaningful progress in protecting everyone’s right to free and fair elections.

Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, cyberattacks, cybersecurity, Defending Democracy Program, ElectionGuard, elections, M365 for Campaigns, Microsoft AccountGuard, Responsible AI, voting

At Microsoft Ignite 2023, we are announcing new innovations across Microsoft Copilot—one copilot experience that runs across all our surfaces, understanding your context on the web, on your PC, and at work to bring the right skills to you when you need them across work and life. Microsoft is the Copilot company. And soon there will be a Copilot for everyone and for everything you do.

On November 1, 2023, Copilot for Microsoft 365 became generally available for enterprises, and already, customers like Visa, BP, Honda, Pfizer, and Chevron, and also partners such as Accenture, EY, KPMG, Kyndryl, and PwC, are betting on Copilot.

New Work Trend Index data shows that already, Copilot makes people more productive and creative, and saves time—77 percent of people who have used copilot said they don’t want to supply it up, 70 percent said copilot makes them more productive, and 68 percent said it improved the quality of their work. In experiments that we ran, users were 29 percent faster overall across a series of tasks and caught up on missed meetings nearly four times faster. It’s clear from the data: the age of copilots is here.  

It’s early days, and we will continue to take a learn-it-all approach to deeply understand both the perceived and quantitative impact of Copilot on work and learning alongside our customers. Read on for more details about the announcements.  

Updates to our Copilot product line-up 

We are taking the next step to simplify the user experience and make copilot more accessible to everyone. Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise will now simply become Copilot. It has foundational capabilities, like the ability to answer questions, create content, and reason over data. And it has web grounding, so it always has access to the latest information. When you’re signed into Copilot with your Entra ID, you get commercial data protection for free—which means chat data isn’t saved, Microsoft has no eyes-on access, and your data isn’t used to train the models.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 has those same foundational capabilities, web grounding, and commercial data protection, and importantly, it also inherits your existing Microsoft 365 security, privacy, identity, and compliance policies—so you know it’s enterprise-grade. Your data is logically isolated and protected within your Microsoft 365 tenant, and always within your control. Copilot for Microsoft 365 doesn’t change any of our data residency or data handling promises. And Copilot acts on behalf of an individual user—so it can’t access any information you don’t have permission to see. Copilot for Microsoft 365 has access to the Microsoft Graph and is integrated into the Microsoft 365 apps that millions of people use every day.

We also announced Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service.

You can access Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Windows and in Bing. 

Introducing Microsoft Copilot Studio 

At Ignite, we announced Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code tool to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots. It brings together a set of powerful conversational capabilities—from custom GPTs, generative AI plugins, and manual topics. You can customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 with your own enterprise scenarios—build, test, and publish standalone copilots and custom GPTs and manage and secure your customizations and standalone copilots with the right access, data, user controls, and analytics. Copilot Studio exposes a full end-to-end lifecycle for customizations and standalone copilots within a single pane of glass—build, deploy, analyze, and manage all from within the same web experience. With Copilot Studio, you can connect Copilot to other data sources, including pre-built or custom plugins and GPTs, to tap into any system of record—from SAP, Workday, and ServiceNow—and even your own proprietary business solutions. Copilot Studio is available today, and the integration with Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now available in preview.

Copilot for Microsoft 365—your AI assistant at work  

At Ignite, we shared three thematic updates to Copilot: more personalization, sophisticated mathematical and analysis capabilities, and Copilot becoming a full participant in collaboration.  

We’re bringing more personalization to Copilot. New capabilities allow you to supply Copilot details about your role and instructions on what’s important to you, so you can get tailored responses based on your unique role and preferences, including preferences on formatting, style, and tone. This new capability will roll out initially in Word and PowerPoint and will follow soon in the other Microsoft 365 apps, complementing previously announced personalization features such as “sound like me” for Copilot in Outlook, which matches your unique writing style and voice when drafting emails.  

The recently announced Python in Excel allows you to perform sophisticated mathematical analysis using one of the most powerful programming languages in the world. And, in combination with Copilot in Excel, users will be able to unlock this capability using natural language.  

We’re also announcing powerful new capabilities that make Copilot a full participant in collaboration, helping everyone stay focused on the discussion in a Microsoft Teams meeting, turn notes from a brainstorm into visualizations on a digital whiteboard, and build shared workspaces in Microsoft Loop that help your team collaborate and stay in sync.    

Read on for the full list of new capabilities in Copilot for Microsoft 365—all generally available unless otherwise noted.  

Copilot in Microsoft Teams 

• Next year, new Copilot in Teams experiences will supply Copilot a seat at the meeting table, transforming it into a meeting assistant so everyone can stay present, engaged, and focused in the meeting. Copilot in collaborative notes takes notes throughout your meeting that are then shared with participants, and you can even instruct Copilot to capture specific content—for instance, ask it to “Quote Ben,” and Copilot will transcribe Ben’s remark for everyone to see.  
• Customers who want to leverage the power of Copilot in Teams meetings—but without creating a recording—now have the option to enable it without transcription. When enabled without transcription, Copilot can answer questions and provide information during the meeting, but no record of interactions will be retained afterward. 

• You can also now use Copilot in Teams channels to do things like synthesize long posts, get action items, or review key decisions in the channels you work in every day.  
• With the Copilot compose box in Teams chat and channels, Copilot will help you write a message or adjust its tone to Improve your writing in the places you communicate most. 
• Starting in December 2023, intelligent recap will be integrated into Copilot, so that everyone in the organization stays on the same page whether they are getting started with AI using Teams Premium or jumping all in with Copilot. Intelligent recap helps you catch up on the meetings you missed by providing a summary of the key points, action items, and decisions. And it gets even better when you use it with Copilot, allowing you to ask specific questions about the meeting and get clear answers.
• Copilot in Microsoft Whiteboard will automatically capture and visualize spoken discussion points during a Teams meeting and organize them for you into a collaboration space in Whiteboard, shared across all meeting participants.

Copilot in Microsoft Outlook 

• Coming in early 2024, Copilot in Outlook helps you prepare for upcoming meetings—combing through invitation details, related emails, and pertinent documents to build a synthesized summary that you can review quickly and show up prepped.  
• Copilot now also helps you navigate bulky email threads effortlessly with an email thread summary. Copilot extracts crucial information, proposing actionable steps like a follow-up meeting. Once a meeting is selected, it drafts agendas, summarizes discussions, creates engaging meeting titles, populates attendees, appends the original thread for clarity, and suggests times when everyone can meet.

• Independent of email, Copilot can also help you schedule meetings on specific topics. It will suggest relevant attendees, draft agendas, recommend files to share, and find times when everyone is available. 

Copilot in Microsoft Loop  

• At Ignite, we announced the general availability of the Microsoft Loop app, the app built for the new way of working, with a flexible canvas for collaboration between people and generative AI to create a center of gravity for your projects and a space for your team and Copilot to think, plan, and create together. 
• With intelligent page creation, Copilot in Loop guides you, suggesting pages from past work and automatically adapting them for your current project, or crafting a new page with content suggestions tailored to your goals.

• Microsoft Loop’s workspace status is like a dashboard, tapping into the collective knowledge of your team to help you stay two steps ahead. It can help you track the work the team has done and even flag important information like upcoming deadlines to help you know where to focus. Learn more about Copilot in Loop.

Copilot in Microsoft Word 

• Coming soon, you can use catchup and comments in Copilot in Word to quickly get up to speed on document revisions by asking questions like, “How do I see what has changed in this document?” to reveal changes and revisions made by anyone who has accessed the document.  

Copilot in Microsoft PowerPoint 

• With the new brand asset and image library (coming soon), you can ask Copilot in PowerPoint to use your corporate brand assets and leverage Microsoft Designer to reimagine them using AI-generated visuals—no photo shoot required.

New Microsoft Viva value coming to Copilot  

• Viva is the measurement and transformation platform for the AI-powered, high-performance organization. At Ignite, we announced the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard, powered by Viva, to help Copilot customers across every stage of the transformation journey: readiness, adoption, and measurement. Now in preview, the dashboard shows how many employees are eligible and ready to benefit from Copilot based on Microsoft 365 app usage, breaks down Copilot usage across apps, and delivers early signals on Copilot’s impact on productivity based on meetings, chat, email, and documents. In early 2024, we will add more advanced capabilities for customers with a Viva Insights license. These include Copilot adoption and usage metrics combined with collaboration data, out-of-the-box reports for organizational leaders, before and after behavioral data, and even insights from employee surveys.   

• We announced that customers who use Viva can now do so right in Microsoft Copilot. Copilot combs across Viva data and applications to guide employees, managers, and HR leaders with self-service insights and experiences. You can do things like check in on team health, set new priorities with objectives and key results (OKRs), or access skilling and learning experiences. This new integration will be available in preview in early 2024. 

• Our existing experience, Copilot in Microsoft Viva Insights, enables leaders and their delegates to use natural language prompts to easily query data from Viva Insights and generate personalized, dynamic reports that answer questions about their teams and organizations. This will be in preview in January 2024. Additionally, there are also updates to Copilot experiences in Viva Goals, Viva Engage, Viva Learning, and Viva Glint, plus new integrations and capabilities coming to Viva Learning, Viva Engage, and Viva Amplify. 

Other Copilot updates 

• With Topics in Copilot, you can harness your organization’s shared intelligence to distribute knowledge to everyone. You will have the ability to uncover new opportunities by summarizing complex Topics across multiple connected documents.  

Windows App

• New product features are coming to Windows 365 and Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop, including the Windows App—now available in preview—which connects you to Windows in the cloud from the device of your choice across Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, Remote Desktop, Remote Desktop Services, Microsoft Dev Box, and more all from a single, unified app.  
• In early 2024, Copilot for Microsoft 365 will be integrated into the Windows desktop, allowing users to ground prompts in their Microsoft 365 Graph content and context. 
• You can preview new graphics processing unit (GPU) support in Windows 365, ideal for workloads such as graphic design, rendering, 3D modeling, data processing, and visualization applications. Windows 365 is now also available in a 16vCore SKU to handle all your high-capacity computing needs.  
• In preview soon, new AI capabilities in Windows 365 for Cloud PC include resizing recommendations to help organizations better forecast and right-size their Cloud PC investment. 
• Update management is now a single solution with Windows Autopatch, extending it to frontline worker devices and unifying updates and upgrades across Windows devices, Windows 365, Microsoft 365 apps, Teams, and Microsoft Edge.  

More news from Ignite 2023

• New features in Teams include voice isolation, which learns your voice and suppresses other people’s voices in the background, and “decorate your background” in Teams Premium which uses the power of generative AI to remove clutter or add decor to your real-world room during video calls. 
• Microsoft Clipchamp is now available for Microsoft 365 enterprise and business suites, with premium features launching in December 2023.
• The new Microsoft Planner is simple, collaborative, scalable, assisted by next-generation AI, and integrated with Microsoft 365 experiences such as Microsoft Loop, Outlook, Teams, and Viva Goals. Copilot in Planner will enable the use of natural language to create plans, tasks, and goals, or answer questions on progress, priorities, workload, and more.
• Microsoft Mesh, a new 3D immersive experience for the workplace, will be generally available in January 2024. We’re reimagining the way employees come together with Microsoft Mesh in the place where hundreds of millions of people work today—Microsoft Teams. You can join these experiences with PC or Meta Quest VR devices.  
• We also announced new features such as shared display mode, designed for improving productivity and IT administration in bring-your-own-device (BYOD) shared spaces. 
• You can now preview SharePoint Premium, with various services launching from late 2023 to early 2024. SharePoint Premium is an AI-powered content management platform offering AI-driven automation, improved content experiences, and enhanced governance.  

We are also continuing to test Copilot with small businesses and entrepreneurs as part of our Early Access Program, and we’ll share more on broader availability in the coming months. 

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