Leslie Anjan's blog

At Microsoft’s Virtual Ignite 2020 conference, a technology took a centre stage: Azure Arc. Part of the Azure Hybrid solution, Azure Arc is a concept and an agent technology, based on well understood Desired State Configuration (DSC) tools, that extends Azure management features to on-premises or other-cloud Windows and Linux computers. You can think of Azure Arc as a ‘management platform as a service’ solution, hosted by Microsoft as a free PaaS service. Microsoft refers to the management layer where Azure Arc lives as the Control plane and it’s happy to share it with you. Azure Arc adds no additional cost to your Azure bill. For free you can use just the default Control plane functions such as tags and role-based access control (RBAC). However, the value from Azure Arc arises when you use Azure Policy to deploy other agents and services–like Azure Monitor, Azure Sentinel, and Backup—via Azure Arc. Below figure illustrates how Azure Arc provides free control plane services (left) and

We live in the information age. The problem is that with evermore information being continually produced, finding the specific content you need becomes ever more challenging. According to one recent survey, 19% of employees struggle to find the information they need in their enterprise content management systems. And 16% struggle to find an internal subject matter expert in a reasonable time frame. Viva Topics is Microsoft’s innovative new approach to help organizations deal with this knowledge management headache. Introduced in early February and already available, Viva Topics uses artificial Intelligence and the Microsoft Graph to help improve how knowledge is found. Viva Topics is one of the four modules in the Microsoft Viva employee experience platform. It’s an offshoot from the Project Cortex initiative which aims to help organizations build an easily accessible (in Microsoft 365 apps) knowledge network based on information stored in SharePoint Online. SharePoint Syntex is the ot