This post was authored by Manu Aery, Senior Product Marketing Manager, ECG

Were happy to announce that the management of the StorSimple Virtual Device Series is now available in the new Azure portal. You can use the StorSimple extension in the new portal to create Azure Resource Manager based StorSimple managers to manage your virtual arrays.

Whats new?

• Enhanced user experience and improved navigation
• Optimized and multiple workflows for efficient task completion
• Integrated Support and Diagnostics experiences
• Support for inbuilt Azure roles and ability to manage access through custom roles

How to get started

You can create a new StorSimple Device Manager in the Azure portal to manage your virtual arrays by navigating to: + NEW > Storage > StorSimple Virtual Device Series.

You can register one or more virtual arrays to this newly created StorSimple Device Manager by navigating to the specific Manager > Resource menu > Quick start to download and register a new virtual array.

Additionally, by navigating to Browse> Filter on StorSimple Device Managers, you will be able to:

• View and manage all StorSimple Device Managers created in the new portal.
• View all StorSimple Device Managers created in the classic portal. However, you will continue to manage these resources through the classic portal, until we migrate them to the new portal. More information on migration to the new portal is covered further in this article.

Managing your StorSimple virtual arrays in the new Azure portal

The enhanced user experience makes it easy to manage your virtual arrays within the new Azure portal.

• The resource menu contains all the options to manage, monitor and troubleshoot your virtual arrays.
• Some of the frequently performed operations on the virtual array are easily accessible through the top-level command bar.
• The StorSimple service summary blade provides aggregated information across the virtual arrays in a particular resource. This blade is designed to give you a quick summary on usage, alerts, etc., and serve as the starting point to deep dive into further details, both from the tiles on the blade as well as from the resource menu on the left.
• Additionally, you can diagnose and potentially resolve common issues with your virtual arrays through the troubleshooting content that is available right within the Azure portal. You can also log a support ticket to request assistance from Microsoft Support.

To learn more about how to manage your StorSimple Virtual Arrays in the portal, please refer to the product documentation.

Migration of StorSimple Virtual Device Series resources from the classic portal

Your existing StorSimple Virtual Device Series resources in the classic portal will be migrated to the new Azure Portal in the coming weeks. We will reach out to you with more details on the date as well as the details of the migration. Stay tuned!

Please note this migration will be seamless and there will be no downtime to your virtual arrays. Once the migration is complete:

• All your StorSimple Virtual Device resources in the classic portal will be managed through the new Azure portal.
• The StorSimple Virtual Device Series management will no longer be available on the classic portal.
• The StorSimple Physical Device Series will continue to be managed via the classic portal. You will be able to view your StorSimple Physical Device Series resources in the new portal, but you will continue to manage them from the classic portal. We will keep you posted about the transition of the physical device series to the new Azure portal.

For more information on the new portal, refer to the blog post, which compares and contrasts the user experience in the new Azure portal and the classic portal.

To learn more about how to manage your StorSimple virtual arrays in the portal, please refer to the product documentation.

It seems logical to think that data you stored in a privately controlled datacenter is safer than data in the cloud. But that’s not necessarily true. In fact, there is a broad range of security features that you benefit from when you put your data in a cloud service like Office 365. And when done right, data is more secure in the cloud than in on-premises servers.

Consider these added security benefits of data in the cloud:

1. Broader scope of threat intelligence—When a customer’s on-premises servers are attacked by an external actor, the customer can take steps to protect themselves from subsequent attacks from that same actor. But damage has been done. Even if they buy access to threat intelligence feeds, the scope of available intel is constrained and your response is reactive. With Office 365, instead of simply reacting to individual attacks, customers gain the benefit of intelligence gathered from threats against other customers within the service as well. An attack launched against any organization in Office 365 can functionally inoculate everyone else.

2. Greater automation and decreased human intervention—In the cloud, managing things like hardware, operating systems and patches boils down to a set of tasks that is familiar to any IT administrator. The biggest difference in the cloud is that to provide the service at scale, these tasks must be automated. The benefits of automation are two-fold. First, gaps in the security posture are addressed at scale. Second, with software operating the service instead of humans, there is less risk of falling prey to spear-phishing, offering an additional layer of protection. Manual management activities are minimal and must be approved by multiple people, which can include customers.

3. Better anomaly detection due to uniformity and simplicity—When cloud services started out, they were mostly based on the same on-premises products that you always used—except they were deployed and managed on servers owned by the provider. In recent years, cloud services have evolved to dramatically simplify configuration options, server roles and management complexity. This simplification gives services the ability to consolidate how they protect, detect and respond to threats. Since software is the main source of interaction, illicit activity by human attackers is easier to identify.

4. Constant innovation—Cloud security teams face two key pressures when building security capabilities: Every feature breaks at some scale, and every customer brings a particular set of concerns and requirements. We find that a robust set of well-designed and implemented capabilities can address most customer concerns, but the growth of the cloud service constantly challenges the design. A successful cloud security strategy requires us to innovate. One example is our approach to penetration testing. Some cloud services, including Office 365, have a full-time team of penetration testers who look for vulnerabilities. We asked ourselves how we would make sure that once the vulnerability has been fixed, it doesn’t recur, and that detections of illicit activity by penetration testers work for all instances of a given vulnerability. Our answer was to automate penetration testing attacks and then use that signal to verify the quality of our detections.

5. Smaller breach boundary—A key piece of an effective security strategy is to make your breach boundary is as small and as diverse as possible. Sensitive assets should be isolated from each other, so that it is more difficult for an attacker to move from one asset to another. Most companies draw their breach boundaries at the directory level. If an attacker can acquire domain admin privileges, they can access any information managed in that domain. When you adopt cloud services, it is more difficult for the attacker to breach your domain and gain access to any of the data in the cloud service beyond normal “front-door” access to the services which are audited. The delegation of management to a third party, in a real and impactful way, asserts a new breach boundary.

6. Cross-application security model—Traditional on-premises security capabilities center on the computer, the operating system and firewalls. In on-premises systems, you parse the logs for multiple applications and must make sense of what those logs mean. In the cloud, we standardize our logging systems to make them more consumable. You can evolve your security capabilities to enable an application-aware security model that adjusts to how attackers work—by breaching accounts, then achieving their goals through front-door interfaces. Cloud application services take your security to a new level by delivering integrated and context-aware security capabilities that cross application boundaries.

7. Transparency—With Office 365 in particular, there is one other benefit: transparency. With many organizations using Office 365, we are compelled to operate in the full light of day. To earn your business, we must have your trust, and to earn that we must be transparent with you about how we protect your data. To that end, we allow our customers to control how a Microsoft support engineer accesses their data. Our business model relies profoundly on the belief that there are no shortcuts and no excuses when it comes to the security of your data.

If you’ve been sitting on the fence about adopting the cloud—based on a set of objections relating to security in the cloud—these security benefits should help ease your concerns. If you want to learn more how we approach security, check out the Office 365 Trust Center.

— Brandon Koeller, principal program manager for the Office security and compliance team

The post Top 7 ways Office 365 offers more security than on-premises services appeared first on Office Blogs.

From the early days of the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace to the modern days of Windows Store, AdDuplex was and is committed to providing top-notch advertising solutions for app and game developers, publishers and advertisers.

Premier cross-promotion network

Back in 2011, AdDuplex launched the first cross-promotion network for Windows Phone 7 apps and empowered thousands of independent developers to advertise their apps for free by helping fellow app and game creators. Apps that got initial attention in the early days of the ecosystem received an overall boost and enjoyed the early exposure for years to come. AdDuplex helped such apps by utilizing their ad space before they had reached a level of popularity that made monetization efforts worthwhile.

AdDuplex cross-promotion network works as an enabler of advertising exchange between participating apps and games. Developers place a line of code into their apps and start promoting other apps on the network. Those other apps return the favor. The exchange ratio is 10:8, meaning that for every 10 ad impressions your app shows, you are advertised eight times in other apps. The remaining two impressions are used by AdDuplex to help commercial advertisers reach their potential users and support future development of the platform.

Since 2011, more than 10,000 apps joined AdDuplex and use it to accelerate and amend their growth efforts.

User acquisition on Windows

Free cross-promotion is great, but it limits the velocity of your growth to a pretty linear scale. What if you want to grow faster and have a budget for that? AdDuplex provides an opportunity for app and game publishers to reach more users faster via paid advertising campaigns.

Publishers from all over the world use AdDuplex to both jumpstart their new apps and games, and acquire new users for their other apps and games.

Windows 10 era

The day after the initial public Windows 10 launch, AdDuplex was ready with an SDK for UWP apps. It lets developers use the same SDK and even the same ad units across desktop and mobile, and is now ready for your apps on Xbox One.

App developers and advertisers can target various versions of Windows Phone and Windows across all main device families and reach exactly the users they are looking for through either banner or full-screen ads.

Make money with your Windows apps and AdDuplex

The most recent development was a launch of ad monetization part of AdDuplex. While still in invite-only mode, every app and game developer is welcome to apply for and participate in a revenue-sharing scheme in which developers get 70 percent of the money that advertisers pay AdDuplex. And even when there are no paid campaigns to show, your ad space is not wasted – AdDuplex cross-promotion network kicks in and generates free advertising for your app or game.

Getting started with AdDuplex

Whether you are an independent app developer or an advertiser in search of scale, benefitting from AdDuplex services is really easy. Here are the basics you’ll need to get started (plus some nice extras):

• General information about AdDuplex can be found at adduplex.com
• Register to start cross-promoting and/or advertising on AdDuplex at manage.adduplex.com
  • Use promo code MSFT2 to get 1:1 exchange rate for the first month
• Use coupon code MSFT2 to get a 50 percent bonus on your advertising budgets.
• More information about app monetization

The post AdDuplex – your one stop shop for Windows app and game marketing and monetization appeared first on Building Apps for Windows.

In part one of the Windows Bridge for iOS series, we created a simple to-do list app in Xcode and used the iOS bridge to bring it over to Windows 10. In part two of the series, we went on a tour of Visual Studio for iOS developers. In part three, we used the Windows Bridge for iOS to convert an iOS calculator app created using Storyboards and Auto Layout to a Universal Windows Platform app that adjusts to various form factors on Windows 10. In part four, we discussed how to mix and match UIKit with XAML controls in a bridged UWP app.

Today, we explain how to customize the Surface Dial Experience for bridged UWP apps using Objective-C projections.

Getting Started

For today’s tutorial, you will need:

• A PC running Windows 10 with Visual Studio 2015 and the Windows Bridge for iOS installed.
• A Mac running Mac OS X 10.11 with Xcode 7 installed.
• A copy of the Radial Control sample initial code.

If you don’t have a Windows 10 PC, you can download one of our pre-built evaluation virtual machines from the Windows Bridge for iOS website. Download the package for your preferred virtualization environment and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Understanding the Project Structure

With the radial control sample initial code downloaded and unzipped on your Mac development environment, open the Xcode project and briefly explore the application. The application consists of:

• AppDelegate– contains the UIApplicationInitialStartupMode Category that ensures the app scales properly on Windows 10 for a variety of form factors.
• ViewController – provides the view management infrastructure for the app’s user interface, which consists of a slider, a label that is updated with the value of the slider and a switch.

Build and run the application in the simulator and move the slider to make sure everything is properly set up.

Using vsimporter

You are now ready to run the app through the vsimporter tool. To do so, you’ll need to copy your Xcode project files to your Windows Machine (or VM). With the files copied, follow the steps under the Using vsimporter section of part three of the blog series. Once you’re done, return to your radial control project directory, which should now contain a brand new Visual Studio solution file.

Open the Visual Studio solution by double-clicking on the RadialControlSample-WinStore10.sln file and build and run the application on your local machine by clicking on the Run button on the top menu. You’ll notice the same UI we saw running in the Xcode Simulator — you now have a native iOS app running on Windows. Try moving the slider and you’ll see its value label change.

Adding a New Menu Item to the Radial Controller Tool

You will now update this app to add a custom menu item to the radial controller tool that will respond to rotate and click actions by changing the slider value and toggling the switch.

To implement radial controller features in your app, you will need the public headers for the relevant UWP frameworks. In the bridge SDK you downloaded, go to the include\Platform\Universal Windows\UWP directory and take a look at what you find. Each header file represents a different namespace within the Windows Runtime APIs. For our purposes, you will need APIs from Windows.UI.Input since the radial controller is an input device and all of its classes are contained in that namespace.

To include this framework – and make sure it’s only included when the code is being run on Windows – start by adding an #ifdef and the #import macros to the top of the view controller implementation file:

#import "ViewController.h"
  
  #ifdef WINOBJC
  #import 
  #endif

To interact with the radial controller, you will need to add a property to the view controller of your app that will allow you to access it. In C++, wheel input devices are represented by the RadialController class. However, as you build using Objective-C projections, you will notice that the standard naming scheme for these objects has been modified to match Objective-C conventions, where classes are prefixed with the letters that constitute their containing namespace:

• Windows.UI.Input.RadialController becomes WUIRadialController

As a result, add a WUIRadialController property to the @interface section of the view controller implementation file:

 @interface ViewController()

  @property UILabel *demoTitle;
  @property UILabel *demoInfo;
  @property UISlider *slider;
  @property UILabel *sliderLabel;
  @property UISwitch *switchControl;

  #ifdef WINOBJC
  @property WUIRadialController* radialController;
  #endif

  @end

Next, you need to get a reference to the WUIRadialController object with the CreateForCurrentView method as explained in the RadialController class documentation. Looking at the WindowsUIInput.h header you’ll find the equivalent Objective-C projection under the WUIRadialController class interface:

  @interface WUIRadialController : RTObject
  [...]
  + (WUIRadialController*)createForCurrentView;

Call this method at the end of the viewDidLoad method of the view controller file to instantiate the WUIRadialController property:

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    [...]

  #ifdef WINOBJC    
    // Create a reference to the radial controller
    self.radialController = [WUIRadialController createForCurrentView];
  #endif
  }

Now you need to get a reference to the radial controller menu and its items. This is done via the Menu property of the RadialController class that returns a RadialControllerMenu object. Looking back at the  WindowsUIInput.h header, you’ll find the equivalent Objective-C property under the WUIRadialController class interface that returns a WUIRadialControllerMenu object:

@interface WUIRadialController : RTObject
  [...]
  @property (readonly) WUIRadialControllerMenu* menu;

Call this property to get a reference to the radial controller menu:

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    [...]

  #ifdef WINOBJC    
    // Create a reference to the radial controller
    self.radialController = [WUIRadialController createForCurrentView];

    // Get the radial controller menu
    WUIRadialControllerMenu* menu = self.radialController.menu; 
  #endif
  }

The menu items are accessible via the Items property of the RadialControllerMenu class. As before, the interface of the WUIRadialControllerMenu class in the WindowsUIInput.h header gives you the equivalent Objective-C property:

  @interface WUIRadialControllerMenu : RTObject
  [...]
  @property (readonly) NSMutableArray* /* WUIRadialControllerMenuItem* */ items;

Call this property to get a reference to the menu items:

  - (void)viewDidLoad {
    [...]

    // Get the radial controller menu
    WUIRadialControllerMenu* menu = self.radialController.menu;

    // Get the menu items
    NSMutableArray* menuItems = menu.items;
  #endif
  }

Next, you need to create a new RadialControllerMenuItem object to add to the menu with the projection of the CreateFromKnownIcon class method:

@interface WUIRadialControllerMenuItem : RTObject
  + (WUIRadialControllerMenuItem*)createFromIcon:(NSString *)displayText icon:(WSSRandomAccessStreamReference*)icon;

Call this method to create the new menu item:

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    [...]

    // Get the menu items
    NSMutableArray* menuItems = menu.items;

    // Create a new menu item
    // To use your own custom icon for the menu item, use the createFromIcon method instead
    WUIRadialControllerMenuItem* newMenuItem = [WUIRadialControllerMenuItem createFromKnownIcon:@"Custom Tool" value:WUIRadialControllerMenuKnownIconRuler];
  #endif
  }

Note that we reused an existing icon for our tool from the RadialControllerMenuKnownIcon enumeration, but you can create your own and use the CreateFromIcon method instead.

Finally, add your new menu item to the menu items array:

  - (void)viewDidLoad {
    [...]

    // Create a new menu item
    // To use your own custom icon for the menu item, use the createFromIcon method instead
    WUIRadialControllerMenuItem* newMenuItem = [WUIRadialControllerMenuItem createFromKnownIcon:@"Custom Tool" value:WUIRadialControllerMenuKnownIconRuler];
  #endif

    // Add a new menu item
    [menuItems addObject:newMenuItem];
  }

That’s it! Now build and run your application and press and hold the Surface Dial to see the new menu item appear.

Adding a Handler for Click Input

In this section, you will add a handler for click input that will toggle the application switch control if the radial controller is clicked when the new tool you added to the menu is selected. Taking a look at the WindowsUIInput.h header, you’ll see you need the addButtonClickedEvent: method:

@interface WUIRadialController : RTObject
   [...]
   - (EventRegistrationToken)addButtonClickedEvent:(void(^)(WUIRadialController*, WUIRadialControllerButtonClickedEventArgs

Since the callback relies on Objective-C blocks, you need to mark the self reference with the __block keyword before using it to access the switch to avoid creating a retain cycle. Add the following code at the end of the viewDidLoad method to do this:

  - (void)viewDidLoad {
    [...]

    // Add a new menu item
    [menuItems addObject:newMenuItem];

    __weak ViewController* weakSelf = self; // Ensures self will not be retained
  }

Now you can safely toggle the switch in the radial controller click callback:

 - (void)viewDidLoad {
    [...]

    __weak ViewController* weakSelf = self; // Ensures self will not be retained

    // Add a handler for click input from the radial controller
    [self.radialController addButtonClickedEvent:^(WUIRadialController* controller, WUIRadialControllerButtonClickedEventArgs* args)
     {
         [weakSelf.switchControl setOn:!(weakSelf.switchControl.on) animated:YES];
     }];
  }

You can now build and run your application, select the new menu item, and click on the radial controller to see the switch toggle.

Adding a Handler for Rotation Input

In this section, you will add a handler for rotation input that will move the application slider control if the radial controller is rotated when the new tool you added to the menu is selected. Taking a look at the WindowsUIInput.h header, you’ll see that you need the addRotationChangedEvent: method:

  @interface WUIRadialController : RTObject
   [...]
   - (EventRegistrationToken)addRotationChangedEvent:(void(^)(WUIRadialController*, WUIRadialControllerRotationChangedEventArgs

As for the click event handler, simply call the method and update the slider value in the callback block:

  - (void)viewDidLoad {
    [...]

    __weak ViewController* weakSelf = self; // Ensures self will not be retained

    [...]

    // Add a handler for rotation input from the radial controller
    [self.radialController addRotationChangedEvent:^(WUIRadialController* controller, WUIRadialControllerRotationChangedEventArgs* args)
     {
         [weakSelf.slider setValue:(weakSelf.slider.value + ([args rotationDeltaInDegrees]/360.0f)) animated:YES];
     }];
  }

That’s it! Now build and run your application, select the new menu item and rotate the radial controller to see the slider value change.

Wrapping Up

Thanks for following along! You can download the complete Radial Control sample for the final project. Take a look at the following resources for more information:

• For the latest release of the Windows Bridge for iOS, see the WinObjC GitHub Repository
• For documentation and tutorials, visit the Windows Bridge for iOS wiki
• To evaluate the compatibility of your app with the bridge and evaluation virtual machines, go to the Windows Bridge for iOS website
• For sample apps and code using the bridge, check the WinObjC-Samples GitHub Repository
• For an overview of Windows wheel devices and UX and developer guidance, see Surface Dial interactions on MSDN.
• For developer documentation on the Windows input system and classes, go to the UI.Input namespace documentation on MSDN.
• To find the iOS bridge API, check the UWP header libraries.

Also, be sure to check out the other posts in our series:

• Building a Simple App with the Windows Bridge for iOS
• Visual Studio Walkthrough for iOS Developers
• Using the iOS Bridge to Bring Storyboards and Auto Layout to Windows 10
• Mixing and Matching UIKit with XAML and the Windows Bridge for iOS

The post Windows Bridge for iOS: Customizing the Surface Dial Experience appeared first on Building Apps for Windows.

As everybody else winds down for the holidays, the cybercriminals behind Cerber are busy ramping up their operations.

Following our discovery of a spam campaign that takes advantage of holiday shopping, we found two new campaigns that continue distributing the latest variants of Cerber ransomware. These campaigns are the latest in a series of persistent cybercriminal efforts that keep Cerber constantly active.

Figure 1. Cerber activity trending in the past three months

First, we detected a fresh spam campaign that delivers document files in password-protected .zip archives. The emails use simple subject lines like “Howdy” or “Hello”, while the email body seem to keep the holiday shopping theme with messages like “your order should be delivered today” and “Statement is attached”. The password to the archive, which is usually “6666” in this campaign, is in the email body.

Figure 2. Sample spam email from recent Donoff campaign that distributes a new version of Cerber

When extracted, the Office files contain malicious macro code detected by Windows Defender as TrojanDownloader:O97M/Donoff. Donoff is a Trojan downloader that installs malware; in this campaign, it downloads and executes Cerber.

Our tracking of Donoff activity shows a spike corresponding to the email campaign.

Figure 3. Donoff activity for the past 30 days

The second campaign that we discovered distributing Cerber ransomware is via the RIG exploit kit, which Windows Defender detects as Exploit:HTML/Meadgive. When a user accesses a compromised page or an attacker-controlled website hosting the exploit kit, vulnerabilities like CVE-2015-8651 are exploited, and Cerber is downloaded and executed on the computer.

Telemetry from Windows Defender shows that this latest exploit kit attack largely affects Asia and Europe.

Figure 4. Geographic distribution of victims of recent RIG exploit kit distributing Cerber

Both of these campaigns deliver variants of the new version of Cerber ransomware. These new iterations of the malware sport the updated configuration and behavior, demonstrating that the cybercriminals behind them are not slowing down in evolving the malware. Below are the notable updates seen in the latest version of Cerber:

1. As with the holiday-themed campaign from a few weeks ago, these new Cerber variants arrive with a wallpaper that is noticeably modified from previous versions’ green palette to red:
   
   Figure 5. New Cerber wallpaper, which changed its color palette
2. Another level of obfuscation is used: UPX on the top of the Nullsoft installer and custom encryption used by older versions.
3. The configuration, which contains the most important data that determine the behavior of the ransomware, are encrypted using RC4 just like older versions, but using Crypto APIs instead of custom implementation.
4. Threat version information, which has been useful in tracking the evolution of Cerber, is nowhere to be found in the configuration.
5. More than 50 new file name extensions are added as targets for encryption; on the other hand, several file name extensions, including .exe., .cmd, and .msi, are exempted from the encryption routine; this latter behavior has been observed in other prominent ransomware families, but we’re seeing for the first time with Cerber.
6. Folders that are prioritized during encryption include new ones, like microsoft\onenote, microsoft\outlook, and \microsoft\excel\, among others; however, folders that are exempted from the encryption routine now include “$windows.~ws”, “intel”, and “windows10upgrade”, among others
7. Shadow copies are no longer deleted.
8. Payment site provided now is a single Tor proxy site, compared to three proxy sites in older versions.
9. Two new sets of IP ranges added where command-and-control (C&C) server could reside behind one of those.

For cybercriminals, releasing a new version of malware not only increases likelihood of evading antivirus detection; it’s also a way of increasing the complexity of malware. Cerber’s long list of updated behavior indicates that the cybercriminals are highly motivated to continue improving the malware and the campaigns that deliver it.

It is important to note that one of the most critical updates in this latest version of Cerber is the new folders it prioritizes during encryption. The added folders, which include microsoft\onenote, microsoft\outlook, and \microsoft\excel\ among others, is further indication that the malware is designed to look for critical Office files to encrypt in enterprise environments.

Stopping Cerber infection in Windows 10

Windows 10 has security technologies that can help detect this new batch of updated Cerber. Keep your computers up-to-date in order to get the benefits from the latest features and proactive mitigation built into the latest versions of Windows.

Windows Defender detects the new version of Cerber ransomware as Win32/Cerber. It also detects files threats to the two campaigns that deliver the ransomware: the malicious attachments used in the spam campaign as TrojanDownloader:O97M/Donoff, and the RIG exploit kit as Exploit:HTML/Meadgive.

Microsoft Edge can help prevent exploit kits from running and executing ransomware on computers. SmartScreen Filter uses URL reputation to block access to malicious sites, such as those hosting exploit kits.

Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection blocks the malicious emails that spread malicious documents that could eventually install Cerber.

Device guard protects systems from malicious applications by maintaining a custom catalog of known good applications and stopping kernel-level malware with virtualization-based security.

IT administrators can use Group Policy in Office 2016 to block known malicious macro, such as the documents in password-protected email attachments used in this campaign, from running. They can also use AppLocker group policy to prevent dubious software from running.

IT administrators can also use Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection to get alerts when suspicious activities are observed in the network, allowing them detect, investigate, and respond to ransomware infection and other advanced attacks on enterprise networks.

An in-depth look at the spam campaign

Beyond providing protection, analyzing Cerber and related campaigns in-depth allows Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) to discern trends and gain deeper understanding of cybercriminal activity. This is how we were able to trace the evolution of Cerber and see the signs that it’s not letting up.

Cerber has historically heavily used email as a primary infection vector. It is no different in this campaign.

Figure 6. Another sample spam email from recent Donoff campaign that distributes a new version of Cerber

The attachment is usually a password-protected .zip archive that contains a macro malware in the form of a Microsoft Word document. When opened, the archive prompts for a password, which is indicated in the email body. This is a change from past campaigns, which password-protected the document, rather than the .zip file itself.

Figure 7. Attachment is a password-protected .zip archive

When extracted and executed, the document attempts to run its malicious macro code. Thus, Microsoft Office prompts to manually enable macro, empowering users to block infection at this point. The document lures users to enable macro by faking a Microsoft Word message.

Figure 8. Malicious document lures users into enabling macro

The macro code contains obfuscated downloading routines, as seen below.

Figure 9. Malware code showing obfuscated download link

The macro code executes the following PowerShell command to attempt to download and execute Cerber in the %AppData% folder:

Figure 10. Malware code showing PowerShell command

An in-depth look at the new Cerber version

The latest version of Cerber protects the configuration data embedded in the malware binary using RC4. However, while older versions use custom codes to implement RC4, this new version uses Crypto APIs. The RC4 key is still embedded in the malware binary.

Figure 11. Code to pass RC4key and encrypted config data to the decryptor

Figure 12. RC4 decryption using crypto APIs

Cerber adds more than 50 file name extensions to its file encryption routine, bringing the total to 493:

However, new to this version is a list of file name extensions exempted from encryption:

• .bat
• .cmd
• .com
• .cpl
• .dll
• .exe
• .hta
• .msc
• .msi
• .msp
• .pif
• .scf
• .scr
• .sys

It adds new folders to a list that it prioritizes when searching for files to encrypt, indicating this new version is particularly going after Microsoft Office documents:

• \bitcoin\ (new)
• \excel\
• \microsoft sql server\
• \microsoft\excel\ (new)
• \microsoft\microsoft sql server\
• \microsoft\office\ (new)
• \microsoft\onenote\ (new)
• \microsoft\outlook\ (new)
• \microsoft\powerpoint\ (new)
• \microsoft\word\ (new)
• \office\ (new)
• \onenote\
• \outlook\
• \powerpoint\
• \steam\
• \the bat!\
• \thunderbird\
• \word\ (new)

But it adds a few more folders to its list of exemptions:

• \$getcurrent\ (new)
• \$recycle.bin\ (new)
• \$windows.~bt\
• \$windows.~ws\ (new)
• \boot\
• \documents and settings\all users\
• \documents and settings\default user\
• \documents and settings\localservice\
• \documents and settings\networkservice\
• \intel\ (new)
• \msocache\ (new)
• \perflogs\ (new)
• \program files (x86)\
• \program files\
• \programdata\
• \recovery\ (new)
• \recycled\ (new)
• \recycler\ (new)
• \system volume information\ (new)
• \temp\ (new)
• \users\all users\
• \windows.old\
• \windows10upgrade\ (new)
• \windows\
• \winnt\ (new)
• \appdata\local\
• \appdata\locallow\
• \appdata\roaming\ (made more generic)
• \local settings\
• \public\music\sample music\
• \public\pictures\sample pictures\
• \public\videos\sample videos\
• \tor browser\

It drops the ransom note, which instruction for decryption, as _README_{RAND}_.hta; for example, _README_2Rg927_.hta.

Figure 13. Ransom note

As of this writing, Cerber uses two new sets of IP ranges where C&C server could reside in one of those IP ranges:

Indicators of compromise

The following files were used for this analysis:

Malicious .zip attachment:

• 7be5e805c5bcb57fcfc3a9ab37292603d73086c4

Extracted document with macro code:

• 6a9e8990add357af0621dcd04600e5fcc9ebac23

Cerber variants downloaded by macro malware from hxxps:// hl3gj7zkxjvo6cra.onion.to/svchost.exe:

• 4f02e747bc68262c2cf24dffaf792d51a57b02bd
• 60c4c6e3f6d196278c0fd111aec0faafb003c4a0
• 99f49b70685803e019734c457b1c77e9c7de5531
• 55f72229d0552daf28744c97c88585b585fa159b
• 8994e43317df691ad9796c95700a827ca613bdca
• 7b318f8a59dc2a6ecd261ffd9b6ab27287a811d6
• e049242200300dbce7aaf80c2235b94d0cea582a
• ab0e408c2fc40996c8b9c3ab6e3aa1f88d22b656
• 9d5ae07111c8c89d4fa92160c00f669f8eb15ddd
• c46a426459c170c886e9f49b0c07cd3f1cc61ff2
• 3fc3b16b915a17cb1c2c8e853c3f0a0c11c3715b
• 3352c25b4dc695a344d4ca34c3efdc1e95a7b0ce
• 5a7116673ab853505e2861240bf3a3d6cfccfc27
• 5c09449b2413c41cf8f1ec64698d9bc4571ed744
• 350ee3cee88cb1bb11cddc5c7e55eccadd3dc8fe
• 67c948556bc2fabfcdc4e4dbcf2bf14cdbe73d51
• f39b72e853ed743b8a9a2946d79f4fa1c91bfd5e

Cerber variants installed by RIG (aka Meadgive) exploit kit:

• 9952b68f6d7965f9775946ba6d78638efa00d5e4
• 75dcf470ef61b63f76865df9c1ed8edcf1c3f6d9

Rodel Finones and Francis Tan Seng

MMPC

Earlier this year we announced the general availability of Azure SQL Data Warehouse, offering a SQL-based fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud solution for data warehousing. SQL Data Warehouse is highly elastic, enabling you to provision in minutes and scale capacity in seconds. You can scale compute and storage independently, allowing you to burst compute for complex analytical workloads or scale down your warehouse for archival scenarios, and pay based off what you're using instead of being locked into predefined cluster configurations. Unlike other cloud data warehouse services, SQL Data Warehouse offers the unique option to pause compute, giving you even more freedom to better manage your cloud costs.

We are excited to see the customer momentum across industries and we have continued to bring new features to even further enhance the customer experience.

Leading digital advertising company MediaBrix uses Azure SQL Data Warehouse to run analysis across billions of rows of data – drilling deep down into 30 TB of data. SQL Data Warehouse not only helps MediaBrix gain fast insights, but it also hooks up to technologies like Azure Machine Learning to create predictive models, change data in real time, and deliver the right ads to the right people. Learn more about how MediaBrix gets answers from data with Microsoft Azure platform.

As 2016 ends, here are some of the highlights from a memorable year.

General availability now across 23 regions world wide

Since announcing general availability in 14 regions in July, we have now extended to 9 additional regions bringing the total to 23 – more than any other major cloud provider. Now customers across following regions can use Azure SQL Data Warehouse: North Europe, North Central US, Central US, East US, East US 2, South Central US, West Central US, West US, West US 2, Canada Central, Canada East, West Europe, Germany Central, Germany Northeast, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia Southeast, Central India, South India, China East, China North, Japan East, and Brazil South.

Industry Leading Performance for Analytic Queries

Azure SQL Data Warehouse is powered by SQL Server underneath and with GA we went live with SQL Server 2016. The industry leading SQL Server 2016 columnstore implementation is at the core of serving analytic queries in SQL Data Warehouse. We significantly improved the data compression and segment elimination to reduce the IO when processing large number of rows.

Batch mode execution on top of columnstore speeds up queries by orders of magnitude. With SQL Server 2016, we added batch mode support for common analytic operators, such as order by and windowing aggregates. In addition, we now support aggregate pushdown and string predicate pushdown to the scan node.

“We can tell customers who’s actually consuming their advertising. For example, we might say that to target women aged 24 to 35 who have children, they’ll need to do so between 6 and 8 AM on the East Coast, preferably in Pennsylvania or New Jersey. It’s mind-blowing to tell them that, because they’re not getting that level of intelligence from anybody else.”

- Christopher Beach, Senior Vice President of Engineering, MediaBrix

Learn more about how an advertising company gets answers from data with Microsoft Azure platform.

Fast Loading with ADF and PolyBase

We recently shared how you can use Azure Data Factory Copy Wizard to load 1TB data in under 15 mins into Azure SQL Data Warehouse, at over 1.2 GB per second throughput. Azure Data Factory is a data movement service in the cloud enabling ingestion of data from multiple on-premises and cloud sources – SQL Data Warehouse has deployed a single-click integration with Data Factory to make data movement even easier. Using the staging blob feature, you can achieve high load speeds from all types of data stores besides Azure Blob storage, which the Polybase supports by default.

“Using Azure SQL Data Warehouse, we’re able to do near-real-time compute so they can see data from the last hour. In some cases, we can even bypass our default system and go into a true live system that shows how many people are in the room at that time.”

- Tom Sheppard, Chief Executive Officer, Presence Orb

Learn more about real-time benefits with Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Enhanced migration, monitoring, and SQL tooling experience

Azure SQL Data Warehouse has introduced updates to the Azure portal and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to provide a seamless experience when loading, monitoring, and developing your SQL Data Warehouse. The updates include integrated support for loading from 20+ data stores on premise and in the cloud, a simple process to troubleshoot common issues. The updates also bring highly requested functionality within SSMS further enhancing the experience for SQL users, like enabling the execution of Generate Scripts wizard for database users and user defined functions.

SQL Data Warehouse introduced a new top level resource blade that allows you to quickly manage all your databases. You can use the SQL Data Warehouse resource blade to quickly scan through your data warehouse for details like the name, status, server, pricing tier, location, and subscription.

Accelerated look up queries

SQL Data Warehouse now supports the creation of secondary B-Tree indexes on column store tables. Most analytic queries aggregate large amounts of data and are served well by scanning the column store segments directly. However, there is often a need to look for a “needle in a haystack”, which translates to a query that does a lookup of a single row or a small range of rows. Such look up queries can get orders of magnitude (even 1000x) improvement in response time and potentially run in sub-second if there is a B-Tree index on the filter column.

Easy integration with Azure Active Directory authentication and other services within Azure

Azure AD provides an alternative to SQL Authentication enabling centralized identity and group management. It enables a single sign-on experience using SQL Data Warehouse for federated domains. Azure AD can be used to authenticate against a growing number of Azure and other Microsoft services and helps customers prevent the proliferation of users and passwords.

“Switching from Amazon Redshift was not just about a direct comparison to Azure SQL Data Warehouse. The overall Azure offering provided a lot of motivation.”

- Bill Sabo, Managing Director of Information Technology, Integral Analytics

Learn more about Integral Analytics switch to Azure from AWS.

HIIPA Certification

To enable greater adoption within the health industry, Azure SQL Data Warehouse is HIIPA certified. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a US healthcare law that establishes requirements for the use, disclosure, and safeguarding of individually identifiable health information.

New products from Partners for easy experience

We have had great partners join us to help customers on their journey to experience and adopt the service – including building custom product to enhance data migration and management experience. For example, Redgate, a long-time partner that delivers SQL Server tools, has created Data Platform Studio (DPS) which provides a simple and reliable way to migrate on-premises SQL Server databases to Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Exclusive free trial

At the annual PASS Summit in October, we announced a SQL Data Warehouse exclusive free trial– enabling customers to experience this cloud-based service for free for a month.

It’s been a great year and thanks to everyone who has joined us in the journey. We are excited for the next year and look forward to helping you solve your most important data warehousing challenges and bringing you even more compelling features and service enhancements. Till then, wish you the best start to 2017.

Learn more

Check out the many resources for learning more about SQL Data Warehouse, including:

What is Azure SQL Data Warehouse?

SQL Data Warehouse best practices

Video library

MSDN forum

Stack Overflow forum

Azure Blob Storage is a massively scalable object storage solution capable of storing and serving tens to hundreds of petabytes of data per customer across a diverse set of data types including media, documents, log files, scientific data and much more. Many of our customers use Blobs to store very large data sets, and have requested support for larger files. The introduction of larger Block Blobs increases the maximum file size from 195 GB to 4.77 TB. The increased blob size better supports a diverse range of scenarios, from media companies storing and processing 4K and 8K videos to cancer researchers sequencing DNA.  

Azure Block Blobs have always been mutable, allowing a customer to insert, upload or delete blocks of data without needing to upload the entire blob. With the new larger block blob size, mutability offers even more significant performance and cost savings, especially for workloads where portions of a large object are frequently modified. For a deeper dive into the Block Blobs service including object mutability, please view this video from our last Build Conference. The REST API documentation for Put Block and Put Block List also covers object mutability. 

We have increased the maximum allowable block size from 4 MB to 100 MB, while maintaining support for up to 50,000 blocks committed to a single Blob. Range GETs continue to be supported on larger Block Blobs allowing high speed parallel downloads of the entire Blob, or just portions of the Blob. You can immediately begin taking advantage of this improvement in any existing Blob Storage or General Purpose Storage Account across all Azure regions. 

Larger Block Blobs are supported by the most recent release of the .NET Client Library (version 8.0.0), with support for Java, Node.js and AzCopy rolling out over the next few weeks. You can also directly use the REST API as always. Larger Block Blobs are supported by REST API version 2016-05-31 and later. There is nothing new to learn about the APIs, so you can start uploading larger Block Blobs right away.  

This size increase only applies to Block Blobs, and the maximum size of Append Blobs (195 GB) and Page Blobs (1 TB) remains unchanged. There are no billing changes. To get started using Azure Storage Blobs, please see our getting started documentation, or reference one of our code samples.

To paraphrase Daniel Webster (American Statesman, 1782-1852), “If all my developer skills were taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of learning like a developer, for by it I would soon regain all the rest.”

To be a good developer is to be a perpetual learner; it is essential for survival. The problems you solve are always changing, but the programming languages, platforms, hardware, tools and technologies you use to solve them are all moving targets. Even the foundation of the agile development processes most developers follow has the notion that you must continue to learn to be more effective. After all, if you’re not learning something new, you’re either falling behind or getting left behind.

Once again, it’s that time of year when many office buildings get a bit quieter, parking and traffic get a little easier, and many production systems go into “hands-off” lockdown for fear of a breaking change ruining the holidays. This slow period provides an opportunity to step back from the stuff you work on every day and learn something new that perhaps you haven’t had a chance to try yet.

Fortunately, there are a lot of great resources available for you to learn new skills in Azure. Below are ten areas to explore that go beyond the familiar cloud workhorses (such as virtual machines and storage) and focus on capabilities related to IoT, containers, microservices, serverless computing, bots, artificial intelligence, and more. Each has a list of resources to give you a quick intro, and additional content to help you dive deeper.

If you’re new to Microsoft Azure, you may want to start with the Get Started Guide for Azure Developers.

1. Internet of Things (IoT)

Anything can be a connected device these days. Azure IoT Suite and the Azure IoT services make it easy for you to connect devices to the cloud, not only to collect the telemetry data they generate but also to do things  in your apps based on that data. You can also get Azure IoT-certified starter kits for some DIY time building your own devices.

Quick:

• Watch: Introduction to Azure IoT Suite and IoT Hub for developers
• Read: Developer's introduction to Azure IoT

More time:

• Watch: Developer’s Guide to Connecting Devices to Azure IoT
• Read: Azure IoT Developer Center
• Do: Azure IoT Starter Kits
• Learn: Getting Started with the Internet of Things (IoT)

2. Functions

Looking for a way to build microservices or get tasks done easily in your apps, such as processing data, integrating systems, or providing simple APIs? Azure Functions offers serverless compute for composing event driven solutions. You only need to write the code that solves a specific need and then not worry about building out an entire application or the infrastructure required to run it.

Quick:

• Watch: Azure Functions and the Evolution of Web Jobs
• Read: Azure Functions Overview

More time:

• Watch: Developing Azure Functions
• Read: What is Serverless Computing? Exploring Azure Functions
• Do: Azure Functions Challenge
• Learn: Using Azure Functions to Build Nanoservices

3. Cognitive Services

Artificial intelligence is no longer science fiction and can be used in your applications today. Cognitive Services is a growing collection of machine learning APIs, SDKs, and services you can use to make your applications more intelligent, engaging, and discoverable. Add smart features to your applications and bots, such as emotion and video detection; facial, speech, and vision recognition; and speech and language understanding.

Quick:

• Watch: Get started with Microsoft Cognitive Services
• Read: How Uber is using driver selfies to enhance security, powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services

More time:

• Watch: Microsoft Cognitive Services: Give Your Apps a Human Side
• Read: Face and Emotion Recognition in Xamarin.Forms with Microsoft Cognitive Services
• Do: Getting started with the Text Analytics APIs to detect sentiment, key phrases, topics and language

4. Bot Service

Looking to improve customer engagement in a new or existing application? Azure Bot Service enables rapid, intelligent bot development, bringing together the power of the Microsoft Bot Framework and Azure Functions. Build, connect, deploy and manage bots that interact naturally wherever your users are talking. Allow your bots to scale based on demand, and you pay only for the resources you consume.

Quick:

• Watch: Introducing the Azure Bot Service
• Read: Azure Bot Service Overview

More time:

• Watch: Introducing the Azure Bot Service
• Read: Bot Framework – Solving Business Problems with the Microsoft Bot Framework
• Do: Create Your First Bot
• Learn: Getting Started with Bots

5. Container Service

If you have been building container based applications and now need to get them into production, check out Azure Container Service. This open sourced service supports popular container orchestration engines such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and DC/OS. Azure Container Service removes a lot of complexity to help you manage clusters of virtual machines to run your containerized applications.

Quick:

• Watch: Azure Container Service
• Read: Azure Container Service 101

More time:

• Watch: Building Applications Using the Azure Container Service
• Read: Azure Container Service Introduction
• Do: Deploy an Azure Container Service cluster
• Learn: Deploying Dockerized Apps to the Azure Container Service

6. Logic Apps

Azure Logic Apps help you automate workflows and integrate applications and services. Nearly a hundred out of the box connectors for all your favorite services  make it easy to set up workflows and accomplish tasks between connected services. Using a visual designer in the Azure portal or Visual Studio, you can compose the logic (and it works great with Azure Functions) that act based on events.

Quick:

• Watch: Enterprise Integration with Azure Logic Apps
• Read: What are Logic Apps?

More time:

• Watch: Getting started with Azure Logic Apps
• Read: Microsoft Azure - Enterprise Application Integration Using Azure Logic Apps
• Do: Build a Logic App in a Free Sandbox Experience
• Learn: Mastering Azure App Service, Part 1: Building Logic Apps

7. API Apps

Azure API Apps make it easy for you to build and consume cloud-hosted REST APIs. Azure provides a marketplace of APIs where you can publish your API, or find existing APIs to use in your applications. You can also generate cross-platform client SDKs for the hosted API using Swagger.

Quick:

• Watch: Azure API Apps 101 with Guang Yang
• Read: API Apps Overview

More time:

• Watch: RESTful Web Services: ASP.NET and Azure API Apps
• Do: Get started with API Apps, ASP.NET, and Swagger in Azure App Service tutorial
• Learn: Mastering Azure App Service, Part 2: Building Azure API Apps

8. DocumentDB

Sometimes a traditional relational database is not the best choice for your data. DocumentDB is a fully managed and scalable NoSQL database service that features SQL queries over object data. You can also access DocumentDB by using existing MongoDB drivers, which enables you to use DocumentDB with apps written for use with MongoDB.

Quick:

• Watch: DocumentDB: overview and offline development experience
• Read: What is DocumentDB?

More time:

• Watch: Delivering Applications at Scale with DocumentDB, Azure's NoSQL Document Database
• Read: An Overview of Microsoft Azure DocumentDB
• Do: NoSQL tutorial: Build a DocumentDB C# console application
• Learn: Azure DocumentDB: Planet-Scale NoSQL

9. Mobile Center

If you’re already working on a mobile app, you should learn more about mobile DevOps with Visual Studio Mobile Center, which brings together our mobile developer services, including HockeyApp and Xamarin Test Cloud. Currently in Preview, Visual Studio Mobile Center provides cloud-powered lifecycle services for mobile apps, including continuous integration, test automation, distribution, crash reporting, and application analytics. The Mobile Center SDK currently supports Android, iOS, Xamarin, and React Native apps with a roadmap to support more over the coming months.

Quick:

• Read: Introducing Visual Studio Mobile Center (Preview)

More time:

• Watch: Visual Studio Mobile Center with Thomas Dohmke
• Read: Mobile DevOps – Exploring Visual Studio Mobile Center

10. Application Insights

Rich application metrics help you deliver and continuously improve applications for your customers. Application Insights is an extensible application performance management service that’ll help you detect, triage, and diagnose issues in web apps and services. You can integrate it into your DevOps pipeline and use it to monitor the usage and experience of your apps.

Quick:

• Watch: Monitor Web Apps using Azure Application Insights
• Read: General availability of Azure Application Insights

More time:

• Watch: Advanced Analytics with Application Insights
• Read: What is Application Insights?
• Do: Interactive data analytics demo
• Learn: Web and Data Application Development with Visual Studio 2017 and Azure (Module 1)

I hope you found an area that caught your interest and you learn something new from the content provided.

Happy holidays!

As more employees work from home and on the go, video conferencing has become a key way for colleagues to connect. Online meetings are becoming an increasingly important part of our daily business communications and collaboration.

Working with your IT team can put employees at an advantage by ensuring they are well equipped for virtual meetings and know how to best use the technology available. Doing so can also save your IT team valuable time by helping employees set up their video conference calls for success.

Check settings in advance

Before the call, employees should confirm with IT that they have the necessary plugins and most up-to-date technology. Additionally, several minutes before the meeting, employees should take it upon themselves to check that all camera and microphone inputs and outputs are channeled through the call.

Prevent unnecessary slow downs

Lagging, out-of-sync video and audio can be common, often due to network connectivity issues. To ensure that this doesn’t impact their meetings, employees can request that the IT team configures the quality of service to prioritize network traffic toward your video conferencing solution for employees making calls from within the office. The number of dial-ins can also slow the connection. With this in mind, employees should include only key participants or group multiple attendees on a single dial-in when possible.

The ultimate meeting guide

Learn how to effectively and efficiently create the best possible meetings for your organization.

Get the eBook

IT insights can enhance the meeting experience

With so many features available in today’s virtual conferencing solutions, employees aren’t always aware of the extent of capabilities available to them in their online meetings. Your IT team can give employees guidance on using in-app live chat rooms, collaborative whiteboards and direct file-sharing tools to enhance their next call.

Develop and share a checklist of tips

A great way to bolster success is for your employees and IT team to work together to develop tips that can be shared throughout the company and used to help ensure that virtual meetings run as efficiently as possible. Every organization is different and each will have its own unique considerations, but here are a few tips to help start an IT checklist for your employees:

• When using an external microphone, meeting organizers and attendees may need to switch from default, “built-in audio” and select the microphone as their audio device.
• To avoid accidental background noise throwing off the flow of conversation and decreasing speed with which participants can communicate, employees should encourage their meeting participants to remain muted until speaking.
• For those planning to share their screen, cuing up everything in advance helps avoid mid-meeting surprises. Pulling up tabs or trying to open files during a meeting can slow down the call and may cause the screen to lag.

Empowering both the IT team and your employees to understand the technology they use helps everyone work more productively. For detailed insights on how to produce compelling virtual meetings and broadcasts, check out the “Host Large-Scale Virtual Meetings Like a Pro” eBook.

The post What employees can learn from your IT team to ensure better online meetings appeared first on Office Blogs.

Pitching ideas isn’t nearly as nerve-wracking when you’ve got a powerful presentation to share. We recently spoke about presenting with Jon Hammond, chief strategy officer for Galvanized Media, the company responsible for the New York Times best-selling books “Eat This, Not That!,” “Zero Belly Diet” and “Best Life.”

Jon has a hand in everything—from marketing his company’s products and brands, to public relations, to looking for new partnerships and opportunities—so we wanted to get his expert advice on what he thought was the best starting point for creating great presentations.

Jon’s advice: Start with your audience, not your idea.

Jon says, “It starts with recognizing what our partners or our potential clients’ challenges are. So we like to get that out front in an outline—getting to the story about how our skill sets and our expertise can help achieve their goals and conquer their challenges. We want to make sure there’s a good story arc there—a very clear beginning, middle and end. And the end gets you to the desired location. It gets all parties on the same page.” Recently, Jon and his team created a general presentation for their well-known brand “Eat This, Not That!”

“We’re assertively trying to attract new partners and realized we want to tell our own story a little bit better. So we created a general presentation—a resource that can be used internally as new people join the team, a tool that can tell them what “Eat This, Not That!” is now, but also something that is modular—something that can easily be adapted or updated by colleagues for a client’s specific needs.”

“We’re taking pieces from our general presentation that are most relevant and adding to them—building client-specific slides that might be needed, just outlining concepts, ideas, underlining the challenges and putting in infographics or video.”

Jon worked with his team to put together something that combines great photography and typography with their vision for the future of the brand. Because it’s in PowerPoint, he felt it could easily be updated by colleagues for a client’s specific needs.

“Since the core creative work has been done, it becomes a utility that is much more nimble than anything else we could be using.”

When thinking about the most powerful visuals to use for his pitches, Jon says it really depends on the client.

“One thing we use is a very clear, bright, energetic kind of lifestyle imagery. Even though we might be talking about food or nutrition, it’s not just about shots of vegetables. It’s about underscoring how using our content allows you to live an active lifestyle.”

Key to a pitch perfect presentation

So what makes a presentation great? For Jon, the answer is it must be succinct. “By that I mean pace,” he says. “Succinct to me doesn’t have to mean short—but if the pace is brisk enough then it will feel succinct. It will feel like you’re getting to the point. What’s most important to me is not just arriving to the point, but making sure that the audience arrives there at the exact moment I arrive there. It’s about making sure that it’s succinct enough that everyone is following along as they should, and as engaged as they should be. That collective realization at the end.”

One of his favorite PowerPoint features is the ability to embed video in a presentation slide. “We realized that PowerPoint is the easiest way to do that,” he says.

We were eager to get his take on some of PowerPoint’s newest features, including PowerPoint Designer, Morph and Zoom, available exclusively with Office 365.

PowerPoint Designer (exclusive to Office 365) automatically gives you layout and design suggestions when you add a graphic to a slide. Jon agrees Designer is a great time-saver for people who don’t have a design background.

PowerPoint Morph (exclusive to Office 365) adds fluid, video-like animated transitions within slides.

“With Morph, you can go to a slide, move the image and the text out of the way and drag and drop—there’s nothing easier.

“I can also see it moreso in some of my presentations for new business, to bring a dynamic view for what we’ve done, especially in ways to show growth on our side, such as how we have scaled the business and the website. It’s an interesting concept to animate some of that. Moving through a chart or a graph or a series of images brings that dynamic nature to a static image. It’ll have a lot of impact.”

According to Jon, if there’s an opportunity to take a static image and make it dynamic, it’s a great opportunity to add interest to the piece.

Zoom (exclusive to Office 365), gives your presentation more action by letting you zoom in on things you want to emphasize on a slide, or move from one section to another. “Any time you can use a tool to break that monotony is an advantage,” he says.

Innovative ways to use Microsoft products

We’re always curious to see how people use Microsoft products in unconventional ways (or at least ways we hadn’t thought of first).

Jon’s no exception to being able to think creatively outside the box.

“I have used it as a catch and capture tool for the early stages of our company, when we were working on strategic vision things. I have used PPT as a “catch-all” for various ideas. I could group the slides in certain categories, and from there I could throw links directly into PowerPoint, so everything could be hyperlinked, and I could easily pull up the slide that dealt with marketing, or the slide that dealt with content, and dive into those ideas.”

As to future projects and potential partners for Galvanized Media, Jon’s looking forward to 2017.

“Being able to take out our core presentation and adapt that to show these partners how our goals are aligned and how our resources help fill a void that they have—that’s incredibly important. If I use PowerPoint a few times a month now, I’m hoping that is ramping up to a couple of times per week.”

Even though he’s been using it for years, Jon still marvels at how universally regarded PowerPoint is.

“I’ve never walked into a conference room and had it not work or have nobody understand it. By removing that learning curve, it helps speed our pace of business.”

Many thanks to Jon Hammond for sharing his thoughts on creating an impactful, effective presentation.

Please note: To get new exclusive features like PowerPoint Designer, Morph and Zoom, subscribe to Office 365 today.

The post Becoming pitch perfect with PowerPoint appeared first on Office Blogs.

Recent updates to the Office 365 admin experience include a new OneDrive for Business admin center, new settings to manage Microsoft Teams and GigJam, and improvements to the new Service health dashboard. In November and December, our efforts focused on enabling admins to manage new workloads and improving the monitoring and the OneDrive administration experience.

Here’s a summary of the recent updates:

New OneDrive for Business admin center rolling out to First Release customers

Over the past year, OneDrive for Business has evolved at a rapid pace—introducing new features for users and IT admins—across sync, web and mobile. As the number of users continues to grow, our customers have asked for an easier way to administer their company OneDrive for Business settings and policies. The new OneDrive admin center delivers on that, making it easier and more efficient to manage OneDrive for Business. The OneDrive admin center has started to roll out to first release customers and can be accessed at onedrive.com/admin while in preview.

We plan to make the OneDrive admin center generally available in early 2017 and will add a link from the Office 365 admin center. Read the announcement for more information.

Manage Microsoft Teams from the Office 365 admin center

Microsoft Teams—in preview since November—is the chat-based workspace in Office 365 that helps teams achieve more together. Office 365 admins can now enable and manage Microsoft Teams directly from the Office 365 admin center.

In the Services & add-ins page, admins will find a new Microsoft Teams section where they can enable the service for their organization, as it is disabled by default during the preview period. After enabling, admins can configure Microsoft Teams for their organization, including notifications, feedback, bots and screen sharing in meetings.

Enable GigJam from the Office 365 admin center

GigJam helps you get work done across your network by sharing just the slice of information you want—with who you need—both inside and outside your company. GigJam—currently in preview—is off by default for organizations with Office 365. You can now enable GigJam directly from the Services & add-ins page in the Office 365 admin center and let your organization try using GigJam.

New Service health dashboard rolling out to First Release customers

The new Service health dashboard has started to roll out to First Release customers—providing admins with a new level of service health insights that are personalized for their organization. The dashboard makes it easier to identify relevant issues by separating major business critical outages from others and splitting them into two categories: incidents and advisories. A new summary view surfaces the most relevant and critical details and allows you to quickly understand the impact on your organization by showing the number of impacted users. This allows admins to stay on top of service incidents, improve your internal support experience and improve the Office 365 user experience.

Based on feedback from the preview customers, we’ve further improved the new Service health dashboard. A new rating option now enables admins to provide feedback on the accuracy and usefulness of the information of each post on the Service health dashboard.

In addition, admins can now access the full history view of each message that provides access to all previous posts by clicking Show details.

Admins can also now also access a searchable history view that displays all incidents and advisories from the past 30 days.

We’re planning to roll out the new dashboard to all admins in February 2017.

More to come

In the coming months, we will add more reports that focus on which clients are used to access SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and Yammer. We are also working on making the Office 365 adoption content pack in Power BI available to all customers and providing new public APIs that will enable you to programmatically access the usage data and integrate it into custom applications, like a company reporting portal.

Let us know what you think!

Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower right corner of the Office 365 admin center. And don’t be surprised if we respond to your feedback. We truly read every piece of feedback that we receive to make sure the Office 365 administration experience meets your needs.

Please note: The features mentioned in this blog post have started to roll out. If they are not available yet in your region, for your subscription or for your organization, please check back in a few weeks!

—Anne Michels, @Anne_Michels, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 Marketing team

The post What’s new in Office 365 administration—December update appeared first on Office Blogs.

We’re counting down to the New Year with a brand-new collection in the Windows Store and today, we’re highlighting some of its awesome year-end deals you can enjoy on your Windows 10 PC.*

GAMES

Gears of War 4: Ultimate Edition – $30 off
Until Dec. 28, purchase Gears of War 4: Ultimate Edition for just $69.99 (that’s $30 off the regular $99.99 price) and play the beginning of a new saga for one of the most acclaimed franchises in video game history. And there’s a bonus: when you purchase this title on your Windows 10 PC, you can also play on Xbox One with Xbox Play Anywhere.

Forza Horizon 3: Ultimate Edition – $20 off
Until Dec. 28, Forza Horizon 3: Ultimate Edition can be yours for only $79.99 (that’s $20 off the $99.99 price). Get in the driver’s seat of this Xbox Play Anywhere game and explore Australia in more than 350 of the world’s greatest cars. Customize everything, hire and fire your friends, and make your Horizon the ultimate celebration of cars, music, and the freedom of the open road.

Dead Rising 4 – Deluxe Edition – $20 off  
Can you discover the truth behind the mysterious cause of zombie hordes in a Colorado town? Can you survive them? Get Dead Rising 4: Deluxe Edition, a thrilling, day-of-the-undead game for just $59.99 (regularly $79.99) from Dec. 29 to Jan. 7 and figure out creative ways to kill them once again.

ReCore – $20 off
As one of the last remaining humans on a planet controlled by robotic foes bent on your destruction, you must forge friendships with a courageous group of robot companions, each with unique abilities and powers. Lead this band of unlikely heroes in ReCore, an Xbox Play Anywhere game on sale thru Dec. 28 for just $19.99 (regularly $39.99).

APPS

Adobe Photoshop Elements 15 – $30 off
Known for easy photo and video organization, editing, creating, and sharing, Adobe Photoshop Elements 15 focuses on further automating these functions. And until Jan. 9, get it for $69.99 (30% off the regular $99.99 price).

Drawboard PDF – $5 off
For reading, annotating and marking up PDFs, it’s hard to beat the features of Drawboard PDF. Get them all now for 50% off until Jan. 9 ($4.99, regularly $9.99).

MOVIES & TV

Game of Thrones
Familiar faces forge new alliances to bolster their strategic chances at survival, while new characters emerge to challenge the balance of power, all in Season 6 of the blockbuster HBO series Game of Thrones. All six seasons of Game of Thrones, now up to 49% off until Dec. 31.

Star Trek Beyond
In Star Trek Beyond, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise explores the vast, uncharted reaches of deep space, where they encounter a mysterious adversary who will put everything the Federation stands for to the test. Get Star Trek Beyond now from the Movies & TV section of the Windows Store for 50% off until Jan. 2.

MUSIC

Rihanna, ANTI
Brash, unapologetic and addictive, this artist’s music has attracted a devoted following. Check out her latest album, ANTI, for 30% off.

Sia, This is Acting
Sia’s latest album, This is Acting, is a collection of songs originally written for – but rejected by – clients including Adele, Rihanna, and Beyoncé. But as the album title hints, her own interpretations add another layer of theater to each tune. Now just $9.99 (regularly $13.99).

This is just the beginning of what’s in the Windows Store Countdown Deals Collection. It’s live now and available through Jan. 9, so check out the Collection today and make sure to come back often so you don’t miss any of the great deals!

*Available through Jan. 9, 2017 on Windows 10 devices in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, and Australia. Offers and content varies by market. Limited availability; offers may change at any time.

The post Countdown to the New Year with great deals in the Windows Store appeared first on Windows Experience Blog.

We’re releasing the December 2016 edition of our evaluation and licensed Windows developer virtual machines (VM) on Windows Dev Center. The VMs come in Hyper-V, Parallels, VirtualBox and VMWare flavors.  The evaluation version will expire on 04/08/17.

Evaluation VM contain:

• Windows 10 Enterprise Evaluation, Version 1607
• Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3 (Build 14.0.25425.01)
• Windows developer SDK and tools (Build 14393)
• Microsoft Azure SDK for .NET (Build 2.9.6)
• Windows Bridge for iOS (0.2.161107)
• Windows UWP samples (November 2016 Update)
• Windows Bridge for iOS samples
• Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

Licensed VM contain:

• Windows 10 Pro, Version 1607
• Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3 (Build 14.0.25425.01)
• Windows developer SDK and tools (Build 14393)
• Microsoft Azure SDK for .NET (Build 2.9.6)
• Windows Bridge for iOS (0.2.161107)
• Windows UWP samples (November 2016 Update)
• Windows Bridge for iOS samples
• Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

If you don’t currently have a Windows 10 Pro license, you can get one from the Microsoft Store. If you just want to try out Windows 10 and UWP, use the free evaluation version of the VMs. The evaluation copies will expire after a pre-determined amount of time.

The Azure portal also has virtual machines you can spin up with the Windows Developer tooling installed as well!

If you have feedback on the VMs, please provide it over at the Windows Developer Feedback UserVoice site.

The post Just released – Windows developer virtual machines – December 2016 build appeared first on Building Apps for Windows.

We’ve just published an update for the Linux Integration Services download. This release includes a series of upstream updates and adds compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Oracle Linux RHCK 7.3.

The LIS 4.1.3 download is available from the Microsoft Download Center.

The LIS download is not required for Linux distributions that have built-in LIS, as described in “Which Linux Integration Services should I use in my Linux VMs?”

Linux Integration Services is an open source project that is part of the Linux Kernel, and we welcome public involvement with the LIS download on github.

Developers,

First of all, we can’t thank you enough for reading our blog. We put a lot of time and care into managing this site, and it means a lot that so many of you tune in regularly. That being said, we want to improve.

We want to make sure that we’re giving you more than just the best possible content. We want to give you all of the content that you want, too.

In order to make sure that every piece is something that you’ll want to read and share with your fellow developers, we need your input.

Do you like tutorials? Updates? Interviews? Jokes? All of it? None of it at all?

That’s exactly what we want to know. By learning more about the topics that interest you, we can tailor our content to your specific interests and hopefully help you become an even better developer. Our goal is to help you achieve your goals. And this survey is a good start to helping us help you.

Thank you in advance! We can’t wait to hear your feedback.

Ready to take the survey? Take it here: http://wndw.ms/bafw

The post We Want You (to help us improve our blog) appeared first on Building Apps for Windows.

This Week on Windows, we’re taking a look at some of the biggest Windows news of the year, including the Windows 10 Anniversary Update and the things you can do with it, Xbox Play Anywhere, HoloLens and much more. This year was a big one for Windows 10, from game-changing updates to Windows Holographic.

Let’s take a look at some of this year’s highlights:

The launch of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update

The Anniversary Update gave us several key features and brought us easy notetaking and screen sketching with the Windows Ink Workspace. It also improved the power and efficiency of Microsoft Edge and introduced us to extensions– the web add-ons designed to help you get the most out of your internet experience. Our favorite digital assistant, Cortana, also got in on the update game with new above-lock functionality. The anniversary update also brought us tools to help educators, such as “take a test” – true innovations for a modern classroom.

Xbox Play Anywhere begins with ReCore

The launch of ReCore also marked the launch of Xbox Play Anywhere—a big day for Xbox gamers, everywhere. As an Xbox Play Anywhere title, ReCore (along with titles including Gears of War 4 and Forza Horizon 3) launched simultaneously on both Xbox One and Windows 10 PC, allowing you to play on both platforms when you at no additional cost. Plus, you can pick up where you left off on another Xbox One or PC, bringing all your game saves, add-ons, and achievements with you.

A new wave of creativity with the Windows 10 Creators Update and Surface Studio

At the Microsoft Event, we showcased some of the most exciting devices coming to market – including Surface Studio, Surface Dial and the new Surface Book– an update to Windows 10 with tools to make 3D and mixed reality accessible to everyone, as well as ways to empower gamers to easily stream their gameplay and connecting people faster to those they care about most.

Device innovation at WinHEC 2016

Windows Hardware Engineering Community event (WinHEC) – a conference all about Microsoft’s vision for the future of hardware – saw innovations from mixed reality, gaming, and a new concept for many: cellular PCs. Whether it’s a partnership with Intel to co-develop PCs to power the first mixed reality headsets, or the expansion into China, or all the Universal Windows apps ready for HoloLens users, it’s clear Windows is the platform that will help make mixed reality mainstream.

Here’s what’s new in the Windows Store this week:

Minecraft Ender Update & Festive Mash-Up Pack

Now you can brave The End in Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition! Explore the outer islands of the End and its mysterious End Cities, loot the Elytra glider, and battle the Enderdragon. Plus, we have igloos and polar bears, and world height is twice as high for your tallest builds.

Windows Store collections to get you in the holiday spirit

We’re excited to share that the Windows Store team has put together awesome collections of apps, movies, TV shows, games and more in the Holiday Roundup, sure to get you in the holiday spirit! Learn more about these collections here.

Pre-Order Assassin’s Creed

Using groundbreaking technology to access his genetic memories, Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) discovers he is descended from a secret society known as The Assassins; as he explores the memories of his ancestor Aguilar, Callum takes on the skills and knowledge of a Master Assassin. Pre-order Assassin’s Creed ($14.99) now in the Movies & TV section of the Windows Store while the film is still in theaters!

Have a great weekend!

The post This Week on Windows: A look back at this year appeared first on Windows Experience Blog.

It’s that time of the week, devs.

In case you missed our updates, here is an annotated list of the latest announcements coming from the Windows Developer team. We hope you enjoy them!

AdDuplex Monetization and Marketing

AdDuplex helps apps utilize app ad space before the app has reached a level of popularity that makes monetization efforts worthwhile. From there, AdDuplex can help devs continue managing, marketing and monetizing their apps.

Customize the Surface Dial

In this post, we explain how to customize the Surface Dial Experience for bridged UWP apps using Objective-C projections. It’s neat.

Virtual Machines Update

We’re releasing the December 2016 edition of our evaluation and licensed Windows developer virtual machines (VM) on Windows Dev Center. The VMs come in Hyper-V, Parallels, VirtualBox and VMWare flavors.  The evaluation version will expire on 04/08/17.

Other than that, have a great new year celebration! We’ll see you in 2017.

Download Visual Studio to get started.

The Windows team would love to hear your feedback.  Please keep the feedback coming using our Windows Developer UserVoice site. If you have a direct bug, please use the Windows Feedback tool built directly into Windows 10.

The post ICYMI – AdDuplex, Windows Bridge for iOS, new Virtual Machine appeared first on Building Apps for Windows.

Windows 10 is packed full of features that will help you be more productive and have fun. With Windows 10, you have your very own digital personal assistant in Cortana, who you can count on to help you find things, complete tasks, set reminders and work across your devices more productively; a browser called Microsoft Edge that provides you with a web experience that’s faster and safer; Windows Hello, password-free sign-in that gives you the fastest, most secure way to unlock your Windows device*, compatible apps and Microsoft Edge websites; the Windows Store, which gives you access to great content across apps, games, movies and music; and awesome gaming features with the Xbox App and Xbox Play Anywhere.

First up, check out the “Get Started” app. You can access the app by typing “Get Started” into the Cortana Search Box on the bottom left of your screen.

Check out the welcome tab for quick navigation in the app:

The Browse topics tab has great information based on topics, including setting things up, Cortana, Windows Hello, Gaming and Xbox and more!

Here are some other helpful resources for getting started with Windows 10:

• Visit this link to learn more about all the current features available on Windows 10.
• Learn how to set up Windows Hello on your PC.
• Learn how to customize your Start menu in a few easy steps.
• Learn how to get the most out of Microsoft Edge and how to write on the web with Microsoft Edge.
• Take a tour of the Windows Store.
• Learn how to search your PC and the web with Cortana.
• Personalize your PC by enabling the dark theme.
• Read up on everything you need to know about getting started with Xbox Play Anywhere.
• Learn how to get started with Windows Ink Workspace.
• Learn how to use Windows Ink in the Photos and Maps apps.

You can also find a new Windows 10 tip every Monday on the Windows Blog. Those are just a few resources for you to check out to get started with Windows 10. If you have questions about getting started, you can tweet to @Windows.

Have a great week!

The post Windows 10 Tip: Getting started with Windows 10 appeared first on Windows Experience Blog.