Terabytes of data stored on WHAT?! | BTP Newsletter

Dear Techies,

This week, we’re exploring the brilliant new filters in OneDrive! We’ll also discuss Microsoft Reflect, Figma embeds in Loop, SMLs, and take a look at some important news and updates to the Microsoft 365 applications.👇

In the web version of Microsoft OneDrive, users can now filter shared files from specific "People" or "Meetings."

For a detailed guide on these new features, read our dedicated blog post:

Incredibly, Project Silica's coaster-sized glass plates are capable of storing data for millennia. This new method of data storage offers an innovative and sustainable solution for global storage needs.

The technology actually dates back to 19th-century with photographic preservation on glass. However, technological advancements today enable small glass sheets to hold multiple terabytes of data.

Elire, a sustainability-focused venture group, in collaboration with Microsoft’s Project Silica, have created the Global Music Vault in Svalbard, Norway. They have done this using silica-based glass plates.

The glass plates ensure a durable archive, resistant to electromagnetic pulses and extreme temperatures, and complement an existing repository like the Global Seed Vault and the Arctic World Archive.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like Microsoft Copilot and Chat GPT have been all over the news lately. But 2024 could see the emergence of SMLs or Small Language Models.

SLMs, despite being smaller in scale, could still provide valuable AI services. The benefit to SLMs is in the size; they’re small enough to fit on mobile devices, potentially allowing users to access AI offline.

Excitingly, Microsoft have already released a suite of SLMs called “Phi,” and you can learn more about it here.

Their latest model, Phi-2, with 2.7 billion parameters, demonstrates remarkable language understanding and reasoning abilities, outperforming much larger models on several benchmarks.

The team achieved this by focusing on high-quality training data and innovative scaling techniques.

What do they say about good things and small packages?

You’ve probably heard of Figma, a powerful collaborative design tool that empowers teams to develop digital interfaces.

Now, you can embed your Figma designs in Microsoft Loop. All you need to do is paste your Figma link into Loop, and get to work!

Microsoft Defender XDR's Automatic Attack Disruption is a cybersecurity feature designed to effectively contain attacks, minimize the impact on organizational assets, and allow Security Operations Center (SOC) teams more time for comprehensive remediation.

In contrast to traditional protection methods that rely on single indicators of compromise, this feature operates at the incident level, leveraging the entire spectrum of XDR signals for a holistic approach.

What sets Microsoft Defender XDR apart is its built-in and researcher-backed Automatic Attack Disruption, which utilizes insights from security experts and advanced AI models to counteract the complexities of advanced attacks.

Unlike other solutions that allow users to create their automatic response actions, Microsoft Defender XDR's feature considers the complete context of signals from various sources to identify compromised assets.

The process involves three key stages:

This process contains the attack in real-time by isolating affected assets. Crucially, the disruption significantly curtails a threat’s progress early in the attack lifecycle, resulting in a substantial reduction in overall impact, including associated costs and loss of productivity.

Let’s take a glance at some exciting new features that are on the horizon, due to roll out in February 2024.

From February 2024, SharePoint will allow you to add an image or color gradient color to page sections.

This feature will be available on New Teams for Windows and Mac, allowing you to focus on whiteboards, printed documents, books, and other physical objects. 

The whole of the Outlook for Android Settings page is being reorganized to make important features easier to access.

The new Collaborative Notes feature will allow all meeting invitees to generate collaborative meeting notes and agendas both before and after the meeting.

Co-organizers will be able to edit town hall details, publish the event, and cancel the event, similar to the organizer.

Users will be able to use team tags to @ mention groups of people within shared channels.

While writing an email you’ll be able to reorder the tools, customize your experience, and make your most used actions even easier to reach.

You’ll be able to reorder tools and customize your experience while writing emails.

Organizers will have the option to schedule a new town hall by duplicating information from an existing scheduled one. The organizer then has the flexibility to edit and modify the information according to the requirements of the new event.

Microsoft Copilot can’t interact with a Mac operating system like it can with Windows. But if you still want to get Copilot on your Mac Desktop for ease of access, then try this easy solution.

If you enjoy what we’re doing, please drop us a like and a comment! 🥰

Many users have been reporting a “Correlation ID” error on Android when using their Microsoft 365 application.

If you’re getting this error, try fixing the problem using these solutions:

1) Update the application in Google Play.

2) Clear the app’s cache and data.

That’s all for this newsletter. Remember to keep your eyes peeled for the first newsletter in March, where we’ll be announcing the winner to our Grammarly Premium competition!

Thanks for reading and see you soon! 👋