IT Knowledgebase Articles

I work with many legal and regulatory organizations that require no retention period for Microsoft Teams channels and their users’ chats. Other industries dictate that the information must be retained for 7 years while other customers don’t want to let go of any information and retain their chats indefinitely. This blog post will assist you…

I’ll admit that I may have done a not-so-best-practice type of thing, I have not gone into the Azure Portal in quite a long time (around 2 months). Now everyone’s usage of Azure is different and for me, I spend most of my time in the Azure Storage world, with many applications interacting with those…

July is here and we are halfway through the year. Am I the only one that feels like 2021 is zipping by? I have been working non-stop for the last 6 months preparing for and migrating legacy workloads from a data center to Microsoft Azure and I have barely had time to look up from…

When approaching a rollout of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) for your organization, it can be difficult to know where to start.  In my last article, MDE was explained at a high level: what it is and why you should care.  This time, we will get into the weeds of how to actually plan for…

If you prefer the ‘classic’ Windows 10 Start menu, or if you want Live Tiles back, then Windows 11 gives you the option to revert to the Windows 10 Start menu. Microsoft could remove the ability to switch back to the Windows 10 Start menu in Windows 11. But I expect to appease enterprise users,…

News and Interests on the Windows 10 taskbar is a new feature that is turned on automatically for all users of Windows 10, version 1909 and later. News and Interests is a little controversial because some people see it as more of a distraction than a useful tool. It shows the current weather next to…

It doesn’t happen that often but sometimes Hyper-V virtual machines (VM) hang when you are trying to shut them down. And you end up with a VM in Hyper-V Manager with a status of ‘Shutting down’ that no longer responds, and it can’t be forced to shut down using the normal controls. Even the PowerShell…

Back at Microsoft Ignite 2017 in Orlando, FL, I attended the session where ‘Project Honolulu’ was announced and demonstrated. This was a fresh, built-from-scratch new server management tool for Windows Servers, Windows 10, and Azure resources. I do recall there being a large number of applause sessions from all the IT Pros in the audience!…

Earlier today, Microsoft released its first build of Windows 11 to Insiders and it is filled with UI updates and other enhancements that improve Windows in ways that are subtle, yet impactful. Generally speaking, Windows 11 looks like a respectable update to Windows 10 at first impression but the story around compatibility is causing more…

Microsoft has released the first build of its ‘next-generation’ operating system that will be known as Windows 11. Featuring significant UI updates and new system requirements that are causing quite a few headaches, Windows 11 is anything but ordinary. In this release, there are many new features that we have not seen before like app…