Michael Reinders

Active Directory is Microsoft’s on-premises identity and access management (IAM) service. In this Active Directory tutorial, learn how Active Directory (AD) makes it easier for IT to manage an organization’s IT resources. Active Directory is especially useful for companies that have to manage lots of endpoints and servers. What is Active Directory and why is…

Outlook app for Android and iOS is free to download, but using some of its features can incur a monthly fee. Learn how to use Outlook without a fee. What is Outlook? Outlook is Microsoft’s mobile email app for Android and iOS platform devices. It allows you to access both personal email accounts (Outlook.com, Hotmail.com,…

Microsoft 365 E3 vs E5 plans in review Microsoft 365, if not the most popular, is way up there in terms of productivity solutions for your organization. There are plans that serve smaller SMBs all the way up to 100,000+ employee enterprises. The solutions serve many vertical markets including healthcare, charities, commercial, etc., with specific…

  In this article, I will show you how to change the Microsoft Teams background in meetings with your own custom image. Virtual backgrounds in Teams meetings let you hide your location and give users more privacy. Change Microsoft Teams Background in Meetings When Microsoft Teams launched, way back when, there were limited features for…

WSL allows you to run applications natively as Linux processes on Windows. Learn how to install and use WSL on Windows Server here. Which versions of Windows Server support WSL? According to Microsoft documentation, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is available for installation on Windows Server 2019 (1709) and above. This includes the few Windows Server…

Microsoft has released a special ‘Hyper-V Server‘ core edition with every release of Windows Server Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC 2012 R2, 2016, 2019). This past summer, while Windows Server 2022 was being developed and finalized, questions arose amongst IT Pros (hey, that rhymes…someone set that to music right away) about the possibility of Hyper-V Server…

Use this guide to learn the basics of what you can do in Microsoft Teams, the system requirements to keep in mind when planning your rollout, and how to download and install Microsoft Teams for your desktop and mobile users in your environment. Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace that brings conversations, meetings, files, and…

  The main gist of this month’s Teams Phone announcement is that Microsoft is consolidating Business Voice with its Enterprise offerings in a new plan, “Teams Phone with Calling Plan.” Microsoft launched Microsoft 365 Business Voice in 2019. It provides SMEs with a complete phone solution that is designed to work with Microsoft Teams. Teams…

Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace that groups people and enables them to share and collaborate on ideas and information. Here’s how to create a team and manage team members. Teams are useful for organizing work information, chat, and tools into channels. Before you create a team, you should understand who should have access to…

As part of Microsoft’s flurry of announcements out of Ignite November 2021, a new feature to assist IT Pros with their transition from Internet Explorer (IE) to Microsoft Edge, called Cloud Site List Management, is coming to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. (What else are they going to add to this portal?!) Cloud Site List…

As a seasoned, or even new IT Pro, you’re likely an avid user of Putty, using secure shell (SSH) to connect to Unix/Linux servers, computers, and even Windows machines for an efficient and secure remote command-line experience. Well, did you know Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server 2019 (and Windows Server 2022) include an…

Back in August, Microsoft started rolling out a web version of the Visio app to Microsoft 365 commercial subscribers. Every user with an Office 365 or Microsoft 365 commercial subscription is entitled to this new web experience at no additional cost. Not bad. As part of the announcement just prior to Microsoft’s Ignite tech conference,…