Michael Reinders

  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,…

One of the most important infrastructure features Microsoft released with the recent Windows Server 2022 is HTTP/3. Since hitting the ‘General Availability’ milestone this past September, the Windows Server team has partnered with the Microsoft 365 team in starting a phased upgrade of the front-end Exchange Online servers with Windows Server 2022. Microsoft started with…

Welcome to my third post discussing all things Windows Insider Program (WIP). My first post went over the business angle. My second described more of the history and various Channels available to ‘Insiders.’ This post will walk you through joining the Windows Insider Program on a device, and the distinct options you have in joining…

Have you ever been scrolling through a large Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and stopped because you came across some cells with important data and it whips right past you? Well, Microsoft Excel engineers have been working to enhance this aspect of Excel for a long time. When they set out to ‘put the idea to code’…

Yes, it’s new! And there are a LOT of new features in the new Microsoft Whiteboard app, which reached general availability at the end of September. For starters, Microsoft is rolling the new Whiteboard interface experience out to the web, Teams, and Android platforms. The last 18 months have seen the evolution of hybrid work…

So, you want to know all there is to know about what the Windows Insider Program is, how to join it, and what all these ‘channels’ mean, right? For example, I’m sure one of your provocative questions is this: If I start on Windows 10 21H1, and join the Beta channel, will that upgrade me…

Microsoft announced and launched the Windows Insider Program on September 30, 2014, along with the announcement for Windows 10. Soon after, they received a good deal of feedback from IT Pros in the Windows Insider Program (WIP) that were looking for specific and detailed assistance on how the WIP could work in their business environments….

Companies of all shapes and sizes have run into many challenges regarding keeping their employees efficient and happy; the transition to virtual education and training over the past 18 months caught many off guard. The Microsoft Forms team was excited to release Polls in Microsoft Teams meetings in November of 2020 to address some of…