Russell Smith

In today’s Ask the Admin, I look at how to set up Your Phone in Windows 10 so that you can use it to make and receive calls via an Android handset.

This month sees a bumper crop of 99 patches from Microsoft, including a fix for the IE zero-day announced last month and a change in default configuration for new Windows Server Active Directory deployments.

Taking a look at the developer preview of a new PowerShell module from Microsoft that aims to make storing and securely accessing secrets easier in your PowerShell scripts.

February 7th saw Microsoft unexpectedly release a new version of its Chromium-based Edge browser to the stable channel.

Last year, Microsoft announced that it would be making changes to the default LDAP channel binding and signing configuration in Active Directory in the middle of January 2020. But now these changes are being delayed until the second half of 2020 to give organizations more time to prepare.

How to centralize Group Policy templates to make managing configuration settings easier in a domain environment.

The Windows Admin Center (WAC) is a web portal for managing local or remote servers via a gateway that uses PowerShell Remoting and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) over WinRM. WAC will eventually replace Server Manager, and going forwards, is where Microsoft will make future investments in Windows Server GUI management.

Most of the changes in Windows 10 version 2004, which is due to land in the first half of 2020, are under-the-hood. And the Windows 10 November 2019 Update got some of the changes that were in development as part of 20H1, like enhancements to search in File Explorer. This second article in a two-part series looks at the new Cortana experience that is coming as part of Windows 10 version 2004.

Microsoft is making available a dual-screen Hyper-V emulator that simulates Windows 10X as part of a forthcoming pre-release version of the Windows SDK.

In January we finally said goodbye to Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Microsoft made its new Edge browser generally available, fixed a search bug in File Explorer, and started rolling out Calls in Your Phone for Windows 10 19H1 and newer.

Redmond could be looking to phase out the Microsoft Store for Business and Store for Education. Not to be confused with the consumer app that is bundled with Windows 10, the Store for Business and Store for Education allows organizations to control licensing and distribution of public Store apps and to distribute line-of-business apps that are developed in-house.

Microsoft adds a subset of existing Azure server security and auditing features to Azure Arc for organizations that need to manage workloads on different platforms and locations.