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Russell Smith, the Editorial Director at Petri IT Knowledgebase, has over two decades of hands-on experience in IT, in both small business settings and government IT infrastructure projects.
Russell started writing for Windows IT Pro Magazine in the early 2000s. Since then, he has contributed insights to various IT publications, including Petri and CDW. His authoritative voice has resonated across industry blogs, where he dissects complex topics into an ‘easy read’.
Russell has authored over a thousand articles, each a testament to his depth of knowledge. His expertise doesn’t stop there: he wrote a book on Privilege Management and co-authored another for Microsoft’s MOAC series. Moreover, Russell’s commitment to education shines through in the courses he crafted for Pluralsight.
He is also presenter on his own YouTube channel, This Week in IT, and the current presenter of Petri Dish.

Last Update: Sep 04, 2024
Learn how to set up billing alerts in Azure to keep your cloud expenses in check.

Last Update: Sep 04, 2024
In today’s Ask the Admin, Russell Smith explains how Shared Access Signatures (SAS) can be used to grant access to objects in storage without revealing the storage account key.

Last Update: Sep 04, 2024
In today’s Ask the Admin, Russell shows you how to apply locks to Azure resources, to prevent accidental deletion or to make them read-only.

Last Update: Sep 04, 2024
Russell Smith shows you how to use the localGPO command line tool in Security Compliance Manager (SCM) to apply security templates to computers that are not part of an Active Directory domain.

Last Update: Jul 08, 2025
In today’s edition of Ask the Admin, Russell Smith will show you how to export security templates as Group Policy Objects (GPOs).

Last Update: Sep 04, 2024
In today’s Ask the Admin, I’ll explain how to use linked Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to facilitate complex deployment options.

Last Update: Sep 04, 2024
In today’s Ask the Admin, I’ll show you how to create an ARM template in Visual Studio for deploying Azure virtual machines (VMs). Having used VS to deploy resources in Azure, this is the way I now recommend you work with Azure templates.

Last Update: Sep 04, 2024
In today’s Ask the Admin, following on from a previous article on how to change the interface language for a user account, I’ll show you how to change the default interface language in Windows 10 for new users, the welcome screen and system accounts.

Last Update: Sep 04, 2024
Russell explains what Thunderbolt 3 is and where USB Type-C connectors fit into the picture. As the Thunderbolt 3 cables start to roll out, remember to check to verify that they can handle transfer speeds of up to 40 Gb/s if you want maximum benefit.

Last Update: Sep 04, 2024
In today’s Ask the Admin, I’ll show you how to sign up for Microsoft Flow and create a simple workflow that posts a tweet with a hashtag from your Twitter account to your Slack channel.

Last Update: Sep 04, 2024
In this post I’ll provide a brief overview of IFTTT and Zapier and Microsoft’s contribution to the user-friendly, user-powered workflow services tool, Microsoft Flow.

Last Update: Jul 30, 2025
Apart from the amusing name, POSH-GIT is a PowerShell module for GitHub supplied as part of Git for Windows. In this Ask the Admin, I’ll show you how to use Git source control via this PowerShell module.