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Azure AD Connect is a free tool from Microsoft that’s used for synchronizing objects between on-premises Windows Server Active Directory (AD) and Azure Active Directory. Microsoft announced in August the availability of Azure AD Connect V2.0. And in this article, I’m going to discuss the major changes in this new release. Here are the major…

Microsoft announced September 2nd that it is releasing Windows 11 and Windows 10 (version 21H2) commercial previews. Organizations in the Windows Insider Program for Business can access the builds and get free support. The builds are available through the usual channels, like Windows Update, Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), Azure Marketplace, and the Windows Insider…

Over the coming months, Microsoft will be re-branding some of what Microsoft calls ‘personal insights’ into your daily flow in Outlook. These include the Daily Briefing email that arrives in your Outlook Inbox every weekday morning, the MyAnalytics digest emails, and the Insights Outlook add-in. They will all receive updates to reflect the Microsoft Viva…

As mentioned last month, the Power Platform release wave two commenced in August. While not all of the planned features were released on schedule, some useful updates were made to model-driven apps. Model-Driven Last month we discussed polymorphic lookups in Dataverse (Preview). This month, the changes come in the form of advanced lookups in model-driven apps. Advanced lookups allow users to…

I think you’ll find that there are quite a few announcements this month. The summer quiet period is over, and we’re into a whole new development/release semester in Microsoft, not to mention the countdown to the usual peak release season for Microsoft Ignite has started – most releases announced at Ignite happen well before Ignite….

Microsoft announces Windows 11 release date, tweaks the Windows 11 minimum hardware requirements (but not much), and Windows 365 goes live but free trials are on hold due to demand. Windows 11 release date Top of the list this month is that Microsoft announced Windows 11 will start rolling out to eligible Windows 10 PCs…

WireGuard is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) protocol that was first developed in 2016 by security researcher Jason A. Donenfeld. It was originally conceived for Linux. And as of kernel version 5.6, which was released in March 2020, WireGuard is integrated into Linux. Designed to be a lightweight alternative to VPN protocols like IKEv2, OpenVPN,…

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced Windows 11 with a refreshed interface, new widgets, and an updated store. But to run the new software, Microsoft moved the baseline specs up significantly from what is required to run Windows 10, and today, the company is sharing the launch plans for the OS. Microsoft has announced that Windows…

Deploying Windows 11 to hundreds or even thousands of devices can be automated if you have a system image that you can clone. To create an image for cloning, you first install Windows 11 on a device or virtual machine (VM), and then configure the operating system to your requirements. For example, you might decide to…

Welcome to Part 3 of my Windows Server 2022 Series. This series of posts has chronicled the upgrade of my Microsoft Hyper-V lab. I have a number of servers running various roles, including Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS), fileservers, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, etc. I’m upgrading all of them to Microsoft’s latest Long Term Servicing…

Contact Center Provider NICE Joins Microsoft’s Business Apps ISV Connect Program NICE, among the leading contact center platform providers, this week said it has joined Microsoft’s Business Applications ISV Connect. The program is designed to let partners build and bring line of business applications to market on Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Microsoft’s Business…

Back in June, when Microsoft announced Windows 11, the company received praise for the interface and scorn for the lack of clarity about the hardware that could run the OS. Generally speaking, to run Windows 11, you need a device with an 8th gen Intel chipset or newer or from AMD, a Zen 2 chip…