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VPNs are commonly used to give users working from home access to corporate resources. But traditional forced tunnel VPNs can have a significant impact on the performance of cloud services like Office 365. In this article, I look at the different ways VPNs can be configured for performance and security.

Around the globe, IT Pros are facing unprecedented challenges in their environments. From supporting hundreds, if not thousands, of newly-remote workers, handling a significant increase in VPN connections or trying to backup data that is outside the firewall – for many of us, we are in uncharted waters. At Petri, our mission is to create…

It’s not too often that you realize an application that you are using frequently is missing some basic functionality. Especially with Teams, an application that is used by more than 75 million people every single day. But that’s the case with the search inside of Teams. While you can search from the top of the app…

Microsoft recently announced at Build 2020 that it is working on a native open-source package manager for Windows. Due to hit general availability in May 2021, Windows Package Manager is now accessible on GitHub and for Windows Insiders in preview. In this article, I will show you how to use Windows Package Manager (WPM) to…

MSIX is a new installer technology for Windows that first appeared in Windows 10 version 1809 and it was later backported to Windows 10 versions 1709 and 1803. It replaces Windows Installer (MSI) and the APPX packaging format previously used for Store apps. MSIX works with all Win32, WPF, Windows Forms, and Universal Windows Platform…

One of the big feature updates coming to Teams that many have been waiting for is the ability to chat with Skype contacts inside the Teams application. Microsoft stated that this feature would be available by the end of April but that timeline has come and gone. The company has posted a new message to its admin center and…

Tracking Down Obsolete Accounts Last December, I wrote about how the problem of identifying obsolete guest accounts that exist in an Office 365 tenant. An increasing number of applications support Azure B2B Collaboration and create guest accounts to allow external people to access content. Teams is a great example, as are the sharing links used…

If you read the headline and thought that this was some sort of an elaborate joke, this is not a drill. After years of developers asking Microsoft to build a package manager into Windows, those requests are finally being answered. Announced at Build 2020, the company is releasing a preview of the Windows Package Manager….

Microsoft has a dream, a dream that developers will build apps for all of its platforms with a single base of code. The company, for years, pitched the write once, run anywhere, idea to developers of Windows applications but the dream never materialized in a way that was widely adopted. The most notable attempt at…

In the Microsoft portfolio, the company has several planning applications including To Do, Planner, Tasks, and previously Wunderlist. At Build 2020, they are announcing other list-style application called Microsoft Lists. Lists, as the name implies, is designed to help you manage information and organize your tasks. The app has several different access points including web,…

Securing Confidential SharePoint Online Data SharePoint Online sites hold some very confidential information. Now that SharePoint Online supports sensitivity labels, you can protect individual documents with encryption to stop their contents leaking. Other features, like regarding newly uploaded documents sensitive by default to stop them being shared externally until Data Loss Prevention (DLP) processing completes,…

At Ignite 2019, Microsoft announced a public preview of the company’s upcoming Fluid Framework. Since that announcement, the noise around the framework has been nearly silent aside from an early, but very limited look, at the functionality a few months back. This week at Build 2020, the company is once again talking about Fluid Framework and the…