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Back at Build 2019, Microsoft announced Fluid Framework, a way to integrate living content inside of Office applications. While news around the availability of the product has been a bit slim, there are signs of it coming to life with a preview that looks to be available to all Office 365 customers. Fluid Framework turns…

After several weeks of customer protest, Microsoft decided that their plan to automatically install a Microsoft Search in Bing extension for Chrome browsers with Office ProPlus wouldn’t fly. While it’s good that Microsoft is tweaking their plans and will allow Office 365 tenants to opt-in, the way they went about announcing such an outrageous decision begs the question just how Microsoft thought this was ever a good idea.

This week, Microsoft is hosting a virtual developer conference where the company is talking in more detail about Windows 10X, foldable devices, and how it plans to support these new products. A key push for this event is to hopefully drum up interest with developers who will build applications for its foldable-future.

The fact that the Teams outage on 3 February was caused by an expired authentication certificate is enough to cause Office 365 tenants to ask why such a thing happened. Teams is built on top of a lot of Office 365 and Azure components, so it’s not altogether surprising that issues happen in what is a very complex infrastructure spread around the world. But given Microsoft’s hyped focus on DevOps, you would have thought that something as fundamental as an expired certificate would have been picked up and fixed before it caused customer disruption.

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

Amazon AWS is today’s leading cloud provider supporting millions of customers with over 175 cloud services from 22 geographic regions around the world. AWS has been available for over 13 years yet Amazon continues to evolve AWS at an extremely rapid pace. Some of the recent AWS announcements from January 2020 include:

AWS Backup was first released last year in January 2019 and since that time Amazon has reported that over 20,000 customers are using it to protect their Amazon cloud and on-premise services.

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.

A new SharePoint Online feature blocks access to newly uploaded files until Office 365 Data Loss Prevention processes the files to detect policy violations due to the presence of sensitive data. DLP processing for SharePoint Online can take several hours to reach new files, so enabling sensitive by default stops users inadvertently sharing sensitive content until DLP can process files. The downside is that you can’t apply sensitive by default to individual sites. It’s all or nothing…

With PowerShell 7 being cross-platform, the question often comes up of how logging works on Linux systems. Most PowerShell administrators are used to working in the Windows world and using the EventLog. Likewise, most Linux system administrators are used to Syslog and log files in general.

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.

Last month I kind of wrapped up 2019. But this month I want to look forward. While I would love to talk about things that I might or might know about, such a violation of my non-disclosure agreement would get me in trouble with Redmond. So instead, I want to talk about what I think we IT pros need to learn about in 2020 to stay relevant.