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A few weeks ago, Microsoft made a significant announcement regarding several of its popular certifications. The company announced that Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA), Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD), Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) certifications would be retired on June 30, 2020.

Because it’s such a great time to be alive, this edition of Short Takes looks at a ton of Coronavirus-related news, including Azure capacity issues, Microsoft/Office 365 service throttling, certification retirement extensions, unprecedented Xbox Live demand, and much, much, more.

Do you have that one PowerShell command you use constantly? If that command has parameters, you have to manually specify the parameter values every time. If you find yourself passing the same parameter values to a command frequently, this post is for you.

Teams is all about communication, but now you can have “targeted communications,” which is a long-winded way to describe tags. A tag is a shortcut method to address a set of team members. You can have default tags defined at the organization level or use tags specific to individual teams. Either way, tags are a useful way to identify the specific people you want to address in a conversation.

Online meetings are becoming an even more regular part of daily work life as many of us move to ‘work from home’. Whether you are a small business or large corporation, online meetings can enable teams to work remotely more effectively and maintain a sense of community and connectedness.

Microsoft said on Monday that it is aware of an unpatched vulnerability in the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library that is actively being exploited by hackers.

Microsoft has imposed further restrictions on some Office 365 services to release CPU cycles and other resources to allow end users to work. The major impact is felt by SharePoint Online, OneNote, and Stream, and consequently by Teams because it uses all of the above. We can expect restrictions to last until Microsoft manages to deploy additional resources in its Office 365 datacenters.

As with any programming language, code will have errors and troubleshooting those problems can be difficult. Thankfully, PowerShell has a rich error object and several powerful tools to help debug your code. With PowerShell 7, these tools become even more useful and error handling even easier. As the language evolves and becomes used in more…

A lot of businesses have begun to incorporate the cloud into their backup processes and most businesses that haven’t done so yet are looking into the process. Using the cloud as a backup target has a lot of advantages; Cloud services have matured and provide extremely high levels of availability.

Mailgun is an email sending service that provides logging and an API to send emails. PowerShell is particularly strong in its ability to use REST API’s. There are many use cases for needing to send emails, but one of the most common is that of sending emails when scripts are completed. This may be for status updates or failures.

As we enter a time of crisis that will see a significant number of employees asked to work from home, organizations need to provide effective but secure remote access to corporate resources. The tried and tested virtual private network (VPN) might seem like the obvious choice. But so called ‘zero trust’ is gaining popularity and could surpass traditional VPN access.

The rise of COVID-19 has put a significant amount of pressure on IT departments around the globe. With the onset of needing to support robust remote work experiences, every type of remote collaboration application has seen strong growth during the past month.