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It’s been another busy year for Windows and here is a summary of the most important events from the last twelve months.

A recent change made to the way that Exchange Online processes notifications for calendar meetings has upset some Office 365 users because they don’t see the email. Instead of leaving the notification email in the Inbox, Exchange processes the update in the calendar and moves the notification to the Deleted Items folder, meaning that it might be missed. Which makes some people mad.

Learn how to block automatic installation of Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge browser when it reaches general availability in January.

Much like Unix, PowerShell has the concept of streams. It’s important to understand how the flow of data output works within PowerShell. By leveraging the power of streams and their capabilities, you will be able to create better troubleshooting and more useful output.

Office 365 has experienced great success since its launch in June 2011, but it’s also had its share of failures as well. This article considers the most important technical advances in Office 365 and the most important parts of the ecosystem as well as some places where things didn’t go quite so well as either Microsoft or tenants would have liked.

With 2020 officially here, there are several major deadlines on the horizon that you need to be aware of when it comes to software in your environment. While we all know, hopefully, about Windows 7 reaching the end of support in about a week, there are other Microsoft products that will reach this milestone later this year too.

By the time you read this, it will be 2020. I hope you have had a great holiday season and are feeling all relaxed and ready for a new semester of Azure action.

This month sees Microsoft preparing for the general availability of its new Chromium-based Edge browser in January, Windows Server Core container images get 40% smaller, and Windows Insiders get new builds in the Fast Ring that are not tied to a specific feature update.

Microsoft launched Office 365 in June 2011. Since then, the cloud office suite has matured nicely and now serves over 200 million monthly active users. Looking back as we enter a new decade, the fears that people had about going to the cloud have been dealt with and the Office 365 record of cost, reliability, and security holds up to close examination.

In today’s Ask the Admin, I talk again about how Microsoft plans to deliver the new version of its Edge Browser. There’s also a Group Policy setting that will let users work with both the legacy and new Chromium-based version of Microsoft Edge.

Microsoft is doing its level best to remove SMTP basic authentication from Exchange Online as quickly as possible. Basic auth for SMTP connections will disappear gradually as time goes by. Tenants can make accounts more secure by removing SMTP authentication from accounts, something that Microsoft will do in the future when these connections are not used. An exception exists (for now) for SMTP client submissions, but these might also be affected in the future.

In today’s Ask the Admin, I show you how to improve network performance in Windows virtual guests running on Oracle’s VirtualBox.