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Windows 10X is coming to new foldable dual-screen devices and clamshell laptops, robots are invading Windows 10, all businesses can buy Windows 7 Extended Security Updates starting December 1st, and Server Core is now in fashion thanks to Windows Admin Center.

It’s the month before Ignite and even though the company will announce lots of updates next week, October had a couple of surprises too.

Microsoft’s larger Surface Laptop 3 is branching out to use an AMD chip but you may want the business version instead.

PowerShell on its own is a robust and versatile language that can help you accomplish any task at hand. Combine it with the ability to run remotely on other computers and it becomes unparalleled as a scripting language

SharePoint Online now boasts the ability to rename site URLs, which seems good, but not so good when you discover that the new URL breaks the connection with Teams. The fact that this happens is revealed in Microsoft documentation and it’s been a problem since the beta testing of the site rename function. Microsoft seems curiously disinterested in fixing the problem as quickly as they should have. A case of attention distracted elsewhere?

Microsoft started using machine learning (ML) to manage the rollout of Windows 10 feature updates with the Windows 10 April 2018 Update (version 1803). In a new blog post by Microsoft’s Archana Ramesh and Michael Stephenson, both data scientists for Microsoft Cloud and AI, the company outlines improvements made since then.

Microsoft says that since the general availability of Windows Server 2019, it has seen the fastest adoption rate for Server Core in history.

Microsoft’s FindTime service helps Office 365 users find the right time to schedule a meeting with people inside and outside their tenant. It’s an underappreciated gem. And the good news is that an even better service called Calendar.Help is on the way. Well, it’s better if you like asking Cortana to find the right meeting dates for you rather than the more-hands on approach taken by FindTime. Whichever way you cut it, help is always appreciated when setting up meetings, so it’s nice that these tools are available.

Earlier this week, Microsoft posted strong earnings with its cloud division continuing to push the stock price higher. Announced today by the U.S Defense Department, Microsoft has won the lucrative JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract besting its rival Amazon as well as Oracle and other providers.

Because it’s that time of the quarter, this edition of Short Takes looks solely at Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report, which was huge for Commercial Cloud, Microsoft 365, and Windows, and not so much for Surface and Xbox. Right. Nothing changed.

While definitely necessary, making and maintaining disaster recovery (DR) plans is definitely not one of the favorite tasks for IT personnel. DR planning is complex, time-consuming, and it involves the resources of a number of both IT and non-IT related personnel. In addition, implementing DR plans isn’t cheap.

Microsoft has reported it’s Q1 FY earnings with Office 365 and the company’s cloud services pushing the revenue needle higher.