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Because baby steps are still forward steps, this edition of Short Takes looks at Microsoft’s less-than-inclusive internal policies, a weird Windows Update prompt, more OneDrive, less Cortana, and much, much more.

Microsoft is rolling out priority notifications for Teams, the ability for users to send urgent messages in chats so that the recipients get notified every two minutes until they respond. Office 365 tenants (except GCC) should see the new functionality in July. Tenants can control who gets to send urgent messages with messaging policies, and some user education would be good to help those allowed to send these messages understand when a message is truly urgent.

Download Hyper-V Server 2019 now from Microsoft’s Evaluation Center website.

An early preview version of Windows Terminal is now available to download from the Microsoft Store.

Microsoft is planning a hardware event for later this year where the company may announce new devices based on chips by companies other than Intel.

Excel fans delight! You can now export task data for a Planner plan to Excel and slice and dice the task information to your heart’s content. The new feature is likely to be popular with Office 365 users because it adds values and it makes sense to use Excel for this purpose, but another way of looking at it is that Planner is so poor at analysis and reporting that it needed external help. The truth probably lies in the middle.

Ransomware attacks are on the rise and as many cities have recently learned, if you don’t have an air-gapped backup, you may not be protected.

Puppet Bolt tasks are scripts that you can run on Linux or Windows systems. A task contains a script, completely unmodified, written in any language supported by the remote system on which the task will run.

Because Microsoft couldn’t communicate its way out of a paper bag, this edition of Short Takes looks at Microsoft’s latest market cap win, a tech consortium looking for a way out of trade tariffs, Microsoft’s latest partnership with the enemy, and so much more.

On this edition of the Enterprise Dish, we dive into demystifying the complexity of Windows update error messages, how to know if your MSP is on-top of all the changes they are pushing down to your environment, and a little bit about classic bikes.

You can add photos to Azure Active Directory guest accounts and have Office 365 apps display those photos. But it’s a lot of work to track down suitable photos for individual guests. If you want to change the default two-initial icon displayed by Office 365, you can use PowerShell to update all guest accounts with a photo. Here’s how I handled the problem.

Microsoft currently offers Edge in three flavors for Windows 10: Canary, Developer, and Beta. For now, you can only install the Canary flavor on older versions of Windows while Windows 10 does offer a Developer release; there is no Beta of Edge available at this time.