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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.

Understanding how Azure App Services works behind the curtain is important if you want to make the most of the App Service resources.

This month Microsoft patches four zero-day flaws in Windows 10 and some Bluetooth security keys stop working.

Microsoft announced a new Azure service this week called Bastion which makes it significantly easier to securely and remotely connect to your non-connected VMs.

Microsoft may soon release a new keyboard with a dedicated Office key with the devices internally codenamed Holgate.

PowerShell is a great way of automating common administrative Office 365 operations. That is, if you know what module to use and how to use the cmdlets in that module. Unfortunately things are a bit of a mess with too many modules and inconsistent behavior in areas like error handling. With so many development groups working on Office 365, the PowerShell situation might be inevitable, but it needs cleaning up.