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Because I heard you missed me, I’m back, this week’s edition of Short Takes examines Microsoft’s massive reorg and my seven stages of grief, US v. Microsoft ends in a whimper, Microsoft helps consumers with ransomware, and so much more.

Microsoft recently stunned a lot of people by announcing that Service Fabric, the platform upon which many of Microsoft’s cloud services are built, was being released under MIT open-source licensing.

Aidan Finn shows you how you can restore an Azure virtual machine from a snapshot, using the recent update that was rolled out to Azure Backup.

Microsoft is bringing many of its corporate data protection services to Office 365 Home and Personal.

Teams now hides the Office 365 Groups that it creates from Exchange clients (Outlook, OWA, and the mobile apps). That’s as it should be for groups created for new teams. If you want to hide groups created for older teams, you can run the Set-UnifiedGroup cmdlet, but that soon becomes boring when you might have hundreds of groups to process. PowerShell to the rescue once again.

One of the things that annoys me in our industry is how supposedly educated people take advice and guidance on IT from no-nothings, the barfly, or the town idiot.

In today’s Ask the Admin, Russell Smith shows you how to manage Puppet, Windows Installer, and Chocolatey.

In today’s Ask the Admin, Russell Smith shows you how to manage local users and groups using Puppet.

Microsoft has made some major changes to how Windows is organized that will have a profound impact on its future.

It is nice to have an Azure Active Directory Expiration Policy for Office 365 Groups, but it’s not so good that the policy functions exclusively based on age. Another problem is that administrators have no way of knowing when groups will expire. So we take out PowerShell, write a script, and hey presto, we have a report. We still need to solve the problem of creating a policy that functions based on activity rather than age, but that’s another day’s work.

Check out this set of things to consider when pricing a virtual machine solution that will eventually run in Microsoft Azure.

In today’s Ask the Admin, Russell Smith explains how unauthenticated access to Windows file shares works.