Blog

Teams is the poster child for Office 365 right now, so it’s only right that Microsoft has refreshed the Teams UI a year into the app’s life. The changes look pretty good and are useful, even if the Who Bot might not be able to unpick the complexities of the organization you work for.

One of the premium features for Office 365 Groups is the ability to use a naming policy so that all groups (and Teams) have a compliant name. The policy is a nice-to-have feature if you are concerned about having a well-organized directory with all your groups gathered in the same place. The question is whether enough business value is gained from a naming policy to make it worthwhile.

Aidan Finn shows you how to backup Web apps that are hosted as an Azure App Service in an App Service Plan.

Intel’s latest fix to patch the Spectre vulnerability is causing more issues than it fixes; Microsoft to the rescue.

How do I block Internet access for my Azure virtual machines?

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update and Windows Server 1709 include a beta OpenSSH server and client. In this Ask the Admin, I will discuss how OpenSSH differs from PowerShell Remoting.

Jasper Oosterveld compares the Modern SharePoint experience to the Classic SharePoint experience.

Because winter in Narnia was shorter than this, this edition of Short Takes looks at Microsoft’s coming $1 trillion market cap valuation, a major Surface Laptop correction, Microsoft v. AWS, and much, much more.

Jeff Hicks discusses Microsoft releasing the next generation of PowerShell tools as PowerShell 6.0.

The Meltdown vulnerability is clearly serious, especially if you run on-premises servers. But if you use Office 365, should you be worried? Well, maybe, but when you sign up for a cloud service, you transfer responsibility for understanding and responding to threat to the service provider. Over to Microsoft…

In this Ask the Admin, Russell Smith uses a PowerShell script to populate Active Directory with test user accounts.

Amazon recently announced AWS Auto Scaling, a new service that enables admins to simultaneously configure scaling options for multiple AWS resources.