Blog

In today’s Ask the Admin, I’ll look at Microsoft’s recommendations for securing Active Directory forests using its Enhanced Security Administrative Environment model.

Office 365 continues to grow strongly but all the added users (and tenants) do not seem to have impacted the reliability of the service, at least not measured by performance against the guaranteed 99.9% SLA for availability. Incidents do steal minutes away from users, but not enough to make a difference.

In this Ask the Admin, Russell Smith provides a brief overview of Microsoft’s Azure Confidential Computing technology and looks at how it might help persuade otherwise hesitant organizations to move sensitive data to the cloud.

Google announced Cloud Firestore, a fully-managed NoSQL document database that is designed to easily store and sync app and website data at global scale.

Adding a secondary administrator to OneDrive For Business in Office 365 is a very common ask for an Office 365 Administrator. Fortunately, this task can be achieved in at least 4 different ways as this article describes.

Microsoft clarified what AAD features need premium licenses at Ignite. Tenants need many of those features to control Office 365 Groups and Teams, and some of the listed features are surprising. Did you know that the group creation policy is a premium feature? Or adding a default classification. The chosen set of features seems odd, but at least Microsoft is now clear about what you must license.

Aidan Finn describes the many networking announcements that were made at Microsoft Ignite 2017.

Aidan Finn explains how to select an Azure virtual machine series and size, including updates to past versions of this post, adding the D_v3, E_v3, and L_v2 virtual machines, as well as using the Azure Compute Unit (ACU) measurement.

Aidan Finn shares a summary of the improvements to the Azure virtual machine and related services and features announced at the Microsoft Ignite 2017 conference.

In this Ask the Admin, Russell Smith explains why you should use application control to restrict which Windows Store apps users can run.

Because I’m in a real Groove this week, this edition of Short Takes looks at Microsoft Edge on Android and iOS (no, really), rumors of an impending death for Microsoft Surface, Microsoft’s share price, and much, much more.

Hybrid IT has many use-cases and while it’s not for everyone, the vast majority of scenarios can benefit from this model.