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Photos Enhance the Tenant Directory In the past I have written about the desirability of assigning photos to guest users and how to use PowerShell to assign a default photo to guest users. Nice as it is to have photos for guest users, it’s even more important to have photos for tenant user accounts, especially…

In this Ask the Admin, Russell Smith discusses why Puppet and DSC together is often the best configuration management solution in mixed Windows/Linux environments.

How can I disable the password requirement for a user in a Windows Server 2003 Active Directory domain? Windows Server 2003 provides security policies that ensure that all users select strong passwords. Creating a password policy involves setting the following options in the Default Domain Group Policy object. These policies, with the exception of those…

Windows allows users to assign permissions to files and folders, for added security and to control which users can perform specific actions on files and folders. Learn all you need to know about basic permissions, folder permissions, user permissions, explicit permissions, and much more. What are NTFS permissions? NTFS permissions, first introduced with Microsoft Windows…

Scheduled to be released in the beginning of 2008, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) delivers improvements and enhancements to existing Vista features that significantly impact customers, but it does not deliver substantial new operating system features. Microsoft has published a comprehensive document outlining exactly what difference SP1 makes to Vista. See a download link…

Learn PowerShell to reduce the time it takes to deploy entire Windows Server environments, on site or in the cloud, from hours to mere minutes.

Active Directory really does keep getting better with age! Learn to install the AD domain services role on Windows Server 2012 in this handy how-to.

MC280914 – Updated September 14, 2021: Microsoft has updated the rollout timeline below. Thank you for your patience. This new feature (preview), Adaptive policy scopes, will allow data administrators to scope retention policies and retention label policies to a dynamic set of users, SharePoint sites, or Microsoft 365 Groups. This is enabled by using the properties…

MC254894 – Updated May 20, 2021: Microsoft has updated the post with additional details for clarity. Thank you for your patience. Microsoft is releasing a new assistant for admins who want to configure Internet Explorer mode (IE mode) for Microsoft Edge. To detect the sites that need to use IE mode, many admins follow the Enterprise…

For organizations wanting to delay the introduction of IE8 until they have tested compatibility with internal applications and sites, Microsoft has created the Internet Explorer 8 Blocker Toolkit. In this article, MVP Daniel Petri details how to use this toolkit to prevent users from installing Internet Explorer 8 through Windows Update or Automatic Updates.