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In this episode of Petri Dish, I speak to Michael Masciulli, Managing Director of Migration Products and Services at Semperis, and an expert in transformational IT and Active Directory. He tells me why you should consider consolidating your Active Directory domains, the benefits for organizational security, how to mitigate some of the risks, and how…

Windows Autopatch is a new Microsoft service that organizations can use to automate the patching of Windows, Microsoft 365 apps for Enterprise, Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft Teams. It aims to complete patching cycles within the least amount of time, whilst keeping downtime to a minimum. In this guide, we’ll show you how to configure Windows Autopatch…

Exchange Online has two new PowerShell cmdlets to help administrators recover deleted email on behalf of users. You can now search for deleted items and recover found items without having to sign into a user’s mailbox, something that will be popular with both administrators and users alike. The joy of helping users find email they deleted and can’t find themselves…

Remotely accessing your servers and workstations through terminal services or RDP is an easy method of doing your job from a remote location, or gaining access to specific published applications that have been published on your servers. However, without properly investing in securing these types of RDP connections, you could be compromising the security and…

How do I configure my Exchange 2000/2003 server to accept e-mails for domains other than my own? Exchange 2000/2003 will only accept e-mail traffic for the e-mail domain that is identical to the name of your Active Directory domain. However sometimes we would like to allow our Exchange server to also receive e-mail for domains…

What are the considerations for the FSMO placement in Active Directory? Windows 2000/2003 Active Directory domains utilize a Single Operation Master method called FSMO (Flexible Single Master Operation), as described in Understanding FSMO Roles in Active Directory. In most cases an administrator can keep the FSMO role holders (all 5 of them) in the same…

Office 365 allows users to apply retention labels to SharePoint and OneDrive documents and to Exchange messages. But after you’ve done the work to create a nice set of retention labels as part of your data governance framework, it’s good to know that people are using the labels. Here’s how to find out.

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.

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is an open standard that facilitates user logon to on-premises and cloud services.

Azure Active Directory (AD) is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) cloud service. Azure AD is generally seen as a move from on-premises IAM to the cloud. Learn more about Azure AD here. What is Azure Active Directory (Microsoft Entra ID)? Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD, AAD, Entra ID, etc.) is a cloud…