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Windows Server 2016: Access Denied for Admin Shares

5th September, 2017

We recently had an issue that started of with a problem promoting some domain controllers in Azure.  We’d set up the site to site VPN and wanted to stretch the Forest into Azure.  It seemed like a simple plan…  Problems arose when we promoted the domain controller with errors such as System log: Can’t process […]

Summarizing GDPR

26th July, 2017

You may well have heard about GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) but do you know what it means for you?  The detailed information is found on the ICO website, but let’s summarize it for you Does GDPR apply to me? That broadly depends on the question “Do you hold or process ‘personal’ or ‘sensitive’ information […]

Introducing a new product Microsoft 365

14th July, 2017

At Inspire there was the announcement of a new product ‘Microsoft 365’.  At the enterprise level this replaces ‘Secure Productive Enterprise’ which has been available in E3 and E5 SKUs.  Microsoft 365 includes Office 365, Enterprise Mobility and Security as well as Windows 10 Enterprise.  So not much new so far aside from a new […]

Backup GPO Settings with retention

26th May, 2017

Backing up Active Directory should be part and parcel of creating a forest, however an often overlooked area is GPO settings.   Of course these are backed up along with AD, but restoring settings from an AD backup is pretty traumatic.  GPO settings should be backed up so that you can quickly apply an older version or […]

Outlook now asks for attachment type

22nd May, 2017

A new feature is coming in Outlook which will make some of you very happy indeed…  If you have been using Outlook with Office 365 and have added cloud attachments, i.e. the default up to now, by mistake then this will be for you! Finally no more accidental sending of cloud documents and people coming […]

Leveraging Microsoft Online Subscriptions on-premises

17th May, 2017

I know that sound like a weird title right?  How can you leverage Microsoft Online Subscriptions on-premises?  After all Office 365 is in the cloud?  What is not obvious is that a number of the subscriptions actually do grant you usage rights that are for on-premises use cases! The key document to refer to is the […]

Free Windows 10 upgrade offer via CSP

17th May, 2017

Most of us know that there was an offer from Microsoft to upgrade from Windows 7 and 8.1 back in 2016, however most of us don’t know that you can still get a ‘free’ upgrade today! Microsoft announced a new offer in January 2017 for any customers who have a Windows 10 Enterprise subscription via […]

Exchange Federation to Office 365 without Hybrid

7th April, 2017

Exchange Federation has been around a long time, but of course more recently any time you talk about integrating with Office 365 people start going down the hybrid route.  What if you don’t want hybrid though, what if all you want is to be able to share free/busy information? Let’s set the scene.  We have […]

Windows Firewall not writing to its logfiles

15th March, 2017

As part of Group Policy Management guidelines from the Centre of Internet Security (CIS), the recommendation is to turn on Firewall logging on all Windows Servers, and to save each profile to their own log file. Configuring this in Group Policy is pretty straight forward.  Just type in the new file name for each profile, […]

Exchange Server 2016 – Unable to determine file version PowerShellEngine

7th March, 2017

After installing Exchange Server 2016 CU4 on Windows Server 2016, the Exchange Management Shell would fail to connect with the error: New-PSSession : [xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Processing data from remote server xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx failed with the following error message: [ClientAccessServer=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,BackEndServer=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,RequestId=bc9549f6-b772-4933-8132-84dfcd57372d,TimeStamp=07/03/2017 12:25:32] [AuthZRequestId=7f855afa-31f2-4e46-bd1b-c1bf1ebc95f1][FailureCategory=AuthZ-SetupVersionInformationCorruptException] Unable to determine the installed file version from the registry key ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellEngine’. For more information, see […]

Week 5 – Advanced Windows Security Course

5th March, 2017

Firstly apologies for taking this long to get back to doing the week 5 blog.  It has been a manic couple of months and it doesn’t look like it is going to let up either!  Anyway, so far we have covered Windows 10/Windows Server 2016 – Platform Security and Internals Attacks on Credentials & Prevention […]

Microsoft Changes MCSE/MCSD… again…

10th February, 2017

As you will probably know, a few years ago Microsoft changed MCSE so that the qualifications would no longer have a version number in the name but instead they required a recertification every three years.  This was good on one hand since it avoided you needing to change your CV, however it did mean enforced […]