Category: Notes from the Field

A recent question was asked about Microsoft M365 Copilot licening. Does a tenant need to license all users or is a subset of users available? M365 Copilot is like any other workload, you see the licenses in the admin center and can assign them to individuals or groups using the GUI or PowerShell. From the

I was recently working with a customer enabling Copilot for their end users. After the Copilot license was assigned, it took several minutes to have Outlook for Windows, Word, PowerPoint, and Teams to have the Copilot option appear. However, the Outlook for Mobile app was taking longer. As a first step (as always it seems

Another day to reflect on the labor of system administrators. What will a system administrator job look like in the future. One guess is, more of a developer than a server administrator. A system administrator role in Information Technology (IT) has certainly changed over the years and will continue evolve. Back in the day, there

One time, I had a phone call from the ISP for the company I was working at and they said they did a firewall scan without notifying us. Ok, thanks for that, but next time, be honest and let us know when you are going to perform a penetration test and we’ll be happy to

The question isn’t can you, but should you virtualize the Primary Domain Controller emulator (PDCe) FMSO role holder. And of course, the answer is, ‘It depends’. Of course it does, why wouldn’t it be black or white? Because there are too many options to consider. Finding the PDCe: There are a few different ways to

Microsoft Certification tests are a good way for people to demonstrate their knowledge to others. I just completed my Messaging Administration certificate, which currently is two tests: MS-200 and MS-201. Yes, there are many different accreditation paths available to people and many choices in the IT field. It’s not always best to just have lots

Thought this would be a good Labor Day discussion, about how much labor an Exchange administrator performs. The short answer is, you’ll still be very needed if/when your company decides to move to Exchange online in O365. So you think you’ll lose your job when your company moves Exchange on premises content into O365 using

Just a reminder, the Exchange Server 2019 role requirement calculator is now only available in the current Cumulative Update download. To obtain the CU downloads, you must have access to the Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center. The main reason the role requirement calculator ships in the CU’s, is that the Exchange Product Group now owns

Any time I’m heading out to lunch and see a back hoe digging, I think ‘cable breaker’. Sure enough, ran into a customer, they had 200’ of fiber torn up as the street was being worked on during construction. I think it’s a rule/law to note wherever a gas line is buried in the ground.

An IT staff member found a Palm Pilot stuck to the underside of a server. It was held there with double sided tape and had a cord running out of the device. The engineer followed the cord, found out it was plugged into the core network switch in the data center. It was packet sniffing network traffic that was