Articles by 'Ed Bratter'

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure

One benefit to Microsoft 365 is the ability to share data and collaborate with partners, customers, vendors and users who are external to your tenant. This benefit, however, can be a scary endeavor as information can be inadvertently exposed to outside entities. Couple this with the fact that tenants by default allow users to share data with outside individuals. Equally concerning is that configuring external collaboration can be complicated because there are multiple options available and there are many ad... read more.

• March 27, 2025

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

Many look forward to the Fall when Apple releases its newest version of iOS with the new features and toys it presents. One of this year’s improvements offers a vastly simplified process for enrolling personal (BYOD) devices into a mobile device management (MDM) solution such as Intune. The current method requires installing both the Company Portal and the Microsoft Authenticator app, and requires a dance through a maze of screens and jumping between applications to successfully enroll a dev... read more.

• November 04, 2024

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

If you are responsible for creating Entra Conditional Access policies, you may have noticed that Microsoft has put the “Require approved client app” control on the soon-to-be-extinct list. Instead, the newer “Require app protection policy” control should be used. Microsoft stated that the older control will stop being enforced in March 2026, so it will be as if it does not exist (more information can be found here: Migrate approved client app to application protection policy in Co... read more.

• July 24, 2024

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure

Microsoft OneNote is a popular program for taking and sharing notes. One challenge with OneNote though is moving or migrating notebooks. This challenge has become amplified because Microsoft has changed the options available for moving notebooks through the various flavors and versions of OneNote over the years. There is also confusing documentation on how to move notebooks. Hopefully this blog will provide some clarity. A quick lesson on OneNote files: A given notebook is a collection of files that are st... read more.

• January 22, 2024

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure

If you are confused about Azure Active Directory (AD) hybrid join, what it is, when to use it, and how to set it up, keep reading. Azure AD hybrid join is for Windows devices and is one of three methods to associate devices to Azure AD: Azure AD registered, Azure AD joined, and Hybrid Azure AD joined. This article focuses exclusively on Azure AD hybrid joins.. If you are using federated management via AD FS or a third-party tool, the hybrid join process is slightly different. What is Azure AD Hybrid Join? ... read more.

• January 27, 2023

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

One of the benefits of Microsoft 365 is the ability for users to collaborate and share with co-workers, clients, vendors, partners, and people external to the organization. This benefit, however, comes with a downside; users can either purposely or inadvertently expose information that the organization would not want shared externally.   To complicate matters, newly established tenants leave the door wide-open for publishing data to external entities. As a result, users can share data with outside ind... read more.

• July 27, 2021

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure

Just wait one damn moment, please. I wonder how many of my fellow IT professionals have experienced some variation of this: You walk into the office on a sunny morning thinking about the tasks you need to do for the day. Before you get to your desk, you run into your manager, who says she needs you to attend a meeting in the conference room in 30 minutes. You grab a cup of coffee, do a couple of quick things, and stroll down the hall wondering what this could be about. You walk into the conference room, wh... read more.

• April 03, 2020

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure

Arguably one of the more tedious tasks when building Exchange servers is configuring the disks and volumes. Even in smaller environments, where there may be only two or three databases, the actual number of volumes gets multiplied by the number of copies in the DAG. Consider an Exchange organization that has three databases with three copies of each database. From a configuration perspective that’s nine volumes that need to be configured. Disk Manager does not provide an efficient way to do this. Ther... read more.

• April 02, 2020

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

Perhaps one of the most popular features of Exchange is the ability to connect Outlook running on a PC to Exchange over the Internet when outside the corporate network without the need to establish a VPN connection. This feature was introduced with Exchange 2003 and is called Outlook Anywhere. Of course, convenience always comes at a price: once enabled, Outlook Anywhere allows anyone with Outlook to connect to Exchange from any PC regardless of who owns it. Many organizations want or need to restrict Outlo... read more.

• January 10, 2020

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Security

As a consultant in the Active Directory (AD) space, I see a lot of AD environments up close. One theme that has become painfully clear to me is that we, as the gatekeepers of Active Directory, are not doing a good enough job of securing our kingdom. Even the organizations that put a strong emphasis on security come up short in one way or another. This is often because the security professionals are focused on other areas of the network such as firewalls or intrusion detection. Those security professionals... read more.

• April 21, 2016