Articles by 'Ed Bratter'

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

Microsoft Autopilot is a cloud-based solution that is used to provision new Windows devices and provides an alternative to the older imaging technology. When coupled with Intune, Autopilot enables vendors to drop-ship new machines directly to end users. The user then initiates an out-of-box provisioning experience by powering on the device, connecting it to the network, and signing in with their Entra ID credentials. Autopilot facilitates the build and performs an Entra join, or hybrid join, and enables an... read more.

• July 27, 2026

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

Modern mobile device management solutions like Microsoft Intune are becoming more popular because they allow people to use their personal iPhones or iPads to access organizational data while giving the organization a controlled way to protect its assets on those devices. For bring-your-own-device scenarios, the goal is not to take over the user’s phone. Instead, Intune helps create a practical balance: users keep personal privacy and familiar device ownership, while IT can apply the right level of man... read more.

• July 23, 2026

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure

Security of an Active Directory (AD) infrastructure can be significantly increased by deploying Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) and installing certificates on domain controllers (DC). AD CS plays a foundational role for enabling certificate-based security across a range of services in AD. Some notable security enhancements are as follows:  Securing AD communication between domain joined machines. Allow for securing LDAP traffic, which by default is not encrypted. This means that cre... read more.

• July 22, 2025

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