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Creating a Lab Domain in PowerShell
I am spending a lot of time in Microsoft 365 these days. Because of my new contract, I found myself needing to build a lab environment from scratch. Yes, I am working in Azure AD, but for my role I realized it would be help to have an on-premise Active Directory Domain Services environment, in…
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Customer Service… and not.
I have had two very different experiences with Customer Service this week which I would like to share. Sometimes a product breaks, and it is nobody’s fault. When this happens, and especially when then product is a recent purchase, it is the company’s responsibility to fix or replace it for you. However most companies are…
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Jaybird Vista: Comfort and quality
Late last year I invested in a pair of Jaybird Bluetooth earbuds. They were okay – I did not love them, but they worked well, sounded good, and that was really all that I needed. When I started having issues with them in January I looked online and tried to apply the latest firmware. When…
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Outlook Is Backwards?
I installed Office 365 on my new laptop this week and did not give it another thought… until I went to start booking travel for my upcoming trip. I went to click on Monday and realized it was not where it was supposed to be… everything was backwards. It was a little confusing, and I…
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In-Person Training During a Worldwide Pandemic
I have been a trainer for twenty years. When I am in front of a class teaching, I am truly in my element. Like many of my colleagues, I make the stage my own. As I have taught so many others over the years, I use the whole stage. I make eye contact, I try…
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Surface Laptop 3: A new chapter
It was almost eight years ago to the day that I walked into the Microsoft Store in Toronto to purchase the very first Microsoft Surface Pro sold in the world. There was a huge midnight event planned so that on the day of the release – February 9, 2013 – anyone lined up at the…
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Rearming Microsoft Office
I am a huge believer in software licensing. If you are going to use a software, pay for the software. With that said, I am also a practical man who teaches a lot of courses, and am also a consultant who believes that companies should thoroughly test software before using it. Microsoft Office 365 is…
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Editor Breaking My Stride
There is a new feature in Microsoft Word called Editor. It reviews the document you are working on for spelling, grammar, clarity, conciseness, punctuation, and more. For people who need the help, it is a godsend. Who am I kidding? I use it rather a lot. It helps me from time to time, although more…
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AzureAD: Joining is easy!
There was a time, years ago, when I maintained my own Active Directory infrastructure. I was living with my family in Canada, I had server racks in the basement, and my company required my having AD that I could use and often demo. Those days are long gone. I now live in an apartment in…
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Event Viewer Tasks: Get rid of them!
A little while ago I was demonstrating some of the functionalities of the Windows Event Viewer. It has been around for so many years, and yet there are people who have not used it. One of the functions that I demonstrated was attaching a task to an event… so when a particular event happens, a…
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Prescience: We saw the future
In February 2012 I had lunch with a friend, Sharon Bennett. Following that lunch, we each wrote an article about ending snow days. These followed a lunch we had where we discussed how easy it would have been, with the technology available to us then (8.5 years ago), to teach remotely… not all the time,…
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American Politics… and my silence
My first business trip to the United States of America was in 2006 or 2007. I remember how excited I was when I was issued my first TN visa allowing me to work in the US, and the pride I felt standing before my audiences as a trainer representing a great brand. Over the course…
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A Product Reviewer’s Integrity
I do not remember when or what was the first product I was asked to review for this blog, but it certainly goes back more than a decade. From the very beginning, I decided that I needed to balance my integrity with a life of positivity. As such, I have told every company, large and…
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Internet Explorer: Still slowly going away
For the last who-knows-how-long, Microsoft Windows users have been opting for a third-party web browser in lieu of the dreaded Internet Explorer. They went through so many versions over the years, it was almost comical. Each time they released a new version, Microsoft would tout their modern browser. Each time, the masses would snicker, claiming…
The World According to Mitch
The day to day ramblings of an IT Professional (and so much more…)
The World According to Mitch 