On the business side of things, it seems that when Windows 10 checks in with a WSUS server (internal Windows update server), Windows 10 does not notify users when updates are available. I spent a solid day working on this, thinking that perhaps I did something in a group policy somewhere that caused it, but lo and behold, even taking a freshly imaged Windows 10 1903 computer, with only a (new) WSUS group policy still didn’t work properly.
Continue reading “Windows 10 Update Notifications: Broken”Lenovo BIOS Simulator and Config Tool
Well here’s a nifty tool I didn’t know existed! If you happen to manage Lenovo devices, such as Thinkpads, Ideapads, etc and would like to have a preview of what the BIOS screens look like, perhaps prior to getting new models, or perhaps walking someone through changing a setting over the phone, then this is for you!
Continue reading “Lenovo BIOS Simulator and Config Tool”December 2019: Two Notable Losses in Computing History
With all the joy and happiness the holidays tend to bring (just hear me out), the computing world lost two notable figures this month, both of which have had quite an impact on technology…
Continue reading “December 2019: Two Notable Losses in Computing History”TIL: Fail to Wire
Always interesting poking around Reddit to read how others deal with their daily battles. Today I came across this article On Reddit that mentioned something I’ve never heard of before: Fail to Wire.
Continue reading “TIL: Fail to Wire”Microsoft Ignite 2019 – Conference Recap and Tips
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, FL. This conference is HUGE – 30K+ people huge, and encompasses nearly everything Microsoft, especially Azure and Office/Microsoft 365. People travel from all over the world to attend, and that alone may be a reason to join in as well; the networking opportunities are huge.
Continue reading “Microsoft Ignite 2019 – Conference Recap and Tips”Conferences and Travel – Life Hacks Part 1
Ok, so not all of these may be earth-shattering, and may be more-or-less common knowledge, but I figured for any youngins out there travelling to their first conference, whether it’s a tech conference like Microsoft Ignite, AWS Invent or something else, to help keep things organized. I’ve been to MANY conferences over the years, and feel like after 2 decades, I more or less have my act together in this ONE AREA 😉
Note that while I mention some apps and services below, I don’t necessarily endorse any of these products or brands, nor am I paid by any of these companies. This article is all my personal experience and opinion, and some links are just simple examples I found doing quick searches.
Anyway, onto the tips; buckle in because this is a long one…
Office365: Teams Mode is configurable per-user
Today I learned (thanks to Reddit) that although my Office365 tenant is still set to “islands” mode, the setting is actually applied per-user with each user actually defaulted to tenant global setting). You can enable any individual user for Teams-only mode, and even then, the setting can be reverted if need be, so it’s not permanent like most people tend to think.
It seems that amongst the settings, each one simply varies of the amount of work “Skype” will do, with “Teams-only” being the only one that truly switches things over to Teams. Even with both Skype and Teams installed, with the Tenant/User in “Islands” mode, calls get routed to Skype by default, including the mobile apps. You need to use Teams-Only mode to have Teams actually accept calls.
I also found some really interesting notification rules in the mobile app I don’t think I’ve seen before (Quiet Time and Quiet Days), and in addition, Teams -FINALLY- has a secondary ringer option so you can actually hear calls when you have a usb receiver or headset plugged in. (This may not be true for mac users yet, at least according to a couple other Reddit posts I’ve seen recently.)
Anyhow, it seems good things continue to come for Teams, and I can only imagine the onslaught of new features that’ll be announced at Ignite, I just hope they all work!
OneDrive Known Folder Move: Your IT Administrator has set a policy that prevents changes to known folders. Please remove this policy and try again.
Nothing makes my blood boil like nearing the finish line on a freshly re-imaged computer, only to come to a OneDrive KFM roadblock.
Continue reading “OneDrive Known Folder Move: Your IT Administrator has set a policy that prevents changes to known folders. Please remove this policy and try again.”Windows 10 Media Creation Tool Errors Out
Figured I would share this tip, as it’s so simple (and really shouldn’t happen), but it does and drives me nuts every time.
The Windows 10 Media Creation Tool downloads a Windows 10 install, and let’s you create an ISO or bootable USB stick to install Windows 10 into a computer. I don’t generally use it much in an IT realm as we use the corporate installer tools, however when working on a home computer or re-gearing an old laptop for home use for someone, I use this to quickly get Windows 10 installed.
As always, there’s a catch. I pop in a USB stick, open the tool, select “Create installation media”, and it will show the E drive or whatever drive my USB stick is. Great! Hit go and it spends some time downloading Windows 10 and starts working on creating the stick.
Then it fails.
Ok maybe it was a fluke…do it all again, wait another 15 minutes, it fails again. ARRG! It usually comes up with some cryptic error that sounds like a media/disk error, in addition the USB stick usually now is corrupted and you have to re-format the stick. What is going on with this??
Turns out the answer is an easy one, and really, it shouldn’t even happen. Once you click “Create Installation media” – it brings up a screen with your USB drive showing, for example E:\. For all intents and purposes it looks like its already good to go. Thing is…you haven’t PICKED that drive yet! Even though it looks like that’s where it’s pointing to, and yes it seems to access the stick, you have to actually click on the drive letter before clicking Next.
Gets me every time!
Powershell – Getting Group Membership in Office365
As I’m trying to clean up some accounts, I found that it’s -not easy- to simply get a list of all the groups a user is a member of in powershell, at least not like the one that displays in the admin portal. In doing some hunting (admittedly, not a lot of hunting) I came across this site that has just about what I was looking for, but I will warn you that the one-liners provided are not efficient – they have to populate the members of all groups, therefore if you have a LARGE directory, these may take a very long time to run, and be data-intensive. If you’re an SMB or SME with only a couple hundred users, they should be OK.
The problem was, it didn’t work! It looked good, but the variable it stored the results in was empty. After a quick review I realized the problem; the $mailbox.Alias at the end of the scripts should have been $mailbox.Name, since the alias will never match the name shown in the group membership. Once I changed that, it worked as it should:
$Office365GroupsMember = Get-UnifiedGroup | where { (Get-UnifiedGroupLinks $_.Alias -LinkType Members | foreach {$_.name}) -contains $mailbox.Name}However…this only works for “Office365” Groups, and not all Office365 group types, that may include groups sync’ed from Active Directory/DirSync, like distribution lists and so on. I took the one-liner from that site, and modified it slightly to use “get-msolgroup” rather than get-unifiedgroup, which worked as it should.
$UserEmail= "someperson@somecompany.com"
$Mailbox = Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.PrimarySmtpAddress -eq $UserEmail}
Get-msolGroup | where { (Get-msolGroupmember -GroupObjectId $_.objectid | foreach {$_.displayname}) -contains $mailbox.name}From there you can pipe the output of that command into others, like remove-msolgroupmembership (although it needs the member objectid which is odd), or store it in a variable. Keep in mind you may want to filter group types as well, as I’m not sure you can remove a user from an Office365 group that was added/created as part of a Teams teams.
Last but not least, see these commands to do simliar roles for Active Directory:
get-adprincipalgroupmembership
remove-adprincipalgroupmembership
I figured this might help someone out, and kudos to the other page for having a one-liner that worked as the basis for this!