This post highlights the most interesting blogs, tweets and articles I’ve read relating to MEM in the past week.

Intro

I figured I’d try and start something new. To stay up-to-date on what’s happening in the MEM and Windows management realm I read a ton of stuff. A serious amount of community effort and a similar amount of items Microsoft puts out. The amount of things being put out is all incredibly valuable, and covers all types of knowledge depth imaginable. On a weekly basis I am going to try and shine a light on some of those items that I personally believe you must read. I’ll equally add my view as to why I believe this is something you should probably look into. Items appear in random order.

Item 1

Peter doesn’t use the word awesome lightly, in this post he calls the Windows Update for Business deployment service awesome, not once, but twice. And he’s absolutely right, the Windows Update for Business deployment service covers a serious gap for those organizations that have asked for more control over cloud based patching. [Getting started with the Windows Update for Business deployment service] (https://www.petervanderwoude.nl/post/getting-started-with-the-windows-update-for-business-deployment-service/)

Item 2

Because it’s a pet peeve of mine. The amount of portals Microsoft has is borderline insane. That’s just me putting it nicely, you could easily lose the borderline part in the previous sentence. The problem with that is operational, remembering them all is next to impossible. There’s equally a security part to that overload of portals. If an admin doesn’t know about which portals he needs to use, than he is more susceptible to fall into a credential phishing scam with all the potential damage related to that. I’d like fewer portals and have all of them end in .microsoft.com to avoid that latter scenario. This post is claiming success on reducing the amount of portals and moves a portal to a name that ends in .microsoft.com and that makes me happy. (That’s what you have with pet peeves.) All Microsoft Defender for Identity features now available in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal

Item 3

A tool, but not just any tool, [a tool to troubleshoot hybrid azure ad join issues] (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/samples/azure-samples/dsregtool/dsregtool/). I am sure that, just like me, several people have spend an abundant amount of time trying to figure out why a device doesn’t register. The Device Registration troublehsooter tool should, at the very least, reduce the time needed to spend on that significantly. I haven’t had the need to actually test it, but the tests covered are pretty extensive. Would have missed this if it wasn’t for Mark pointing to it on twitter