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Read-Only Friday

02-14-2025 MSOnline and AzureAD PowerShell modules.. One last Valentine’s day card each

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If you haven’t seen the news already, MSOnline and AzureAD PowerShell modules will be no longer supported after March 30, 2025. So looks like this will be our last year to give them a Valentine’s day card for all the times they’ve been there for us! Now, what do we need to know:

ModuleEnd of supportTemporary outage testsRetirement
MSOnlineMarch 30, 2025Between January 20, 2025 and March 30, 2025Early Apr 2025 to late May 2025
AzureADMarch 30, 2025N/AAfter July 1, 2025

If you haven’t already upgraded your scripts/modules that use these, the time is definitely now. Are there any scripts you can’t migrate over? If so, put it in the comments, social media, and reach out to Microsoft as well, and let’s figure it out!

Source: Microsoft Tech Community

Read-Only Friday August 4, 2023 End Of Life Server 2012R2 and managing EOL

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Read-Only Friday August 4, 2023

Do you still have any Windows Server 2012R2 or earlier in production? This is a friendly reminder that they will be going End Of Life October 10 of this year. If you do have any in production, what is your plan to decommission them? Do you still need the server, or will you be spinning up a new upgraded VM? Do you have the licensing to upgrade? What are your next steps?

Talking about End Of Life, how do you manage and track your equipment and licensing for this scenario? Do you have special asset/license management software, SharePoint list, SQL Database, Excel workbook, or even a csv with dates and costs?

If you’ve made it this far, I’m hoping this isn’t a surprise and this is only a reminder to keep following your plan, but if this is the first time you’re hearing this, please look at this now and put a plan in place, especially if you will need to purchase new licensing. While you are at it, I’d check those servers running 2012R2 and see how much of the services you really need running now, as a lot has probably changed since you first put them into production. Also, do you have enough resources to run both at the same time, or do you have to take a current backup(test to make sure the backup works), delete(or turn off and hope you don’t accidently turn it on while new server is on) your current 2012R2, then build the new on?

Good luck with your migrations and as always if there is anyway I can help, feel free to reach out! Have a great Friday, and remember no unscheduled changes today.

Read-Only Friday 365 Developer Program

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Want to have some fun with Office 365, but don’t want to mess up your production environment? Or what about being able to try out scripts and not having to brace yourself as you run them and hope they don’t clear out all your data? Now you can do whatever you want with the Microsoft 365 Dev Center.

That is right, up to 25 E5 licensed users at your disposal for 90 days and will be renewed as long as you are using it. They will even create 16 users for you, mail traffic, and more. This isn’t just for PowerShell, this all aspects of 365.

Awesome, right? Here are few examples:

  1. You could copy up to 25 of your current users and import them into this Developer tenant and test scripts see exactly how it would work with your information. Think of those times where you test a script with fictional users and your script works perfect, but once you put it into production, your script fails because one username had a character that your test data didn’t have. Now your spending unnecessary time trying to figure out what went wrong when it worked perfectly in proof of concept.
  2. You want to test new features or policies, but you don’t want to enable them in your production environment, as your not 100% sure how it will react to your environment. Configure this test environment how your current tenant is then enable those features or policies you want to test. Much safer to test in the dev environment, then do it in production and all of a sudden your users can’t access critical resources or anything at all!
  3. Your boss wants you do a proof of concept on how to streamline the onboarding process and to make it as simple as possible for the organization. It is recommended that you use Sharepoint and Teams as the company already uses both and are familiar. Instead of using your production environment, you can do this all in the dev tenant without affecting anything in production. You can even invite key players in this project to login and test it with you. Now you don’t have to worry about a teams alert that you setup for when a new hire has been added to AD or Microsoft Entra ID spamming a your production channel because your script or flow errored.

These are just a few scenarios that the 365 Dev tenant can be useful, but there are so many more. I’m barely scratching the surface, and hope you sign up right away for this if you haven’t already. It is free, if you administer or develop 365, you need this.

I hope you found this helpful, and if you have any questions, I’d be glad to help out in anyway I can.

Sign up for the Microsoft 365 Dev Center

Read-Only Friday March 10, 2023

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It’s Friday, and I’m going to keep this one short in sweet copy. I’ve mentioned this module before, but it is so helpful if you use any of the products, that I want to make sure you don’t miss out on it! Yes, I know it’s Read-Only Friday, but this module will step up your documentation game ten fold.

AsBuiltReport on Github or you can find them on asbuiltreport.com.

What they have created is multiple modules depending on the product you need documentation on, and with one quick line of code, you get a full breakdown of the product you requesting information on. How about a 144 page document on your Active Directory? Not bad, right?

Check them out, and let me know what you think!

GitHub:
https://github.com/AsBuiltReport

Website:
https://www.asbuiltreport.com/

Read-Only Friday February 17, 2023

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It’s been a little bit for a Read-Only Friday, and need your input. Do you like the 3 days of smaller posts, or would you rather have one more in depth post a week, possibly every 2 weeks? They would be targeted to real life examples using PowerShell or scenarios in IT and how to best handle them. Would love your feedback and feel free to message me if you rather not put it in here!

Remember, no major unplanned changes today unless mission critical! And might be a good day to review your documentation to make sure it is up date or anyway you can improve it!