Posey's Tips & Tricks


How To Ransomware-Proof Your Backups: 4 Key Best Practices

Backups are the only guaranteed way to save your data after a ransomware attack. Here's how to make sure your backup strategy has ransomware mitigation built right in.

Microsoft Helps Office Users Cope with Unfamiliar Acronyms

A new AI-powered feature in Office scans your e-mails and documents to help you tell one "SaaS" apart from another.

Better E-Mail Management with Outlook's Insights Feature

How a new capability is succeeding where Cortana failed at taming the Outlook beast.

Exploring OCR, a New Way To Get Data into Excel

Microsoft recently added a new optical character recognition feature to Excel that lets users import data from a photograph taken from a smartphone. Here's how to use it.

A Quicker Way To Create Hyper-V Inventory Reports

If you need to generate Hyper-V inventory reports but don't want the hassle of writing your own custom PowerShell script, here is a shortcut.

Is a Cloud Backlash Coming?

The cloud has long been touted as the future of computing. But for some organizations, cloud computing has only added more complexity and not enough cost-savings.

Automating Virtual Machine Activation in Hyper-V

Microsoft's "automatic virtual machine activation" feature lets you spin up a short-lived VM without wasting a license key. Here's how to use it.

How To Make Office 365 Planner Acknowledge Recurring Tasks

While useful in plenty of ways, Microsoft's task-management service doesn't have a feature to manage repeating tasks. The solution? Create a "template plan."

Is There a Good Alternative to Microsoft's Surface Studio?

Microsoft is expected to unveil new Surface hardware next week, but unless a standalone Surface Studio monitor is one of them, it might be time to consider some of the other (cheaper) options from its OEM partners.

Patch Management for Hyper-V Replica Hosts

Here's how you can use Hyper-V's replica infrastructure to minimize disruptions caused by the patch management process.

What Happens If You Can't Get a Perpetual Microsoft Office License?

It's getting harder to buy standalone Office licenses from Microsoft. Will a purely subscription-based Office model be worth it for users, or are there better alternatives in the market?

How Console Gaming Paved the Way for Desktop-as-a-Service

The earliest gaming consoles provided a tidy solution to the problem of PC hardware compatibility. Now, Brien argues, DaaS is doing the same thing.

Server Capacity Planning: How To Choose Between Current and Future Memory Needs

How much server memory is enough, and for how long? Brien works through the math as part of his ongoing hardware refresh.

Taking a Fresh Look at Office 365 Flow

Microsoft has evolved Flow into a very capable workflow automation platform. The catch is that if you want to use Flow to its fullest potential, you'll need to pay a little extra.

How To Add More Servers to Windows Admin Center

Brien shows how to extend the scope of Windows Admin Center's management capabilities to the other servers on your network.

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