Mobile Computing

Azure Conditional Access for Chromebooks

I suspect most of you reading this article will already know this, but part of Microsoft’s Azure AD (AAD) / Office 365 Cloud directory service that you get when you pay for premium AAD is Conditional Access (CA), which can be used to allow quite sophisticated access controls for accessing Office 365 resources. Of course, you get basic Office 365 MFA with the basic Office 365 enterprise product, and you should absolutely look into enrolling your users and turning this on straight away if that is what you have.

Continue reading →

Tuning up Intune, an introduction.

Introduction to Microsoft Mobile Device Management I'm currently settling in to a new job where I'm spending a fair amount of time working with Microsoft's Mobile security management tools, mostly Microsoft Intune. This is largely what I was doing towards the end of my old job too, and while there's some great people writing great material out there, I think there's a lack of articles that try to start at the beginning with current (as of April 2019) tools and pull all the strands together, so that's what we're going to talk about here.

Continue reading →

Tuning up Intune - Self Service Password Reset from the login screen.

IntroductionOne of the new features in Windows 10 1803 is the ability for "local Active Directory" Domain joined workstations to allow users to reset their password from the login screen. This was introduced for Azure Active Directory joined systems in Windows 10 1709. In this post I’m quickly going to run through what you need to do in order to configure this for your domain. I’m making the following assumptions:

Continue reading →

Scratching the Surface

At work I tend to turn up to meetings with a MacBook Pro. This surprises a few people who know me as a former Microsoft MVP, a Windows Server/Infrastructure person and the manager of a IT system that is predominantly Windows based. The MacBook Pro isn’t ideal; it’s a 15" 2010 model and it is starting to be a problem. Even with a SSD installed, it’s starting to get slow and cranky when it comes to waking up.

Continue reading →

WiFi is hard... Yes, even with today's Top Gear.

Wireless is already ubiquitous in any modern home or business these days, yet it’s one of the areas that probably most upsets employees, managers and IT staff all alike. There’s an assumption that business WiFi must be easy because anyone can purchase a cheap home wireless router and set it up at home, so how hard can it be to do the same thing for a business? Actually for a small business where you’re just providing connectivity for one or two people with their work laptops and maybe a mobile phone or two in a small office, it’s probably not too difficult at all.

Continue reading →

Microsoft's Marketing confusion

Just lately Microsoft seem to be determined to mix up brand names to confuse customers. For a while now we’ve had OneDrive for Business, the product that is built on the back of totally has nothing to do with OneDrive. OneDrive is your typical cloud file sync platform… and actually one I like enough to make my primary cloud storage of choice. OneDrive for Business is the name Microsoft have decided to give to uploading documents to a personal document library in SharePoint, in particular SharePoint Online/Office365.

Continue reading →

The Problem with BYOD projects

I see lots of people talking about and asking about hardware being “prepared for BYOD” and/or “BYOD ready”. Most of the time they’re talking about Wireless Access Points(WAPs) or other similar items of infrastructure. In a lot of ways, as long as you stick to a reputable vendor, what make of WAP you buy is the least difficult and least interesting part of the project - you wouldn’t focus too heavily on what brand of switch your desktops were wired into as part of a project to give everyone access to a new corporate intranet site from the desktop - you’d spend more time checking that the site’s CMS system worked with your standard browser and thinking about what content users should be able to get to, and how they’d get to it.

Continue reading →

Keep taking the tablets Dell

Let me just start this post by saying that professionally at least, I’m a happy Dell customer. I’ve built up a good relationship with them over the years, met senior Dell staff and we almost exclusively use their server & storage infrastructure where I work, we’ve used them for consultancy in the past, and I’ve been delighted with the results. This is not me hating on Dell. But I am going to have to take them to the woodshed over a recent post by Andre Meier on their corporate blog, “Tablet matters - taking the right decision”.

Continue reading →

Spend less time playing with featureless glass

Ok. So apparently Sergey Brin (seen here with an entire computer strapped to his face) thinks we should spend less time just “standing around rubbing this…"(smartphone/tablet)”…featureless piece of glass". He said this with an entire computer strapped to his face, covering his eyes. He seems to feel smartphones are “emasculating” somehow. Not sure about that myself, but I’d love to hear him explain why a smartphone or tablet is more emasculating than, say, having an entire computer strapped to your face.

Continue reading →

All I wanted to do was give you some money - a customer service story.

iPhone 4S disappointment... why? So the new iPhone 4S. Who's excited about that eh? Not the technorati apparently. More fool them, it seems. I guess a lot of tech commentators feel let down because they had decided among themselves that Apple were going to release something called the iPhone 5 and it was going to have 4G (despite no-one being entirely sure what that means exactly), be a nice new shape, possibly come with some kind of matter replicator and who knows what else exactly.

Continue reading →

Talking Tablets

So I finally took the plunge into the world of tablets and got myself an iPad 2, and very nice it is too. Now those people who know me (and know exactly how many Apple gadgets I have) could be forgiven for thinking I just went for the Apple on autopilot… and nothing could be further from the truth. Apple’s original iPad was clearly a very clever bit of kit but when I picked one up to try it never “spoke” to me.

Continue reading →