It has been a while since I last blogged - life has certainly been busy! Over the past two years I’ve somewhat immersed myself in PowerShell. While I wouldn’t claim to be a PowerShell Guru, my knowledge has substantially grown, thanks in part to splendid collaboration with some exceptional colleagues. ➡️

OK….that title was a bit of a mouthful - but it’s a little difficult to categorise what is essentially a kind of hack! Recently, I felt it was advisable to start regularly recording my blood pressure results (comes with age I’m afraid). ➡️

I’ve recently being getting deeper into the weeds (so to speak) with Power Automate. Whilst this product clearly isn’t a fully fledged programming model, it does sit very nicely in that “low code” methodology, and can be extremely effective when there is a need to quickly create and perform a specific task. ➡️

Firstly, let me register that I much prefer writing raw SQL when interrogating iSAMS than using the official iSAMS REST API - there, I’ve said it! However, I do entirely appreciate the necessity for an official API in order to cater for security, consistency, potential database schema changes & futureproofing etc. ➡️

Like many people, I’ve tinkered with Power BI over the years but have never really dug deep into the weeds; the same can also be said for the iSAMS REST API. ➡️

Having fully migrated our on-prem Exchange to Exchange Online, there were a few little gotchas along the way that we had to contend with - which was to be expected. ➡️

It’s not uncommon to receive unwanted emails which have managed to work their way through the array of filtering systems in production. Recently our organisation received such an email - a classic phishing email sent to multiple end user accounts. ➡️

To be honest, as I’m sure any right-minded individual would agree, downloading videos from YouTube for personal gain is wrong. However, there are occasions when it is arguably reasonable and possibly even legitimate to do such a thing. ➡️

A common issue with supporting a primarily Windows based user body, is that thanks to the “always on” expectation emboldened by smartphones and tablets, it can be a constant battle to try and encourage end users to restart their computers with some degree of regularity - yes IT friends, you know exactly what I mean! ➡️

It’s been eight months since my last blog post, having taken on a new job, been on the receiving end of a full-on enterprise ransomware attack (that wasn’t nice!) and quite frankly experiencing one heck of a baptism of fire - I felt it was time do write a quick blog post tip! ➡️