Active Directory

Active Directory Domain Services modules on Microsoft Learn

The following is a list of Active Directory Domain Services modules on Microsoft Learn sorted from introductory to advanced. Is there an Active Directory topic that isn’t listed here that you’d like to see covered? (AD CS modules are coming). If you know all this, remember we have the free 45 minute practical Active Directory […]

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Bacpac and Dacpac, the similarities and differences

When you need to move an entire database or move the objects in a database, bacpac and dacpac files often come up because of all of the tooling options to interact with them. Bacpac and dacpac files share some core similarities as well as some major differences in how they’re used in SqlPackage and other

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Advanced Windows Firewall

If you administer Windows, you’re already aware of Windows Firewall. You might use it to allow an application, open a port, or block unwanted inbound traffic. But those familiar tasks only scratch the surface of what it can do. The Microsoft Learn module Understand advanced Windows Firewall takes you beyond basic rules and introduces Windows

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Consume Dataverse MCP server in Microsoft Foundry-Bringing business data to AI Agents

Introduction Building AI agents that can actually do things in your business systems—create records, update opportunities, trigger workflows—typically requires weeks of custom integration work. The Dataverse MCP Server changes that. In this tutorial, you’ll connect a Microsoft Foundry agent to your Dataverse environment in under 30 minutes, giving your AI agent secure, real-time access to

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The Hidden Reason Your Foundry Agent Can’t Reach Any of Your Private (Bring-Your-Own) Resources

The setup You’ve built the deployment the enterprise architecture review asked for. Nothing touches the public internet. Your Microsoft Foundry resource is private — public network access disabled, a private endpoint fronting it inside your virtual network. Every resource the agent depends on is locked down the same way: Azure AI Search — private endpoint,

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Setting Up Microsoft Intune Remote Help on Azure Virtual Desktop

Remote Help lets your helpdesk team screen-share, chat with, and (with the right permission) take elevated control of a user’s session — including AVD multi-session hosts where several users can be active on the same VM at once. This is a two-part walkthrough. Part 1 covers enabling Remote Help at the tenant level and doing

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Executive AI Avatar Platform on Azure: Frontier Intelligence Meets Fireworks AI Open-Source

The 2 a.m. Question Nobody Wants to Answer Twice It is the night before open enrollment closes. An employee in another time zone has a question about HSA eligibility. No HR representative is available, and the FAQ PDF she received three months ago is nowhere to be found. She does not want to submit a

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Automating the Disconnected Session Time Limit Policy with PowerShell and Microsoft Graph

Reclaiming host pool capacity from disconnected sessions is one of those AVD hygiene tasks that’s easy to configure once by hand in Intune, and easy to forget to replicate consistently across every host pool, tenant, or DTAP environment you manage. If you’re standing up host pools programmatically — or you just want this baked into

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Build locally, ship to Azure: meet Azure SQL Database container

Big news: The Azure SQL Database container is here, in private preview. It’s the Azure SQL Database engine, on your laptop, in a container. Build against the exact engine you run in the cloud. Ship the same code to Azure. Change one line, the connection string, and you’re in production. Free for local dev and CI. No subscription.

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Some tools and techniques for hardening Windows Server

In this post I go over some tools and techniques exist for hardening Windows Server. As always, apply controls according to the server’s role, test them against representative workloads before production rollout, document approved exceptions, and maintain tested console and recovery access in case a security control affects management or application compatibility. Apply the role-specific

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