I published my book, Practical Guide to PKI with Windows Server on September 22, 2021, and it has now been over a full year since I made it generally available for purchase. I wanted to reflect on what I have learned since releasing the book, what issues I have encountered, and what the next steps are.

I have received several emails lately from people who have purchased my Practical Guide to PKI with Windows Server book and from people who have been downloaded my free guide on the same subject. There isn’t a problem with this, I am glad that people are reading both publications and have questions about it, but I wanted to set expectations with people whenever they have questions about it.

Internet Explorer 11 has officially gone end of life and it had a good run despite the issues associated with it. The first version of Internet Explorer was released on August 16, 1995, and it had a 26+ year run as one of the most well-known Web Browsers in the world. Unfortunately, with the widespread adoption of modern Web Browsers, there was no longer a need for IE, and it is time to move on.

I have had some time to think about it and I don’t normally comment on things like this, but the recent news that Broadcom was acquiring VMware from Dell for approximately $61 billion has me quite concerned about the future of on-premises virtualization and what is going to happen to enterprise solutions like VMware. Perpetual software licenses are going away faster than ever, and once it is normalized there will be no going back.

I ran into a somewhat annoying issue with using Mail Flow Rules with Exchange Online to modify the subject header on emails that were sent to aliases on some of my Office 365 accounts. I wanted to modify the email subject of those emails to show what alias it was meant for, and I figured I should share that process here if someone else runs into the same issue. This isn’t something that I do very often, and I was doing it wrong from the beginning, hence why I was having an issue.

I found a useful resource a few days ago that lists all the known/major Microsoft Administration Portals on a single website. While it is a great resource, it also represents a lot of the frustrations that I have with Microsoft’s online services and how administrators are expected to manage them.

Now available for download, a version of the Building a Certificate Authority in Windows Server 2019 guide that I published in early 2020. This guide offers a rapid deployment of a Two-Tier Certificate Authority using Windows Server without advanced features.

World Backup Day is a day of awareness for people to learn about the importance of regular backups of their important data.