Have you rolled out Microsoft Defender for Cloud? Richard chats with Yuri Diogenes about the bundle of tools under the Defender for Cloud moniker. Yuri describes Defender for Cloud as a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). This Gartner term covers the various elements that go into a cloud-native application, including APIs, servers, containers, storage, resource manager, and more! Defender for Cloud integrates with Microsoft Purview to understand data sensitivity, and...

How can Microsoft Copilot make your intranet better? Richard chats with Susan Hanley about her experiences adding Copilot into the intranet via the Copilot Studio and Viva Engage. Susan talks about the challenges of getting your intranet data in order - most notably, archiving old information so that it doesn't clutter up a Copilot with out-of-date and inaccurate data. The conversation explores making smaller Copilots focused on specific domains, like company policy. It's still the early days...

How are your company's Apple devices connected to the enterprise? Richard talks to Michael Epping about the recent additions in Entra that support the authentication of Apple MacOS and iPadOS devices. Michael discusses Apple's Secure Enclave as the equivalent of Trusted Platform Management in Windows. With Entra Platform SSO, you can now use that authentication to access Azure resources and, ultimately, on-premises Kerberos-secured resources! These features are still in public preview but...

How can you use PowerApps to extend the functionality of other apps? Richard talks to Christina Wheeler about her efforts to teach folks to use PowerApps to add the functionality they need to Dynamics 365 and elsewhere! Christina talks about her move to Microsoft, shifting from SharePoint to PowerApps, but still essentially doing the same thing - finding customer solutions. The conversation ranges over the power of the Dataverse to provide access to all sorts of data and the emerging role of...

Two old guys talk about Windows AGAIN? Richard brings back Paul Thurrott for the tenth time to discuss Windows more. This time, the discussion focuses on the end of life for Windows 10 - currently October 2025. Paul discusses how it used to be April 2025, but that's not enough time. Is it enough time now? The conversation spans other Windows-related topics, including alternative versions like Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop. And what about Windows 12? There is a bit of speculation at...

Machine learning models need updating - what's the reliable way to do it? While in Romania, Richard sat down with Annie Talvasto to talk about her work helping to build DevOps practices around machine learning: Building repeatable processes for data ingestions, cleaning, organization, model building, and deployment. The challenges are the arrays of skilled people needed to operate and evaluate the pipeline - it takes domain experts to know if the machine learning results are accurate and...

How's your identity governance? Richard talks to Jef Kazimer from Microsoft about Entra's capabilities to help you have robust governance around identity. Jef talks about the lifecycle of identity - when someone joins the organization and a new identity gets created, privileges changing as roles evolve, to the eventual offboarding when that person departs. The same sort of cycle exists for devices, too - the question is only how much work you must do to get through those cycles. Entra offers...

How does artificial intelligence fit in with SQL Server? At the Microsoft Fabric Conference in Las Vegas, Richard sat down with Muazma Fahid and Bob Ward to discuss the AI developments in SQL Server. Muazma talks about SQL Server as a crucial source of data for building machine learning models and the new features added to make SQL Server a key store for vector data and other elements of machine learning. There's also Copilot for Azure SQL Data to help with diagnostics in your databases and...

Have you downloaded the latest version of PowerShell? While at the MVP Summit in Redmond, Washington, Richard sat down with Sydney Smith to discuss some of the features in PowerShell 7.4. Sydney talks about the successful delivery of PSResourceGet and PSReadline, two long-in-development features that have reached their so-called "1.0" state. The conversation also digs into the ongoing challenge of some sysadmins sticking with PowerShell 5.1, the last of the Windows-only versions. Today,...

How can GitHub Copilot help you? Richard chats with Damian Brady at NDC Sydney about the power of GitHub Copilot to help you understand and write the bits of code you need - whether you're using PowerShell, understanding a RegEx expression, or trying to get a Bash prompt right. GitHub Copilot and help to explain the code you've got, even across workspaces - so you can find all the scripts that changes might impact. And if you think it's time to rewrite some old scripts into more modern...

As Artificial Intelligence enters our organizations, how do we secure them? While at NDC in Sydney, Richard sat down with Sarah Young to discuss the challenges of securing these new technologies. Sarah talks a bit about the fundamentals - in the end, AI technology is just more software and needs all the same authentication and authorization that other apps need. However, there are some unique aspects and potential exploits that you can address through tooling and education. We're all learning...

How can Microsoft Copilot for Security help you? While at NDC in Sydney, Richard chatted with George Coldham about Microsoft Copilot for Security - combining GPT-4 with information about Microsoft security products and your organization's resources in Azure to provide guidance and insight into making your company more secure. George talks about how it's early days for this copilot - and it's only in preview so far. Bringing together the vast array of security products that Microsoft makes,...

What can GitHub do for you? While at NDC London, Richard chatted with April Edwards about how GitHub can help sysadmins - and everyone in your organization! In the end, GitHub is an engine for managing work, with GitHub Actions kicking off workflows that can send messages, run all sorts of code, activate scripts, and more. Ultimately, you get a good report of what happened - or didn't happen. And over time, those scripts can mature to be more reliable and detailed - and keep a record of every...

Aren't we all platform engineers? Steve Buchanan says yes! But there's more to it - and Steve talks about the mindset of looking beyond individual products that we might have skills with and owning the entire problem of providing platforms for your organization to get work done. The conversation dives into the many products that can help our applications function better and the challenge of making them secure and fast. Are containers the solution? Possibly! It's your platform; focus on the...

What do you know about large language models? While at NDC in London, Richard sat down with Dr. Jodie Burchell to discuss how machine learning has reached this new technological milestone. Jodie talks about different types of machine learning and how large language models fit into the landscape. The conversation explores where LLMs come from, what they are good at, and what they should not be used for. They are not intelligent and certainly not a panacea for work - but they can be valuable...

Have you upgraded to TLS 1.3? While at NDC in London, Richard chatted with Scott Helme about his work moving companies onto the latest version of TLS. But do you need to? Scott talks about how SSL 2 and 3 were used until they were broken by the black hats, leading to a panic to update quickly. While there is no evidence that TLS 1 and 1.1 are breached, they are already deprecated - and are slower than the later versions. Want a performance boost? Move to TLS 1.3!

How are we going to manage the use of M365 Copilot? Richard chats with Martina Grom about her experiences helping organizations prepare for M365 Copilot. Martina talks about getting your data estate in shape - and the challenge that represents in terms of identifying what data should be available within an organization. The conversation also digs into the larger picture of the Microsoft Graph - all the information about how people interact on M365, the resources they create and use, and the...

What's coming next for Windows Server? Richard chats with Jeff Woolsey about the latest information around Windows Server vNext! Jeff discusses how customer feedback influences Windows Server and the challenges of moving folks to the latest versions. Server vNext is designed to live in a cloud hybrid world and includes improvements for interacting with Azure, but it also has plenty of on-premises features. The conversation turns to Active Directory and its ongoing modernization to make it...

How does your company organize information? Richard chats with Emily Mancini about the metadata in SharePoint. Emily points out that if you're using Teams, you're using SharePoint - it's all under the hood. And that means any files are being tagged with metadata whether you do it intentionally or not. Taking control of your metadata can mean more effective searches and managing surprises with tools like M365 Copilot. Metadata can help you protect sensitive data and make existing data visible...

How do you manage cloud-native applications? While at Ignite in Seattle, Richard chatted with Brendan Burns about ongoing efforts to develop tools to make building and operating cloud-native applications more manageable. Brendan discusses the challenges around building apps with Kubernetes and how next-generation tools like Radius and Dapr try to address those problems to make it easier to make the right choices. There's a powerful intersection between sysadmins and developers when making...

Is there a strategy for buying software licenses? Richard talks with Mary Jo Foley about her new role at Directions on Microsoft, including her experiences around the multi-day workshops on effectively buying software licenses today. Mary Jo talks about understanding the entire landscape of software licenses your organization needs, how they are used, and how you can build a strategy to negotiate a better licensing cost for your organization. You already do much of the work for this, but...

How can artificial intelligence help sysadmins? While at Ignite in Seattle, Richard talked with Gil Pekelman of Atera about their AI for IT product. Gil talks about developing smart instrumentation for IT and extensively monitoring machines and networks to give you a broad overview of your infrastructure. Then OpenAI expanded its capabilities - allowing users to submit report requests to a large language model that can act as a copilot or an autopilot, able to resolve tickets or prepare them...

How is the Power Platform evolving? Richard chats with April Dunnam about the latest on the Power Platform - especially the emergence of Large Language Models like Copilot. April talks about how it's possible to use Copilots in Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Automate to help you build your automation - and how writing prompts can help you think through what you're trying to make. The conversation also digs into providing Copilots to users so that you spend less time creating UX and more time...

Active Directory is still part of our lives - but can we make it more robust? Richard talks to Jerry Devore about his ongoing blog series on hardening Active Directory. Jerry talks about credential drift - decisions made in the past to turn down (or off!) security features in AD that made sense at the time but are no longer relevant. Most of these efforts only consume time - no products are involved, or the products are free. Check out the links in the show notes for Compliance tools that can...