Writing
Notes from running a Microsoft estate, mostly written the week after something broke. 11 posts.
EWS goes dark in October, and your migration tool probably still uses it
Disabled by default on 1 October 2026, gone entirely by April 2027. The allow list buys you six months, not a solution.
Secure Boot certificates expire this year and the fleet has not noticed
Fifteen year old certificates, staged expiry from June, and a failure mode that does not announce itself at boot.
Windows 10 ESU is a bridge, not a plan
Three renewable years is enough time to migrate properly and exactly enough time to keep postponing it.
Agents are being created faster than you can inventory them
Your users are already building them. The permission model they inherit is the one you set years ago and forgot.
Autodiscover resolves in an order, and the order is the bug
Six lookup methods, first answer wins. After a migration the second one is usually a server that no longer exists.
Why Outlook keeps asking for the old password
Three caches hold the previous identity, and clearing the obvious one fixes it for about a day.
Every destructive script should refuse the first time
Dry run by default, back up before writing, read the value back, and exit non-zero when it did not work.
Your pilot group is not representative
Ten volunteers from the same team share a laptop model, an OS build and a set of habits. That is one user tested ten times.
PowerShell 5.1 is still the deployment target
The version on the machine matters more than the version on your machine, and it is older than you think.
Running a marketplace while running an IT function
What building KiezHelfer taught me about the difference between owning a system and owning a product.
Two hundred tickets are usually one bug
How I read a ticket queue for the shape underneath it instead of working through it in order.
Tell me what is breaking.
Migration work, an estate that has outgrown its last design, or a question about the toolkit. All of it is welcome.