Understanding what Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) actually is had eluded me for a while – it’s not included in something like EMS, it’s not available with a Visual Studio Enterprise subscription and you’ll need to r…

Deploying a jump box into a cloud environment such as Azure or AWS, is a common way of providing access into said environment through a single entry point. Often access to the jump box will be restricted by source IP, but that approach isn’t completely secure for many r…

Intune has simplified the process for deploying Office 365 ProPlus to Windows 10 PCs with a wizard driven process that will get you deploying the Office suite in less that 5 minutes. I’m not exaggerating either – the process is so simple, it will take you longer …

A couple of months back, I sent an email to the Microsoft MVP mailing list to see if anyone knew of a JSON feed of Windows 10 updates from Microsoft . I’d found a way to grab the latest Firefox version via PowerShell and was hoping to do something similar for Win…

Enabling Azure AD and Office 365 features including multi-factor authentication and Conditional Access will impact your users because they’ll need utilise App Passwords (one time passwords used for authentication with legacy applications). Unfortunately this will …

I recently posted an article on a script I’ve written for downloading and installing the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables. Thanks to Cornelius Schuchardt, the script now supports creating applications for each redistributable in Configuration…

In updating my MDT deployment shares recently, I got tired of having to do something about the Visual C++ Redistributable installers and finally decided to do something about it, so I’ve written a script that will download the installers and optionally install t…

Every so often a few of your favourite technologies intersect to create something magical and your passion for IT is renewed. That happened for me this week when configured Citrix NetScaler to authenticate to Azure Active Directory via SAML and enforce access to Xe…

I was recently testing out the setup of single sign-on (SSO) and user provisioning with Azure Active Directory and Salesforce via the Azure Resource Manager portal and came across a couple of minor hiccups that I wanted to share. With Salesforce being as popular as…

I am excited about the opportunities that managing Windows 10 devices with Azure AD Join and MDM (i.e. modern management) provides for both users and admins. In this article, I’ll cover deploying and managing modern applications (Universal apps) on a modern pla…

While the Universal app platform on Windows 10 isn’t going to replace legacy Win32 apps for some time, the potential of this platform to improve the way IT approaches application lifecycle management is high. Apps can be deployed, updated and removed without packa…

In a previous article, I wrote about the differences between managing Windows 10 PCs with the Intune Client vs. the Windows 10 MDM channel. Two key monitoring pieces that you lose with going to MDM instead of the Intune Client is the ability to report on Windows updates and …

It’s been a long time coming and the time is nearly here for the inaugural meeting of the Melbourne Citrix User Group. On the 6th of December 2016, we’ll be really proud to kick off an independent Citrix User Group at the Golden Gate Hotel, South Melbourne.…

To understand sizing Machine Creation Services on Hyper-V, we should first look at how XenDesktop creates virtual machines across the various deployment choices. XenDesktop 7.9 and 7.11 have introduced new features to MCS that will require additional consideration for storage req…

How much storage capacity do you need for Citrix Machine Creation Services? If you’re designing a XenApp or XenDesktop environment, one question you’re going to ask is “how much storage do we need?”. Let’s dig into the fundamentals of …

Automating the installation of the Citrix ShareFile Drive Mapper requires deploying a code signing certificate to target machines before setup will complete. If you’ve installed the Drive Mapper client, you will have seen the following dialog box during setup: M…

I recently wrote a couple of articles on setting up and Root Certification Authority and a Subordinate Certification Authority as a basic cheat sheet for setting up and Enterprise PKI. One configuration item that is less well understood and often the cause of major h…

In the last article, I documented the steps for deploying an offline Root Certificate Authority on Windows Server 2012 R2. This article will continue the process and show how to install and configure a Subordinate Certificate Authority that will be used t…

Setting up an Enterprise Root Certificate Authority isn’t a task that you’ll complete on a regular basis and something I think I’ve done twice, maybe 3 times, ever. Each time I forget what I did previously and you can guarantee I’m using a…

Microsoft Intune has multiple methods for managing Windows 10 – you can choose to deploy a client or use the mobile device management capabilities built into the operating system. However, guidance from Microsoft on the comparing the capabilities of each, especially from …

Chicken Little seems to be working overtime when it comes to the Windows Store in Windows 10. I’ve read and heard many different thoughts and approaches to the Store in Windows 10, but I believe that the Store and Universal apps should be embraced. It wou…