Today is the last time that Microsoft will publish any updates for Windows 8.1. Today marks the end of extended support for Windows 8.1, and Windows 8.1 is now officially end of life. To say that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 were controversial is an understatement, but at the end of the day they were both solid improvements over Windows 7, despite the issues that they introduced.

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.

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 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 of the known/major Microsoft Administration Portals on a single website. While it is definitely 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.

The conclusion to this 8-part series on creating a Certificate Authority in Windows Server 2019 using Active Directory Certificate Services.

What good is a Certificate Authority in an Active Directory environment if there is no way to automatically deploy the Certificates? Luckily, with the use of Group Policy and a few configuration changes to Certificate Templates, this is a fairly easy task.

Certificates are not always one size fits all for an organization, but luckily it is fairly easy to customize the Certificates that are deployed to your organization.