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.

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.

The last thing that you ever want to deal with is losing the Private Key for an important Certificate. Luckily, this is easy to avoid with the use of Key Archiving directly to Active Directory.

For every Certificate Authority, it is inevitable that you are eventually going to need to revoke a Certificate for one reason or another. The Online Responder Role in Active Directory Certificate Services is capable of rapidly revoking Certificates and ensuring that users in your organization are notified as quickly as possible.