Just let me know (Powershell server RDP ping availability script)

(this point has been relocated to my powershell blog: Toddomation.com)

Fool me twice, shame on me (Office 365/Office2016 Updates)

If you're like myself, and have *joined* the #clouduser stampede - (e.g. you've been forklifted to an 'Office 365' revision of Office) - you're probably extremely familiar with the above happy little popup, on your Word/Excel/Outlook/what-have-you chunk of MS Office.

Until very recently, as a busy admin, I've tended to get the 'Update now' clicked sooner rather than later, just to get this annoying banner out of my eye-space.

Well last week we had an informative *learnin'* oppurtunity round these parts, where some of the more recent #evergreen MS Outlook 2016 code changes -- or possibly Windows Update Win7patch -- Desktop folk are still working a case on the subject) -- has led to multiple Outlook issues for a fair swath of users:

Outlook2016's latest new #misfeature appears to be the ability to arbitrarily switch the client mail profile out of Cached-mode, at-will, and without warning.

• For enterprise deployments, with mail servers built around 'Cached-Mode' Outlook, and less-expensive storage infra, a significant chunk of users switching out of 'Cached Mode' could beat the heck out of the I/O capacity on mail servers. 8^.

• And when it comes to flipping back from the setting (to cached-mode), with remote offices on WAN connections, this can be an absolute *nasty* outcome, if the subject user runs a couple of gb or more of mailbox, that gets freshly transferred back to the workstation when you finally get cached-mode re-enabled. 

And the other new Outlook2016 #misfeature, is the corruption of the user's mail profile, and concurrent-break in ability of local Outlook to run searches of mail content. Yea, that yields up some happy users (and is the first symptom we got this month of the array of fresh problems).

So, this morning, when I was greeted by o365's 'Update now' prompt, I instantly said, "No sir, I'm not going to take that risk. I like getting my work done, waaay too much". That update is going to age a bit before I become a routine early adopter of any new MS Office 365 code. #QaIsntOptional

Exchange Hub Top Queued Domains (Powershell Snippets)

(this point has been relocated to my powershell blog: Toddomation.com)