A few weeks back, June 26th specifically, Microsoft announced archival functionality for Teams. Archiving a Team does just what you’d expect by keeping the Team itself, but freezing changes to preserve the current state of the data. There are a couple of things that I found interesting, and good to know before you get started.
While troubleshooting an issue recently, I noticed failures showing up in the Azure Sign-In Activity panel with a sign-in error code 50140. The error code gave the following details:
Failure reason
This error occurred due to ‘Keep me signed in’ interrupt when the user was signing-in. Open a support ticket with Correlation ID, Request ID, and Error code to get more details.
This was happening for a variety of single-sign on enabled applications. Upon testing, the user logged in and was prompted with KMSI as expected. They experienced no trouble either when selecting Yes or No to the prompt. After opening a case with Microsoft, and reaching out to someone on the inside, both confirmed that this was more of an anomaly in the logs and could be safely ignored. It sounds like this will soon either be resolved or changed to an Informational message instead.
Microsoft Teams continues to get new functionality and I saw a nice addition just the other day. The ability to quickly create a survey in a channel conversation without leaving the app or even adding Forms as a new tab makes collaboration with your team more seamless.
While catching up on a few emails today, I came across a link for using Microsoft Translator in EDU. The Microsoft Translator app has been around for over a year now, but I had not tried it out. While downloading the app, I immediately thought about different ways the translator would be helpful…then I got distracted by the cold, snowy scene outside which caused me to drift off to vacation land – adventurous locations, cold (adult) beverages, and potentially non-English speaking residents.
Update: Intel has reported that customers with certain CPUs are experiencing random reboots after applying firmware updates to patch this vulnerability. I can’t say this enough but TEST before rolling these out!
By now, you have likely heard about recently disclosed vulnerabilities called Spectre and Meltdown. If not, TechCrunch has a detailed article about them that will get you up to speed. The vulnerability affects most modern operating systems and processors. It also affects other systems such as iOS, MacOS, Android, Chrome, etc.
I have found that many IT people I talk with do not understand what needs to happen to address these vulnerabilities. I think this is (at least partly) because unlike many previous vulnerabilities, simply installing a Windows update does not fix the problem. The fix also requires registry keys to be set and firmware updates released by the hardware manufacturers to be applied.
After reviewing what needs to happen to protect enterprise systems, I have pulled together some information so you can protect yourself as well. While this is not an all-encompassing guide, it should point you to many of the resources needed to address the vulnerabilities. Rather than this blog post being extremely long and repetitive, you will find many linked items below to already created documentation that will be helpful in patching your systems. Continue reading
It's Partly Cloudy 