External collaboration in Microsoft 365 is a game-changer. Whether it’s inviting a freelance designer to review mockups in SharePoint Online (SPO) or working with a partner team across tenants in Microsoft Teams, enabling seamless collaboration is crucial for today’s workplace. But let’s be honest—understanding the web of settings that make this possible can feel overwhelming. That’s where the map I’ve created comes in. It’s a visual guide to navigating the dependencies and connections between Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) and Microsoft 365 when setting up external collaboration.

Hey there, and welcome! If you’ve stumbled upon this little corner of the internet, I’m thrilled to have you here. This blog is dedicated to all things Microsoft technology—think Azure, Microsoft 365, and all the cool tools and tricks that make our work and lives easier (and sometimes more fun). Now, a quick confession: this isn’t exactly a brand-new blog. Once upon a time—about 12 years ago, to be exact—I used to run The Blown Light Bulb in Wordpress.

Today, is another day but a special one. Microsoft has recognized me as Microsoft Community Contributor (MCC) for my involvement and contribution on TechNet’s online community (see Contributing to the Microsoft community). It is great to see how every day millions of experts worldwide invest time and effort on helping others for free, and I like to see how Microsoft recognizes such an effort to them. Thanks Microsoft.

For those who decided to test the Evaluation Version of Windows Server 2012 and now want to use it for production, Microsoft published Evaluation Versions and Upgrade Options for Windows Server 2012 TechNet article to help you move from one edition to the other. It also shows the available upgrade paths to Windows Server 2012 and a per-server role considerations table that should be followed before upgrading.

Those who currently own a hotmail.com e-mail address, can move to Microsoft’s new mail platform Outlook.com. A more clean and simply interface, very similar to Windows Phone 8 Metro UI now helps you to move around your e-mail and contacts (seems like Calendar and Skydrive are still running on the old interface).But don’t worry, if you don’t like it you can easily roll back to your classical Hotmail.com interface, so give it a try.

The most recent edition of Microsoft’s server OS has introduced some changes on how common tasks have been performed until now. While on Windows Server 2000 and later editions, the dcpromo command was used to promote or demote a domain controller, in Windows Server 2012 dcpromo has been discontinued and it is no longer available. Instead of it, the role-installation based procedure should be used to add Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS) role and run the configuration wizard once role installation is completed.

One of the coolest features enhanced in Windows Server 2012 is going to be Hyper-V Dynamic Memory. It allows you to better use existing resources and consolidate more virtual machines in less Hyper-V hosts. This can lead to lower costs, especially in environments that have many idle or low-load virtual machines. Dynamic Memory lets you distribute virtualization host physical memory across more virtual machines by taking advantage of this dynamic assignment.

Extracted from Accessing resources across forests. (Combine it, if needed, with Group Scope information from TechNet). By carefully using domain local, global, and universal groups, administrators can more effectively control access to resources located in other forests. Consider the following best practices: To represent the sets of users who need access to the same types of resources, create role-based global groups in every domain and forest that contains these users. For example, users in the Sales Department in ForestA require access to an order-entry application that is a resource in ForestB.

As soon as your Active-Directory gets bigger and bigger, as more and more you need to be ready to partially or entirely recover it. As a good domain admin, you should always have a reliable backup/restore strategy in place to safeguard your domain data and, in worse case scenarios, restore your entire directory on a disaster recovery scenario. The most common and basic strategy is backing up the system state of your PDC emulator, which grants you a consistent backup of your entire directory that can be used if all needs to be restored.

It is in here, it has arrived. The new generation of Windows server family is quickly being introduced everywhere. All social networks, blogs, forums and publications are speaking about it; and that is because Microsoft is offering a lot of resources to get up to speed with it. Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate (RC) is available for free download and evaluation, as well as the eBook Introducing Windows Server 2012.