Microsoft Intune Portal

The Microsoft Intune Company Portal is the website address that IT staff and / or users go to for device management. The address is below. Intune is used by IT staff to reset devices entirely to the factory configuration, reset device passwords, manage apps, obtain BitLocker recovery keys if needed, and to check the status of a device. There is more, but the portal is the starting point after the foundational Intune requirements are in place.

A key point made on the Microsoft Learn website is that both enrolled AND non enrolled devices can use this website.

Using the Intune Company Portal website | Microsoft Learn

Android Studio

Enter Koala

Android Studio is the premier Integrated Development Environment (IDE) allowing for smarter Android App development. Koala is its name. Android Sudio continues to improve upon its Gradle build technology. Koala allows for help with writing, commenting, and documenting code.

Development questions can be asked within Koala. There is a bot within Studio called Gemini that can help in the development process. These AI-based responses help reduce errors, solve problems, and become a proper Android developer. This makes for smarter development.

Gemini in particular is very helpful. “Gemini makes use of your project’s context to provide more meaningful responses and suggestions, all in Android Studio.” Check it out!

Gemini in Android Studio – Android Developers

Meraki Administration Overview

This is a useful webinar or video of Cisco Meraki administration (link below). Meraki is the ultimate cloud-managed solution, in my opinion. I use it at my job and can verify that it is a solid product, possibly one of the best out there in the networking world. It is ubiquitous and seems to be growing even more steadily, as evidenced below. These are very impressive statistics, especially the 20 PB (petabytes) of daily traffic – we do not see PB referenced a lot even in the modern data-driven world. But 20 PB DAILY is a LOT of data!

Meraki Metrics

The webinar gets very good once you pass the first 5 introductory minutes. It is geared towards Meraki in schools, but the basics of how Meraki simplifies network management complexity are covered. Besides, universities, public or private K-12 schools, along with all businesses and entities all need to have reliable, safe, and secure networking and proper management tools.

Some items covered are Meraki WiFi, and IoT and switch device management. Also covered are rules for a Meraki network – example given was a simple block of bit torrents, which are files that are truly detrimental to any and all networks. Finally, the Cisco webinar covered environmental sensors and video cameras. Meraki is very advanced with these last two areas. Network administrators can monitor video cameras and sensors in real-time because they too are networked via IP and connected within the Meraki environment. The video management is highly detailed and advanced. There is no need for additional storage nor is there a need for video software to watch the videos, given that the videos are viewed within the Meraki interface (they can be shared or exported from there if needed). And sensors such as temperature controls can be remotely configured and monitored as well.

This is the link to the Meraki webinar:

Veeam Cybersecurity Poll

I use Veeam back up software for Microsoft 365 backups. It is an excellent, efficient, and effective backup program. It is used specifically for team SharePoint sites, user mailboxes, and user OneDrives (‘My-SharePoint’). I installed the needed Veeam modules on a standalone Azure virtual machine which communicates to our related cloud services. Although this article is very useful, the headline is a bit misleading. 76% of organizations have not admitted to paying ransomware to criminals so they could recoup locked data. But 76% of organizations affected by ransomware did pay ransomware to hackers. Per Veeam’s survey: (we) “surveyed 1,000 IT leaders whose organizations had been successfully attacked by ransomware at least once during the past 12 months”. So, of those hacked, 76% had made some payouts. This is all very good information.

A very important additional piece of information is that 19% of those affected by ransomware (in this survey) did not need to pay any ransomware because … they had proper and secured backups. This, of course, is the objective. Ransomware breaches are failures in the penetration sense. But at least a proper organizational backup strategy can remedy any data loss. Once backup data is retrieved and restored, security breaches can be investigated, analyzed, and fixed.

Cybersecurity Research: 76% of Organizations Admit to Paying Ransomware Criminals, with One-Third Still Unable to Recover Data (veeam.com)

Windows 11 Themes and Backgrounds get a Refresh

Well, well, well. Hell HAS frozen over. Microsoft has finally moved away from the, umm, basic desktop default background offerings once and for all. Worker bees have been forced for years to upload nifty cat or dog images, or even pictures of their children, to serve as the default desktop background image. But now Microsoft has blessed their customers with a sleek array of 6 themes to choose from. I chose “Captured Motion” and I really dig it. You can still upload your lovely dog images and yes, slide shows are still there as well as lock screen options etc. Right-click on your desktop and personalize away!

Captured Motion background
Windows 11 personalize

Windows 11 Broke our Snipping Tool

Have you upgraded recently from Windows 10 to Windows 11? Did you notice that the new Snipping Tool gives an error when you first try to use it on your new Windows 11? I tried a bunch of hacks to fix it, but it turns out it was an acknowledged Microsoft bug and MS needed to provide a fix. This is the error:

Snipping Tool

The key/fix is to aggressively update your recently upgraded Windows 11 PC. No, really. Go to the search magnifying glass in Windows 11, type ‘update’, and proceed to run as many updates as possible. After restart, go back and try to update again until KB5008295 is installed or your snipping tool is fixed.

Windows 11 Update History

Here are the details to that bug fix / KB (Snipping Tools is mentioned right away in the highlights) … a few other minor bugs are fixed as well:

November 5, 2021—KB5008295 Out-of-band (microsoft.com)

All in all, nice job Microsoft.