2022.1 Round-Up

We'll start our first round-up of the year with news of an out-of-band update for Windows Server, versions 2012 R2 and above. Seems the December updates introduced a performance issue that can be resolved with this release.
 
We've been able to sync a single AD to multiple Azure tenants for years through trickery, but now it's an officially-supported replication topology. I'm seeing this having huge potential implications for GCCH, healthcare, education, and dev teams. GCCH can actually recycle custom domains between their commercial and gov tenants, too, so consider this the post-Christmas miracle you didn't know you needed. And and? Password hash syncing and writeback from any tenant is totally on the table, so you don't have to remember to go to Some Specific Environment to reset a password. And you can call Microsoft to complain when it misbehaves.
 
Remember when antivirus products made your computer slow? Apparently Norton was nostalgic for that experience, because Norton 360 now includes a built-in crypto-miner. In a business decision as curious as NFT's, US Norton subscribers can opt in to leveraging their antivirus client to mine Ethereum. So you get to pay for the experience of slowing your computer down to raise your power bill. And you get to foot a 15% mining fee. Maybe Norton 360 is your jam, but if you're using it for business systems, maybe think twice before turning on all the features?
 
We spent a few minutes last year musing over the possibilities of the metaverse, from the first virtual nightclub to Teams AR meetings to Pokémon battles. Microsoft took another important step forward with an announcement to begin manufacturing chipsets with Qualcomm for lightweight AR glasses. This is going to be really important, because while the Hololens family is amazing, it's not exactly lightweight. The first gen device couldn't really be worn comfortably for very long, and for general adoption it's going to be critical to support devices that can be worn all day long.
 
 
Did you know Azure Files supports both SMB and NFS? Support for NFS 4.1 was introduced mid-December, along with increased IOPS for all premium file shares. You can also leverage capacity reservations in either 1- or 3-year instances for both hot and cool Azure file shares.
 
 

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