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Office 2016 Logo

Your Guide to the Confusing Microsoft Office 2016 ‘My Account’ Service and How to Take Control

You might have wondered why licensing Retail versions of Microsoft Office 2016 on Windows has become so cumbersome and clunky and confusing? Why does Microsoft force a login to install and activate Office?  Why is this service so bad at showing information and handling more than one installation? If fact, if you have more than one retail copy of Office to install and activate on the same account, you’re in for serious confusion. I can’t answer all these questions, but I’ll show you how to fix this mess so you can install Office and move on.

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Microsoft Exchange 2016 Logo

Exchange 2016 and Reducing Disk Usage on the Server’s Boot Drive

Every new version of Exchange Server seems to need more space on a server’s boot drive. Given that, you may be faced with building an Exchange Server and wish you had made the boot partition larger. Once it’s done, though, you can’t always take it back and reconfigure everything. Here, I have some strategies for redirecting drive use from an Exchange Server installed on C: to another, larger data drive.

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Windows 10 Logo

Microsoft Releases List of Windows 10 Versions

As is often the case with Microsoft operating system releases, we’re interested in the beta and preview versions, releases dates, and what Microsoft will end up calling them. With a long history of just screwing up names (or at the very least, making them confusing), these things can tend to be a big thing while we use the software for the next few years.

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Server Logo Square

Evaluating Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 2

Windows Technical Preview 2 was released on Microsoft’s website and made available for download. Usually, this process is a challenge because we don’t always have the best and newest hardware available to test with; but I tend to find what I can in the lab to test as many features as possible. I took a bare-metal Dell PowerEdge server (with a RAID 5 drive setup), and installed off of a burned DVD.

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Thinking Of Running Windows Server 2012 Foundation? You Might Want To Think again.

Microsoft has had an interesting history with creating versions of Windows Server that might fit into different verticals. You might recall the horrible Windows Small Business Server version for an example of how you can’t just slap a bunch of products together and make a good product. What Microsoft tends to do is create limits on products that can do more, instead of taking limited products and giving them more options. Nowhere is this more evident than Windows Server 2012 Foundation edition. Read on to see why you might not want to implement this version.