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For most customer networks, file servers turn into a mess over the years. This is usually due to a few things. First, users have access to make folders at high levels and then place data in those folders that should have access restricted. Second, users try to solve the first problem by securing those folders, but end up breaking access to administrator accounts. Third, most lack a logical structure or any guidance as to where certain documents should be stored, so documents end up in multiple folders.

I have been working with a customer who had all of these issues, along with the need to merge two file structures into a single structure after the merger of their two companies. My suggestion to the customer was to come up with a structure for five to ten top level folders that would be the shared folders. Their primary focus for the top level folders was by department (HR, Finance, Legal, etc.) We then tightly controlled the second to fifth levels, depending on the granularity needed of the specific folder. At the controlled levels, we did not allow users to make new folders or files and also prevented them from changing the permissions for these folders. We used a combination of list, read, and read/write access to all of these folders. We created an Active Directory group for each folder and the level(s) of access necessary for that folder. We then created additional groups in Active Directory based on job role and made these groups members of the Active Directory groups used for setting permissions on each folder.

After setting all of the folder permissions, I found that the Owner of the file or folder had Full Control even if they should not have this level of control based on the NTFS permissions. This can be fixed by setting OWNER RIGHTS to none, which will cause the permissions explicitly defined to be enforce and not be circumvented by OWNER RIGHTS.

The partial folder tree shown in the screenshots below is as follows:

• Shares – OWNER RIGHTS permissions set
  • (Other folders not shown)
    • Internal Reports – List permissions
      • Containment – Read only and Modify permissions set

Example of OWNER RIGHTS permissions. Notice no boxes are selected, which causes the owner to have no rights and the other defined permissions to be used:

Example of the Internal Reporting folder with list permissions:

Example of the Internal Reporting\Completions folder with read only access:

Example of the Internal Reporting\Completions folder with modify access. Notice "Delete" is not selected, but "Delete Subfolder and files is". Delete is the value in the "Modify" permission set, so this change makes this not truly "Modify", but rather "Special":

I've run into this issue a few times over the past few months and the fix has been roughly the same each time. Typically, what will happen is that a user account is created in Azure AD with a specific username/UPN. Later on, an account will be synced from the on-premise Active Directory environment with the same username/UPN. Azure tries to automatically reconcile this during the sync by renaming the synced account and appending numbers to the end.

Naturally, this is a problem if you need the on-premise AD account to be the authoritative copy. The first thing to be resolved is whatever is causing the conflict in the first place. Once that is resolved, Azure won't automatically rename everything back. Not to mention that once the account is already synced, it won't auto update the account as the source has not been changed since the original sync.

Since deleting and re-creating the on-premise account isn't always the best option, your solution is fairly simple – update the attribute on the source side to some bogus value, force a delta sync, update the attribute back, and force a delta sync again.

For example, if the email address of your on-premise user is tuser@domain.com and the Azure AD account shows the SMTP attribute is listed as tuser5589@domain.com, update the primary SMTP value in the proxyAddresses attribute to tuser1@domain.com and force a delta sync. Azure AD should then show tuser1 as the primary SMTP value with tuser5589 no longer listed. Once you see that, change it back to tuser@domain.com and force another delta sync.

I've had to run through similar steps with the proxyAddresses and the UPN attributes for the conflicting objects.

We have a customer that I'm working with to rebuild their RDS farm from 2008R2 servers to 2016. Once I finished the initial deployment, I began testing the builds and realized pretty quickly that I couldn't open the start menu or use even use the search feature in the taskbar no matter what I tried.

I was using the same group policies that were currently applied on their existing farm thinking it should transition pretty smoothly, but that turned out not to be the case. I was eventually able to narrow it down to a single policy, but I also made the mistake of using Group Policy Management from their current 2008R2 management server, which I discovered later on complicated the troubleshooting since the setting causing the issue isn't visible from the 2008R2 console.

It ultimately turned out to be due to Applocker's Packaged App Rules. Since this had never been configured previously, there was no default rule to allow signed packaged apps that had been introduced in Server 2012 and later, and is what was ultimately breaking the Start button/Search feature.

My home Surface Mini running Windows 10 would default to Pacific time zone instead of Central. I would change the time zone, but when the system was rebooted it would default back to Pacific. One place where you change the time zone we would get an "Unable to continue" error. After trying a few things, I attempted using the command prompt to change the time zone & it worked. Here are the time zone commands you can use:

• "tzutil /g" will show you the current time zone.
• "tzutil /l" will give you a list of possible time zones.
• "tzutil /s "name of time zone"" will allow you to set a time zone, (i.e. tzutil /s "Central Standard Time"}

I had a customer who had several users who could not do any searching in Outlook. The error was, "Something went wrong and your search couldn't be completed." along with a mention of the appearance of there being no network connection.

Another engineer had been talking with one of the customer's IT people about a different issue and apparently they may have accidently turned off EWS (Exchange Web Services) globally while investigating/troubleshooting another problem. I compared the broken mailbox to a known working mailbox and the working mailbox had EWS enabled, so I re-enabled it using some Powershell commands and the user was now able to search. 

To check if EWS is enabled/disabled - get-casmailbox someMailbox@domain.com | fl *ews*

To turn on EWS on for Outlook - Set-CASMailbox someMailbox@domain.com -EWSEnabled $true -EWSAllowOutlook $true

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/client-access/set-casmailbox?view=exchange-ps

Exchange Web Services is typically on by default for Outlook as it is used for a variety of functions including searching, calendar shares, permissions and availability, shared mailbox permissions, and out of office settings.

After changing my domain password, the Microsoft Teams app on my iPhone signed me out, and I was unable to sign back in. When I would enter my username & password, it would go to a white screen with a spinning circle for several minutes and eventually time out. After trying several things I finally wondered if some of my content/privacy restrictions might be causing the problem & sure enough that was the case.

When I disabled the web content filter it worked. To configure this setting on an iPhone with iOS 13.x, go to Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > Content Restrictions > Web Content and set it to "Unrestricted Access"

I wanted to be able to install some software on a personal Microsoft Surface, but when I went to switch Windows out of S mode, the "Get" button was grayed out.

This can happen if you are not an Administrator on the machine or if the machine is associated with a domain; however, neither of these were the case. The issue for this device was it had an associated school account. To fix the problem and allow you to get out of S mode, follow these steps:

1. Open Windows settings.
2. Select Accounts.
3. Click on the Access work or School tab on the left-hand side.
4. Click on the businesses account (school or work), then click on Disconnect or Remove. Removing these accounts will not actually remove your organization email from individual apps, but these kinds of accounts can have automatic restrictions associated with them which would limit things like switching out of S mode.
5. Reopen the Microsoft Store and you should now be able to Get out of S mode.
6. Re-add the associated accounts if needed.

A customer was setting up Bitlocker encryption on laptops so that they could be checked out of the office. They wanted to have Bitlocker startup keys created on one removable flash drive and then be able to copy the required key to another flash drive. When a user needed to check out a laptop, they would also be given a flash drive to be able to start up any of the laptops with Bitlocker.

The customer was saving the startup keys correctly through BitLocker, but could not see them on the removable flash drive through Windows Explorer. Although they had "show hidden files" enabled, they needed to uncheck the view options for "Hide protected operating system files". This allowed the customer to see the startup keys to be able to copy to other removable flash drives.

I ran across an issue where I was trying to delete a file and kept getting several errors while attempting to delete said file.

1. Permissions issue --- Received an error that I needed permission from File owner to be able to delete. I made myself the owner of the file and attempted to delete the file. That introduced error #2 listed below.
2. Directory is not Empty --- After resolving the permissions issue I began to receive an error that indicated the folder was not empty "Cannot Delete folder: The directory is not empty". So I went into make sure 'view hidden files' was checked in file explorer and it already was, yet the file in question still showed to be empty when opening it. Did some research and discovered that you can change the search options to include all subfolders and also to allow searching for files that are 'Empty' see screenshot below. After searching in this manner I was able to view a ton of subfolders that were sometimes 4 or 5 levels deep, and inside of those deeper folders, there would be data, which introduced error #3 to follow.

3. Filename too long --- The final error I was receiving indicated that the filename was too long. "The file name(s) would be too long for the destination folder…" This is the result of embedded file paths that end up surpassing the 255 character limit. Typically what you'll come across is filename\filename\filename\filename\filename\filename\filename or you might see filename\filename\realllyyyllllonnngggfilename\. Some suggestions for fixing this are to find one of the directories that seem to include the long string of characters and rename the folder. That didn't always work. 

A more common suggestion is to navigate a good way into the long directory path (filename\filename\filename\filename\filename\filename\filename) and then share out one of the folders. Map to the newly shared folder and then delete everything inside. After that you should be able to delete this directory itself, and the root directory that this folder lives in. This solution was actually working, but with so many files to navigate through, this was very time consuming and not really practical for my situation.

What I ended up using as the actual solution was a robocopy script with the /purge switch. Basically you create an empty folder somewhere, and use that as the source folder during the robocopy. Script will end up looking like this:
Robocopy EmptyFolderPath FolderToDeletePath /purge
Robocopy will cycle through and purge, or delete anything in the destination folder that is NOT in the source folder. Since the source folder in this case is empty, all files will be deleted. Please note you will need to run this through and elevated cmd prompt.