Commanding your Philips Hue lights with PowerShell

A couple of years ago I bought a number of Philips Hue bulbs and put them in the living areas of my house. Typically we control them via the Hue App on our phones, or via the Google Assistant. This all works very well, but of course I’m a techie and have a bunch of other Internet of Things devices and it would be great to integrate the Hue lights with those.… keep reading

Checking and patching your Microsoft Windows computer for Meltdown and Spectre

Overview

A Google team named Project Zero in mid 2017 identified vulnerabilities with many Intel, AMD and ARM CPU’s that allow speculative pre-processing of code to be abused. Speculative pre-processing aids performance which is why it exists. However when used maliciously it would allow an attacker to use JavaScript in a webpage to access memory that could contain information present in a users environment such as key strokes, passwords and personal sensitive information.… keep reading

Provisioning Hybrid Exchange/Exchange Online Mailboxes with Microsoft Identity Manager

Hybrid Exchange/Exchange Online Mailboxes

Introduction

Working for Kloud all our projects involve Cloud services, and all our customers have varying and unique requirements. Recently one of our customers embarked on their migration from On-Premise Exchange to Exchange Online. Nothing really groundbreaking there though, however they had a number of unique requirements including management of Litigation Hold.… keep reading

Display Microsoft Identity Manager Sync Engine Statistics in the MIM Portal

Introduction

In the Microsoft / Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service Manager under Tools we have a Statistics Report. This gives a break down of each of the Management Agents and the Connectors on each MA and therefore MIM Sync Statistics.

I had a recent requirement to expose this information for a customer but I didn’t want them to have to connect to the Synchronization Server (and be given the permissions to allow them to).… keep reading