Administration – MicroTechPoint

Top 10 Microsoft Ignite 2025 Highlights Every Microsoft 365 Administrator Should Know

November 25, 2025December 5, 2025Brian Alderman

Microsoft Ignite 2025 delivered one of the most transformative sets of announcements we’ve seen in years — especially for Microsoft 365 administrators responsible for productivity, security, governance, and now AI-driven operations. The shift toward agent-based workflows, deeper intelligence layers, and unified governance means the admin role is rapidly evolving from “systems operator” to “AI orchestrator.” If you’re a Microsoft 365 admin, consultant, architect, or IT decision-maker, here are the top 10 Ignite highlights that will shape how you manage and secure your environment in 2025 and beyond. Agent 365: A Unified Governance Platform for AI Agents The star of Ignite was Agent 365, Microsoft’s new central control plane for managing… Read More

Using the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) to Migrate SharePoint Sites to Microsoft 365

July 8, 2025December 5, 2025Brian Alderman

Microsoft provides a free and simple migration tool, the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT), to assist in the migration process from SharePoint sites to Microsoft 365. SPMT can perform SharePoint-related migrations to SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Teams from the following: SharePoint Server 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019 SharePoint Foundation 2010 and 2013 SharePoint Server 2010 out-of-box (OOB) workflows to Power Automate SharePoint Designer 2010 and 2013 workflows to Power Automate Note: If you are proficient with Windows PowerShell, SPMT contains all the functionality available in PowerShell to complete your migration. Understanding SPMT It is important to prepare for and understand SPMT, including supported authentication methods, migrated content permission behavior, migration assessment,… Read More

Using SMAT to assess migration from SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online

June 20, 2025December 5, 2025Brian Alderman

The SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool (SMAT) is a command-line utility designed to help organizations evaluate their current on-premises SharePoint environment and prepare for migration to SharePoint Online. SMAT assists in identifying potential issues that could arise during the migration process and provides recommendations to address these issues. It’s essentially a tool to ensure a smoother migration experience. Note: For information about the free SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT), which assists in the migration process from SharePoint sites to SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Teams, see Using the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) to Migrate SharePoint Sites to Microsoft 365. SMAT Tasks Scans and Analyzes: The tool scans your existing SharePoint environment to collect information about the… Read More

Microsoft 365 Administrator Certification

March 20, 2025March 20, 2025Brian Alderman

Microsoft announced an update to the Microsoft 365 administration certification. Let’s begin with the fact that Microsoft has renamed the certification from “Microsoft 365 Certified: Enterprise Administrator Expert” to “Microsoft 365 Certified: Administrator Expert”. They dropped enterprise from the name. To obtain the previous Microsoft 365 certification, you had to pass both the MS-100 and the MS-101 exams. The new exam that has replaced the MS-100 and MS-101 is called the Microsoft 365 Administrator, MS-102 exam, which you need to pass to obtain the new Microsoft 365 Certified: Administrator Expert. However, before you study and take the MS-102 exam, you need to pass one of the prerequisite Microsoft exams. Below… Read More

What’s Changed or Missing in the Preview Release of Microsoft Teams

May 15, 2023July 30, 2024Brian Alderman

With any preview release of software, the product is often not yet fully functional. I look at preview mode like half-baked brownies: the recipe calls for you to bake them at 350 degrees for 30 minutes for them to be edible, but instead you bake them at 200 degrees for 20 minutes, producing something that resembles brownies, but they’re not fully baked or ready to consume. The preview of the new Microsoft Teams is no different; it is missing some features that were in classic Teams, and not everything announced has been fully implemented. With this in mind, it is important to balance what you’re gaining versus what you’re losing… Read More

Managing Microsoft 365 using PowerShell

February 2, 2023July 30, 2024Brian Alderman

Managing the powerful productivity and collaboration suite Microsoft 365 can be a daunting task, especially for organizations with thousands of users, licenses for those users, and hundreds of groups used to manage the users. PowerShell is a command-line tool that can simplify and automate the management of Microsoft 365 and save time and resources. It’s important for Microsoft 365 administrators to have the ability to automate, bulk manage, and configure these users, licenses, and groups. To benefit, you need a thorough understanding of how PowerShell integrates with Microsoft 365 and how you can use PowerShell to manage users, licenses, and groups, and generate reports and PowerShell scripts to perform some… Read More

Managing Microsoft Teams using PowerShell

September 18, 2022July 30, 2024Brian Alderman

Microsoft Teams can potentially have tens of thousands of users, thousands of teams, and thousands of channels, and the ability to automate and bulk manage these teams, channels, and team members means that it’s imperative to have an on-the-ball administrator. It’s helpful to understand how nicely PowerShell integrates with Microsoft Teams and how you can use PowerShell to interact with Teams and generate scripts to perform some of the more common – and possibly tedious – tasks associated with Teams. Microsoft Teams PowerShell provides several cmdlets for managing all aspects of Microsoft Teams, and the Teams PowerShell module offers three great features: Support for authentication options, like credentials and access… Read More

Understanding SharePoint Server Subscription Edition

July 12, 2022July 30, 2024Brian Alderman

Over the years there have been several releases of SharePoint Server for on-premises installations. In the past, Microsoft released them about every three years (SharePoint Server 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019). This meant customers didn’t see any new features for three years and then we had to go through a lengthy, well-planned, and thought-out upgrade process to deploy the next version. You may be wondering where the next major release of SharePoint Server is since we haven’t seen anything about SharePoint Server 2022. … Microsoft released SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, which is expected to be the last major release of any on-premises SharePoint Server product. Microsoft is changing things up… Read More

Renaming the GUID-Challenged Central Administration Database

June 1, 2015June 3, 2018Brian Alderman

The Central Administration content database that is created during the installation of your SharePoint farm is probably the second most important database, with the SharePoint Configuration database being the first most important, so it is imperative that you are able to easily reference this database when performing administrative tasks. If you perform the SharePoint installation using the GUI the Central Admin database is created with a not-so-user-friendly name that includes a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID). This name makes it challenging to work with when writing scripts that reference the database because of the GUID included in the name of this database. You can avoid the GUID from being applied to… Read More