In this day and age having an on-premise Active Directory is not mandatory, especially if you are a small and/or new organization. Most of the services will be in Microsoft 365 anyways, so why bother maintaining local AD?

If you have an Azure Active Directory Tenant, users are allowed to join Windows 10 devices to the AAD domain by default.

In the AAD Portal, under Devices > Device Settings, settings can be adjusted to the organization’s needs.

Joining the device is very easy. Just open the modern Settings app in Windows 10 > Accounts > Access work or school > + Connect. Then select Join this device to Azure Active Directory.

After logging off, any user that is a member of the tenant can log in with their email address/Azure AD account.

If you do hate passwords, this new feature from Microsoft might have solved that problem. With this feature, a user can send a push notification to Microsoft Authenticator, allowing access to any Microsoft 365 site without entering a password.

First of all, enable the so called “combined registration experience” in Azure AD under User settings.

Since I have a new tenant, the feature is automatically enabled for me.

After that, browse to Security > Authentication Methods > Policies. Select Microsoft Authenticator and enable it.

Users are not forced to use the new authentication method. They have to set that up themselves at https://aka.ms/mysecurityinfo.

Select Authenticator App as the method.

Download Microsoft Authenticator on the mobile phone.

Scan the QR code shown there.

Inside the Microsoft Authenticator app, select “Set up phone sign-in” and follow the wizard.

Now, upon logging in, you can select “User an app instead”. This will trigger a notification on the phone app.

References:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/authentication/howto-authentication-passwordless-phone

With this awesome script, you can read Active Directory group membership and convert that information into a CSV file, which can be imported in Microsoft Excel.

The file will be saved inside C:\Temp. The result looks something like this (I’m no Excel wizard):

https://github.com/ajnik/AD-Group-Membership-to-Excel/blob/main/AD-Groups-To-CSV.ps1

Note: Not my script. Check credits.

It is not possible to delete or rename a folder that contains a blank space at the end with Windows Explorer. It can only be done by using this cmd command:

rd “\.\C:\temp\my folder “

References:

https://superuser.com/questions/198256/how-to-delete-a-folder-containing-trailing-spaces

You can easily run one or multiple programs at logon without messing with the Registry by using Group Policy Object (GPOs).

Under User (or Computer) configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Logon > Run these programs at user logon you can insert the path of the executable. Very clean and straight forward.