Your book's companion page

Authentication and Conditional Access with Microsoft Entra ID

Most sign-in lockouts and silent MFA gaps do not trace to one wrong setting.

Microsoft Entra ID Fundamentals Field Guide

Most Microsoft Entra ID problems are not bugs. They are gaps the portal never warns you about.

Hybrid Identity and Global Secure Access with Microsoft Entra ID

Hybrid identity runs on two planes. Synchronization moves identity objects from Active Directory into Microsoft Entra ID; authentication decides whether a credential is valid at sign-in.

Identity Governance with Microsoft Entra ID

Knowing what each governance pillar does is the easy part. Knowing how the four break in production is the part the portal blades never tell you.

Workload Identities and App Registrations with Microsoft Entra ID

The breach rarely starts with a misconfigured Conditional Access policy. It starts with a three-year-old client secret sitting in a public repository, attached to an app nobody remembers registering.

Microsoft Intune Windows Autopilot and Deployment Field Guide

Autopilot never images a device, and the engineers who learn that on a live tenant lose a rollout to it.

Microsoft Intune Application Management Field Guide

You add the app, it lands in All Apps, and nothing installs.

Microsoft Intune Device Management and Enrollment Field Guide

Intune deployments fail green, not red: nothing enrolls, every device passes by default, and the admin center reads healthy the whole time.

Microsoft Intune Endpoint Security and Updates Field Guide

Configured is not the same as enforced, and the Intune admin center reads green in exactly the failures that matter.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Field Guide

Most MDE deployments fail quietly, not loudly.

Microsoft Defender XDR Field Guide

A thin, low-priority incident is far more often a coverage gap than a clever adversary, and the portal warns you about neither. This is not a product you turn on.

Microsoft Sentinel Field Guide

Onboarding Microsoft Sentinel to the Defender portal can silently disable Fusion, rewrite the scope of your automation rules, and strip the incident-provider condition out of detections you already shipped.

KQL Threat Hunting Field Guide

A hunting query returns zero rows and nobody in the room can say whether the environment is genuinely clean or the table was never populated because the connector behind it was never turned on.

Audit, Alerts, and Investigation with Microsoft Purview

The what-happened ticket arrives with a deadline, and the event you need aged out of the audit log months ago. The investigation surface, in the order you use it.

Communication Compliance with Microsoft Purview

One Microsoft Purview tool reads your employees' messages, inspecting Teams, Exchange, Viva Engage, Copilot prompts, and connected third-party sources for harassment, threats, and regulatory violations.

Data Loss Prevention with Microsoft Purview

Turn on Microsoft Purview DLP the way the wizard suggests and you get one of two outcomes: a wall of false positives nobody reads, or a policy so timid it protects nothing.

eDiscovery and Legal Holds with Microsoft Purview

When legal hands you a hold notice, the clock is real and the stakes include sanctions. Holds preserve and searches collect, so a matter you searched but never held can quietly lose data before anyone notices.

Insider Risk Management with Microsoft Purview

There is no button that blocks the leak.

Data Retention and Records Management with Microsoft Purview

Nothing visibly breaks when retention is wrong.

Sensitivity Labels and Data Classification with Microsoft Purview

Classify your data once and the protection travels everywhere. That is the pitch.

Channels, Chats, and Apps for Microsoft Teams Administrators

Remove a user from a team and they still show up in the SharePoint site. Delete a chat and it stays discoverable for another 21 days.

Environment and Security for Microsoft Teams Administrators

Most Teams problems are not Teams problems. A data loss prevention policy scoped to Teams skips channel posts.

Governance, Guest Access, and Devices for Microsoft Teams Administrators

You enable the guest-access toggle, the Teams admin center reports it as On, and guests still cannot open the Files tab, because the gate you missed lives one portal away.

Monitoring and Troubleshooting for Microsoft Teams Administrators

Most Teams call-quality tickets stay open too long, and the reason is rarely a hard problem. It is the wrong tool.

SharePoint Online Administration and Migration Field Guide

SharePoint Online has no servers for you to patch, which is exactly why its failures are harder to find.

SharePoint Online Governance, Security, and Compliance Field Guide

Nothing in SharePoint compliance breaks loudly.

SharePoint Online Permissions and Sharing Field Guide

You can build a textbook-correct site permission model and still watch an Anyone link walk a document out to an unauthenticated stranger.

Microsoft Entra ID Directory Synchronization Field Guide

Hybrid identity fails quietly. The run history is green, licenses assign, and a third of your users cannot sign in.

Microsoft 365 Tenant Administration Field Guide

The tenant that fails in production is rarely broken by anything exotic. It breaks on the boring interactions nobody connected.