Huh. I only have Office 365 Pro Plus (x64) installed on Windows 8.1 (x64), no other “Office” products. Adobe Creative Cloud doesn’t qualify, obviously.

I’m guessing it’s an error in the One Drive subsystem, because when I went and browsed to the file on my hard drive, it opened just fine.

Guess it’s a good thing I know my administrator (me), otherwise I might be out of luck. Heh.

My colleague [name doesn’t really matter] frequently gets requests from customers for documentation that explicitly says that a bad idea is a bad idea.

From: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj643252.aspx

My perspective is that if it’s not documented by Microsoft, it could be for a variety of reasons, so it doesn’t hurt to ask, but if you already know it’s probably an edge case or a borderline idea—find another way to solve it. Keep your architecture and your code as simple as possible, but no simpler, folks!

I learned the hard way over the past few decades that there are no bonus points from “the customer” for a fragile solution, no matter how clever it is.

I wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge that my [many] task lists were really just a pile of things that I wish I had time to do. But don’t.

I bought the book, 18 Minutes, anyway and had Peter sign it for me. He was very gracious.

My wife and kids have read it (and done better than I have at following Peter’s advice).

Sure, I adopted some of his recommended practices:

• I made a simple, six-box set of priorities. (I even look at them once in a while!) They’re in OneNote and pinned to the start screen on my phone so that I can’t ignore them (all the time).
• I schedule time on my calendar for the important things, instead of putting them on a list.
• I don’t put anything on my calendar that doesn’t fall into one of the six boxes.
• I make myself accountable for the items on my calendar every day, even if they don’t get done during the time slot I originally allocated to them.
• I celebrate the things I do get done, which is a lot more than I did two years ago.

Even the partial adoption of the 18 Minutes philosophy has made me more productive and successful in the past two years. I highly recommend the book. Peter’s fun to read.

Fast forward 2 years, 2 months, and a fortnight.

I still have hundreds of task list items in 6 different mailboxes (two of them Office 365 mailboxes). Many of them over a year old. Most of them long overdue.

I’ve known that I have a task problem for a long time, but it was never a priority to do anything about it, and I always promise myself that I’ll review the task list someday and do those things.

So why am I saying goodbye to my task lists now?

Windows Phone 8.1 made me do it.

I’ve had the same Windows Phone 8 device since Launch Day™. I stood in line for 8 hours on Microsoft’s main campus with a couple thousand of my closest cow-orkers to get my “free” phone. I’ve never been without it since, not a single day. Until this past Monday. My reliable, beloved HTC 8X has finally gone to the great phone Valhalla in the sky. RIP, little guy. I’ll miss you.

I have a great new device, a Nokia Lumia 635 with Windows Phone 8.1 on it. I love it. It’s so yellow that you can see it from space. I’m not prone to losing devices, but just in case, you know?

Now, I’ve always had the comfort of being able to easily swipe over to my task list on my phone and look at them. Occasionally even complete (or delete) one! But over the years with Windows Phone, as it grows and matures, it is becoming clear that Tasks are an afterthought for the team that maintains the Calendar app.

I can’t swipe over to my task list anymore. I have to perform some alternative action to discover my tasks. As a creature of habit (part of my autism is being pretty change averse), this is painful. It just seems like nobody thinks tasks are important enough to treat like first class citizens the same way that email, contacts, and appointments are. I don’t know if Tasks are going the way of Outlook Notes. (I don’t think ActiveSync has supported Outlook Notes since Windows Phone 7, but I could misremember; maybe it never did. I gave up on Outlook Notes long ago.)

• I can’t pin Tasks to the start menu or create Tasks from the start menu.
• I can’t do a lot of the categorization, coloring, etc, on the phone that I can do with tasks in Outlook. I’m not sure the two teams are communicating with one another regularly.
• I can’t effectively search or do more than a basic sort of tasks on my phone.
• OneNote is where the task functionality seems to be headed. Which sort of makes sense, although they don’t really have reminders, sortability, etc, either.
• For now, tasks do still sync with my various clouds, but… I can’t find a Windows Phone app that does what I want AND supports more than one mailbox at a time.
• The Windows Phone API only allows read-only access to other apps for appointments and contacts, not for tasks, which means I’m really, really too lazy to reinvent the wheel and code to the Office 365 API and manage my own task store on the phone. Ick.
• Do I really need them after all?

No. I don’t really need them after all.

Fine. I can admit when I’m wrong. I’m sorry, Peter. You were right.

With my grieving done, I’ve made one final task list in OneNote.

Goodbye, Outlook Tasks.

I appreciate that she’s writing about MSFT and promoting what our execs are saying (have been saying for years =), but I think that Emily’s analysis is fine, if uninspired. Two factor auth has been around for a while for Microsoft Accounts, Facebook, etc, but most people don’t want to be bothered with it. Even that could be defeated by an enterprising criminal with a little effort, though.

We’ve had locks and physical security for millennia, and criminals are still defeating them in the real world. That’s what insurance is for, right?

This topic was all the buzz two weeks ago, and it will come around in the 24-hour news cycle again. In essence, you get the security you are willing to pay for in several ways:

1. The technology you deploy.
2. The training you provide to your staff.
3. The culture you foster at your company.

In my observation, the culture of a company has more to do with its likelihood of being compromised than the amount of money it throws at the problem. The problem is almost always people and process, not technology. Except in the rarest of cases (Stuxnet was such an outlier that it’s tough to believe all the hype about it was real), the biggest “hacks” aren’t done using technical exploits alone; they’re inside jobs or social engineering. Biometrics and other fancy security theater can’t solve those two problems: criminals with the keys to the kingdom AND stupid users.

If you think of cybersecurity the same way that you do about physical security, you’ll usually be fine. The problem is that most people who make buying (or deployment) decisions don’t understand technology well enough for that analogy to be valid. They take shortcuts in cyberspace for time or cost that they would never tolerate analogues of in the real world.

Take Target, for example, if a store alarm system were going off all the time, they wouldn’t ignore the warning siren: they’d hire someone to fix it so that it only went off when a real alarm was triggered and then respond with armed guards when it did. If the company that installed the alarm system couldn’t configure it so that it only went off when there was a real intrusion, they’d fire them, rip out the alarm system, and install a new one. That’s not what happened. Instead they ignored the alarm until their neighbors called and the police showed up to tell them that burglars were in the house… Doh.

I have customers who would love to pay someone millions of dollars for a complicated solution to a simple problem just to have a “guarantee” that they’ll be safe. There are no guarantees. If you have valuable stuff, people will try to steal it: in this world or the digital one. Make your security simple and strong and resistant to error and failure. This is a comic, but it’s absolute, mathematical fact. (If Bruce Schneier and Randall Munroe ever get married and wanted to adopt adult children, I want to be first in line! Just sayin’.)

Keep it simple and human-centric people, otherwise the Bad Guys® will continue to defeat your security.

I was curious about why my PC suddenly started skipping tunes in Zune (yeah, I know) and losing keystrokes in InDesign. Apparently it was because OneDrive was re-uploading the entire contents of the internet. Maybe it’s time to reboot? It’s only been a month or three…

Got to wonder about the code path that resulted in creating that tooltip for the OneDrive tray icon. Whoops!

I hope to be 32,988,845% done with something someday. Wow.

Never mind. Carry on.

In that restrictive mode, you’ll need to add the following domains to the allow list for FSS in order for SharePoint Online to work correctly (or much at all):

• *.aadrm.com
• *.activedirectory.windowsazure.com
• *.live.com
• *.microsoft.com
• *.microsoftonline.com
• *.microsoftonline-p.com
• *.microsoftonline-p.net
• *.microsoftonlineimages.com
• *.microsoftonlinesupport.net
• *.msecnd.net
• *.msocdn.com
• *.onmicrosoft.com
• *.office.com
• *.office.net
• *.office365.com
• *.officeapps.live.com
• *.Sharepoint.com
• *.Sharepointonline.com

This is a subset of Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges. Some of those can probably be edited out for just pure SharePoint Online functionality with Office 365, but I didn’t take the time to experiment further.

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/ebooks

You’ll have to register, of course, and you’ll have to have an ereader of some sort that can display PDF, EPUB, and/or Mobi for Kindle formats (yes, your PC is an ereader).

I’m just sharing in case you have insomnia, too. Heh.

Lots of good MS Press stuff in there!

Yes. In the immortal words of Dr. Simon Tam, “That’s what going mad feels like.”

What on earth was he talking about?

My favorite new data toys! Power BI for Office 365. Whether you’ve got data in Excel, big data in SQL Server, or really big data in HDInsight, not to mention a whole host of other data sources that shall not be named, you’ve now have the power to turn data into insights at your fingertips (literally, if you have a touch screen).

Power Map is my personal favorite. It really empowers people who can’t normally think in more than 3 dimensions to understand time series data.

You’re right, Aaron. In the immortal words of Don Farmer, “you can now [officially] party on your data.”

Enter Cortana.

Windows Phone 8.1 will be bringing a sexy voice to my phone very soon who promises to keep track of all kinds of things for me. Stuff I may not remember about myself, so (as a data nerd) I’m very curious to see what get’s inferred from all of the digital footprints I leave everywhere now. I may be a little short for a Spartan, but this really appeals to my inner Halo player. (It’ll almost be like that whole crazy ex-girlfriend thing didn’t happen with her in Halo 4.)

Just as long as Cortana doesn’t get frisky with my Fitbit. I already know I need to be more active, but I don’t really want to be reminded of this by yet another female voice in my life.

Maybe my wife won’t mind too much, if Cortana can help me remember her birthday and our anniversary more reliably?