As an admin it gets so much worse. Twice a year your admin portal gets renamed, redesigned, merged with and/or split from another one, or removed, and all those changes are done halfway.
Which means some settings are only on the old version and others only on the new. Then the old one is discontinued even though the new one doesn't have all its functions, yet.
So you completely rely on Powershell. But wait, there's 2 incompatible versions of it now.
I'm currently thinking about a career change, after reading in Microsoft's official documentation that you need to install the new version of Powershell, import the beta version of several commandlets and then run a long script provided by them, only to keep every user on your org from creating their own Teams teams.
And their newest feature is allowing every user to put in their credit card info and buy MS products on the company domain without running it by IT. It's called "self service", enabled by default, and you have to click on a slider to disable it individually for every. single. product. Microsoft. offers.
I've been doing linux admin and honestly I haven't been looking back. My breaking point was Microsoft pushing a kb that rebooted domain controllers for no reason.
I also remember the update that sent domain controllers into a bootloop.
And the one that bluescreened all Windows servers.
No, the other one.
Oh, and the one that did an in-place-upgrade by itself, then locked your server cause it wasn't licensed for the new OS version.
I love how this doesn't even begin to cover bad kbs ms pushed out. The fact that windows admins think testing updates before deploying them is a routine operation that should always be done boggles my mind.
Oh, and the one that did an in-place-upgrade by itself, then locked your server cause it wasn't licensed for the new OS version.
Wasn't that primarily an issue with a third party software? And the server shouldn't be locked by now since I believe you get a trial period of a few months. Our servers didn't upgrade to 2025 but we use WSUS.
The third party software did exactly what it was designed to do:
Push security updates automatically, while holding back feature updates for testing.
This is standard operating procedure. Security updates are not supposed to change anything about how a server works, so the risk of breakage is very low.
And they need to be installed as fast as possible, to patch holes that are now known to every attacker.
Microsoft were the ones who pushed out a new Server OS installation and labelled it as security update.
I'm shopping for an MSP that is Linux-centric. 70 workstations and a handful of servers but I will drop MS in a heartbeat if I had the right support to fall back on.
And their newest feature is allowing every user to put in their credit card info and buy MS products on the company domain without running it by IT. It’s called “self service”, enabled by default, and you have to click on a slider to disable it individually for every. single. product. Microsoft. offers.
It's maddening, cause it's so blindingly obvious what went on in their minds when they implemented it that way.
"If just 0.1% of the users do that, it'll make us $XX million. Can you design a popup for it that we can show all users when they open Teams?"
It tells me as an admin that the software I manage as my career isn't designed to be useful anymore. It's only designed to extract the maximum amount of money.
It also tells me it's time to get off this ride, cause Microsoft is evidently pushing towards a future where they administer the system, not me.