Welcome!

Welcome everyone!

I've been with Microsoft for over 10 years (the majority of that time as a PFE -- Premier Field Engineer), and have come close to starting my own blog on numerous occasions, but never took the plunge until now.  So, let me officially welcome you to my blog!

My intent with this blog is to publish things that I found interesting and/or helpful, specifically those things that I either a) haven't seen elsewhere or b) not applied to my particular scenario, in hopes of making relevant information easier for administrators to find.

For example, my "first" post (this is technically my first post, but my first technical post) will be regarding enabling TLS 1.1 / 1.2 connections to Exchange Server in Outlook running on Windows 7.  Although TLS 1.1 and 1.2 are fully supported by Schannel in Windows 7, it turns out that applications using WinHTTP ("Microsoft Windows HTTP Services"), such as Office (which includes Outlook), will only use TLS 1.0 by default.  It took me a while (and help from colleagues) to figure out that it takes an Optional Windows Update (published in March 2016) and the addition of a registry key to enable TLS 1.1 and 1.2 connections from these applications.

Thanks so much for your time, and I hope my future posts are helpful!

Sincerely,
Chris Schrimsher