Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Windows 10 - Disable Windows Firewall Notifications in Action Center

I recently made the move to dual boot my work laptop, so I could test out Windows 10 Enterprise (kind of being the guinea pig for my organization and seeing how our development tools worked with the new OS, as well as other server and domain management tools).

The biggest "irritation" I've come across so far is the action, or notification, center messages after turning off Windows Firewall (because we use another 3rd party tool in its place). Every few hours, and after every restart I'd be shown the message that the firewall was turned off, and I could click on the notification to turn it on (as opposed to the normal action of click on the notification to disable future messages about the firewall).

It turns out that the way to disable/suppress these messages in Windows 10 is to go to Control Panel > System and Security > Security and Maintenance (or just open the Start Menu and type Security and Maintenance), and there you will see a clickable option to hide future messages about Windows Firewall. Not as intuitive or easy to find as it was in Windows 7, but still possible.

Hope this helps ease the annoyance for some who have a legitimate reason to disable the Windows Firewall.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Its been a Do While....

So it's been close to 5 years since I actually posted anything here. I first started to use this blog as a way to document some trials and experiences I was coming across when working on an On-Premise Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 deployment for the State Agency I work for.

Since then, a few things have changed. I, uh, got a new computer, I started to work on a lot more systems, and I got promoted to Lead Programmer Analyst.

Oh yeah... and I'm about to get started with CRM again. The 4.0 system I developed and posted about has been chugging along just fine, for the most part, but the time has come for a fresh new system to take it's place. I'm now working on an IFD On-Premise Dynamics CRM 2015 deployment (although I will probably wait for the '15 Fall release, making it CRM 2016 I guess).

I attended some rather nifty training from a Microsoft Partner company called PowerObjects. A 5 day bootcamp in CRM 2015, and then 3 days of developer training. It should be enough to get me started, once I get the initial infrastructure set up that is. Due to various limitations on access to our network, I'm going to have to use an ADFS Proxy Server in the DMZ that will talk to an ADFS Server on the network which will be used to authenticate internet access attempts to the CRM application server from the web or mobile clients. And there probably needs to be a database server in there somewhere too, I hear that is kind of important for CRM.

So I'll try and post more. I'll post when I get frustrated. I'll post when I have victories, and I'll post when I think I've come across or done something that someone else could benefit from.

It's been nice to see that posts about my 4.0 issues and solutions still get active views and are hopefully helping people not pull their hair out.

Fingers crossed my posts can continue to do that.