Configure Azure WordPress web app to work with Exchange Online SMTP relay

I am on the process of recreating the public websites for my company using WordPress (which will do just fine for now). One of the cool things in Azure is that we can provision WordPress (and many other web applications for that matter) on a platform-as-a-service model, meaning that we don’t have to worry about the underlying operating system or virtual machine. With just a few clicks we can have a full-blown WordPress site up and running on Azure, and with a few more clicks we can scale the deployment up or out. It is a fantastic service, but there is one aspect that is not as straightforward: emails. By default WordPress will not send any sort of email notification since there is no SMTP server in the local host. I wanted to configure WordPress to use my Office 365 Exchange Online via SMTP relay, which I managed to do after a few hours of research. Here is how is done.

Azure AD Domain Services: A death foretold

As the technical director of my company, one of my tasks is to foresee the expansion of our IT infrastructure, which is mostly hosted in Azure. In the past few months I have been working on a whole new Azure environment that streamlines our virtual machines (VMs), offloads most of our workloads to manage services and users the latest and greatest when possible.

One of the products I was looking forward to is Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AADDS), which provides two domain controllers for our Azure environment as a managed service. Not only this means we don’t have to worry about deploying domain controller VMs, but also a tighter integration with our Azure Active Directory. After two weeks of researching on the subject and speaking with Azure support, I decided to take the leap — hoping the leap was based on empirical research more than faith. Boy, was I wrong wronged.

Azure: Claim VM space by moving the temporary folders to the D drive

We have a bunch of Workstations Virtual Machines hosted in our Azure development environment that have been hogging a lot of space. I had a quick look into those and I noticed that a lot of space is being used by temporary folders, both by the system and by the user profiles. I came up with a simple solution to claim most of this space, which I would like to share with you: Moving temporary folders to the D: drive (known as the temporary drive). Read more >>

The dangers of Cortana Analytics and poor data

Microsoft has recently introduced Cortana Analytics — an Azure-based service that allow users to perform predictive analysis through natural language, by just asking a question either via text, or by speech. While I believe Cortana Analytics to be amazing and I look forward not only to use it, but to implement it to our customers, I am concerned on the dangers imposed in relying on this technology. And no, Microsoft is not the one at fault this time. It is the users who I am worried about. Read more >>