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Ask an AI assistant to write you a Python script and it will usually run first time. Ask the same tool for a PowerShell script that audits mailbox permissions or disables dormant user accounts, and the odds shift noticeably. The script will look right. The indentation will be immaculate, the comments helpful, the structure sensible. And somewhere in the middle there will be a command that has never existed, or a parameter that was quietly retired three years ago. For anyone keeping a small business network running, the gap between “looks right” and “is right” is worth understanding, because it changes how these tools should be used.

The failure that does not look like a failure

When an AI assistant gets Python wrong, you usually find out immediately: the script throws an error and stops. When it gets PowerShell wrong, the failure is often quieter. A misspelled cmdlet or an invented parameter fails loudly enough — PowerShell rejects both outright. The dangerous cases are the quiet ones. Under PowerShell’s default settings, a filter that refers to a property which does not exist will often match nothing at all rather than raise an error, so a script that should have found forty mailboxes reports a tidy run against none. A command whose behaviour differs between Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7 can do exactly the wrong thing without complaint. And an -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue added to keep the output clean will suppress precisely the failure you needed to see.

Much of the best PowerShell was never published

Continue reading →

Microsoft has begun increasing mailbox sizes for many Microsoft 365 Business plans, including Business Basic, Standard and Premium. These mailboxes are moving from 50GB to 100GB, giving organisations more room to store emails, attachments and years of communication history.

For business owners and staff, this sounds like a straightforward improvement. More space means fewer warnings about full mailboxes and less time spent deleting old messages. However, there is an important detail that Microsoft hasn’t changed — and it affects how Outlook behaves on your computer.

Outlook still has a 50GB limit
Even though your mailbox in the cloud may now be 100GB, the Outlook app on your computer still stores a local copy of your email in a file called an OST. This file helps Outlook work smoothly offline and keeps everything in sync.

The problem is simple:
Outlook’s OST files become unreliable once they grow beyond roughly 50GB. Continue reading →

UK keyboard layout may behave like a US keyboard even when Windows settings appear correct

Summary: We recently encountered a Windows 11 PC that began behaving as though it had a US keyboard after a restart. The @ and quotation-mark keys were reversed, yet Windows showed English (United Kingdom) and only the United Kingdom keyboard layout was installed. Here is how to check and correct the problem.

What Are the Symptoms?

The most obvious sign is that the @ and quotation-mark characters appear in the wrong places.

On a standard UK keyboard:

• Shift + 2 should produce ".
• The key beside the Enter key should produce @.

When Windows uses a US keyboard layout, these two characters are effectively reversed.

This can be especially confusing because the letters and numbers continue to work normally. Users may initially assume that the keyboard itself is faulty.

Why Does This Matter to Businesses?

A keyboard-layout problem may sound like a minor inconvenience, but it can quickly interfere with normal work. Continue reading →

For years, Outlook users had a simple safety net against sending email to the wrong person. If a stale, mistyped or outdated address appeared in the suggestions under To, Cc or Bcc, many users could click the small “X” beside it and stop that suggestion appearing again. But following Microsoft’s 31 March 2026 retirement of “Contact Masking”, and recent changes to how Outlook generates recipient suggestions, that familiar control is no longer behaving consistently across Outlook clients. Microsoft says the AutoComplete list is not affected. Many users say the experience tells a different story.

Contact Masking was one of the features users experienced through that familiar “X”. It allowed a user to hide a specific suggested recipient, so that the address would no longer appear when they composed a new message. Microsoft says it had become a recurring source of customer confusion and support escalations, because contacts could be hidden for one user but remain visible to others, and the behaviour was inconsistent across Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365 Search. In its retirement notice (MC1234566), Microsoft says no replacement is planned for Contact Masking, and that previously hidden contacts may now reappear in addressing fields.

On paper, that should not affect the separate AutoComplete list, the locally cached suggestions Outlook builds up from addresses you have sent to before. In its own retirement notice, Microsoft is at pains to say that the AutoComplete list for Outlook will not be impacted by this change, and that users can still remove entries from their autocomplete history. Microsoft’s published guidance on the AutoComplete list still tells users they can remove an individual entry by selecting the X beside a name, or by highlighting it and pressing Delete. In theory, the X for Contact Masking is gone, but the X for AutoComplete should remain. Continue reading →

As Microsoft pushes Copilot deeper into Microsoft 365, owners and managers of small and medium-sized businesses face a confusing licensing landscape, shifting product names and price rises taking effect on 1 July 2026. Here is what has changed, what is on offer now, and the controls every administrator should understand.

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For most UK small and medium-sized businesses, Microsoft 365 has quietly become the backbone of daily operations: email in Outlook, files in SharePoint and OneDrive, meetings in Teams, and documents in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Over the past three years, Microsoft has been layering an artificial intelligence assistant — Copilot — on top of that stack. What started as a single premium add-on has fragmented into a confusing patchwork of free tiers, paid tiers, bundles and admin controls. And the rules keep changing.

With significant pricing changes due on 1 July 2026, a new SME-friendly licence already on the shelves, and free Copilot features being pulled from Office apps for unlicensed users at larger firms, now is the moment for business owners to take stock.

A short history of moving goalposts

Microsoft 365 Copilot was first unveiled in March 2023 as a glimpse of “AI for work”. When it became generally available on 1 November 2023, the terms were eye-watering for smaller firms: a substantial per-user add-on on top of an existing Microsoft 365 Enterprise licence, with a minimum commitment of 300 seats. The Register reported at the time that small businesses “need not apply”.

That barrier did not last long. In January 2024, Microsoft removed the 300-seat minimum and extended eligibility to Office 365 E3 and E5 customers. At the same time, the company launched Copilot Pro for individuals and began folding its various AI products — including the old Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise — under the single “Copilot” brand.

A further rebrand arrived in January 2025: the work-account version of Microsoft Copilot, previously known as Bing Chat Enterprise, was renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and positioned as a free “freemium” entry point for any user signed in with an Entra ID. The branding distinction was, and remains, easy to miss — the free product (Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat) is not the same as the paid product (Microsoft 365 Copilot), and neither is the same as the consumer Copilot Pro or the older “Microsoft 365 Chat” feature.

Through 2025, Microsoft kept tinkering. Role-based products such as Copilot for Sales, Service and Finance were retired and folded into the main Microsoft 365 Copilot licence at no extra cost. The “messages” consumption unit for autonomous agents was rebranded as “credits”. The Microsoft 365 desktop app itself was renamed to the “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”, regardless of whether the user actually had a Copilot licence.

The most significant shift for SMEs came on 1 December 2025 with the launch of Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, a new SKU aimed squarely at companies with fewer than 300 users.

Where things stand in 2026

There are four Copilot options UK SMEs are likely to encounter: Continue reading →

Deadline Fixed, Legacy Prices Rising, and Copper Broadband Must Be Migrated Properly

With the PSTN switch-off now close, this is no longer something businesses can leave on the to-do list for “later”.

The deadline is fixed at 31 January 2027. Openreach has already confirmed 2026 price rises for legacy WLR (Wholesale Line Rental — the traditional phone-line product Openreach sells to communications providers, who then resell it to you as your line rental) services, and the biggest remaining area of confusion is broadband: if you still have a copper DSL service, the right migration path depends on whether FTTP is available at your premises.

If your business still relies on analogue lines, ISDN, or broadband tied to a traditional phone service, now is the time to review every circuit and every connected device.

The Deadline Is 31 January 2027

All users of the Openreach PSTN must be migrated to new services by 31 January 2027.

This is not only about voice calls. It also affects legacy services built around the old WLR/PSTN model, including analogue lines, ISDN and broadband services that still depend on a traditional phone line.

In practice, that means many older services now need to be replaced with digital alternatives such as FTTP or SOGEA.

Openreach Is Increasing Legacy Line Prices in 2026

Openreach has announced a series of WLR price increases during 2026 to push the remaining migrations through: Continue reading →

Britain’s cyber security authority has, for the first time, told the public to choose passkeys over passwords wherever they can. Here’s what that actually means for the businesses still running on “Summer2025!” and a sticky note.

Last week at CYBERUK 2026 in Glasgow, the National Cyber Security Centre — the part of GCHQ that issues the UK’s official cyber guidance — formally recommended that passkeys should be the default way of logging in to online services where they are available. It’s a striking departure from decades of advice telling us to pick longer, stranger, more memorable strings of characters, and it follows a similar move by the UK government to roll passkeys out across GOV.UK services in place of SMS verification, a change expected to save several million pounds a year.

The NCSC still recommends a good password manager paired with two-step verification for the many services that have not yet added passkey support. But where the option exists, the message is clear: take it.

For small business owners, that translates into something simple: if your suppliers, banks and cloud platforms support passkeys — and most of the big ones now do — it is time to start switching over.

This week’s passkey checklist

If you read no further, do these five things:

1. Turn on passkeys for your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace admin accounts first, then your standard user accounts.
2. Register passkeys on at least two devices per account (typically a phone and a laptop).
3. Set up a working fallback for every account — recovery codes where offered, a second registered passkey where they’re not, and a Recovery Key on your Apple ID if you use iCloud Keychain.
4. Review the registered passkeys and sign-in methods on your critical accounts and remove anything you don’t recognise.
5. Make sure your IT provider has documented the recovery process before someone loses a phone — not after.

The rest of this article explains why, and what to do when things go wrong.

So what actually is a passkey?

Continue reading →

A humorous explainer on bits, bytes, storage, and the strange unit system that still confuses modern computing.

Our technology correspondent descends into the microscopic society living inside your laptop and returns with troubling news.

You may not be aware of this, but at this very moment there is a bustling society of microscopic workers living inside your laptop, your phone, and that suspiciously warm router in the hallway. They have a rigid class system. They have internal squabbles that were settled by committees decades ago and have never been revisited. And they are, almost without exception, much smaller than you’d think.

Allow me to introduce them.

The Bit: A Humble Beginning

At the bottom of the digital food chain lives the bit – the smallest employee in computing, paid in either a 0 or a 1 and nothing in between. Bits have exactly two moods and have shown no interest in developing a third. They have been asked, repeatedly, over the course of seventy-plus years, whether they might like to try being a 2. They have declined every time.

A single bit is, frankly, useless on its own. It can tell you whether the light is on or off, and that’s about it. This is why bits are never seen alone in polite society. They travel in packs.

The Nibble: A Unit Nobody Takes Seriously

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We get asked a lot of the same questions by businesses looking to move their IT to a proper managed provider. Here are the ones that come up most often, with straight answers.

Why would you use Trichromic?

If you value IT in your business and want a provider who actually cares about keeping things running smoothly, we’re a good fit. We’re passionate about what we do, genuinely pro-active, and we insist on getting to the root of chronic problems rather than patching the same issue month after month.

Why would you NOT use Trichromic?

If IT is just a cost you want to minimise — or you’d rather only hear from your IT provider when something’s broken — we’re probably not for you. We work best with businesses who see reliable, secure IT as an investment in their own productivity and reputation.

What makes Trichromic different?

Two things. First, our pro-active approach — we’re not content to just fix what’s in front of us, we want to stop issues recurring. Second, we run our own infrastructure and apply the same security standards we recommend to our clients, including the principles behind Cyber Essentials.

How long has Trichromic been in business?

Since 2006. Trichromic LLP is owned by Alex Bailey and Lloyd Reid, who still run the business day to day. Continue reading →

We’ve seen three successful attacks this year where users had MFA enabled and still got compromised. Here’s how it works and what you can do about it.

Multi-factor authentication is one of the most important security controls you can implement. Microsoft says it blocks over 99% of credential-based attacks. We enforce MFA for every user, on every account, with no exceptions.

But MFA isn’t bulletproof. This year alone, we’ve seen three successful attacks against Microsoft 365 accounts where the users had MFA enabled and working correctly. They entered their password, they completed the MFA challenge, and the attackers still got in.

This isn’t a theoretical vulnerability. It’s happening right now, and many IT professionals don’t fully understand how it works. This article explains the attack, why it succeeds, and what we’re doing to protect against it.

How Microsoft 365 Authentication Actually Works

To understand the attack, you need to understand what happens when you log into Microsoft 365. Continue reading →