Darren James

Active Directory

Password Management

Security

Darren James is a Senior Product Manager at Specops Software, an Outpost24 company. Darren is a seasoned cybersecurity professional with more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry. He has worked as a consultant across various organizations and sectors, including central and local governments, retail and energy. His areas of specialization include identity and access management, Active Directory, and Azure AD. Darren has been with Specops Software for more than 12 years and brings his expertise to the support and development of world-class password security and authentication solutions.

Articles written by Darren James

Jun

20

Custom ADMX templates for the Specops Authentication Client with Specops Password Reset

One of the great things about Specops Software solutions is that they are designed to require as little installation effort as possible. This means that our customers can get a system up and running very quickly, usually zero impact on…
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May

02

Windows error code 0x800708c5 when resetting a password using ADUC

We recently had a case where a customer saw the following unfriendly message during an administrator password reset against a user. The administrator performed the same reset from another DC in his environment (the same password against the same user),…
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Apr

12

Confessions of an IT admin – O365 implementation experience

For its average user, over a 100 million of them, O365 equals seamless access to corporate data, and a ton of apps. For the IT administrator, it is a bigger attack surface, added complexities, and of course, a few surprises…
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Mar

29

How to create a fine-grained password policy in AD

For the first eight years of Active Directory, the only native way of having multiple password policies in your AD forest, was to have multiple domains. When Windows Server 2008 arrived on the scene, Microsoft introduced the concept of fine-grained…
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Jan

12

Are my computers patched against Meltdown and Spectre?

Following the discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, we have had a number of enquiries from customers about tools that can identify affected machines in their environment. Microsoft has prepared a PowerShell script that can run on individual machines,…
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Jun

28

Office 2016 Silent Install with Specops Deploy

In this blog post, I will walkthrough how you can silently install Microsoft Office 2016 on machines on your network using Specops Deploy / App. To get started, you will need to run the Office Customization Tool, and create a…
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Mar

01

“Untrusted Connection” error in Firefox & Intermediate Certificates

There are many reasons why you may see an SSL error, some of which will vary by browser. Even if the SSL certificate is installed correctly, you are not necessarily in the clear. One of our password reset customers experienced…
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Feb

17

License import errors in Specops Password Policy

Following a Specops Password Policy installation (and in some cases an upgrade), you will need to import your license. The process is pretty seamless, but there are some errors you may encounter. In this blog post, we’ll walk through some…
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Jul

25

Sysprep Capture of Windows 10 fails

Since November 2015, the ISO of Windows 10 has included more “modern” applications in its default build. This has caused some problems when trying to capture an image using SYSPREP. Some of the applications are 3rd party such as Candy…
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Jun

19

Cannot Deploy Applications via Normal Group Policy Software Installation (GPSI)

A client ran into an issue that prevented them from deploying any application (including our Specops Deploy CSE) via normal Microsoft Windows GPSI. This was happening on a Windows 2008 R2 Domain and Windows 7 x86 clients, but I believe it could…
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