Global Micro Solutions founder JJ Milner launches Notes from the Field

Published on his Substack, the series brings a practitioner’s perspective to modernising Microsoft environments. (Image: Global Micro Solutions)

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JJ Milner, founder of Global Micro Solutions (GMS) and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, has launched Notes from the Field, a new series taking readers through the problems his team encounters in customer deployments, how they solve them and what they learn in the process.

Published on his Substack, the series brings a practitioner’s perspective to modernising Microsoft environments. Milner examines the choices engineers face when existing applications, business deadlines and years of accumulated configuration meet new technology.

GMS manages more than 1 200 Microsoft 365 tenants. That ongoing responsibility gives Milner a view of how deployment decisions hold up over time, including how easily a solution can be supported, adapted and checked as customer requirements change.

Notes from the Field shares that experience beyond the customer engagement. Milner explains where an assumption proved wrong, what testing uncovered and why the team changed its approach. Readers can follow the reasoning closely enough to assess it against their own environments.

The opening instalment examines work for manufacturers within an industrial group comprising 10 companies and more than 5 500 synchronised users. New PCs were joined to Microsoft Entra ID and managed through Microsoft Intune, while file servers and access permissions remained in on-premises Active Directory.

Employees still needed their departmental drives. Business applications depended on familiar file locations, and customer IT teams needed to continue managing access without duplicating every change in another system.

GMS developed an approach that separated each customer’s drive-mapping information from the software applying it. Administrators could update the mappings through 421 Operate, the company’s operations agent, while a common engine on the devices handled the connections.

The benefit became particularly clear when a customer requested a change on a Sunday evening. Its ERP system required a specific drive letter before the business opened at 7:30am. The team amended the relevant entry and applied the update without rewriting the underlying software.

Milner also describes a test in which Intune reported that a configuration had failed, although the expected settings had reached the PC intact. The discrepancy led the team to verify the configuration on the device itself rather than rely solely on the central status report.

The full article explains the engineering behind both examples, including the safeguards required to make the approach reliable across customer environments.

That attention to verification connects Notes from the Field with Milner’s broader writing on security, compliance and operations. In his examination of endpoint security controls, he considers what an organisation must establish to demonstrate that protection is working. The new series follows similar questions into deployment: what reached the device, what changed and how can the team confirm the result? 

For GMS, these questions influence how solutions are built and maintained. Routine administrative changes need appropriate controls. Software must accommodate exceptions without becoming difficult to support. A successful deployment must remain manageable after the initial implementation.

Milner makes those decisions visible, giving customers and fellow practitioners access to experience that would otherwise remain within project discussions and engineering records.

Each instalment begins with the customer problem, with clearly marked technical sections for readers who want to examine the implementation. Planned articles will explore the device engine, the interpretation of existing group policy configurations, and the identity and authentication challenges of connecting cloud-managed PCs to on-premises resources.

Read Notes from the Field and subscribe free at jjrmilner.substack.com to follow the deployment decisions, testing findings and practical lessons behind GMS’s work.

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