A field journal by Phillip Büchler

Forged in the
fires of
Enterprise IT.

Microsoft security, the modern workplace, endpoint management, and the leadership questions that come with all of it. Written for people who run IT in Swiss organisations, including the regulated ones.

Latest writing

all 176 posts in the archive

Isometric miniature town of software buildings on a cliff above the clouds, where medics in teal coats carry glowing parcels between buildings marked with coloured tags, red drones sit on a few roofs, and three cleared plots stand empty.

27 October 202614 min read

Patch Less

AI finds and exploits vulnerabilities faster than most patch processes can follow. Why consolidation and tiering help more than faster packaging.

Four exhausted men, one supporting a limping colleague, walk out of a sandy arena littered with sticky notes, broken mugs and torn flipcharts, while a silverback gorilla sits calmly behind them with a sticky note on his shoulder

22 October 20266 min read

Knowing When to Stop

Programmes plan themselves well. The single topic inside rarely has a definition of done, neither for the thinking nor for the people doing it.

Three men at a wooden arena gate push a fourth man in an olive shirt forward toward a silverback gorilla waiting with crossed arms, while a crowd of office workers queues behind them

21 October 20265 min read

Who Goes First

Large programmes need two kinds of courage: going first and holding on. The usual volunteering pattern spends both in the first phase.

A silverback gorilla waits with crossed arms in a meeting room while four men argue over a whiteboard full of diagrams

20 October 20265 min read

100 Men and a Gorilla

A ridiculous internet debate turns out to be a good place to practise thinking. Taking a question apart is easy. Deciding how far to go, and who should do it, is a leadership problem.

Glass office tower with finished, lit upper floors and a crane on top, while the lower floors and entrance are still wrapped in scaffolding.

9 October 20262 min read

The workplace leader’s two horizons

Workplace leaders are asked to shape an AI-enabled future while keeping meetings, access and support working today. Neither horizon can be dropped.

Person at a desk on one cliff edge, a rope bridge to the opposite cliff crowded with speech bubbles labelled Copilot, AI Platform, Governance and Model Wars

29 September 20265 min read

The AI Adoption Chasm

Individual AI use is easy to show and easy to measure. Enterprise value only appears when people stop acting as the translation layer between systems.

26 August 20263 min read

Climbing in Place

Picture two versions of the same person. In the first, hands on the rung above, one foot pushing off the rung below, golden light spilling down from somewhere unseen and …

10 June 20269 min read

Microsoft Endpoint Privilege Management: free in E5, but not free to run

From July 2026, Endpoint Privilege Management becomes part of Microsoft 365 E5. That changes the buying decision, but not the operational work.

12 May 20263 min read

The MSA Key Leak: Why Your "Double Key" Wasn't a Deadbolt

The MSA Key Leak: Why Your “Double Key” Wasn’t a Deadbolt We’ve all spent time dissecting the post-mortem of the Microsoft MSA signing key heist …

26 August 20253 min read

Task Management in Microsoft 365 - Challenges and Integration

Overview Microsoft 365 offers a suite of task management tools—Outlook, Microsoft To Do, Planner, Teams, Project, and Loop—but users often experience them as fragmented. …

2 December 20221 min read

Newsletter Recommendations

This week I subscribed to a newsletter. The author was hesitant to start one but was worried that his current distribution channel will not be there forever. Guess where …

Forged in thefires ofEnterprise IT.

Latest writing

Forged in the
fires of
Enterprise IT.