A New Home for the Technical Blog | aboutcloud.io | AboutCloud

I built the first tool almost by accident.

It was a role assignment question, one of those small, stupid, expensive ones: which built-in Entra ID role actually covers this one task, without dragging in twelve permissions nobody needs. I knew the answer existed somewhere in Microsoft's docs, buried across dozens of pages, but I didn't want to go find it again. So I built a lookup table instead. Then I mapped every task I could think of against every built-in role. Then, because I'm apparently incapable of leaving a good idea alone, I added a role diff view so you could actually see what you'd be giving up by picking the "safe" broad role over the narrow one. That became Entra RoleLens: 130 roles, 211 tasks, free, no login.

Somewhere around the second tool I noticed a pattern. I kept hitting the same category of problem, spending fifteen minutes on something that should take fifteen seconds, and the fix was always the same shape: take the thing that lives in my head after years of doing this, turn it into something that runs by itself, and give it away.

For a while, though, this blog didn't live in that world. It sat on its own Ghost install, on its own subdomain, writing about the same ecosystem the tools were built for, but disconnected from all of it. That always felt slightly wrong. If the tools exist because of things I learned the hard way, the writing should sit right next to them, not off in its own corner pretending to be a separate project.

So that's the news, plainly: the blog has a new home. It's not a rebrand. It's a reunion. The blog is now part of aboutcloud.io itself, sitting right alongside the tools, the case studies, and the curated news feed, instead of off on its own. And since I'm already explaining the move, it felt like the right moment to explain what this whole site is actually trying to be, not just where things live now.

The mission

aboutcloud.io is a practitioner's lens on the Microsoft ecosystem: Entra ID, security, Intune, M365, and increasingly AI. Not a press-release aggregator, not a vendor blog. Everything here comes from actually working in these tenants, hitting the same errors you hit, and writing down what I learned fixing them. When AboutCloud has something to announce, this is also where that happens. Same roof, same voice, no separate "corporate news" channel pretending to be something else.

Where I'd like this to go

Here's the more honest, more ambitious part, the one I've been sitting on for a while.

I'd like aboutcloud.io to become somewhere other people can build too, not just somewhere I publish. A place where a publisher with something worth saying about this ecosystem can write here, freely, without needing to stand up their own platform first. A place to put out eBooks that actually help someone get through a migration or a certification instead of gathering dust in a lead-gen funnel. And, maybe the part I care about most: a place where engineers looking for real work, short-term or long, and people who have real work to hand off can actually find each other.

This isn't LinkedIn, and I'm not pretending it will be. It's smaller than that, more personal, built by one person who's still figuring out how far it can go. But underneath the noise, that's always been the actual job: connecting people who need help with people who can give it. That doesn't stop mattering just because the platforms that used to do it got worse at it.

And yes, that includes me directly. Consultancy, architecture design, mentoring and learning, time you can actually book with me, and hopefully, one day, with us, once this is bigger than one person's evenings and weekends.

So: got a tech idea sitting half-finished somewhere? Want to publish something real instead of another newsletter nobody opens? Trying to build a product and want another set of hands or eyes on it? I'd genuinely like to hear about it. Let's do it.

The tools

If you've landed here from Entra RoleLens, EntraPass, Entra Tracker, or AADSTS Entra Errors, welcome, you're not in the wrong place. Those are all mine. They're free, open source (MIT), and built for the same reason this blog exists: because I needed them, and figured other people probably did too. They live on their own subdomains, but they're part of the same family now, cross-linked back to here rather than scattered across disconnected corners of the internet.

None of them are affiliated with Microsoft. They're community tools, built by someone who works with this stuff daily and got tired of doing certain lookups by hand.

The tech aggregation and affiliation angle

The News section deserves its own explanation too, because it's not a typical RSS dump. Every day, I go through what's actually moving in the Microsoft ecosystem: roadmap changes, breaking-change announcements, Graph API deprecations, the stuff that actually affects how you configure a tenant, and filter it down to what matters. Act Now specifically surfaces breaking changes with real deadlines, so if something's about to break in your tenant, it doesn't get buried under routine updates.

It's curated, not scraped. That's the whole point, and honestly, it's the same instinct behind everything else on this page: less noise, more of the thing you actually came here for.

What's next

More posts. More tools, when they're genuinely useful rather than built for their own sake. A newsletter if you'd rather have the shorter version land in your inbox than remember to check back. And, over time, I hope, more voices here than just mine.

Thanks for reading, old subscribers and new ones alike. If you've got something to say, publish, or build, you know where to find me now.

Antonio Russo | Founder AboutCloud.io