The 2021 edition of Office 365 for IT Pros, the world’s best book covering management and deployment of Office 365 is now available (July 1, 2020). The book is completely refreshed with material about SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Teams, Stream, Planner, OneDrive for Business, Yammer, and all the administrative interfaces (portals, PowerShell, and the Graph). It might take you 30 hours or more to read Office 365 for IT Pros (or so SharePoint tells us), but it will be more than worthwhile.
Teams supports the selection of an image to use as the background for meetings. For now, you can choose from a set of images selected by Microsoft, but soon users will be able to upload their own images and use them in Teams meetings. While we wait for Microsoft to complete some work on admin framework to control image upload, a workaround is available to use custom images today.
When you need to block external access to your most sensitive documents, Office 365 Data Loss Prevention policies and sensitivity labels combine to find and protect the documents. A really simple policy is enough to detect and block external access, and is covered by Office 365 E3 licenses. If you have E5 licenses, you can consider auto-label policies to find and protect sensitive documents at scale.
Once Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams reach the end of their useful life, it’s good to archive them so that their data stays online and available for eDiscovery. A recent request looked for help to archive 600 Groups at the end of the academic year. The script described here might help solve the problem.
Microsoft has introduced a new apps usage report in the Teams admin center. The new report helps tenant admins understand how much use Teams apps get. However, if you want to do any detailed analysis, you will have to download the data to Excel and interpret it there.
Sensitivity labels are spreading across Office 365. Now you can search SharePoint Online to find documents with a specific label. And if you make an extra tweak to the search schema, you can find labeled sites too. All of which seems boring and uninteresting until you actually need to do it.
Microsoft Stream administration include a Manage deleted users option. However, you can’t manage a deleted user until all trace of their account has been removed from Azure AD, which means that you usually must wait 30 days for an account to be hard-deleted. It’s logical, but not in a good way.
Microsoft has extended the temporary increase in the limit for attendees at Live Events from 10,000 to 20,000 until October 1,2020. The extended limit reflects the popularity of online events during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s just a pity that they didn’t tell more people about the extension.
Among the announcements made by Apple at their annual developers conference is the welcome news that iOS14 will allow you to replace the default mail app and browser. This is great news for people who use Outlook for iOS. And you might even consider Edge as a browser.
Episode 19 of the Office 365 Exposed podcast covers the imminent release of the 2021 edition of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Learn how we put the book together and how we keep track of what’s happening inside Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem. And how we take this information and incorporate it into the book.
The Planner iOS app now supports the ability to share items like tweets, Facebook posts, and web links and create them as new tasks in plans. It’s a very useful feature announced in the Planner blog, but never highlighted to Office 365 tenants in a Message Center notification.
