You can now add your personal Outlook.com or Gmail calendars to your work OWA calendar. The integration allows for only one personal calendar, and OWA synchronizes events from the personal calendar to make sure that people don’t schedule work events when you have personal commitments. TeamSnap calendars are also supported (real-only), but this feature is likely to not be used outside the U.S.
Microsoft plans to disable basic authentication for five Exchange Online connection protocols on October 13, 2020. They’ve been clear on this point for several months and are now moving to deliver tools and provide guidance about what people should do about clients that use basic auth connections with Exchange Web Services, Exchange ActiveSync, IMAP4, POP3, and Remote PowerShell. Work is needed to make sure that clients are prepared for the switchover to modern authentication.
A new version of the Exchange Online management PowerShell module is available. The update includes a number of bug fixes (including some security upgrades) and new features. You should upgrade to the new version as soon as possible and keep an eye out for more changes in the future.
Outlook Mobile now supports delegate access to Exchange Online mailboxes. By granting fuil access to a delegate, they can open and work with a mailbox, and send messages using the SendAS or SendOnBehalfOf permissions. The new feature underscores the advantage Outlook mobile enjoys over other mobile Office 365 email clients.
Like many other parts of Office 365, you can manage SharePoint Online with PowerShell. At least, you can manage some aspects of SharePoint Online with PowerShell. Microsoft has made it easier to keep up to date with the latest SharePoint Online module and the PnP module, so there’s lots of cmdlets to help Administrators do a better job of automating different aspects of SharePoint Online.
OWA stores user signatures in mailboxes, which makes it a lot easier for Office 365 admins to update signatures centrally with just a few lines of PowerShell and some HTML magic. OK, maybe more than a few lines… but it’s a lot less complicated than it is to mess around with the system registry and points the way to how Microsoft might introduce cloud signatures for all Outlook clients.
Microsoft is working on cloud signatures for Outlook, but how can you update signatures for the current versions of Outlook click to run. Here’s our best attempt with PowerShell. The code works, but it could do with some error handing and various improvements before it could go anywhere near production. Think of it as a working example of why cloud signatures will be so much better,.
Have you ever been in a to-and-fro email conversation that never gets anywhere fast? It might be better to transfer to Teams, and that’s what the Outlook Reply with IM feature does. Instead of battling through multiple replies, you discuss matters in a Teams chat and hopefully end up with a good resolution. At least, that’s the plan.
Writing code to illustrate a point sometimes falls into the trap that things don’t work so well when you scale things up. Take Graph calls for instance. Code that works well with 100 teams isn’t so good with 4,000. The solution is to keep on telling the Graph to fetch data until it’s all in the safe hands of PowerShell, and then process it.
If you receive a notification about Yammer conversations in OWA, you might notice that you can now do all sorts of new things to interact with Yammer while remaining in OWA. It’s part of Microsoft’s effort to make Yammer more relevant and accessible to people who prefer to communicate through email. And the nice thing is that the approach works well.