Microsoft is now rolling out MyAnalytics access to Office 365 accounts with an Exchange Online license.The first sign that anyone gets is when they receive one of MyAnalytics’s well-intended messages to help them organize their work life smarter. Funnily enough, some people don’t like the idea of Office 365 analyzing and reporting their work habits, which is why you might need to disable MyAnalytics for some mailboxes.
Microsoft has confirmed that disconnected Exchange Online mailboxes are not included in the sources scanned by Office 365 content searches, thus clearing up some misunderstandings that might have existed in the field. The bottom line is that if you want to search mailboxes that don’t belong to accounts, you should use inactive mailboxes.
Exchange Online allows users to add personal retention tags to their maiboxes through OWA settings. Some organizations don’t like this, so they can deploy user role assignment policies to block the feature. It;s something that you could consider doing if you’re preparing to switchover to Office 365 retention policies to impose the same retention regime across multiple workloads.
Outlook mobile users now have shared mailbox support in both iOS and Android platforms. The work to upgrade the backend service is also progressing and is past 50% rollout. And dark mode is coming too. It’s available in beta today to Testflight users (only for iOS), and it’s also been enabled for some users who run the latest version of the clients.
The Outlook Places service is used by Outlook clients to present metadata about meeting locations to users. Currently, OWA is the only client that consumes the service. You can update location metadata with details to make it easier for users to select the right location for their meeting, including geocoordinates that can be used to display map directions to the location.
A question about how best to set auto-replies for Exchange Online shared mailboxes to respond to messages arriving during a public holiday gives another chance for PowerShell to show how useful it is. You could do the work with Flow, but PowerShell is more flexible and capable when dealing with multiple shared mailboxes.
Teams does a good job of storing compliance records in Exchange Online mailboxes so that the data is available for Office 365 eDiscovery. But the number of records can impact the mailbox quotas of frontline workers, especially if they send graphics in personal and group chats. Here’s some PowerShell to help discover how much mailbox quota is being absorbed by compliance records.
Removing Office 365 accounts is easily done through the Admin Center. You can also restore deleted accounts within 30 days, but what if you want to remove accounts in such a way that they can’t be restored? The answer is that it can be done using a two-stage process. And if the mailboxes belonging to those accounts are on hold, they are kept as inactive mailboxes.
Microsoft has announced that it will deploy the ability to add shared mailboxes to Outlook Mobile by the end of July. But if you want to see the feature early, you can join the Testflight program and install the beta version of Outlook mobile. Using Outlook for iOS with Testflight also forces the upgrade of your Office 365 tenant to the Microsoft Sync Technology.
Microsoft has announced that Outlook Mobile (iOS and Android) will include support for Exchange Online shared mailboxes “in the next several weeks,” which probably means early July 2019. The update comes as good news for many people who have been forced to use an IMAP4-based workaround to access shared mailboxes. Microsoft is also making some other changes to improve the Files view and calendar sync in Outlook mobile.
