ORCA is a project to help Office 365 tenant administrators validate their anti-spam and anti-malware settings against recommendations from Microsoft. ORCA is installed as a PowerShell module with just one cmdlet. After running Get-ORCAReport, you’ll have a report containing recommendations and observations about your configuration.
Microsoft is rolling out an upgraded rich federated experience for Teams to replace the previous plaintext 1:1 chat experience. When enabled, you’ll be able to send rich formatted text, emojis, and stickers to external Teams users in other Office 365 tenants and greatly increase the impact of your thoughts. The upgrade is rolling out now and should be complete worldwide by early December 2019.
Lots of announcements and other news flowed at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 Conference. Here’s a YouTube playlist for four short videos about interesting topics from the conference. We cover Office 365, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and the famous “Office 365 substrate.”
In a session recorded at Microsoft Ignite 2019, Tony Redmond discusses the question of will Microsoft Teams take over from email. The session covers the strengths and weaknesses of both technologies and makes recommendations for how organizations can take full advantage of Teams and email.
Like any technology, Microsoft Teams has some lesser-known parts. At the Ignite 2019 conference, we had the chance to talk about topics from backups to DLP to background blur. You can listen to the recording of the session online and download a copy of the deck here.
Tony and Paul taped episode 17 of the Office 365 Exposed podcast at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference with guests Mark Kashman and Ross Smith IV of Microsoft. Topics discussed included SharePoint’s success at reaching 100 million monthly active users, Project Cortex, and Intune.
At the Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando, Microsoft announced that Office 365 Groups will soon support sensitivity labels, but only to mark group containers with levels of sensitivity. The actual content of the containers, like the messages in Outlook Groups or Teams, will remain unaffected by the labels. For now.
In a surprise development, Microsoft reversed course for Exchange Online auto-expanding archives and imposed a 1TB limit. The promise of a bottomless archive that continually expanded to cope with user data is removed. Although it’s reasonable for Microsoft to restrict the consumption of resources, suddenly implementing a limit is not, especially when you don’t communicate with customers.
In May 2015 we launched the first edition of Office 365 for IT Pros at the new Microsoft Ignite conference. At that event, we had printed copies of the book. Since then we have learned our lesson and haven’t gone near hard copies, mostly because of the cost and complexity of coordinating content for a book that changes so often. If you’re considering writing a technical book about cloud services, our advice is to go along the ePublishing route.
The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team has published the November 2019 updates for the eBook. Subscribers can download the updated files from Gumroad.com (EPUB and PDF formats) or Amazon.com (Kindle). This update touches sixteen of the twenty-four chapters. We’d appreciate if our subscribers can download the new files as we hate to think of you using outdated material.
Modern browsers make it easy to pin websites to the Windows desktop and taskbar. Using OWA in this manner is great when network connections aren’t too reliable, like the flaky connections you often have on airline Wi-Fi networks. Other Office 365 apps work fine too when pinned from the browser, like the Admin Center, Planner, To Do, and Stream.
Outlook can schedule online Teams or Skype for Business Online meetings. But what marks an online meeting as different to a regular Outlook meeting? The magic lies in a set of MAPI properties populated by Outlook to help meeting participants connect to the right online meeting. A little poking behind the scenes with MFCMAPI reveals more.
Microsoft annoyed many Office 365 tenant administrators when they announced plans to allow self-service purchases for the Power Platform apps. A curious note in the FAQ might reveal how tenants can block this feature. If self-services purchases depend on accessing your tenant directory, maybe you can disable the service principal that holds the role enabling that access.
Microsoft Teams now supports the ability to post a topic to up to 50 channels at one time. It’s a feature that no doubt some will welcome with open arms, but it does come with a downside. For one thing, multi-channel posts might lead to a form of the email reply-all storm. Another potential issue is that there’s no good way to see the replies to all the messages posted in the target channels.
Paul Robichaux and Tony Redmond recorded episode 17 of their Office 365 Exposed podcast on October 23. It covers recent Office 365 news and an interview with Anna Chu of Microsoft. Anna is deeply involved in the organization of the Microsoft Ignite conference and we chatted about how sessions are selected and other topics.
According to Microsoft’s FY20 Q1 results, Office 365 now has 200 million monthly active users. The interesting thing is that the growth has remained constant at about 3 million users per month since November 2015. Moving from 60 million users to 200 million over 4 years is impressive, but growth is probably going to become harder as the number of on-premises Microsoft customers decline.
Outlook for iOS and Android now support marking and encryption of email with Office 365 Sensitivity Labels. Sensitivity labels can now be applied through Office ProPlus, OWA, and Outlook mobile. All that really remains to achieve full coverage for sensitivity labels across Office 365 are the Office Online and SharePoint/OneDrive browser interfaces. In other news, Outlook Mobile also supports S/MIME.
OneDrive for Business now allows users to generate an external sharing report. The report is designed to help people understand what files are shared in their account. The report generates a CSV file that has lots of data, but you need to understand how to make sense of the data.
Azure Active Directory now features the public preview of the My Sign-Ins feature, which allows users to see where their sign-ins originate and what applications are used to sign-in. It’s a nice idea but Office 365 users are unlikely to find the page. We can help by creating a custom tile with a link to the My Sign-Ins page. The tile appears in the Office 365 apps menu and makes it easy for people to access their sign-in data.
The Office 365 for IT Pros author team is busy packing for the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference in November. We’ll deliver sessions, tape podcasts, and staff booths, and come back with a ton of new information that we will incorporate into the December update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.
Teams is all about open communication, but sometimes you just want to make a statement and not have a conversation. You can do this by restricting replies to a topic, in which case only the original author and channel moderators can reply. And if moderation isn’t used for a channel, team owners take that role.
Office 365 Informatiom Barriers allow tenants to erect communication firewalls between different groups. Teams supports Information Barriers, but currently has a problem adding new guest accounts to team memberships. An easy workaround exists, but debugging what’s going on is difficult because of the lack of clues.
In an Office 365 notification to tenants, Microsoft says that the Modern Lifecycle Policy means that users must keep the Teams desktop up-to-date. The result is that users must make sure that their desktop client is no more than three months behind the latest software. If it is, they won’t be able to use the desktop client until it is updated.
Microsoft 365 applications create many Entra ID guest accounts. Here’s how to find old accounts and check their membership of Microsoft 365 groups. If you know the accounts that are old and stale and aren’t members of any Microsoft 365 group, you can consider removing them from your tenant.
The Office 365 Admin Center includes reports of licenses assigned to users. The same information can be extracted with PowerShell, which means that you can analyze license assignments anyway you wish. The script is quick and easy, mostly because its error handling is non-existent, but it’s enough to get going.
The Teams desktop and browser clients now offer the ability to filter personal chats and channels. Filtering is a useful feature, but it does draw the attention to the lack of precision in the Teams search function that really needs a revamp if Teams is to be taken seriously as a “hub for teamwork.”
The Teams desktop and browser clients now boasts the ability to report per-team and cross-team analytics. The information is interesting (at least the first time you look at it), but some doubts remain about its accuracy when the different methods of reporting are checked against each other. I’m sure it’s nothing more than timing, synchronization, or something else getting in the way.
The fight against spam and malware goes on unabated. ZAP, or zero-hour auto purge, is an Exchange Online Protection (EOP) feature that’s getting some extra features to deal better with spam and phish malware. New policy controls are available to control the feature.
Teams now supports live captions for meetings, but only for the English language. If you speak slowly and clearly into a high-quality microphone, you have a good chance that your words will be correctly interpreted. On the other hand, if you mumble or turn away from the microphone, be prepared for some interesting results. Overall, a nice enhancement that will be appreciated for those who need the captions.
OWA now supports Office 365 Sensitivity Labels, which means that users can apply labels to mark and/or protect messages with encryption just like they can with Outlook. The update adds to the ways that sensitivity labels can be applied to Office 365 content, with the next step being to achieve the same support for the other online Office apps.
The Microsoft Graph gives programmers a RESTful interface to Office 365 data. Flow allows even non-programmers to automate tasks by combining building blocks of Office 365 data and actions. Put the two together and you can generate some impressive results. In this example, we combine Graph and Flow to create some nagging emails to admins to encourage them to improve the tenant’s Secure Score.
The Teams mobile clients allow users to record and send voice memos in personal and group chats. It’s nice functionality, but from a compliance standpoint some glaring weaknesses exist in the way that Office 365 captures compliance records for these memos. No voice recognition, no metadata, nothing to search for. It’s a compliance mess that Microsoft needs to clean up.
Some Exchange Online mailboxes are quite small (2 GB for frontline users). Tenant administrators might want to monitor mailbox usage to make sure that quotas aren’t unexpectedly exhausted. This post explains how to use a PowerShell script to calculate the percentage of mailbox quota used and highlight the problem if a threshold is passed.
The ability for a Teams user to contriol the notifications they see for channel conversations is being expanded with a new option to mute specific conversations. This is useful when you’ve contributed to a conversation that becomes very chatty and floods your activity feed with updates. Direct @mentions and reactions to your replies still get notified even when a conversation is muted.
You can configure Send As and Send on Behalf of permissions to allow Exchange Online users to send messages for an Office 365 Group. All is well if the messages arrive, but if they don’t, the NDRs might not get to where you think they should go, such as a folder in the Recoverable Items structure. That’s OK if the sender was told that a problem exists with a message, but they don’t know anything happened.
Office 365 makes extensive use of Azure Active Directory guest accounts. Implementing a risky sign-in policy is a good idea, but it can have the unfortunate side-effect of suddenly blocking guest accounts that could previously access tenant resources. If blocks happen, they can only be lifted through administrative intervention in the guest account’s home tenant.
The Office 365 E5 plan includes Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), which builds on the anti-malware capabilities of Exchange Online Protection. ATP the includes Safe Attachments and Safe Links features, both of which can delay email delivery. I don’t notice the delay but others do. In any case, the more protection you have against malware, the better.
Microsoft Teams now supports the ability for users to pin their most important channels to the top of the teams list in the desktop and browser clients. Pinning channels is a good way of tracking what’s happening in critical channels, especially when you belong to some chatty channels whose conversations might swamp your activity feed.
Microsoft has announced that basic authentication for multiple email connection protocols won’t be supported after October 13, 2020. You won’t be able to connect with EWS, EAS, IMAP4, POP3, or Remote PowerShell unless you use modern authentication. There’s just over a year to prepare, but there’s some work to be done.
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.