The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Microsoft 365
The Microsoft Graph developers and some other folks inside Microsoft have launched a new series of short blog posts to help people become acquainted with the Graph. It’s a nice idea, and one that’s worthwhile to read.
By default, the Groups policy for an Office 365 tenant allows group owners to add guest users to group membership. You can block this access if necessary, but it’s probably not what you want to do as blocking brings guest access to a complete halt across the tenant.
Exchange administrators are accustomed to looking through mailbox audit logs to find details of events. Those same events are in the Office 365 audit log, so that’s the place to go look for information, like when you want to find out who sent a message from a shared mailbox using the SendAs permission.
Azure Information Protection rights management templates now support the Any Authenticated Users permission to allow Office 365 users to share email and documents with anyone who can authenticate with Azure Active Directory or has an MSA account or uses a federated service.
Backup vendors say you should definitely use their products to protect your valuable Microsoft 365 data. Backup products can do a good job, but the nature of Microsoft 365 creates many challenges at a technical level. A lack of APIs is the most fundamental issue, but the connected nature of Microsoft 365 apps is another.
Microsoft will retire the Windows S client for Teams on November 29, 2018. The decision to double-down on the Electron-based client is probably due to the fact that not many people use Windows S.
Do you need to remove some offensive or otherwise doubtful material from Teams? If the original author won’t do the right thing, the team owner or an Office 365 administrator might have to step in to do the right thing.
When you impose a block on certain domains, you’d like to think that applications like Teams will respect that block. As it turns out, if you have some lingering guests in your Azure Active Directory, the B2B collaboration policy might not be as effective as you’d hope.
Office 365 offers different ways to apply encryption to important messages. When those messages hold sensitive data known to Office 365, like credit cards or passport numbers, we can define a transport rule or DLP policy to protect outbound email automatically. And while you can define rules and policies through the GUI, PowerShell is available too.
If you run a hybrid Exchange deployment, you probably have some on-premises distribution lists that you’d like to move to the cloud. Office 365 offers no way to do this, so it’s up to PowerShell. Instead of starting from scratch, you can use a script created by Tim McMichael of Microsoft and amend it to meet your needs. PowerShell is just great.
On October 12, Microsoft and Adobe launched the public preview of the native integration of Azure Information Protection for PDF files. Knowledge about protection is built into the latest version of the Acrobat reader, meaning that third-party tools are no longer needed to process protected PDFs.
Office 365 continues to grow and has now reached the lofty heights of 155 million monthly active users. Just how long Microsoft can keep growing its cloud services is the question that no one can answer!
Microsoft has released a preview of the cmdlet set to allow tenants to create and manage protocol authentication policies for Exchange Online. It’s a great chance to disable basic authentication and reduce the attack surface for password spraying.
Tony spoke about “Can Teams Replace Email” at the Modern Workplace Conference in Paris on October 17. Here’s a sketch note about what he said and a copy of the slides.
Microsoft has released a nifty Network Testing Companion to help Office 365 admins validate that their network can support the deployment of Teams and Skype for Business Online.
Microsoft has updated its retention period for Office audit records from 90 to 365 days, but only for accounts with Office 365 E5 licenses. On another front, the problem with truncated audit records for Azure Active Directory events still persists.
The Teams T-Bot is no more and has been replaced by a snazzy new help “experience.” No doubt this is good news for those who consult help on a regular basis, but it won’t help Office 365 tenant admins much.
A recent update for Exchange Online gives extra control over who can access public folders. The change is intended to help with scalability, but it can be used to turn public folders off for any mailbox for which you care to disable access.
The writing team is pleased to announce the availability of the seventh update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Sixteen of the 24 chapters are updated in this release, which is the most we have ever changed in a single update. Please be sure to download the new files at your earliest convenience.
Microsoft issued Message Center update MC151582 to tell Exchange Online administrators about a new default value for automatic processing of events sent to room mailboxes. Unfortunately, the PowerShell code in the update contains an error, so here’s some fixed code to check existing values and to set them to the new default, if you want to do that.
How many guest users does your Office 365 tenant have? And how many of those accounts are actually used? Given that many Office 365 applications now generate guest user accounts to facilitate external access to content, managing these accounts is a growing concern.
The prospect of having to pay for many Azure AD Premium P1 licenses just because you use an org-wide team is horrible to contemplate. But don’t worry. You don’t have to because the Teams developers look after membership updates for you.
Everyone’s got a question to ask, and if you have an Office 365 business subscription, you can use Forms to do the asking. It’s quick and easy to build a simple questionnaire and not much more trouble to build something more complex.
Microsoft would like Office 365 tenants to use the Click to Run (C2R) version of the Office desktop applications because C2R is automatically updated with new features. We like C2R, but we also like knowing what’s installed on user workstations. Here’s how to check the Click to Run configuration with PowerShell.
Org-Wide Teams are a nice feature, but calculating their membership can be puzzling, as in the case of some perfectly valid accounts that were not added to a team. As it turns out, the error lies in Azure Active Directory.
Microsoft has confirmed that they will not release a free hybrid license for Exchange 2019. That’s OK, because if you want to use Exchange 2019 as the HCW host, you simply assign the server one of your licenses. After all, the server won’t simply be running hybrid connectivity, will it?
Microsoft is releasing new training resources and materials as part of its continuous commitment to help in the adoption and usage of Microsoft Teams. In the “Instructor-led training for Microsoft Teams” web site, anyone using or interested in using Microsoft Teams will find a series of free, live, online training classes designed to get you …
Read More “New Training and Adoption Resources for Microsoft Teams”
Everyone knows how simple date-based retention works, but what happens when you want to tie retention to a specific event, like the signing of a contract or the completion of a project? That’s when you need event-based retention.
Teams supports the ability to create org-wide teams, but only if your tenant has fewer than 10,000 accounts. It’s a neat idea, if you can use it, but if your organization spans more than 10,000 accounts, there are other ways to foster company-wide communications.
Microsoft designed the Teams & Skype Admin Center to make it easy to manage settings for both platforms. In the case of the organization wide settings, the latest updates in the Teams & Skype Admin Center provide the following features: Manage External access, Guest access, Teams settings and Teams upgrade options for the organization. This …
Read More “Org-Wide settings in the Teams & Skype Admin Center”
Microsoft has a new OWA user interface in targeted release. So far it all looks good even if some features are still missing, Expect to see the new UI generally available in late 2018 or early 2019.
Slack is the most obvious competitor for Microsoft Teams. The question is how many users does each platform have? Here is our best guess.
Tony spoke at the recent Ignite conference about the knotty subject of writing about technology. Have a listen and see if you’re attracted to become a writer.
A quirky side of the New-Team cmdlet is that it creates some interesting values for the properties of the underlying Office 365 group that you might like to control better. As it turns out, the Alias parameter is what you need to set.
A simple question asked where Teams stores its Wiki content. A search found that the Wiki is stored in a SharePoint document library, while some further investigation discovered some interesting facts about the Teams wiki.
You can now connect Office 365 accounts to LinkedIn accounts (or block the connection at a tenant level). It’s a nice way to keep tabs on your LinkedIn contacts and find out what they’re doing with a simple click in an Office 365 people card.
Paul Robichaux and Tony Redmond took the chance to tape an episode of Office 365 Exposed at the Ignite 2018 conference. After uploading the video to Stream, it was interesting to see what Stream’s intelligent voice recognition technology made of the soundtrack when it came to creating an automatic transcript.
The “Yammer Vision” session at last week’s Ignite conference was interesting. At least, I thought it was because it showed signs of a new willingness and direction to make Yammer a better citizen of the Office 365 ecosystem. Time will tell whether the grand plans succeed.
Details of how Microsoft IT manages its deployment of Office 365 Groups were discussed at the recent Ignite 2018 conference. It’s a good idea to write down the basic framework of your Office 365 Groups deployment, if only to understand how all the different policies and features fit together.
The new Microsoft 365 roadmap features the ability to download items (filtered or the entire roadmap) to a CSV file. You can then open the file with Excel or pour its contents into Power BI to analyze the roadmap to your heart’s content. That seems like a good thing.