Tony Redmond

From a technology perspective, Microsoft’s announcement of Viva, their new employee experience platform (EXP) for Microsoft 365, contained a mixture of the good, not-so-good, and puzzling. I don’t plan to cover Microsoft positioning and launch messaging (see Brad’s article). Instead, I want to probe at the technology. To start, Viva is a great example of…

In a surprise development, Microsoft has released the source code for the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) on GitHub. Fans of the non-SQL database engine, which has powered every version of Exchange since the initial 4.0 release twenty-five years ago, now have the chance to peruse the ESE code. Although Microsoft isn’t accepting suggestions to improve…

Activity Explorer Highlights Label Activities In June 2020, I covered Microsoft’s “Know Your Data” initiative, essentially the introduction of a bunch of new features in the Data classification section of the Microsoft 365 compliance center. Requiring Office 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5 (or E5 compliance) licenses, Microsoft targets this functionality at large enterprises who…

Delve: Exposing Permission Weaknesses Since 2015 Since its introduction in 2015, people have complained that Delve exposed documents to other users that they’d prefer not to share. In fact, the problem lies with poor permissions practice rather than Delve because Delve only ever shows information to a user which they are entitled to see. In…

When I wrote about Azure AD Access Reviews for Office 365 Groups (now Microsoft 365 Groups) in November 2017, I concluded that “any tenant that wants to use access reviews to control external access to Office 365 Groups or Microsoft Teams faces the challenge of having to create individual access reviews for each group that…

Surprising Play from Microsoft Microsoft has published an add-on to allow Google Calendar users to create and use Microsoft Teams meetings in the Google Workspace Marketplace. From the age of the comments, it seems like the add-on has been available since late November. However, Microsoft isn’t saying too much about the topic and the only…

Big Files and Differential Sync Some excitement was generated, at least inside Microsoft, for the January 12 announcement that SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business now support uploads of files sized up to 250 GB. This is an increase from the previous 100 GB maximum announced in July 2020. The new capability is designed to…

Now Rolling Out Among the Message Center notifications posted before Microsoft closed for the holiday break is MC230569, which confirms that Advanced eDiscovery can decrypt content collected from SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. The update is Microsoft 365 roadmap item 68705 and will roll out to tenants in January 2021. It’s already in my…

Last October, I wrote about One Outlook, Microsoft’s vision for the future of its family of email clients. The basis of the story was a collection of three technologies deemed critical for the long-term development of Outlook: OWA Powered Experiences (OPX), Microsoft synchronization technology, and the augmentation loop. Mary-Jo Foley’s recent story about the Monarch…

Last November, Microsoft experienced a great deal of criticism from privacy campaigners following the introduction of the Productivity Score feature. The resulting hubbub evolved into a PR issue which caused Microsoft to abandon display of individual user details, even if the data is easily available and widely used elsewhere inside Microsoft 365. In a nutshell,…

Removing Puzzlement Last month I reported my puzzlement about Microsoft’s announcement of priority accounts. I couldn’t figure out what value these accounts brought to the table, especially as they were targeted solely at tenants with more than 10,000 accounts with more than 50 active Exchange Online users. My report was based on details in a…

Time to Make Final Checks It’s natural to take time off during the holiday season to forget about the woes of IT operations. One of the nice things about using a service like Office 365 is that other people take care of running it while you’re away. On the downside, decisions made by the people…