Tony Redmond

Javier Soltero, ex-boss of Outlook, is now running G Suite for Google. The appointment is an opportunity to reboot G Suite to take on Office 365 and make up some of the ground that’s been lost in the last five years using the “new brush sweeps clean” principle. In other news, Microsoft bought Mover to acquire its migration connectors that move files into SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, including files from Google Drive.

Office 365 applications now create many guest accounts in Azure Active Directory. You can see what accounts exist, but it’s more difficult to discover who created the accounts – or why they were created. Fortunately, the Office 365 audit log holds a lot of useful data that can be interrogated to find some answers and PowerShell is a great tool for slicing and dicing audit data. See what you think of the answers I’ve come up with.

The fit-and-finish quality within Office 365 is sometimes less than desirable. Two recent changes in SharePoint Online make it easier for users to know when a document library is connected to Teams and to generate thumbnails for items stored in the library. Neither change is awe-inspiring, but both are examples of how to improve SharePoint’s fit-and-finish, which is a good thing.

A recent Microsoft post contained the news that Exchange Online uses Windows Server Core. That might be news to some, but not to anyone who’s been following the advice of the Exchange product group. Exchange Online doesn’t use virtual servers, follows a preferred architecture, wants to reduce the potential attack surface, and extract as much CPU as possible out of its servers. All good reasons why Windows Server Core helps.

Microsoft Teams is very successful at present, but a nagging doubt exists that some of the approaches taken by Microsoft towards Teams management and administration are less than optimum. It’s great to introduce a mass of new features on an ongoing basis and it’s better when policies exist to control the use of the features. But do new features always need to be enabled out-of-the-box?

Microsoft posted an odd blog on September 9 to announce improvements in the relationship between Exchange Online and Azure Active Directory. Many Office 365 tenants might have ignored the post, but it’s actually about a piece of important work to help the service run better. Many updates happen to Exchange Online objects that need to be replicated to Azure Active Directory and onward to other Office 365 app directories. This work means that changes show up faster, which is good, but there’s a small downside to note.

Adoption and Change Management are often discussed when companies move to cloud services, including Office 365. How quickly can we adopt the new services and how can we manage change? As it happens, Microsoft is extremely interested in driving customer adoption, so much so that this can cause problems with change management simply because so much change happens so quickly insist Office 365. As we discuss here, a structured approach to change management helps.

The September update of the Office ProPlus monthly channel delivers support for Office 365 sensitivity labels without the need to install the Azure Information Protection client. This is a step forward to make it easier for Office 365 users to be able to protect their most confidential information with encryption. More work remains to be done to upgrade the Office Online apps (including OWA), Outlook Mobile, and SharePoint and OneDrive. Will all this happen before Ignite?

Microsoft has announced that Exchange Online and Outlook will soon synchronize email signatures across devices. Does this mean that the ISV market for email autosignature products is over? I don’t think so because there’s lots of other things to do with email signatures once device synchronization is handled.

It’s hard to find and fix every legacy on-premises setting. In the case of OneDrive for Business, it allows users to stop their site appearing in search results. That doesn’t sound too bad, but blocking search affects many other Office 365 features and it’s a good example of how a legacy setting can have a big influence in the cloud. Fortunately Microsoft agrees and they’re going to fix the problem. We don’t know when or how the fix will come, but when it does, users won’t be able to disable eDiscovery for their OneDrive for Business site.

Lots of hot air and fuss resulted when Microsoft confirmed on the Teams UserVoice site that they are actively working on a Teams client for Linux. Many Office 365 tenants will be bemused at the attention this topic received, but competition with Slack and the need to drive faster adoption in Teams deployments are compelling reasons for Microsoft to do this work. We can only hope that the project results in better Teams clients all round.

A self-service migration process to move content from the Office 365 Video portal to Microsoft Stream is now rolling out. The wizard-driven process is easy and efficient and doesn’t have too many problems. In fact, the biggest issue facing Office 365 tenants might be finding the time to review all the migrated content before the go live date for Stream comes around.