Tony Redmond

Although Teams has a PowerShell module, its cmdlets can’t get at some of the interesting information for team objects. But the Graph API reveals that information. Combining the Graph with PowerShell makes it possible to retrieve the information with just a little effort. A working example helps make the point, so here’s a script to report the Teams channels with email addresses.

SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business are making increasing use of Azure B2B Collaboration for sharing, which means that Office 365 tenants will have more guest user accounts. Using Azure B2B Collaboration is a reasonable approach because it’s secure and works well, but it does mean that tenant admins have some extra work to do to keep an eye on those guest accounts.

The original Office 365 Groups expiration policy was pretty good. It helps tenants keep control of potential group sprawl by removing old groups based on age. Now the policy takes user activity into account. While still not perfect, the new implementation makes the group expiration policy even easier to use because owners don’t have to do anything to renew their groups if the groups remain in active use. You might debate the set of activities chosen by Microsoft to represent a good signal of group activity, but not the way the policy now works.

It’s great when Microsoft introduces new functionality to SharePoint Online to make the lives of administrators and users easier, which is what the Restore this library feature is all about. Then problems happen, and we understand where the flaw lines exist. Recovering from a recent ransomware attack caused one Office 365 tenant more problems than they thought likely because Restore this library didn’t work as well as expected.

Microsoft has updated the vererable Get-MailboxStatistics cmdlet in Exchange Online PowerShell to return a bunch of new mailbox activity properties. The properties cover different activities like email and calendar, but the problem with the LastLogon property remains and you still need to do some extra work to get accurate last login information for a user.

Moving Teams between Office 365 tenants has been a challenge since the earliest days of Teams. Now a beta Graph API has allowed BitTitan to create the ability to transfer team settings and channel conversations between tenants. The migration isn’t perfect, but it’s a good start and will improve over time as BitTitan and other ISVs work out the best way to move Teams content around.

OWA is the only Outlook client that supports “Likes.” This begs the question how OWA supports likes and where the information about likes is stored. Some probing using easily accessible tools reveals the answer. You might think that the answer only interests Office 365 Trivial Pursuit nerds, but it’s actually of real interest to eDiscovery investigators.

Some people worry that Exchange Online mailboxes could be compromised by ransomeware and people will be forced to pay BitCoin to decrypt their messages. It’s certainly a possibility, but out-of-the-box solutions exist if you’re unlucky enough to be infected. That is, if you’ve done the necessary up-front planning to prepare for the worst to happen.,

Microsoft has started to flag its intention to deprecate the Search-Mailbox cmdlet. It’s probably the right time to remove this cmdlet from Exchange Online because Office 365 compliance searches can serve the same purpose. At least, compliance searches can do most of what Search-Mailbox does faster. Some functionality gaps need to be filled before we can bid adieu to Search-Mailbox, but its time is coming.

In part 1 of this series, we discussed how to setup Office 365 Information Barriers. We now get to the practical application of those barriers to stop different user groups communicating with Teams. Chats and VOIP calls are blocked, users are removed from team membership, and generally everything works as you’d expect.

Office 365 Information Barriers allow organizations to erect logical firewalls between different user communities to ensure that regulatory and legal requirements are met. Teams and Exchange Online support Information Barrier policies, which replace Address Book Policies. Some work is necessary to get Information Barriers set up. We cover that work in this article and prepare the ground for deploying the policies to Teams.

Slack’s July 22 post reports some advances in their desktop client that seem to aim at reported weaknesses in the Teams desktop client. The best update is better protection against network outages. The other claims of 50% less RAM, 33% faster startup, and 10x better call joining need validation in the real world.