Tony Redmond

Office 365 has experienced great success since its launch in June 2011, but it’s also had its share of failures as well. This article considers the most important technical advances in Office 365 and the most important parts of the ecosystem as well as some places where things didn’t go quite so well as either Microsoft or tenants would have liked.

Microsoft launched Office 365 in June 2011. Since then, the cloud office suite has matured nicely and now serves over 200 million monthly active users. Looking back as we enter a new decade, the fears that people had about going to the cloud have been dealt with and the Office 365 record of cost, reliability, and security holds up to close examination.

Microsoft is doing its level best to remove SMTP basic authentication from Exchange Online as quickly as possible. Basic auth for SMTP connections will disappear gradually as time goes by. Tenants can make accounts more secure by removing SMTP authentication from accounts, something that Microsoft will do in the future when these connections are not used. An exception exists (for now) for SMTP client submissions, but these might also be affected in the future.

The new Exchange Online Management PowerShell module has cmdlets that are faster than their older Remote PowerShell equivalents. Converting scripts to make the new cmdlets work takes some effort because the REST-based cmdlets have their own little quirks that need to be understood and mastered before scripts work properly. This example explains some of the issues met when converting code to report the Inbox sizes and items for Office 365 groups.

The Brave Browser offers the prospect of speed and security. But how well does it work with the Office 365 browser apps? As it happens, pretty well, with some exceptions. Here’s what I discovered when I test-drove Brave with OWA, Teams, SharePoint Online, Yammer, Planner, and Stream.

Designers working with Microsoft Forms can now include a file upload question type in their questionnaires, surveys, and other forms. It’s a small but valuable change to Forms. Depending on the form type, the uploaded files are stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online.

Microsoft is notoriously careful at giving out usage numbers for different Office 365 workloads.We know what the overall count is and now we have numbers for SharePoint Online and Teams. Some glances into a handy crystal ball and some inspired guesswork allows us to calculate likely numbers for Exchange Online, Yammer, and Planner and paint a more comprehensive picture of what’s happening inside Office 365.

OneDrive for Business is responsible for how sharing works within Office 365. Big strides are being made to achieving consistency across all the Office 365 apps and new some tricks are coming along too, like being able to link to a PowerPoint slide, requesting people to upload files to a folder, or using the URL in a browser as a link. All good stuff.

The Office 365 Substrate is a poorly understood part of Microsoft’s Cloud Office system. The substrate is a critical part of enabling services that run across different applications like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams, and so on. Functionality like search, information protection, data governance, and eDiscovery is a lot harder when you have multiple moving parts. The substrate gives cohesion and coherence to what could otherwise be a tangled mess.

If you work with Teams through PowerShell, you’ll know that you sometimes need to open the Skype for Business Online module. It’s a royal pain in the rear end to deal with two inconsistent modules. It would be much neater if everything was gathered into one coherent module. However, that’s not going to happen much before Skype for Business Online retires in 2021. In the interim, here are seven sets of policy cmdlets that you’ll probably need to use to assign policies to multiple users at one time.