Tony Redmond

The need to download PDF files to work with them has been a longstanding irritation for SharePoint Online users. Now Microsoft and Adobe have come up with a new file handler that sends PDFs to the Adobe Document Cloud, where the files can be updated and sent back to SharePoint Online for storage. The changes look good in the standard file viewer too! Worth looking at…

Microsoft dug themselves out of a pit of pain last Friday when they reversed the decision to nix some popular partner benefit just before the Inspire conference in Las Vegas. However, the world is changing and the cloud is where the action is. Microsoft pays to deliver services from the cloud and that cost must be either absorbed internally or transmitted to partners. That simple fact makes it sure that difficult conversations await in the future.

In February, I published a script to report the activity in Office 365 Groups and Teams. It is natural that some of those groups will be obsolete, so here’s another script to email the owners of those groups. I know the script works because I tested it against 200 groups, but it’s rough and ready and deserves some TLC from people who really know PowerShell.

Microsoft’s decision to make its partners pay commercial rates for software licenses might seem logical at first glance, but it’s not helpful in a world where cloud technologies change so often. The problem I have is that anything that might prevent partners acquiring knowledge about Microsoft technologies is a bad thing for customers who depend on those partners. It should be interesting to see if any spirited debates happen at next week’s Inspire conference.

Microsoft introduced support for like reactions in OWA in 2015. Teams also supports likes, but it also supports other reactions to messages from sad to angry. Knowing how to use these reactions is a social minefield. On a serious notes, reactions are not currently stored in Teams compliance records in Exchange Online, which is a problem if people react to messages with likes.

Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) now offers an advanced set of features to Office 365 E5 tenants. You can have messages with specific branding delivered to different domains. Advanced OME also includes message revocation. Branding is a feature that will appeal to a limited set of tenants, but it would be nice if revocation was available to a wider set of Office 365 tenants.

Microsoft is rolling out priority notifications for Teams, the ability for users to send urgent messages in chats so that the recipients get notified every two minutes until they respond. Office 365 tenants (except GCC) should see the new functionality in July. Tenants can control who gets to send urgent messages with messaging policies, and some user education would be good to help those allowed to send these messages understand when a message is truly urgent.

Excel fans delight! You can now export task data for a Planner plan to Excel and slice and dice the task information to your heart’s content. The new feature is likely to be popular with Office 365 users because it adds values and it makes sense to use Excel for this purpose, but another way of looking at it is that Planner is so poor at analysis and reporting that it needed external help. The truth probably lies in the middle.

You can add photos to Azure Active Directory guest accounts and have Office 365 apps display those photos. But it’s a lot of work to track down suitable photos for individual guests. If you want to change the default two-initial icon displayed by Office 365, you can use PowerShell to update all guest accounts with a photo. Here’s how I handled the problem.

PowerShell is a great way of automating common administrative Office 365 operations. That is, if you know what module to use and how to use the cmdlets in that module. Unfortunately things are a bit of a mess with too many modules and inconsistent behavior in areas like error handling. With so many development groups working on Office 365, the PowerShell situation might be inevitable, but it needs cleaning up.

The new version of MyAnalytics is available to Office 365 E3 and E5 users and takes a different approach to the interpretation of data gathered about user work activities inside different apps. Instead of telling you the raw counts of messages sent and read and other data, MyAnalytics gives insights to help people work smarter and achieve a better work-life balance.

After seeing a tweet about a site that could return the tenant identifier for any Azure or Office 365 tenant, I was a tad suspicious. After all, this data should be private – or so you’d think. In fact, the WhatIsMyTenantId.com site simply takes records available to enable OAuth 2.0 sign-ins and extracts the tenant identifier from their content. It’s an easy way to get hold of tenant identifiers.