Tony Redmond

Cloudy attachments are an excellent way of sharing documents through email without attaching files. Behind the scenes, an anonymous link to the document is sent to recipients, who can then use the link to open, edit, or download the document (depending on the assigned permission). Office 365 tenant administrators don’t have great visibility into what kind of anonymous sharing happens, but they can with a little bit of PowerShell and the contents of the Office 365 audit log.

Microsoft has declared some undefined period, perhaps starting at the Ignite conference, to be the “Year of Yammer.” Cynics might say “What! Yet again?” as Microsoft tries to position its enterprise networking app within Office 365 collaboration as it certainly feels like we have been down this path before. On the upside, this attempt seems to focus on what Yammer is good at instead of mimicking other apps. Time will tell.

Outlook users are more than aware of the problems involved in message recall, a feature that’s only available in Outlook desktop and has a nasty habit of not working. The reasons why the feature fails are well known, but soon might be addressed by a new Exchange Online implementation that promises to work for all clients and across Office 365. Time will tell if careers and love can be rescued by the new message recall.

Everyone got very excited when Microsoft introduced private channels for Teams. Which is nice. The hard work of understanding the technology and managing its introduction now begins, so in this article we look at how to control the creation of private channels and what to do once private channels are out there in use. Some planning is always good, and mastering private channels will take preparation. Let’s begin!

Microsoft launched private channels for Teams at the Ignite conference. This article describes the architecture and structure of private channels and discusses their intended usage. In a follow-up, I’ll go into how to create and manage private channels in a Teams deployment and discuss some of the issues you should consider when using this new feature.

Microsoft made a ton of Office 365-related announcements at their Ignite conference in Orlando. Here’s a summary of the key news for SharePoint, Exchange, Stream, Teams, Yammer, and Outlook. More information will emerge during the week, so stay tuned for more coverage as news emerges.

SharePoint Online now boasts the ability to rename site URLs, which seems good, but not so good when you discover that the new URL breaks the connection with Teams. The fact that this happens is revealed in Microsoft documentation and it’s been a problem since the beta testing of the site rename function. Microsoft seems curiously disinterested in fixing the problem as quickly as they should have. A case of attention distracted elsewhere?

Microsoft’s FindTime service helps Office 365 users find the right time to schedule a meeting with people inside and outside their tenant. It’s an underappreciated gem. And the good news is that an even better service called Calendar.Help is on the way. Well, it’s better if you like asking Cortana to find the right meeting dates for you rather than the more-hands on approach taken by FindTime. Whichever way you cut it, help is always appreciated when setting up meetings, so it’s nice that these tools are available.

In a rather odd decision, Microsoft is launching self-service purchases for Office 365 tenant users who want to use the Power Platform without consulting an administrator. Another troubling sign is the way that the MailItemsAccessed audit event has been packaged into a new Microsoft 365 Audit feature. Tenants expected to see this audit event last January after Microsoft announced it was coming. Its subsequent disappearance was a mystery until now.

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.