Tony Redmond

Microsoft says that new Yammer networks can have their messages stored in the European Union instead of the U.S. That sounds good, until you understand the downside that Yammer loses a lot of its external collaboration capabilities. Given this, it’s likely that some existing EU-based Office 365 tenants who use Yammer will be happy to have their messages stay in the U.S.

You can easily rename a team by giving it a new display name, or do the same thing to a channel. But Teams and SharePoint Online have the kind of relationship that’s based on tight connections, so renaming team or channel names leaves SharePoint untouched. Site URLs remain unchanged and if you try and fix up the folder names for channels, you can end up with a real mess.

A recent report by a security vendor says that 25% of phishing messages get by Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and arrive into Office 365 user mailboxes. This highlights the need to configure EOP properly and run multiple lines of defense. Microsoft would like you to use Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) alongside EOP. Offerings from other security vendors are also available. For better protection against phishing, you should consider something like ATP.

Microsoft has moved the venerable EHLO blog maintained by the Exchange product group to the Microsoft Technical Community (MTC) platform. The first post is about the Exchange 2019 sizing calculator. Hopefully the changeover won’t affect the great content published in EHLO over the years. What’s of more concern is the lack of participation in the MTC by Microsoft product engineers and MVPs.

Microsoft made a ton of announcements at this week’s SharePoint conference in Las Vegas. If you’re an Office 365 tenant administrator, the health of SharePoint Online and what it and OneDrive for Business can do is important to you. Among all the fluffy stuff about intelligent intranets, there was some good news about improvements in administration, security, and network utilization, all of which will help other Office 365 apps too.

You can now connect Office 365 sources like SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, and Yammer to Microsoft Search and have Bing reveal results from those sources in its searches. It’s a useful trick, as long as you use Bing as your search engine. And there’s the small matter that Microsoft has left Exchange out of the list of connected sources, which seems to reduce the usefulness of searches a tad.

You can now protect your Azure Active Directory account with a 256-character password, including spaces. This news will bring much joy to Office 365 administrators and others who hated the previous 16-character limit, but please don’t rush into forcing users to change their passwords without taking the time to pause and consider how best to proceed. Longer passwords are good, but they should be only one part of a strategy to protect user accounts.

Microsoft launched the preview of Entitlement Management, a new part of their Azure Active Directory Identity Governance program. The idea is that you can manage access to resources via policy, which seems to be a good thing, especially in large organizations where objects like Office 365 Groups, SharePoint Sites, and Teams might just get a little out of hand. The preview is interesting, but like all previews, it needs some work to be ready for prime time.

Turla, a Russian cyber-espionage group is reported as being behind an attack on Exchange on-premises servers that uses transport agents to capture and process messages for selected users. It’s an attack vector that hasn’t been seen before and raises the question of how often administrators should review transport agents active on their servers. The important point is that unless your network is compromised, hackers cannot install transport agents on Exchange servers and this attack is more theoretical than practical.

The PST is now a very old file format. Originally introduced to give users the ability to store email moved from their Exchange mailbox, the need for PSTs disappeared years ago because Office 365 users have massive mailboxes. Despite this, some organizations persist in allowing people to use PSTs.

Office ProPlus Version 1904 boasts new privacy controls and Microsoft has documented how it thinks about required and optional data collected from users. Office 365 still lacks privacy controls for the server apps. It remains to be seen if customers will be happy and consider that Microsoft has solved the GDPR issues identified in the Dutch DPIA report in November 2018.

If your Office 365 tenant has many private Teams, you might run the risk that people create duplicate teams because they don’t know that a team already exists. Teams doesn’t have a separate directory but you can create one with PowerShell and publish the output in Teams. The magic is provided by deep links, which users click to navigate to a team they want to join.