Tony Redmond

Microsoft released the generally available (1.0) version of the Teams PowerShell module on April 24. The Get-Team cmdlet receives a big makeover (and slowdown), but overall the module is solid and you shouldn’t need to make too many changes to scripts.

Microsoft announced the Files Restore feature for SharePoint Online on April 22. It’s the kind of news we can expect as the SharePoint conference draws near, and it’s good news for Office 365 tenants. Some backup vendors might not be so keen as Files Restore makes it a tad harder for them to sell their backups. Small Office 365 tenants also got the news that the new SharePoint Admin Center is becoming the default. The new portal might even be ready soon.

The Azure Information Protection team recently published an interesting post about making a “cloud exit.” In other words, how to move your encrypted data out of a cloud service like Office 365. As it turns out, this is feasible if you plan. But how many organizations have even thought about how they might decrypt protected content?

Slack released some integrations for Office (365) on April 9. I took a look and discovered some interesting things about how the Outlook add-in for Slack works (and doesn’t work sometimes). If you use Slack, you’ll probably be interested in a tighter connection between it and Office, but if you’re invested in the Office 365 ecosystem, Teams is a better choice.

Microsoft Teams supports Office 365 Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, which means that you can check for the sharing of sensitive data like credit card or passport numbers in personal chats or channel conversations. Quite why someone would want to share their credit card number with someone else in a chat is beyond me, but there’s no accounting for human taste.

On April 4, Microsoft announced that Kaizala, their mobile chat application, is now available to all Office 365 commercial customers and will be integrating with Teams. On the surface, the two applications target very different user types: Teams takes care of corporate users with Office 365 licenses while Kaizala uses phone numbers as identities. We don’t know how the two will meld, but the process will be interesting.

Microsoft says that the Office desktop Windows apps will have native support for Office 365 sensitivity labels in the second half of 2019. Native support means that users won’t need to install the Azure Information Protection (AIP) client to apply labels. However, if they want to continue using the AIP client (because it is more functional), they need to deploy a system registry update.

Teams is on a roll at present with the number of organizations using the app accelerating past 500,000. Good planning and forethought help enormously to ensure the success of any deployment and Teams is no different. Whether you’re running a migration from Skype for Business Online or a greenfield deployment, thinking before deploying is always a good thing to do.

Office 365 retention policies help organizations keep information for as long as needed. But retention consumes storage. This isn’t a problem for Exchange Online, but it is for SharePoint Online, because files held in the Preservation Hold Library are charged against the tenant storage quota. This isn’t a reason to not use retention policies, but you should be careful.

Microsoft has announced that version 1904 of Office ProPlus (click to run) for Windows includes new privacy controls to allow organizations limit the data sent back by the Office apps. There’s no word about when they will deliver similar controls for Office for Mac, Office mobile, and the Office 365 server apps. Privacy is a real challenge in a world where cloud apps gather so much telemetry to measure performance, reliability, and other aspects, but it’s good that organizations will now be able to control how much they share with Microsoft.

Good news for those who like to know what’s going on in email: Office 365 supervision policies now support Teams personal chats and channel conversations in addition to email. And you can now use sensitive data types to find communications worth reading. Seriously, supervision policies are important to a certain section of the market, so it’s good that Teams messages now surface for review.

A question none of us like to think about too much is what we would do if a natural or man-made disaster took out Office 365 and disrupted service for an extended period. The good news is that the way Microsoft has built out Office 365 into datacenter regions helps to limit the effect of any outage, but the fact still remains that something bad could happen. What would you do then?