Tony Redmond

Artificial intelligence is of major interest to Microsoft right now, so it really shouldn’t be a surprise that Jeffrey Snover, one of their technical chiefs, is now heading the charge to bring AI to the Office 365 substrate. Quite what this means for the internal operations of Office 365, applications and clients, and customers is to be seen, but some interesting times lie ahead in the evolution of Office 365.

If you have a small Office 365 tenant, you probably don’t need to use Teams messaging policies to control user access to Teams features. But larger tenants soon discover that policy-based management is a great way to control the functionality available to select sets of Teams users. Here’s how to create and assign a policy to users through the Teams Admin Center or PowerShell.

Microsoft says Office 365 is stable, secure, and trustworthy. But then something happens to make people less sure that Office 365 really is what Microsoft says it is. To see if we can resolve some of the doubts in peoples’ minds, Mary-Jo Foley is going to question me about some of the seamier sides of Office 365 on March 4. The audio and transcript will be available soon afterwards.

A year is a long time in Office 365. Lots changes in that time, so it’s good to go back and look at some PowerShell written to report Teams and Groups activity. Improvements can be made, advantage taken of changes made by Microsoft, and generally the whole thing can be tidied up and upgraded. PowerShell makes it easy to do – and to change if you don’t like what I’ve done.

Microsoft has announced the ability of the Planner web app to create multiple plans for an Office 365 group. This is a useful feature that Teams and SharePoint Online (the Planner web part) can already do, but some extra work was needed to break the connection between a plan and a group, and that’s what Multiplan means. Or it means a spreadsheet.

Teams now supports memberships of up to 5,000 users. This is great for large tenants, but probably isn’t too interesting for most of Office 365. If you’re in the situation where you might need to operate very large teams, you might need Microsoft to make some changes to the client, write some tools, and impose some basic etiquette on Teams users.

The recent exposure of a privilege elevation vulnerability that exists in the control Exchange has over Active Directory and EWS push notifications is fixed by cumulative updates for Exchange 2013, Exchange 2016, and Exchange 2019 and a roll-up update for Exchange 2010 SP3. These changes mark an architectural modification for Exchange, something that Microsoft is loathe to do outside major releases. Install the updates now!

Office 365 Groups and Teams make SharePoint much easier for people to use, with the price paid being the imposition of the groups permission model on SharePoint. On the upside, everything is very simple. On the downside, the permissions assigned to group members might not be what you want.

Secure (or private) channels is the biggest user request to the Teams development group, possibly because Slack has this feature. The only problem is that the Office 365 Groups membership model doesn’t allow for filtering within a group, so introducing elements available to a selected set of members might create all sorts of difficulties for how Teams interacts with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem.

Exchange Online transport (mail flow) rules are a powerful way to ensure that email from Office 365 tenants to specific recipients are encrypted in a consistent manner. Using rules relieves the need for users to become involved and makes sure that email is protected in a way that recipients can read messages. It’s a good way to use the protection features built into Office 365.

Office 365 serves a wide spectrum of organizations. Many are very small, some belong to government agencies, and some are used by large enterprises. And in the enterprise space, mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures are common events.

No fix is available yet for the Exchange vulnerability reported by Dirk-jan Mollema and described in CVE-2018-8581. Apart from deploying a split permissions model, no out-of-the-box mitigation exists today. Microsoft is working actively to fix the problem and in the meantime, the brains of the Exchange community are hard at work to come up with possible solutions.