Tony Redmond

Microsoft says that Office 365 has 155 million monthly active users. That’s an interesting statistic, but how many people use Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, and Planner? Microsoft never gives firm numbers, only clues to what might be happening, so we have to do some analysis to tease out what might be happening behind the Office 365 curtain.

Microsoft has simplified the synchronization architecture used to connect Outlook mobile clients to Exchange. The new approach sets the scene for some new functionality, like support for S/MIME and access to shared mailboxes. It’s all good and it marks the continued progress of Outlook mobile since the Acompli acquisition in 2014.

Given the increased ways to apply rights management protection (encryption) to Exchange Online messages, the volume of encrypted traffic should rise. That’s good for users because their email is protected, but it’s not so good for ISVs who must deal with encrypted email. One such example is autosignature products, where server-based components can’t touch protected email to add their text.

Sensitivity labels allow Office 365 tenants to encrypt messages and documents very easily. That is, as long as you have applications that understand labels. A preview version of the AIP client integrates a Sensitivity button in the Office desktop applications, but we must wait for native integration across desktop, web, and mobile clients.

Microsoft announced on November 19 that they had acquired FSLogix, a developer of software aimed at easing the pains of VDI deployments. The news is good for Office 365 tenants because if there’s one suite that needs to have some VDI pain eased, it’s Office 365.

The new sensitivity labels available in Office 365 bring marking and protection functionality for Exchange and SharePoint that was previously only available with Azure Information Protection. In this article, we consider how to migrate AIP labels to Office 365 so that users can encrypt their way to happiness.

A report prepared for the Dutch Government slams Microsoft for GDPR personal data violations discovered in Office 2016 and Office 365. The best intentions lie behind the amount of telemetry sent back to Microsoft for user actions and the audit data gathered by Office 365, but GDPR makes it clear that personal data must be protected, and Microsoft might be failing.

Microsoft plans to deliver new migration tools to move Google G Suite email, contact, and calendar data to Office 365 (which means Exchage Online) by Q2 2019. The new tools are likely to move from the existing implementation built around the antique IMAP4 protocol, which only covers email and is prone to throttling by Google.

Microsoft has made privileged access management (PAM) generally available for Office 365, but in reality it’s only Exchange Online that supports the new feature. This isn’t surprising because Exchange has a well-developed role-based access control system that the PAM developers can leverage, but it does pose a question about how they’ll extend PAM to other Office 365 workloads.

Microsoft has updated the Teams PowerShell module to version 0.9.5. The best thing about the refresh is that the Get-Team cmdlet works. Well, it can now retrieve a full list of Teams in an Office 365 tenant. It would be good if Get-Team returned more data and supported server-side filtering, but it’s a start.

Teams borrows from many other Office 365 applications to build its functionality.The latest component taken is Exchange Online address book policies, used to segment the directory and stop users getting in touch with other people in the organization outside the scope of a policy. But it’s an imperfect and partial block, and if you really want to stop people talking, you’ll have to do a lot more work.

Do you need to backup Office 365 data? The question isn’t simple because technology changes all the time and it’s hard to backup some applications like Teams and Planner because APIs don’t exist. The important thing is for companies to review what data they use, the features available to them, and then figure out if any gaps exist.