Author: Tony Redmond

Refreshing the Substrate Last year, I wrote about the Office 365 substrate, a little understood but critical component of how Microsoft is developing their cloud services. That article followed a talk by Microsoft Fellow Jeffrey Snover at the Ignite 2019 conference. Now boasting the title of CTO for Modern Workforce Transformation, Snover recently explored the… Read More

SMS and Voice MFA Methods in Microsoft’s Crosshairs On November 10 Alex Weinert, the Director of Identity Security at Microsoft, posted It's Time to Hang Up on Phone Transports for Authentication. The article argues that it’s time to consider dumping the SMS and voice methods for multi-factor authentication (MFA) in favor of passwordless strong authentication… Read More

How Microsoft Advises Tenants About New Features During a recent discussion, I was asked why Microsoft seems to publish so many incorrect roll-out dates for new Teams features. While my gut feel was that it certainly seems like some Teams features are delayed, some evidence was needed to prove or disprove the case. When Microsoft… Read More

Launched in 2019 for the U.S. Microsoft introduced Play My Emails in Outlook mobile (initially iOS, now for Android too) at the Ignite 2019 conference. I was excited at the notion of being able to process email in a different way. The promise was that a natural voice would generate an intelligent readout of messages… Read More

  In late October, Microsoft released a compliance assessment report written by Cohasset Associates to compare Microsoft 365 services against the requirements of U.S. financial regulations. The report covers SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, Exchange Online, and Skype for Business Online, but excludes Stream, OneNote, and Planner because these apps do not support retention… Read More

Rights Management and Protection Sensitivity Labels are built using Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) and are available to Office 365 users with E3 or above licenses. When a label protects a file or message with encryption, the ability to decrypt the item to reveal its content is governed by the rights assigned to the recipient as… Read More

No Data Compromised but Bad Day for Teams Retention Alarm bells went off on Thursday, October 29 when administrators in several tenants noticed that retention policies created to process Teams chat messages were apparently applied to Exchange mailboxes. Microsoft subsequently issued incident EX225368 “Admins may see Microsoft Teams retention policies unexpectedly update to Exchange Online… Read More

Time to Review How Sensitivity Labels Are Used In Scoping Sensitivity Labels, I discuss the evolution of sensitivity labels and the ability to scope a label so that it deals with files and messages, container management, or both. Given this new capability, I questioned if it is a good idea to have multi-purpose labels and… Read More

On October 14, Microsoft announced that Project Moca, a new “productivity module,” is available as a public preview for Office 365 commercial tenants. The feature had previously been made available to Education tenants in August and to premium Outlook.com accounts in June. Moca is the “Outlook spaces project,” the first sights of which leaked in… Read More

Brain Fails to Understand Microsoft I know I must be missing something in Microsoft’s cunning plan to make priority accounts available in Microsoft 365. It must be a basic point that I have overlooked, some simple need that has remained unanswered since the introduction of Office 365 in June 2011. But I can’t make head… Read More

Helping Investigators Understand What Happened In March, Microsoft eventually released the MailItemsAccessed “crucial audit event” for accounts holding Office 365 E5 licenses (other suitable licenses include Microsoft 365 E5 or the Microsoft 365 E5 compliance). Crucial events are deemed to be of higher value to investigators or others who need to understand exactly what happened… Read More

Logical Division of Azure Active Directory Management Since its launch in 1999, Active Directory has used Organizational Units (OUs) to logically partition the directory. Despite discussions going back as far as 2014, the ability to partition Azure Active Directory in the same or an equivalent manner wasn’t available. Administrative Units (AUs), launched in public preview… Read More

Image 1 Expand Those who listened to Microsoft’s virtual Ignite session on Supporting Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures in Microsoft 365 might have concluded that Office 365 tenant restructuring was about to become possible. It’s not. What’s really happening is that Microsoft is taking on the easiest parts of tenant to tenant migrations: cross-tenant mailbox migration (now… Read More

New Technologies at the Center of Outlook’s Future Outlook fans would be forgiven for thinking that all the oxygen in the Microsoft 365 collaboration ecosystem is being sucked out by Teams). But then a series of videos created for the virtual Ignite 2020 conference revealed that there’s life in this venerable product yet (given a… Read More

Really Useful Way to Understand Connectivity of Office 365 Tenant Microsoft added Network Connectivity as an option under the Health section of the Microsoft 365 admin center in late September. The feature is a preview of what Microsoft 365 roadmap item 67153 to deliver an “assessment that evaluates the impact of your network design on… Read More