Author: Tony Redmond

Publicity for Exchange for a Change I’ve been impressed by the amount of coverage given by mainstream IT reporters to Thursday’s announcement by the Exchange development group that they are rolling out a feature to suppress Reply-All storms. Few of the recent announcements by the Exchange group have received such attention, possibly because Teams hoovers… Read More

The first article in this series discussed how to remove the ability of OWA users to create autoforwarding addresses. This does a lot to stop the forwarding of email outside an organization, but OWA is only one part of the problem. We also need to deal with the other ways that messages can be automatically… Read More

Autoforwarding is Badness Allowing users to forward their email outside Exchange Online is bad, especially if they don’t keep a copy of the forwarded messages in their mailbox. Apart from removing email from the controls imposed by data governance policies, it creates a risk that confidential information travels outside the organization, including when an attacker… Read More

If you have Office 365 E5 licenses, your mailboxes generate MailItemsAccessed events. These events are stored in the Office 365 audit log and can be used for investigating potentially compromised mailboxes. Useful information is in the audit events, but some processing is needed to extract the full benefit. Here's how to do it with PowerShell.

Soon you'll be able to synchronize Office 365 notification messages to Planner and manage the introduction of the changes through Planner. The integration is straightforward and works well. In fact, I have nothing much to complain about, which is why I wonder if I am missing something.

Communications Compliance is a part of Microsoft 365's Insider Risk functionality. This is a replacement for Office 365 supervision policies and introduces coverage of new communications and a lot of machine learning, plus a link to Advanced eDiscovery for the really complicated cases. Not every Office 365 tenant will be interested in employee monitoring, but those that need to should look at Communications Compliance.

The new licensing guidance for Microsoft 365 security and compliance features is welcome, but as is probably inevitable, some inconsistencies exist that need to be probed and discussed, and hopefully resolved by Microsoft in the long run. Why do DLP policies for Teams need E5 licenses? Why does applying a default retention label to a SharePoint library need E5? There's lots to discuss about issues Microsoft should fix.

Office 365 Sensitivity Labels are supported by Teams, Groups, and Sites, but some work is needed if you want to replace older text-only classification labels with Office 365 Sensitivity Labels. This article explains how to use PowerShell to update Office 365 groups with new sensitivity labels. The labels are then synchronized to teams and sites.

Licensing the range of Microsoft 365 compliance and security features is a task taken on by the bravest. Or so they say. Another way of putting it is that people just don't understand what licenses are needed for the different compliance, data governance, and security features. A new Microsoft 365 Compliance plan and three sub-licenses might make it easier, even if they're more expensive. After reading the PDF to explain what licenses are needed, maybe you'll know what you need to buy.

Microsoft will remove the Search-Mailbox cmdlet from Exchange Online on July 1, but that doesn't mean you can't purge bad messages from user mailboxes. Office 365 content searches and content search actions can hard- or soft-delete messages. Some limitations exist, but not enough to be worried. And we include a PowerShell script to show how to get the job done.

Slack has revealed its add-on for Teams calling to dispel the mystery (at least in my mind) for how they would create a calling integration without Microsoft's help. As it turns out, Slack has taken some work they already had and the fact that Teams has URIs for meetings and combined them together to get their integration done. Very smart|

The Slack CEO says that the company is working on a calling integration with Teams. Slack hasn't released any technical information, which leads to a certain amount of speculation as to how such an integration might happen. Slack's previous attempts to integrate with Office 365 applications haven't been too successful, but perhaps a federated hook-up like the one between Skype consumer and Teams might work.

Although Teams has seen a spike in usage due to more people working at home, the view of participants in Teams video meetings is not as good as competitors such as Zoom. Basically, the 2 x 2 view used by Teams isn't as visually attractive or useful as the gallery views supported by other video conferencing systems. Microsoft says they have elevated the priority of the work necessary to increase the number of participants in the meeting window. They don't say when this will happen.

Microsoft announced that Teams now supports a maximum of 10,000 users in the membership of an individual team. The new limit is rolling out to Office 365 tenants in April and should be available worldwide in May. The need for increased membership is likely driven by large enterprise deployments of Teams who find the previous 5,000 limit just too small for their discussions.

Teams is all about communication, but now you can have "targeted communications," which is a long-winded way to describe tags. A tag is a shortcut method to address a set of team members. You can have default tags defined at the organization level or use tags specific to individual teams. Either way, tags are a useful way to identify the specific people you want to address in a conversation.