Tony Redmond

Microsoft released a report in late October to demonstrate how well Microsoft 365 meets the compliance needs of the financial sector subject to U.S. regulations. The level of inaccuracy in the text meant that I didn’t think much of the report. In any case, the report placed great emphasis on two developments. The first was…

On December 15, Microsoft announced the preview of Yammer support for guest user access through Azure B2B Collaboration. Yammer joins Microsoft 365 Groups, Teams, SharePoint Online, and Planner as the mainline Microsoft 365 applications supporting guest access. Yammer’s External Collaboration Journey Guest access first appeared in Office 365 Groups in September 2016. At the time,…

Photos Enhance the Tenant Directory In the past I have written about the desirability of assigning photos to guest users and how to use PowerShell to assign a default photo to guest users. Nice as it is to have photos for guest users, it’s even more important to have photos for tenant user accounts, especially…

Very Useful Sensitivity Labels Microsoft has steadily been building out the ability of sensitivity labels to manage different aspects of containers (teams, groups, and sites), with the ability to control the external sharing capability for SharePoint Online team sites the latest addition (Figure 1). Image 1 Expand Figure 1: Defining external sharing capability in a sensitivity…

Great to Protect Content Until Access is Needed The growing popularity of sensitivity labels is goodness if you simply look at the desirability of protecting confidential information. However, the presence of a larger percentage of encrypted data within Office 365 creates some addition management challenges. As I have noted during several conference talks, the only…

Microsoft Graph and Audit Log Too Important to Lose Thinking about the fuss and bother which erupted over Microsoft Productivity Score, I concluded that the people concerned about management oversight of user activity within Microsoft 365 had very little knowledge about the topic. They looked at the pretty graphs and tables of user data and…

Following Personal Support in Teams Mobile Clients On November 19, just before things started to wind down for the Thanksgiving holidays, Microsoft announced the preview of “personal” features in the Teams desktop and browser clients. Preview availability for personal features on desktop (Windows only) and browsers follows up the debut of Teams at home for…

Intrusive Usage Data Exposed in Microsoft 365 Admin Center Over the past few week or so, a bunch of news reports have emerged about the new Microsoft 365 Productivity Score feature (Figure 1), which was announced at the Ignite 2019 conference before achieving general availability in October 2020. In the Microsoft blog, CVP Brad Anderson…

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…

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…

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…

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…