Tony Redmond

Teams is a great place to host conversations, but sometimes certain messages need to be purged. It’s easy for a team owner to remove something offensive from a single channel, but what happens if someone posts in multiple channels across multiple teams. As it turns out, some manual intervention is needed.

Office 365 now has 155 monthly active users and is gaining new users at over 3 million seats per month. That’s impressive by any measure, with growth fueled by migrations from on-premises servers, new customer wins, and the influence of new applications like Teams.

Microsoft has shipped Exchange 2019, the latest in a long line of enterprise-class email servers stretching back to 1996. The latest version runs on Windows Server 2019 and Microsoft recommends that you use Server Core. There’s fewer people using on-premises servers today, but those that do can install the best email server in the business.

Many Office 365 applications (Teams, Groups, Planner, SharePoint, etc.) now support external guest access. you might end up with a lot of guests, and like any good accommodation, some management is needed. In this article, we look at how to manage the guests created by Office 365.

Microsoft Forms is included in Office 365 business subscriptions (and in preview for Office 365 home), but how many people actually use Forms? As it turns out, Forms are easy to develop and share through web sites and Microsoft Teams, so maybe they should be used more often in your Office 365 deployment?

Office 365 classification labels dictate how workloads like SharePoint and Exchange retain content. Now you can control retention based on events like a contract completing or an employee leaving the business. Events start the retention clock and it’s a way to make sure that you keep material needed for the business for a predetermined interval after the event occurs.

Microsoft has released a new version of Outlook Web Access (OWA) to preview. Office 365 targeted release tenants can check the new UI out to see how it works. It’s new and it’s early, so some glitches exist, but the new OWA is more attractive than the old, which might be all that’s important.

You can connect LinkedIn to Office 365 so that Office 365 users are able to look up LinkedIn contacts from applications like OWA and SharePoint Online. Some privacy concerns have been expressed about the connection, but there’s really nothing to worry about because users are in control of what they see and what they share with others.

At the Ignite conference last week, GM Murali Sitaram laid out a new vision for Yammer and explained how the product will be better integrated with Office 365 and Azure. At first blush, the vision addresses the obvious deficiencies that have afflicted Yammer for years and sets out a path for Yammer to become the social layer for Microsoft 365. Time will tell.

Microsoft announced at Ignite that you can soon manage Teams through the Teams and Skype for Business Online Admin Center. Office 365 administrators will welcome this because it means that they can manage teams without being a member of those teams. And they can avoid PowerShell, which is a pity.

Microsoft released lots of information about Exchange 2019 at the Ignite conference. Administrators will love some of the new features, but end users will find little to amuse them. But then again, the Exchange on-premises story is all about being a bulletproof enterprise-class email server. And that’s just what Exchange 2019 delivers.

In news gently leaking out, Microsoft says that new Office 365 tenants with 500 or fewer licensed seats will have to use Teams. These tenants won’t have the option to use Skype for Business Online. Then again, you have to ask the question whether they want or need to use Skype for Business Online? Existing tenants aren’t affected by the news.