Tony Redmond

To make things easier for Office 365 tenant administrators, Microsoft has released four new administrative role for Teams. You can now assign these roles to other people and have them take care of areas like Teams general admin or the more complicated area of voice and audio meetings and calling. It’s a sign of increased maturity in the Teams product.

Microsoft has scheduled 1,500+ sessions for the Ignite 2018 conference in Orlando next week. What’s happening for Office 365? Well, there are many sessions to attend, but the interesting thing is the huge number of sessions assigned to Teams compared to other workloads. SharePoint does OK, but Exchange is low, and Yammer gets a surprising allocation.

When someone leaves your company, you might need to preserve their Office 365 data. Email, OneDrive, and SharePoint are straightforward, but what about Teams? As it turns out, a content search or an Office 365 DSR is a good way to retrieve information about Teams messages and information about their activities can be found in the audit log.

SharePoint Online makes it easy to publish news items, but people might miss the news if it only exists there. Publishing to Teams spreads your message and there’s three ways to get the job done. Choose from email, a connector, or linking to news with a tab.

A recent survey revealed that 22% of executives in small to medium businesses continue to share email passwords. There’s no way this should happen inside Office 365 because many techniques exist to support more secure collaboration. Take your pick from mailbox delegation, shared mailboxes, Office 365 Groups, and Teams

Office 365 Administrators have many ways to access user data. It’s important to set up a policy to control and then verify that access. If you don’t, your administrators might be looking into Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint, and OneDrive without oversight. And that would be a bad thing.

You can create an Office 365 retention policy to process Teams channel conversations and personal chats, but how do you prove that the policy is working? As it turns out, the only way is by checking the mailboxes where Teams stores compliance items and the statistics generated by the Exchange Online Managed Folder Assistant.

Teams and Skype for Business Online both capture IM conversation records that can be found by Office 365 eDiscovery (content) searches. All of which is good, but if you ever get around to performing eDiscovery and need this information, you’ll find that Skype for Business Online conversation transcripts are easier to use than the individual copies of conversation contributions captured by Teams.

Microsoft has done a good job of helping Office 365 tenants prepare for GDPR, but the best intentions sometimes run into difficulties. Such as what you might find with the new GDPR Data Loss Prevention policy template, which does an excellent job of finding things like European tax numbers… but sometimes too good a job.

The licensing model for Teams is now per-user instead of tenant-wide. That’s fine if you leave everyone enabled for Teams, but removing licenses one at a time for a set of users through the Office 365 Admin Center is a tiresome and boring operation. PowerShell can help ease the pain, and here’s a script to do the job.

Office 365 Groups and Teams can hold tons of secrets that we don’t want to share outside our organization. To keep sensitive information secure, you can block guest users from groups by setting a directory policy on your most important and confidential groups.

Two simple principles are key for Office 365 network connectivity. Keep things simple and get user data to a Microsoft edge node as quickly as possible. However, some organizations insist on using VPNs and proxy servers to interfere with Office 365 network traffic, which slows things down and makes users unhappy. It’s strange that people haven’t gotten the message after so many years…