Tony Redmond

Microsoft announced that the MyAnalytics app is available to any Office 365 user with an Exchange Online license. Also, Teams and SharePoint signals are soon to be included in the MyAnalytics analysis and dashboard. Expanding the user base is a good idea, but the really big news is the expansion of MyAnalytics to cover a much wider breadth of Office 365 activity.

PowerShell is great at getting lots done for Office 365 administrators. As an example, here are a couple of ways to check the membership of an Office 365 Group or a Microsoft Team to find out whether a specific user is already present. You might never need to use this tip, but then again, it’s always surprising when PowerShell comes to the rescue.

Meeting the commitment given at Ignite 2018, Microsoft has published the preferred architecture for Exchange 2019. As you’d expect, the architecture is highly influenced by the cloud. The fingerprints of Exchange Online are all over the document, but at least it’s nice to see some technology (the MetaCache) being transferred from the cloud to on-premises customers.

Office 365 allows users to apply retention labels to SharePoint and OneDrive documents and to Exchange messages. But after you’ve done the work to create a nice set of retention labels as part of your data governance framework, it’s good to know that people are using the labels. Here’s how to find out.

Microsoft has optimized the Click-to-Run version of Outlook for Office 365. There’s nothing startling about that, but the Outlook team didn’t communicate the change well and they weren’t very kind to people who asked them to reconsider the change in UserVoice. That’s not good.

Microsoft says that Office 365 has 155 million monthly active users. That’s an interesting statistic, but how many people use Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, and Planner? Microsoft never gives firm numbers, only clues to what might be happening, so we have to do some analysis to tease out what might be happening behind the Office 365 curtain.

Microsoft has simplified the synchronization architecture used to connect Outlook mobile clients to Exchange. The new approach sets the scene for some new functionality, like support for S/MIME and access to shared mailboxes. It’s all good and it marks the continued progress of Outlook mobile since the Acompli acquisition in 2014.

Given the increased ways to apply rights management protection (encryption) to Exchange Online messages, the volume of encrypted traffic should rise. That’s good for users because their email is protected, but it’s not so good for ISVs who must deal with encrypted email. One such example is autosignature products, where server-based components can’t touch protected email to add their text.

Sensitivity labels allow Office 365 tenants to encrypt messages and documents very easily. That is, as long as you have applications that understand labels. A preview version of the AIP client integrates a Sensitivity button in the Office desktop applications, but we must wait for native integration across desktop, web, and mobile clients.

The new sensitivity labels available in Office 365 bring marking and protection functionality for Exchange and SharePoint that was previously only available with Azure Information Protection. In this article, we consider how to migrate AIP labels to Office 365 so that users can encrypt their way to happiness.