Tony Redmond

Many Office 365 tenants use Planner for group-based task management. Generally, the application is OK and has been getting better. Now it can connect to Outlook to synchronize tasks into a user calendar, which then allows users to see tasks alongside their other commitments and print details off if needed. It’s an imperfect but acceptable solution to the lack of print capabilities within Planner.

Microsoft Teams now shows team owners when their team is going to expire – that if, if you use the Office 365 Groups expiration policy. But tenant administrators don’t have a report showing them when groups expire, so we wrote one in PowerShell for you to use (and improve).

GDPR comes into force on May 25, 2018. To help Office 365 tenant administrators respond to GDPR data subject requests, a new DSR case feature is available as a preview in the Security and Compliance Center. The feature is based on the existing eDiscovery case and content search functionality, so it should be very familiar to anyone who has searched Office 365 for email, documents, and other information.

Microsoft has boosted the per-user storage allocation for SharePoint Online by 20x to make it easier for people to move data to Office 365. It’s a good move, and one that’s probably overdue. Teams and Office 365 Groups have accelerated the use of SharePoint over the last year or so. However, Exchange also increased its storage allocation and that hasn’t got everyone to the cloud. Yet.

Anyone running an Office 365 tenant knows that it’s hard to keep up with everything that changes. Imagine what it must be like to write about Office 365! To clear my list of things that I want to mention but haven’t had the chance to, here’s some short snippets that you might or might not have heard about.

Office 365 makes it easy to collaborate with external users through Office 365 Groups and Teams, both of which use Azure B2B Collaboration. In fact, collaboration is so easy that users might be carried away and share with all and sundry, including your competitors. Which is why it’s nice to have a policy to control sharing with certain domains that works for applications like Groups, Teams, and Planner.

Microsoft is switching the default access type for Office 365 Groups to be private. It’s a change that you can easily reverse, if you want it groups to be public. The change will be effective for Outlook endpoints first, meaning OWA, Outlook desktops, and the Outlook mobile apps. Later, the other Office 365 apps that create Office 365 Groups might fall into line. Or not, as the case might be.

Office 365 Groups are the reason why many SharePoint Online sites appear in tenants. If you’re on the Pacific coast of the U.S., the regional settings are OK. But anyone else in the rest of the world who uses the SharePoint browser interface will see times and dates in that instead of the local format. You can change the regional settings for a site, and now you can make sure that new sites have the right settings.

With GDPR coming, it’s good news that Teams now supports Office 365 retention policies. You can apply retention to messages posted to channels and chats, or use a mixture of policies to target different sets of users and teams. You might be surprised how Teams has implemented retention – and remember, we’re only talking about messages – other content might also need a policy.

The venerable Exchange Get-MailboxStatistics has been around for over ten years, but now it’s telling lies about Office 365 users. Well, just the last login date to their mailbox. The problem is that the world is a very different place to when Microsoft first introduced PowerShell in Exchange 2007. Mailboxes didn’t get so many visits from mailbox assistants then…

Office 365 has a new admin center for Teams and Skype for Business Online. It’s still early days for the TSBAC, as I like to call it, but you can see where Microsoft is going as it unifies the disparate parts of Teams and Skype for Business Online into one uber-admin center to beat them all.

Teams now hides the Office 365 Groups that it creates from Exchange clients (Outlook, OWA, and the mobile apps). That’s as it should be for groups created for new teams. If you want to hide groups created for older teams, you can run the Set-UnifiedGroup cmdlet, but that soon becomes boring when you might have hundreds of groups to process. PowerShell to the rescue once again.