Tony Redmond

It is nice to have an Azure Active Directory Expiration Policy for Office 365 Groups, but it’s not so good that the policy functions exclusively based on age. Another problem is that administrators have no way of knowing when groups will expire. So we take out PowerShell, write a script, and hey presto, we have a report. We still need to solve the problem of creating a policy that functions based on activity rather than age, but that’s another day’s work.

PowerShell is a critical skill for Office 365 tenant administrators. A knowledge of PowerShell allows you to fix things that Microsoft leaves undone in apps like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams. Sure, black holes exist for PowerShell (like Planner) and it is slow to process thousands of objects, but there’s nothing like a little script for getting things done.

Companies that move to Office 365 have to decide what mobile email client to use. A native client that uses Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) or Outlook? In the past, the best choice was probably something like the iOS mail app. Now, Outlook is the focus of Microsoft’s mobile efforts and it’s where all the new functionality appears. EAS is still valuable, just less so than it was before.

Office 365 now includes out-of-the-box email encryption, which might just mean that the era of using S/MIME and PGP might be coming to a close, at least inside Office 365. The new functionality scores highly on ease of use and integration, but the lack of support in the current Outlook desktop clients means that adoption will be slow.

Since Office 365 appeared in 2011, Microsoft’s collaboration story has varied according to whatever technology is available. Originally based on Exchange and SharePoint, it’s gone through Yammer, Office 365 Groups, and now Teams. You’d be forgiven for being confused by the frequent changes in the strategy du jour. And now we have inner and outer loops to consider, at least according to Microsoft’s favorite collaboration slide. Here’s my take.

Microsoft upgraded their EOP anti-spoofing capabilities inside Office 365, which is good, but they didn’t tell anyone. The first users knew was when they started to receive messages stamped with “the sender failed our fraud detection checks” – something that is never assuring. This only applies to ATP customers, but it’s not the first time Microsoft has failed to communicate important news.

Exchange Online has two new PowerShell cmdlets to help administrators recover deleted email on behalf of users. You can now search for deleted items and recover found items without having to sign into a user’s mailbox, something that will be popular with both administrators and users alike. The joy of helping users find email they deleted and can’t find themselves…

Owners of Office 365 Groups can delete groups if they want. Some don’t like this as it means that SharePoint site collections, teams, and plans are removed. The simple membership model used by Office 365 Groups is the cause, and while you cannot stop owners deleting their groups, you can take action to detect and recover deleted groups if necessary.

Office 365 now supports external access to Teams for guests with any email address, a development that creates some questions in the minds of those who might want to add guests from non-Office 365 domains. In this article, I try and answer some common questions that you might have about guest access.

Microsoft might be working on a free version of Teams to take on Slack. As it turns out, not many technical changes are needed to transform the full enterprise version of Teams as available inside Office 365 into a limited version that Microsoft can make available for free, leveraging its existing consumer office services like Outlook and OneDrive.

Six months after allowing users from other Office 365 domains to access Teams as guest users, Microsoft now supports access from any email address. You can now invite people to join teams from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Yandex, Outlook.com, or any other email system. The same basic Azure B2B collaboration flow is used to invite guests and redeem the invitations, so it should be a well-worn path for administrators at this stage.

GDPR is coming and Office 365 tenants need to be prepared to deal with topics like data spillage and the right to be forgotten. It’s easy to see how to remove someone’s PII from Exchange mailboxes and SharePoint Online, but you might have a bigger challenge dealing with offline data in PSTs and OneDrive-synchronized folders. More to ponder…