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Tony Redmond has written thousands of articles about Microsoft technology since 1996. He covers Office 365 and associated technologies for Petri.com and is also the lead author for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, updated monthly to keep pace with change in the cloud.
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 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.
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.