Tony Redmond

If you use Office 365 Video today, you will use Stream in the future. The migration is happening – slowly. But when it does, you can use Office 365 Groups to organize videos into mini-portals and take advantage of some interesting “intelligent” features to better use content in videos. The only downside is that you’ll have to pay a little more.

Microsoft Teams has introduced a way for Office 365 tenants to archive teams. Basically you set the team to be read-only, a status that affects conversations and files. However, it doesn’t stop team members having read-write access to other group resources, like Planner or Power BI.

Office 365 Groups and Teams support guest users, who enjoy full access to the SharePoint document libraries. You might not want this, because not every document in those libraries are suitable for sharing with guests. The question is how to collaborate with guests while maintaining some control over information. Rights management seems like a good way to accomplish the task.

Lots happens in a month within Office 365. I can’t possibly write an article about every change in SharePoint, Teams, Exchange, etc. released by Microsoft,, so sometimes I need to publish a catch-up (or catch-up) post. Here are ten things that I think are interesting enough for you to know about.

Microsoft has updated the Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) to transfer some Exchange on-premises configuration settings. That’s nice, but possibly too little and too late to make any real difference. Office 365 has moved on, most people who wanted to configure hybrid connections are now in the cloud, and the settings aren’t all that exciting.

The Office 365 Audit Log holds lots of interesting information about how people share information. In this article, we explore how to use the audit log records to discover the document sharing habits of users, including the documents shared with guest users and people outside the tenant.

I don’t consider backups to be a necessity for Office 365, but ISVs continue to offer these products and customers continue to buy, so I chatted with Spanning to find out what’s happening in the Office 365 market, who’s using cloud backups, and why. We also spoke about the challenges that backup vendors continue to have in coping with some of the unique aspects of Office 365.

Many Office 365 Groups and Teams have external guest members.Part 2 of our series about external access to documents in Office 365 explains how to use PowerShell to query groups about external guests so that we understand where the guests come from and what groups and teams they can access.

Teams is now able to capture compliance records for contributions to private chats by guests or on-premises users in a hybrid Office 365 organization. The new mechanism uses “phantom mailboxes” in the cloud to hold the compliance records for on-premises users. You must register your tenant to be able to get an updated GUI for the Security and Compliance Center, but PowerShell can find these records now.

It’s a good idea to understand whether any external people have access to documents in your Office 365 tenant. There’s no option on the Office 365 or SharePoint Online consoles to tell you what access external users enjoy to SharePoint sites, so we must use some PowerShell to interrogate SharePoint and see what that reveals.