Tony Redmond

Microsoft clarified what AAD features need premium licenses at Ignite. Tenants need many of those features to control Office 365 Groups and Teams, and some of the listed features are surprising. Did you know that the group creation policy is a premium feature? Or adding a default classification. The chosen set of features seems odd, but at least Microsoft is now clear about what you must license.

You can capture Exchange mailbox events in the Office 365 audit log, but only if you remember to enable auditing for target mailboxes. Exchange Online doesn’t enable new mailboxes for auditing by default, so administrators must remember to enable the mailboxes manually – and check for new mailboxes periodically. If you don’t, nothing is recorded and your audit log will be empty.

After returning from the Ignite conference, I have pages of notes to pour over. Here are some of the more interesting things i learned about Office 365, including who should be in my “inner loop” and “outer loop”, why Microsoft talks about Microsoft 365 when they really mean Office 365, and some Exchange Online cmdlets I had not heard about before.

Revealed at the Ignite conference, Microsoft plans to make some changes relatively soon to relieve the complexity and overhead of deploying and managing hybrid Exchange organizations. Microsoft also showed how to move mailboxes between tenants. It’s a small part of the tenant-to-tenant migration scenario, but it’s good to see it happening.

A UK-based leak revealed a plan to require Office 365 inactive mailboxes to have licenses. Storage costs, but because Microsoft told people to use inactive mailboxes for purposes such as keeping content for ex-employees, it wasn’t a good idea to suddenly demand licenses. Good sense prevailed and the plan isn’t going ahead.

Microsoft will release Office 365 multi-geo tenants to general availability in early 2018. You can then deploy Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and (later) SharePoint Online across multiple Office 365 datacenter regions. It’s good for data sovereignty, but won’t solve network problems.

Day 2 at Ignite featured news about SharePoint, Exchange, Office 365 Groups, and Teams, And on a personal note, I had the chance to speak twice. That was nice, but I’m exhausted and there’s still three days to go.

Microsoft made a number of announcements about improvements they are making to Office 365 administration at the Ignite 2017 conference. Here’s a synopsis of what was announced from support for scoped administration using Azure AD admin units to a new “Usage Score.”

Everyone has a different experience at a massive conference like Microsoft Ignite. Here’s some personal notes from Day 1 of the 2017 event. As always, my conference days are a mixture of sessions, chats, and walking.

At the Ignite conference in Orlando, Microsoft confirmed that they will transition Skype for Business Online to Teams over the next year or so. Here’s how the transition will happen.

Office 365 audit logging generates a lot of data – sometimes too much. The trick is to know what events are recorded and what applications capture. Some pretty strange audit events turn up in the log, but everyone should relax because they are just traces of the system doing its own thing.

Now that Microsoft has shipped external access for Teams, it is obvious that they have some work to do to smoothen access and increase functionality. Although access works as long as guest users have accounts in other Office 365 tenants, areas like switching, auditing what external users do, compliance, and blocking deserve some consideration. Here’s what we know from the last week.