Tony Redmond

Much excitement was sparked when Microsoft introduced Teams, their purported Slack-killer, on November 2. Now that everyone’s calmed down a tad and we’ve had the time to get some solid hands-on time with Teams, it’s appropriate to look at what Microsoft has delivered and explore the strengths and weaknesses of Teams.

Teams Advanced Communications at $12/user/month On August 1, Microsoft launched a new Teams Advanced Communications add-on license. Because the license is not of general interest, Microsoft has not bundled it in Office 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5. Instead, Advanced Communication is an add-on which must be purchased individually at $12/user/month (U.S. price). The new…

Microsoft announced at Ignite that you can soon manage Teams through the Teams and Skype for Business Online Admin Center. Office 365 administrators will welcome this because it means that they can manage teams without being a member of those teams. And they can avoid PowerShell, which is a pity.

In this guide, we’ll explain the technology behind plus addressing and how to enable and use plus email addresses with Exchange Online. The background of plus addressing The idea of plus addressing has existed for many years. The idea is simple enough. An email address is divided into a local part (resolved within an organization)…

Microsoft introduced the Safe Attachments feature as part of its Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) offering in 2015. ATP is an option for Exchange Online Protection (EOP). It is included in the Office 365 E5 plan and can be licensed as an add-on for $2/user per month for other Office 365 plans. Now Safe Attachments can handle dynamic delivery and the improvement is noticeable.

Securing Confidential SharePoint Online Data SharePoint Online sites hold some very confidential information. Now that SharePoint Online supports sensitivity labels, you can protect individual documents with encryption to stop their contents leaking. Other features, like regarding newly uploaded documents sensitive by default to stop them being shared externally until Data Loss Prevention (DLP) processing completes,…

Azure Conditional Access policies can be used with Azure Information Protection (AIP) to secure protected documents against unauthorized access. If you have already decided to use AIP as part of your Office 365 data protection strategy, adding a conditional access policy is a quick way to frustrate people who try to access documents when they shouldn’t.

Licensing the range of Microsoft 365 compliance and security features is a task taken on by the bravest. Or so they say. Another way of putting it is that people just don’t understand what licenses are needed for the different compliance, data governance, and security features. A new Microsoft 365 Compliance plan and three sub-licenses might make it easier, even if they’re more expensive. After reading the PDF to explain what licenses are needed, maybe you’ll know what you need to buy.

The quarterly cumulative updates for Exchange Server quietly appeared with little fuss this week. Meanwhile, in cloud land, Office 365 continues the crusade to eradicate distribution lists with new bulk conversions to Office 365 Groups.

The new Request Files feature in OneDrive for Business is great for users but comes with no admin controls. You can block the feature completely with a kludge and use Office 365 audit records to know when people are requesting files. However, Microsoft could make the feature so much better by extending some existing controls to make requesting files work better and more securely.