Tony Redmond

The new Office 365 data governance framework has been updated to allow content marked with classification labels to receive a manual review before being removed. It’s the kind of thing that makes data governance administrators happy.

Microsoft launched the long-awaited external access for Teams on Sept 11. The downside is that only Azure AD accounts are supported, but the functionality is sufficient to support interaction between Office 365 tenants. You can access a team in my tenant and I can access a team in yours. What’s not to like about that?

Office 365 allows you to block a user when necessary, as when someone is leaving the organization. You can also initiate a forced sign-out, but the option to do so is buried in the user’s OneDrive for Business settings, which seems like a logical place to find it!

Microsoft has new tools to migrate public folders (the “cockroaches of Exchange”) to Office 365 Groups. Sounds good. The good news is that the tools work, even if they need a lot of manual oversight. ISVs offer tools to do the same job with more automation. The choice is yours!

If you use Office 365 and store documents in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business, the Office applications can autosave as you work to ensure that you never lose any content. It’s a good idea and the implementation works well. But I have a slight nagging doubt about the network impact for some tenants.

Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams are two of the collaboration offerings available within Office 365. Some get very vexed about the two applications. I don’t because I think the two serve different audiences and exist for different reasons.

Microsoft is working on ways to improve how tenants receive support for Office 365. The problem is that they haven’t told anyone what they or doing or why they are changing the support process. Some good things are happening, but it’s all cloaked in darkness.

The European Union will introduce the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in May 2018. The intention is to deliver better protection for personal data, which is laudable. Like with many regulations, the problems arise in implementation. Office 365 holds a lot of personal data, so Office 365 tenants must cope with GDPR.

Microsoft must have been happy with the $18.9 billion run rate they achieved for commercial cloud products in fiscal 2017. But what segment makes the majority of this revenue? Microsoft is not saying, but given the number of Office 365 users, it seems like it is Office 365.

On August 9, Microsoft launched the Office 365 Groups expiration policy into preview. It expires groups after a set period and helps keep the spread of groups under control. All sounds good, but the new feature needs an Azure Active Directory Premium license, which isn’t so welcome.

The Azure AD team changed the sign-in experience used by services like Office 365 to improve and rationalize it. But things didn’t work out so well as tenants reacted badly to the way Microsoft communicated the change. Or rather, failed to communicate the change.

The Office 365 Admin Center experienced a problem on August 3 when it began to include data from other tenants in its usage reports. It seems like the problem arose in a flawed code change and Microsoft fixed the issue quickly. What’s worrying is what data leaks like this mean in the context of regulations like the EU GDPR.