Tony Redmond

Since Office 365 appeared in 2011, Microsoft’s collaboration story has varied according to whatever technology is available. Originally based on Exchange and SharePoint, it’s gone through Yammer, Office 365 Groups, and now Teams. You’d be forgiven for being confused by the frequent changes in the strategy du jour. And now we have inner and outer loops to consider, at least according to Microsoft’s favorite collaboration slide. Here’s my take.

Microsoft upgraded their EOP anti-spoofing capabilities inside Office 365, which is good, but they didn’t tell anyone. The first users knew was when they started to receive messages stamped with “the sender failed our fraud detection checks” – something that is never assuring. This only applies to ATP customers, but it’s not the first time Microsoft has failed to communicate important news.

Exchange Online has two new PowerShell cmdlets to help administrators recover deleted email on behalf of users. You can now search for deleted items and recover found items without having to sign into a user’s mailbox, something that will be popular with both administrators and users alike. The joy of helping users find email they deleted and can’t find themselves…

Owners of Office 365 Groups can delete groups if they want. Some don’t like this as it means that SharePoint site collections, teams, and plans are removed. The simple membership model used by Office 365 Groups is the cause, and while you cannot stop owners deleting their groups, you can take action to detect and recover deleted groups if necessary.

Office 365 now supports external access to Teams for guests with any email address, a development that creates some questions in the minds of those who might want to add guests from non-Office 365 domains. In this article, I try and answer some common questions that you might have about guest access.

Microsoft might be working on a free version of Teams to take on Slack. As it turns out, not many technical changes are needed to transform the full enterprise version of Teams as available inside Office 365 into a limited version that Microsoft can make available for free, leveraging its existing consumer office services like Outlook and OneDrive.

Six months after allowing users from other Office 365 domains to access Teams as guest users, Microsoft now supports access from any email address. You can now invite people to join teams from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Yandex, Outlook.com, or any other email system. The same basic Azure B2B collaboration flow is used to invite guests and redeem the invitations, so it should be a well-worn path for administrators at this stage.

Office 365 keeps on changing, which makes it very hard to keep up with detail. The big stuff gets covered in articles but small changes might be overlooked. In this post, Tony looks at some of the changes that happened in the last week or so that you might have missed, including Teams, Planner, OneDrive, Yammer, and Exchange. And preparation for GDPR…

GDPR is coming and Office 365 tenants need to be prepared to deal with topics like data spillage and the right to be forgotten. It’s easy to see how to remove someone’s PII from Exchange mailboxes and SharePoint Online, but you might have a bigger challenge dealing with offline data in PSTs and OneDrive-synchronized folders. More to ponder…

Now that so many apps (like Teams) create Office 365 Groups, it’s logical that some of the groups will serve their purpose and then need to be archived. Office 365 offers no way to do this, but conceptually it’s a reasonably easy task and something that PowerShell handles with aplomb.