Tony Redmond

Teams is one of Microsoft’s hubs for teamwork within Office 365. People work with documents all the time and the documents are in SharePoint Online libraries. However, Teams imposes its own view of documents and omits some of the functionality available through the SharePoint browser interface. This doesn’t seem to matter very much, except in the case of data governance.

A recent vacation meant that I didn’t spend as much time as usual monitoring changes inside Office 365. As it happened, lots of change occurred. The large stuff (major updates for Teams and Planner) has already been covered in detail, but many other small but important changes are now active inside Office 365. And, as always, it’s the small stuff that can trip you up. Here’s what I learned after a weekend of catching up…

MyAnalytics is one of the AI components inside Office 365. Part of the E5 plan or available as an add-on, MyAnalytics is usually seen as a dashboard of weekly activity. Its Outlook add-on can highlight commitments you made in email and remind you about other ways you can work smarter. The only problem is that MyAnalytics is handicapped by a lack of signals…

Microsoft has released some useful updates for the Office 365 Planner app, but external access is still not there, which is baffling. On the other hand, you now have an OWA-like schedule view, filters to suppress tasks that you don’t want to see, and better notifications to tell you when you must do some work. And an iCalendar feed is coming soon to allow you to clutter up your Outlook calendar with even more stuff.

Teams is the poster child for Office 365 right now, so it’s only right that Microsoft has refreshed the Teams UI a year into the app’s life. The changes look pretty good and are useful, even if the Who Bot might not be able to unpick the complexities of the organization you work for.

One of the premium features for Office 365 Groups is the ability to use a naming policy so that all groups (and Teams) have a compliant name. The policy is a nice-to-have feature if you are concerned about having a well-organized directory with all your groups gathered in the same place. The question is whether enough business value is gained from a naming policy to make it worthwhile.

The Meltdown vulnerability is clearly serious, especially if you run on-premises servers. But if you use Office 365, should you be worried? Well, maybe, but when you sign up for a cloud service, you transfer responsibility for understanding and responding to threat to the service provider. Over to Microsoft…

Office 365 Groups (and Teams) can quickly become obsolete, but administrators need some help to find the underused groups. PowerShell comes to the rescue through a mixture of checks against the group mailbox, Office 365 audit log, and Teams compliance records. A nice HTML report is the result – and isn’t that always welcome.

Many differences exist between the on-premises and cloud worlds. The Files folder is one of Office 365’s unique features. The folder exists in user mailboxes to hold information about “file-oriented experiences.” As it turns out, apps like Delve, SharePoint, and Office 365 Groups like to display file information to users, but they need a fast and efficient way to get to that data. Files is the answer!

You know that Office 365 Groups have a mailbox and that the mailbox holds conversations and the group calendar. But many other folders exist in a group mailbox. Some are used for internal purposes, some by clients. And sometimes you want to look to see what those folders hold, as when some mail might have been misdirected to Junk Email.