Tony Redmond

Outlook 2016 click-to-run desktop clients are now getting the necessary code for the Focused Inbox feature. It’s a good step forward when a really important client is upgraded with an important feature, but you kind of wonder what’s happening for the poor-old on-premises community…

Microsoft’s Q3 FY17 results tell us that Office 365 now has over 100 million monthly active users. That’s great, but the really interesting thing is how many on-premises seats remain to move to the cloud.

Microsoft extends the Office 365 data governance framework to cover conversations in Teams. Office 365 captures chats as items in Exchange Online mailboxes that are discoverable with content searches. And audit events work too!

A French law might force companies to turn Office 365 off at the weekend. It might be blissful to never receive mail or be asked for a document when you’re supposed to have downtime. The question is how to make this happen with Office 365?

Office 365 content searches are very powerful at finding content in SharePoint, Exchange, Groups, public folders, and OneDrive. Permissions filters can restrict the ability of eDiscovery managers to see results. With a little PowerShell, you can create effective filters.

As part of the Office 365 data governance framework, tenants can now create retention policies that apply to the mailbox and team site belonging to Office 365 Groups. The process is quite straightforward, but some gotchas exist that you need to think about!

Office 365 now boasts a new data governance framework to provide compliance coverage across multiple workloads. The new framework covers Exchange, SharePoint OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business, and Office 365 Groups. It is a big step forward for tenants that have been waiting for Microsoft to deliver common compliance processing across the full service.

Microsoft Planner added the ability to assign multiple people to a task. It’s a good step, but it’s the first new feature in nine months. That’s curious when you compare to the development cadence of other Office 365 applications.

Delve does a good job of finding Office 365 content stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. But you can make Delve so much more effective by changing your habits to tag documents and add them to boards. Try these simple steps that pay big dividends.

The latest version of the PowerShell module for Azure Active Directory contains the cmdlets to recover a deleted Office 365 Group (and a plan or a team). We have been waiting for this feature for two and a half years, but maybe the waiting makes the feature all the sweeter…

Exchange Online now boasts an “archive folder”, helpfully furnished to allow users to keep items they need to retain. Unless they have an archive mailbox. Or use Outlook auto-archive. It’s just a tad confusing.

After an extensive trial, Microsoft is preparing to release the Office 365 Adoption Content Pack to all enterprise tenants. Gaining insight into how people use the Office 365 applications will help tenants maximize their investment in the cloud. However, the content pack is not a silver bullet and won’t make your organization any more effective than it is today.