Tony Redmond

Microsoft plans to auto-generate Office 365 Groups for managers to enable them to collaborate better with employees. Sounds good, until you realize that the reporting relationships stored in Azure Active Directory drive the process. And we all know how reliable that information really is.

My transition to an iPhone is fine and I have mastered Outlook for iOS. That is, except for Contacts, which are a problem because Outlook must obey Apple’s rules. And I won’t even discuss searching.

The Microsoft Teams application is now generally available. Lots has been done to improve Teams since its preview release and Microsoft has made many good updates. Some edges remain for Microsoft to work on, but Teams is now more than a valid competitor for Slack in the chat-based collaboration market.

Backup vendors have been slow to move from an on-premises view of data. Office 365 applications form a software parts bin used to build new apps and backup and restore is more complex. AvePoint now supports backup and restore of Outlook Groups. One step forward…

The U.S. patent office granted IBM a patent in January that seems to cover email auto-reply. The only problem is that auto-replies existed a long time before IBM claimed to have invented them. But it’s all good now.

Microsoft has introduced a new feature into public preview to allow Office 365 tenants to manage license allocations to users via membership of security or Office 365 Groups. It is not a full-blown license management system by any means, but it will help small to medium companies get more from their Office 365 licenses.

Changing from one mobile platform to another can be interesting. I went from Windows 10 Mobile to iOS and so far, no major damage is done. Some interesting differences exist in how Outlook for iOS and Outlook mobile synchronize email to devices. I wanted to learn more, so I poked and found out why the differences exist.

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.

Microsoft has moved 400 million Outlook.com mailboxes to an Office 365 infrastructure. Outlook.com mailboxes are now powered by Exchange Online and exploit other parts of the infrastructure like EOP. It’s a good change from a engineering and economic perspective.

Microsoft has intensified its competition with Slack by making the Teams platform more attractive for developers. New Bots and deep link capabilities are now available. Meantime, Microsoft also says that they will enable Teams for all Office 365 business tenants.

Teams and Planner are excellent examples of new functionality that Microsoft can create using the toolkit of parts that exist within Office 365. The two applications have excited and delighted customers since their announcement, but the applications are not yet complete. Some challenges exist that Microsoft really needs to take on to round out functionality and capabilities.

Microsoft offers Office 365 administrators the opportunity to measure the security of their tenant against standard benchmarks set by Microsoft. Despite some glitches, the Secure Score service is a worthwhile and useful tool.