Tony Redmond

Microsoft has announced that they will block Office 365 tenants from creating workload-specific searches from July 2017. Instead of using Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, you have to create content searches and eDiscovery cases through the Security and Compliance Center. It’s a good change, even with the complication of keeping old searches until they expire.

Beginning in March 2017, SharePoint site owners will no longer be able to create new site mailboxes. Existing site mailboxes will function until they are replaced by something else.

Background processing usually remains hidden from end users. No need exists for a user to understand what maintenance goes on under the covers of the service. Office 365 delivers service with no fuss to its users, but recently I have noticed some instances when background processes have made themselves felt. Although these are not serious issues, they are a worrying sign of a lack of attention to detail.

Office 365 Connectors provide a means to connect network data sources such as Twitter, Trello, and RSS feeds to Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams. The out-of-the-box connectors work well, but there’s nothing like being able to process your own data, which is exactly what the Incoming Webhook connector allows you to do. In this example, we grab some Office 365 service incident information and post it to a group. All a mere matter of writing some PowerShell code.

Microsoft’s FY17 Q2 results posted on January 26 boasted a 49% year-over-year growth in commercial Office 365 revenues, contributing to an annualized run rate for commercial cloud products that now “exceeds” $14 billion. The number of cloud users has grown again, underlying the continuing movement of work to the Office 365 and Azure.

Microsoft has long used OWA as the test-bed client for new features. After all, it’s easy to update a web client. Now they’ve added the ability to integrate content stored in Office 365 Groups in OWA searches. It’s a nice feature, as is the message digest for Office 365 updates that you can have sent to your mailbox.

Microsoft has finally provided an effective method to allow users to recall messages. Outlook’s Recall Message function usually doesn’t work, but OWA’s new Undo Send will stop messages that should never be sent. Five seconds might be too short to realize that you have made a mistake and should stop an outbound message, but ten seconds is about right. And if you are really indecisive, you can take up to 30 seconds to decide whether a message should go.

An update to SharePoint Online for some Office 365 tenants clashed with Google’s determination to move from SHA-1 to SHA-2 as the basis for securing web sites. The symptom is that Chrome flags SharePoint sites as “Not Secure”, which is a pretty worrying thing for an Office 365 administrator to see. Fortunately, Microsoft is reversing the update out to fix the problem.

Microsoft StaffHub is a new Office 365 application built from bits of Office 365 Groups, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Azure, and Teams. The concept is simple – provide an application to allow the schedules of workers to be managed through a combination of browser and mobile interfaces. It’s an idea that will be popular with some Office 365 tenants, but it’s probably of limited interest to the majority.

It’s hard to think of new features for an application like Word that has been around for so long. Adding something that nags the user to be more precise and concise wouldn’t seem like it would be popular, but I rather like the new “Editor” feature. And providing more context in spell checking is a good thing too!

You might be familiar with the DLP policies available in Exchange or SharePoint. These policies work, but they are workload-specific. Microsoft has embarked on a journey to replace them with Unified DLP policies, which provide protection across multiple Office 365 workloads. The new policies are not yet as functional as those available for Exchange, but they will get there.

Microsoft can’t be expected to code for every possible scenario within Office 365. That’s why PowerShell is so useful as it lets administrators come up with their own solution. Master the Shell!