Tony Redmond

Microsoft is improving the way that people share calendars in Office 365 to make it easier and more straightforward. That’s nice, especially as the new mechanism extends to Outlook.com as well. However, no joy for on-premises servers…

It’s impossible for an email hygiene service like Exchange Online Protection (EOP) to suppress every possible piece of malware that attempts to penetrate Office 365. Even the broad array of anti-malware techniques will let some small percentage of spam through. Email administrators need to be on guard all the time.

Auditing is usually one of the last things that are considered for implementation in an IT system. The Office 365 audit log gathers a lot of information. Can you use it?

Microsoft is increasing the default mailbox quota for the Office 365 E3 and E5 plans to 100 GB. That’s quite a lot of space to fill, but Microsoft has good reasons for upping the limit.

It’s reasonably common for an HTTP 400 error to occur when accessing an Office 365 page. The Office 365 Admin Center seems to be particularly susceptible to the problem. What can you do when an Office 365 page barfs?

Microsoft set out to rename OWA as Outlook on the web last year. That effort never gained real acceptance in the Exchange community, but in fact the project isn’t to rebrand OWA. Instead, it’s all about preserving and building out the Outlook brand across multiple clients and different experiences. Microsoft is struggling against the weight of history here, so don’t expect any great success anytime soon.

Managing Azure Active Directory using PowerShell is a pretty common technique for Office 365 administrators to master. Many scripts to automate administrative processes have been written to leverage the -Msol* cmdlets included in version one of the Azure Active Directory PowerShell module. Version 2 of the module is now generally available, which is good, but be careful because scripts need to be updated before you can use the new module.

Microsoft is introducing safety tips to Office 365 to highlight bad or suspicious email that might tempt users to do things that they shouldn’t. The initiative is good and valuable, but it rather loses some of its gloss because not all safety tips are exposed in Outlook. However, Microsoft is making sure that mobile and other clients see safety tips, even if not in the same interactive manner as is possible with OWA.

If you examine the network connections opened by an Outlook 2016 client, you might find many connections established to the mailboxes belonging to Office 365 Groups. Using connections to grab data is fine, but why are the connections quite so persistent and what do they do anyway?

Microsoft CVP Julia White says that it’s time to dispel the top cloud myths of 2016. It’s good to have an opinion on these matters, but when an interested party like Microsoft advances a case that something is a myth, you have to ask yourself whether the myths are true or not. So here’s a look at those six top cloud myths in the context of Office 365.

The news that Office 365 achieved 99.99% availability in the last quarter comes as no real surprise. As cloud services become ever more massive, it becomes harder for any incident to affect a service’s SLA in any meaningful way.

Microsoft plans to make the information contained in the Office 365 Roadmap more accessible so that software updates can be tracked from development through announcement to implementation. It all sounds good. The only question is why it took so long to happen. In other news, some odd things happened in Office 365 this week, but I’m not going to write about them (much) as Office 365 Snippets are no more.