Tony Redmond

Microsoft has announced the demise of RPC over HTTP (“Outlook Anywhere”) connections, which will be blocked for connections to Exchange Online from Outlook desktop clients from October 31, 2017. The year’s notice is intended to allow tenants to upgrade clients to the necessary versions.

Lots of news about moving things around in Office 365 this week — how to move items that have been archived by Exchange Online back to primary mailboxes, how to move tenants between data center regions, and finally, Microsoft plans to help public folders transform themselves into Office 365 Groups.

Much excitement was sparked when Microsoft introduced Teams, their purported Slack-killer, on November 2. Now that everyone’s calmed down a tad and we’ve had the time to get some solid hands-on time with Teams, it’s appropriate to look at what Microsoft has delivered and explore the strengths and weaknesses of Teams.

Exchange 2016 CU3 is the first version to support Windows 2016 as a deployment platform. At least, it was. Microsoft has discovered a problem lurking deep in the bowels of Windows 2016 that causes Exchange 2016 CU3 to crash when deployed in a database availability group (DAG). IIS is tagged as the problem child, but it’s really not.

A busy week with lots of new things to discuss in the world of Office 365. The Outlook for iOS client has a new scheduling assistant, Microsoft launched Teams, its hoped-for Slack-killer, Quest returns to full life, and Skype for Business is going to improve voice calls.

Google’s battle with Microsoft for dominance in cloud application suites continues. New developments, new applications, and even new names keep the pace up as Office 365 and G Suite go head-to-head for customer loyalties.

Delve makes it easy to find documents and other items stored in Office 365. Sometimes some surprising results show up after a search. Maybe Microsoft needs to adjust some filters!

Some recent changes made by Microsoft in how an Exchange Online mailbox is treated when an Office 365 license is removed from their owner’s account caused chaos for the account provisioning system of a large U.S. university. The changes actually make a lot of sense, but it’s bad when Microsoft makes changes like this without warning anyone.

Microsoft’s Q1 FY17 results contain the news that the annualized revenue run rate for commercial cloud products is now over $13 billion. Perhaps even more interesting is the news that the new official figure for Office 365 monthly active users is 85 million. At this rate, the 100 million barrier will be cracked in early 2017.

Some interesting announcements during the last week informed us about Yammer getting better at compliance and a new Office 365 connector. I’m not so hot on the bots, though. In other news, MyAnalytics has an unexplained love for Internet Explorer and the topic of password trimming and the Office 365 maximum password length caused some confusion – at least for one administrator! And some news about an interesting Exchange 20th anniversary video and a VDI collaboration project between VMware and Microsoft for Skype for Business rounds out the week.

It’s frustrating when a promised feature isn’t available. Microsoft announced auto-expanding archive mailboxes for Exchange Online in June 2016, but Office 365 customers have reported that their storage quota is limited to 170GB. That’s a lot of space, but hardly the “truly bottomless archive” that Microsoft promised. What’s going on?

The Focused Inbox is the keynote feature of the Outlook for iOS and Android mobile clients. All other clients in the Outlook family have used the Clutter feature, which processes mail on the server and removes unimportant items into the Clutter folder. Now Microsoft is dropping Clutter and introducing the Focused Inbox across the entire Outlook family. Rationalization and commonality is good, especially when features that really work are made available to all clients. Here’s how the changeover will occur.