Tony Redmond

A relaxed week between the bedlam of Ignite and the calmness of the IT/DEV Connections conference in Las Vegas gives me a chance to catch up with some of the less-important but still worthy things I learned about recently. The Exchange team celebrated the 20th anniversary of the product, another of its leaders joined the Microsoft SLT, email from Paul Robichaux caused some problems, and the new Office 365 Admin Center finally reached general availability.

Microsoft has made a big thing about the one-click option in the Exchange Online Administration Center (EAC) to convert a traditional email distribution group to an Office 365 Group. However, the option only works for groups that consist of Exchange Online mailboxes.

Tony Redmond explores some things he found out or explored during the week, including a solid DLP roadmap for Office 365, how BMC Remedy creates incident tickets from DLP audit events, that Veeam now offers a backup for Exchange Online, how QUADROtech’s ADAM plans to drag public folders into the 21st century, and more.

There’s lots to hear and learn about with regard to Office 365 at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta this week. All of the product groups are putting their best face forward to impress and amaze customers with what has happened or what will happen inside the service. Here’s some of what I have been hearing.

Yammer and Office 365 take two very different approaches to collaboration, but both exist inside Office 365. Although slow in coming, Microsoft has finally given details about how Yammer and Office 365 Groups will connect to each other. AAD is the glue and SharePoint, notebooks, plans, and calendars are the common functionality available to both types of groups.

An exhausting first day at Ignite brought lots of Office 365 news. Surprisingly, the number of Office 365 MAU hasn’t grown, at least not publicly, and confirmation arrived that the Outlook apps now run in the Microsoft Cloud. Lots of focus on using intelligence to repel threats. MyAnalytics arrived, and Exchange 2016 CU3 embraced the Outlook REST API.

The world of Office 365 is ever-changing. This week my attention was distracted by the inability of the Admin Center to report unlicensed accounts, a Watson dump in an ActiveSync cmdlet, some interesting data about the number of Office 365 users affected by outages as revealed through an API, and more odd entries in the Audit Log. Thankfully Ignite is next week and nothing will happen.

Inactive mailboxes are only available inside Exchange Online and don’t exist outside Office 365. Litigation or in-place holds keep inactive but soft-deleted mailboxes in a state in which their data is easily accessible for compliance and recordkeeping purposes.

Microsoft has put a huge amount of emphasis on Office 365 Groups as the basis for team-based collaboration for its cloud service. Collaboration often requires input from external people and that hasn’t been possible until now. The announcement of external user support for Office 365 Groups is welcome, even if it is restricted in part.

Migration of legacy archives like Enterprise Vault are often left as the last part of the journey from on-premises servers to Office 365. A wide range of third-party migration tools are available, but many complex twists and turns await the unwary as they cope with journal reports, archive mailboxes, splitting and explosions, and the sheer amount of data to be migrated. It’s an interesting problem to solve.

Office 365 Connectors allow data drawn from multiple internet sources like Twitter to be imported into Office 365. This article explains why imported tweets result in multiple SendAs events logged in the Office 365 Audit log.

The Office 365 Import Service does a good job of “bringing data home” by ingesting PST files and other data into Exchange Online mailboxes and SharePoint Online libraries. But sometimes you just want to do your own thing – and you can with the New-MailboxImportRequest cmdlet.