Tony Redmond

Stream to Use SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business Microsoft announced Stream 2.0, a major refresh of the Stream video portal, in the What’s New for Microsoft Stream and Video in Microsoft 365 session at the virtual Ignite 2020 conference. The big news is that Stream is moving its video storage from the Stream Azure-based…

Last On-Premises Version? Last March, a Microsoft employee caused a stir with an assertion that Exchange 2019 will be the last on-premises version of Microsoft’s enterprise email server. At the time, my assessment was “I don’t expect Microsoft to ship on-premises versions of Exchange or SharePoint in the way they’ve done in the past because…

Welcome to 48 Hours of Free Technical Content The annual Microsoft Ignite conference for IT Professionals was originally planned to run in New Orleans starting today. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Microsoft decided not to run in-person events through June 2021, and consequently Ignite 2020 is now a 48-hour online event run over three days…

Clamping Down on Guests After several years’ usage, most Office 365 tenants are accustomed to guest users and the way that the Microsoft 365 groups membership model allows guests access to group resources such as plans, sites, and teams. For most, the model works well, and the only issue is how to best manage the…

Controlling Access to Sensitive Content A recent Microsoft Technical Community article covers how to use Azure AD Privileged Identity Management to control access to the super-user permission for Azure Information Protection. An account holding super-user permission can access any content protected (encrypted) by an Azure Information Protection or Office 365 sensitivity label. I don’t intend…

Outlook Prepares for the Coming of iOS14 Apple’s much-awaited release of iOS 14 is due this Fall. According to Office 365 notification MC221506 published on 4 September, a consequence of the release is that Microsoft will adjust its minimum iOS system requirements for Outlook for iOS and watchOS. Microsoft has always supported the two most…

The Evolution of Sensitivity Labels When Microsoft launched sensitivity labels in late 2018, the implementation was simple: you defined labels that could mark and protect Office files and email and published them to users, who then applied the labels as needed. Over time, Microsoft has increased the usefulness of sensitivity labels by building native support…

Creating Alerts from Office 365 Audit Events As events from workloads flow into the Office 365 audit log, activity alerts and alert policies look for instances of specific events. Alert policies are more sophisticated because they allow time-limited thresholds for activities to be defined so that an alert won’t be created unless the threshold is…

Teams, Tabs, and Lists Office 365 notification MC220295 posted on 13 Aug 2020 (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 64162) announces the arrival of the Lists app for Teams. This app allows access to Microsoft Lists, the new iteration of the well-known SharePoint lists, with the notable restriction that personal lists (stored in OneDrive for Business) are…

The Challenge of Retention Processing Retention labels control how long items remain in an Office 365 workload and what happens once the retention period expires. Labels can be assigned manually, but the success of manual labeling depends on users understanding how to make the best choice from the available retention labels. Sometimes the choice is…

Smart Technology Figures Out What You Want to Type On May 8, Microsoft announced plans (MC212345) to introduce a feature called “suggested text” to OWA. Microsoft 365 roadmap item 63795 says “Using smart technology, Outlook will predict text while you type. Just use the Tab key to accept the text prediction.” Text predictions is another…

Smart Information Tracking On July 28, Microsoft said that Microsoft Lists, described as a “smart information tracking app in Microsoft 365,” began rolling out to targeted release tenants with the aim of completing this phase of the deployment by the end of August. The deployment covers business customers for now, but full deployment is expected…