Tony Redmond

A Bad Idea Reinforced In October 2019, Microsoft announced that it would allow Office 365 users to make self-service purchases of Power Platform licenses. Although this was viewed as a terrific idea within Microsoft and a useful way to generate new revenues, few Office 365 tenants were as positive. In fact, so much pushback happened…

AzureADPreview Module Gives Insight into Sign-in Data The Azure Active Directory (recently renamed Microsoft Entra ID) PowerShell module (now renamed the Azure Active Directory PowerShell for Graph module) comes in two versions. The general availability version is intended for production while the preview version (AzureADPreview) contains the cmdlets from the general availability version plus some…

Put October 13 In Your Diary Time passes and products age, except in the cloud where renewal is an ongoing process. For Exchange Server 2016, Microsoft is keen for you to know that it reaches the end of mainstream support on October 13, 2020. Extended support for Exchange 2016 ceases on October 14, 2025. Exiting…

The Office 365 Substrate uses Exchange Online mailboxes to store a lot of data that users never see. The data is used by the substrate for different purposes, mostly to make it easier for features to get to relevant information. Microsoft doesn’t document exactly what is stored, where it is stored, and how it is used, so we must poke around in the innards of mailboxes to see what we can discover.

Teams Advanced Communications at $12/user/month On August 1, Microsoft launched a new Teams Advanced Communications add-on license. Because the license is not of general interest, Microsoft has not bundled it in Office 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5. Instead, Advanced Communication is an add-on which must be purchased individually at $12/user/month (U.S. price). The new…

Integration of Tasks, Planner, and To Do Teams has supported Planner as an app and a channel tab since 2018. It’s a popular integration that is used by many Office 365 tenants to support coordination of team activities. Initially a team could only support one plan, and the need to support a plan per channel…

Slack’s Odd Complaint I read the news that Slack filed a competition complaint against Microsoft in the EU on July 22 with a mixture of mirth and despair. Mirth because of the allegations advanced by Slack; despair because a company like Slack would resort to such a tactic. Slack’s complaint says that “Microsoft has illegally…

Microsoft dodged the opportunity to fire a bullet into their own foot when they pulled back plans to launch “workspaces” in Exchange Online. Announced on Monday and withdrawn on Tuesday, Workspaces are a new form of room mailboxes, the difference being that room mailboxes are used to reserve traditional conference rooms while workspaces seem to…

Expanding the Control of Sensitivity Labels In a Teams live event to brief customers on July 14, Microsoft revealed details of how they plan to evolve the container settings in sensitivity labels to exert more control over SharePoint Online sites. Microsoft also plans to improve the flow of creating new sensitivity labels to create “label…

Good Visibility Over Guest Activity for Host Office 365 Tenants From a host tenant perspective, Microsoft has done a great job with Azure B2B Collaboration, the foundation for guest user access for applications like Teams and Planner. External people can be invited to join groups and teams or share documents and folders (including now through…

Microsoft has a very competent PR engine that is skilled at pumping news out that’s designed to thrill and excite people. We saw this happening in full flood on July 8 when Microsoft announced a set of improvements for Teams meetings. Now that the fuss surrounding the announcements has calmed down, it’s time to take…

PowerShell has its Limitations I like using PowerShell to work with Office 365 data, but sometimes PowerShell isn’t the right tool. It might be too slow, or a PowerShell cmdlet isn’t available to work with some data. Planner is a good example. People have asked about reporting the plans available to a user or the…