Tony Redmond

Intrusive Usage Data Exposed in Microsoft 365 Admin Center Over the past few week or so, a bunch of news reports have emerged about the new Microsoft 365 Productivity Score feature (Figure 1), which was announced at the Ignite 2019 conference before achieving general availability in October 2020. In the Microsoft blog, CVP Brad Anderson…

Refreshing the Substrate Last year, I wrote about the Office 365 substrate, a little understood but critical component of how Microsoft is developing their cloud services. That article followed a talk by Microsoft Fellow Jeffrey Snover at the Ignite 2019 conference. Now boasting the title of CTO for Modern Workforce Transformation, Snover recently explored the…

SMS and Voice MFA Methods in Microsoft’s Crosshairs On November 10 Alex Weinert, the Director of Identity Security at Microsoft, posted It’s Time to Hang Up on Phone Transports for Authentication. The article argues that it’s time to consider dumping the SMS and voice methods for multi-factor authentication (MFA) in favor of passwordless strong authentication…

How Microsoft Advises Tenants About New Features During a recent discussion, I was asked why Microsoft seems to publish so many incorrect roll-out dates for new Teams features. While my gut feel was that it certainly seems like some Teams features are delayed, some evidence was needed to prove or disprove the case. When Microsoft…

Launched in 2019 for the U.S. Microsoft introduced Play My Emails in Outlook mobile (initially iOS, now for Android too) at the Ignite 2019 conference. I was excited at the notion of being able to process email in a different way. The promise was that a natural voice would generate an intelligent readout of messages…

  In late October, Microsoft released a compliance assessment report written by Cohasset Associates to compare Microsoft 365 services against the requirements of U.S. financial regulations. The report covers SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, Exchange Online, and Skype for Business Online, but excludes Stream, OneNote, and Planner because these apps do not support retention…

Rights Management and Protection Sensitivity Labels are built using Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) and are available to Office 365 users with E3 or above licenses. When a label protects a file or message with encryption, the ability to decrypt the item to reveal its content is governed by the rights assigned to the recipient as…

No Data Compromised but Bad Day for Teams Retention Alarm bells went off on Thursday, October 29 when administrators in several tenants noticed that retention policies created to process Teams chat messages were apparently applied to Exchange mailboxes. Microsoft subsequently issued incident EX225368 “Admins may see Microsoft Teams retention policies unexpectedly update to Exchange Online…

Time to Review How Sensitivity Labels Are Used In Scoping Sensitivity Labels, I discuss the evolution of sensitivity labels and the ability to scope a label so that it deals with files and messages, container management, or both. Given this new capability, I questioned if it is a good idea to have multi-purpose labels and…

On October 14, Microsoft announced that Project Moca, a new “productivity module,” is available as a public preview for Office 365 commercial tenants. The feature had previously been made available to Education tenants in August and to premium Outlook.com accounts in June. Moca is the “Outlook spaces project,” the first sights of which leaked in…