Tony Redmond

Brain Fails to Understand Microsoft I know I must be missing something in Microsoft’s cunning plan to make priority accounts available in Microsoft 365. It must be a basic point that I have overlooked, some simple need that has remained unanswered since the introduction of Office 365 in June 2011. But I can’t make head…

Helping Investigators Understand What Happened In March, Microsoft eventually released the MailItemsAccessed “crucial audit event” for accounts holding Office 365 E5 licenses (other suitable licenses include Microsoft 365 E5 or the Microsoft 365 E5 compliance). Crucial events are deemed to be of higher value to investigators or others who need to understand exactly what happened…

Logical Division of Azure Active Directory Management Since its launch in 1999, Active Directory has used Organizational Units (OUs) to logically partition the directory. Despite discussions going back as far as 2014, the ability to partition Azure Active Directory in the same or an equivalent manner wasn’t available. Administrative Units (AUs), launched in public preview…

Image 1 Expand Those who listened to Microsoft’s virtual Ignite session on Supporting Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures in Microsoft 365 might have concluded that Office 365 tenant restructuring was about to become possible. It’s not. What’s really happening is that Microsoft is taking on the easiest parts of tenant to tenant migrations: cross-tenant mailbox migration (now…

Really Useful Way to Understand Connectivity of Office 365 Tenant Microsoft added Network Connectivity as an option under the Health section of the Microsoft 365 admin center in late September. The feature is a preview of what Microsoft 365 roadmap item 67153 to deliver an “assessment that evaluates the impact of your network design on…

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…