Tony Redmond

Should I Create a List or Some Tasks? Following Microsoft’s announcement about the new Lists application at the recent virtual Build conference, the thought might have crossed your mind that Microsoft 365 is accumulating too many ways to make lists. As in: Outlook tasks. To Do. Planner. OneNote. And that’s without counting Excel or Word,…

Tracking Down Obsolete Accounts Last December, I wrote about how the problem of identifying obsolete guest accounts that exist in an Office 365 tenant. An increasing number of applications support Azure B2B Collaboration and create guest accounts to allow external people to access content. Teams is a great example, as are the sharing links used…

Securing Confidential SharePoint Online Data SharePoint Online sites hold some very confidential information. Now that SharePoint Online supports sensitivity labels, you can protect individual documents with encryption to stop their contents leaking. Other features, like regarding newly uploaded documents sensitive by default to stop them being shared externally until Data Loss Prevention (DLP) processing completes,…

Year of Yammer Keeps on Rolling Seven months after Microsoft declared the “Year of Yammer,” a public preview of a much-hyped (at Ignite 2019) new user interface is available to Office 365 tenants. General availability of the new Yammer is expected in July 2020. The new interface is already available in the Yammer mobile app…

Publicity for Exchange for a Change I’ve been impressed by the amount of coverage given by mainstream IT reporters to Thursday’s announcement by the Exchange development group that they are rolling out a feature to suppress Reply-All storms. Few of the recent announcements by the Exchange group have received such attention, possibly because Teams hoovers…

The first article in this series discussed how to remove the ability of OWA users to create autoforwarding addresses. This does a lot to stop the forwarding of email outside an organization, but OWA is only one part of the problem. We also need to deal with the other ways that messages can be automatically…

Autoforwarding is Badness Allowing users to forward their email outside Exchange Online is bad, especially if they don’t keep a copy of the forwarded messages in their mailbox. Apart from removing email from the controls imposed by data governance policies, it creates a risk that confidential information travels outside the organization, including when an attacker…

If you have Office 365 E5 licenses, your mailboxes generate MailItemsAccessed events. These events are stored in the Office 365 audit log and can be used for investigating potentially compromised mailboxes. Useful information is in the audit events, but some processing is needed to extract the full benefit. Here’s how to do it with PowerShell.

Soon you’ll be able to synchronize Office 365 notification messages to Planner and manage the introduction of the changes through Planner. The integration is straightforward and works well. In fact, I have nothing much to complain about, which is why I wonder if I am missing something.

Communications Compliance is a part of Microsoft 365’s Insider Risk functionality. This is a replacement for Office 365 supervision policies and introduces coverage of new communications and a lot of machine learning, plus a link to Advanced eDiscovery for the really complicated cases. Not every Office 365 tenant will be interested in employee monitoring, but those that need to should look at Communications Compliance.

The new licensing guidance for Microsoft 365 security and compliance features is welcome, but as is probably inevitable, some inconsistencies exist that need to be probed and discussed, and hopefully resolved by Microsoft in the long run. Why do DLP policies for Teams need E5 licenses? Why does applying a default retention label to a SharePoint library need E5? There’s lots to discuss about issues Microsoft should fix.

Office 365 Sensitivity Labels are supported by Teams, Groups, and Sites, but some work is needed if you want to replace older text-only classification labels with Office 365 Sensitivity Labels. This article explains how to use PowerShell to update Office 365 groups with new sensitivity labels. The labels are then synchronized to teams and sites.