Tony Redmond

A Microsoft employee commented that Exchange 2019 is the last on-premises version, something that would bring the era of Exchange to a close after 25 or so years. Perhaps that’s the case, and certainly there’s been a huge transition of email workload to Exchange Online. But is an opinion expressed by a single Microsoft employee enough to tell us what will happen over the next few years?

A Forrester Research study sponsored by Microsoft concludes that the deployment of Outlook Mobile brings big benefits for organizations. Given the funding source, the outcome is hardly surprising. But like with all similar reports, the important thing is to view the findings through the lens of your organization to understand the good points and discard the marketing messages. In a nutshell, all your need to understand is that Outlook mobile is the best mobile email client for Exchange Online.

Microsoft has made a preview of the Fluid Foundation available for Office 365 users to try out. The preview demonstrates how components can work together to share information quickly. It is very focused on SharePoint Online at present, but Microsoft plans to make intelligent fluid components available in Teams, OWA, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Office apps. The preview raises some questions, but that’s the nature of the beast.

SharePoint Online document libraries keep 500 versions of files by default. The minimum recommended by Microsoft is 100. But why are so many versions kept? The reason is that it leads to better recoverability and underpins features like AutoSave and co-authoring. You might be tempted to reduce the number of versions, but why? I can’t come up with a good answer.

Since its inception, Microsoft Teams has had an odd relationship with email. Some think that Teams will replace email, at least for many internal conversations. The real facts are that Teams and email need to survive and co-operate together as collaborative modalities for Office 365 tenants. Microsoft is introducing three new features to help Teams gets along better with email, and that’s a good thing.

The news that Microsoft is working on cloud signatures for Outlook for Windows is welcome. The venerable Outlook client has long stored its signature information in the system registry, which makes it hard to move signatures from PC to PC. On the other hand, OWA stores its signatures in mailboxes, so the same signature is used no matter where you log in. Of course, OWA is a simpler client (no profiles, for instance), but it should be eminently possible to store everything Outlook needs in the cloud. At least for Outlook clients connected to Exchange Online…

After several weeks of customer protest, Microsoft decided that their plan to automatically install a Microsoft Search in Bing extension for Chrome browsers with Office ProPlus wouldn’t fly. While it’s good that Microsoft is tweaking their plans and will allow Office 365 tenants to opt-in, the way they went about announcing such an outrageous decision begs the question just how Microsoft thought this was ever a good idea.

The fact that the Teams outage on 3 February was caused by an expired authentication certificate is enough to cause Office 365 tenants to ask why such a thing happened. Teams is built on top of a lot of Office 365 and Azure components, so it’s not altogether surprising that issues happen in what is a very complex infrastructure spread around the world. But given Microsoft’s hyped focus on DevOps, you would have thought that something as fundamental as an expired certificate would have been picked up and fixed before it caused customer disruption.

A new SharePoint Online feature blocks access to newly uploaded files until Office 365 Data Loss Prevention processes the files to detect policy violations due to the presence of sensitive data. DLP processing for SharePoint Online can take several hours to reach new files, so enabling sensitive by default stops users inadvertently sharing sensitive content until DLP can process files. The downside is that you can’t apply sensitive by default to individual sites. It’s all or nothing…

Microsoft has made a preview PowerShell module for the Graph available for developers to play with. Being able to use PowerShell with the Graph exposes a lot of data to play with, so it’s a great addition to the administrator toolkit. To see how things worked in practice,, I convert a script to report Teams channels that are email-enabled to use the Graph module. Things worked out pretty well, but as you’d expect, some rough edges exist that need to be smoothed.

Microsoft fixed the copy-on-write bug in Outlook for Windows in Exchange Online. The fix stops users removing attachments from sent or received messages. A strong case can be made that the fix should have been present from the start to stop any possibility that clients could comprise Exchange Native Data Protection. Microsoft doesn’t think many people were affected and they could be right, but that doesn’t make the problem any easier to swallow.

The new Request Files feature in OneDrive for Business is great for users but comes with no admin controls. You can block the feature completely with a kludge and use Office 365 audit records to know when people are requesting files. However, Microsoft could make the feature so much better by extending some existing controls to make requesting files work better and more securely.