Exchange Online

Microsoft introduced the Safe Attachments feature as part of its Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) offering in 2015. ATP is an option for Exchange Online Protection (EOP). It is included in the Office 365 E5 plan and can be licensed as an add-on for $2/user per month for other Office 365 plans. Now Safe Attachments can handle dynamic delivery and the improvement is noticeable.

Microsoft has moved 400 million Outlook.com mailboxes to an Office 365 infrastructure. Outlook.com mailboxes are now powered by Exchange Online and exploit other parts of the infrastructure like EOP. It’s a good change from a engineering and economic perspective.

On January 20, Microsoft unexpectedly updated their original blog post from July announcing the Focused Inbox with information about client updates to support the feature. The update contains some answers to questions why people have not been able to use the much-trumpeted feature.

Microsoft has finally provided an effective method to allow users to recall messages. Outlook’s Recall Message function usually doesn’t work, but OWA’s new Undo Send will stop messages that should never be sent. Five seconds might be too short to realize that you have made a mistake and should stop an outbound message, but ten seconds is about right. And if you are really indecisive, you can take up to 30 seconds to decide whether a message should go.

You might be familiar with the DLP policies available in Exchange or SharePoint. These policies work, but they are workload-specific. Microsoft has embarked on a journey to replace them with Unified DLP policies, which provide protection across multiple Office 365 workloads. The new policies are not yet as functional as those available for Exchange, but they will get there.

Shane Young dives into the different PowerShell for SharePoint Online and Office 365 cmdlets available, how to get them installed, and then the tricky part of connecting.

It’s impossible for an email hygiene service like Exchange Online Protection (EOP) to suppress every possible piece of malware that attempts to penetrate Office 365. Even the broad array of anti-malware techniques will let some small percentage of spam through. Email administrators need to be on guard all the time.

Microsoft is increasing the default mailbox quota for the Office 365 E3 and E5 plans to 100 GB. That’s quite a lot of space to fill, but Microsoft has good reasons for upping the limit.

Microsoft is introducing safety tips to Office 365 to highlight bad or suspicious email that might tempt users to do things that they shouldn’t. The initiative is good and valuable, but it rather loses some of its gloss because not all safety tips are exposed in Outlook. However, Microsoft is making sure that mobile and other clients see safety tips, even if not in the same interactive manner as is possible with OWA.

Microsoft’s no-limit archive mailboxes were supposed to be available throughout Office 365 by now. As previously reported, the feature is available in some Office 365 datacenter regions but not others. Now word comes that Microsoft has paused the roll-out of the feature until sometime in the first quarter of 2017. What’s going on?