Microsoft 365

In today’s Ask the Admin, I discuss whether federated authentication is really the most secure way to set up hybrid authentication between Windows Server Active Directory and Office 365.

Microsoft’s Teams app has quickly become a cornerstone of the Office 365 platform. Offering a wide variety of customized experiences, the communication hub is a product that is receiving significant investment from senior management and today they are rolling out several new features.

Office 365 retention policies help organizations keep information for as long as needed. But retention consumes storage. This isn’t a problem for Exchange Online, but it is for SharePoint Online, because files held in the Preservation Hold Library are charged against the tenant storage quota. This isn’t a reason to not use retention policies, but you should be careful.

Good news for those who like to know what’s going on in email: Office 365 supervision policies now support Teams personal chats and channel conversations in addition to email. And you can now use sensitive data types to find communications worth reading. Seriously, supervision policies are important to a certain section of the market, so it’s good that Teams messages now surface for review.

Artificial intelligence is of major interest to Microsoft right now, so it really shouldn’t be a surprise that Jeffrey Snover, one of their technical chiefs, is now heading the charge to bring AI to the Office 365 substrate. Quite what this means for the internal operations of Office 365, applications and clients, and customers is to be seen, but some interesting times lie ahead in the evolution of Office 365.

Because Punxsutawney Phil is a lying liar who lies, this edition of Short Takes looks Windows 10 stumbling to 800 million active devices, an open source Windows Calculator, Microsoft’s two new datacenters in Africa, and so much more.

Exchange 2019 has been around for six months. It’s a good time to consider if on-premises organizations should upgrade or stick with the version of Exchange they run today. Exchange 2019 is a solid release, even if Microsoft’s engineering efforts are largely focused on the cloud these days. Of course, moving to Exchange Online is an option too, but perhaps not for the dedicated on-premises deployments.

Microsoft has flipped the switch and you can now integrate a Yammer conversation directly into Teams.

A question none of us like to think about too much is what we would do if a natural or man-made disaster took out Office 365 and disrupted service for an extended period. The good news is that the way Microsoft has built out Office 365 into datacenter regions helps to limit the effect of any outage, but the fact still remains that something bad could happen. What would you do then?

While snow may have hit Seattle this month, Office 365 still dripped out of Redmond – here’s what happened in February.