Office

Microsoft is working on new features for Teams that they hope will entice workers in the healthcare industry to adopt the collaboration platform.

Office 365 Groups and Teams make SharePoint much easier for people to use, with the price paid being the imposition of the groups permission model on SharePoint. On the upside, everything is very simple. On the downside, the permissions assigned to group members might not be what you want.

Secure (or private) channels is the biggest user request to the Teams development group, possibly because Slack has this feature. The only problem is that the Office 365 Groups membership model doesn’t allow for filtering within a group, so introducing elements available to a selected set of members might create all sorts of difficulties for how Teams interacts with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem.

Exchange Online transport (mail flow) rules are a powerful way to ensure that email from Office 365 tenants to specific recipients are encrypted in a consistent manner. Using rules relieves the need for users to become involved and makes sure that email is protected in a way that recipients can read messages. It’s a good way to use the protection features built into Office 365.

A new generation is being brought up not on Windows and Office, but with iPads and Chromebooks; Microsoft needs to find a way to win in the hardware space at the low end of the market.

The signs are that Office 365 will store more encrypted content as time goes by. But ISV products might not be able to process that content because they cannot decrypt it. All of which creates the prospect that you might archive or move data somewhere only to discover later that it is inaccessible. And that’s a bad thing.

Microsoft is announcing a new peripheral for the Surface Go, new laptops aimed at educators, and new features for Teams.

Most Office 365 users might be unaware of SharePoint’s Document ID service, which generates unique document identifiers for documents in a site. That’s OK, because records management is not the kind of subject that turns everyone on. But business situations do occur when document IDs might be useful, which is why I went looking at how this SharePoint feature works.

Exchange 2010 will become unsupported on January 14, 2020. It’s time to decide whether to move to Office 365 or Exchange 2016/2019. Exchange 2010 was a really big and important release in the 23-year history of the product, so it’s sad to see it heading to the software scrapyard.

Azure Conditional Access policies are pretty powerful, especially when applications accommodate their controls. OWA and SharePoint Online can co-operate with conditional access policies to block the ability of Office 365 users to download email attachments and documents. Although not a perfect solution, it’s a good start.