Office

Microsoft is still building out the new OWA (for Exchange Online) interface. One new feature is the ability to make categories into Outlook favorites. This seems like a small thing, but it’s really quite useful if you make an effort to use categories. Some people will love it. Some will say “blah.”

Microsoft is bringing new features to Teams that will make it easier for firstline workers to communicate with other employees.

Microsoft plans to create an automatic policy to encrypt outbound email containing sensitive data for all Office 365 tenants. It sounds like a good idea until you begin looking at the operational consequences of such an action. For instance, how to insert a new transport rule into a complex set of existing rules. All in all, this is not a good plan.

Microsoft announced that the MyAnalytics app is available to any Office 365 user with an Exchange Online license. Also, Teams and SharePoint signals are soon to be included in the MyAnalytics analysis and dashboard. Expanding the user base is a good idea, but the really big news is the expansion of MyAnalytics to cover a much wider breadth of Office 365 activity.

PowerShell is great at getting lots done for Office 365 administrators. As an example, here are a couple of ways to check the membership of an Office 365 Group or a Microsoft Team to find out whether a specific user is already present. You might never need to use this tip, but then again, it’s always surprising when PowerShell comes to the rescue.

Microsoft is releasing a new Office app for Windows 10 that is designed to make it easier to switch between apps and dive into previous tasks.

Microsoft will start a mass data collection practice for US employees that the company hopes will help them improve their AI and ML data models.

Microsoft is frequently expanding the functionality of Office 365 and with the success of Teams, the company may have found its new Excel.

Office 365 allows users to apply retention labels to SharePoint and OneDrive documents and to Exchange messages. But after you’ve done the work to create a nice set of retention labels as part of your data governance framework, it’s good to know that people are using the labels. Here’s how to find out.

Microsoft has optimized the Click-to-Run version of Outlook for Office 365. There’s nothing startling about that, but the Outlook team didn’t communicate the change well and they weren’t very kind to people who asked them to reconsider the change in UserVoice. That’s not good.