Office

Microsoft has done a good job of helping Office 365 tenants prepare for GDPR, but the best intentions sometimes run into difficulties. Such as what you might find with the new GDPR Data Loss Prevention policy template, which does an excellent job of finding things like European tax numbers… but sometimes too good a job.

The licensing model for Teams is now per-user instead of tenant-wide. That’s fine if you leave everyone enabled for Teams, but removing licenses one at a time for a set of users through the Office 365 Admin Center is a tiresome and boring operation. PowerShell can help ease the pain, and here’s a script to do the job.

Office 365 Groups and Teams can hold tons of secrets that we don’t want to share outside our organization. To keep sensitive information secure, you can block guest users from groups by setting a directory policy on your most important and confidential groups.

Two simple principles are key for Office 365 network connectivity. Keep things simple and get user data to a Microsoft edge node as quickly as possible. However, some organizations insist on using VPNs and proxy servers to interfere with Office 365 network traffic, which slows things down and makes users unhappy. It’s strange that people haven’t gotten the message after so many years…

Most of the time, the Teams clients run along without a problem. But like all software, they have their moments. Here’s how to attack the problem if your Teams clients start to misbehave, including how to give the Microsoft developers some feedback.

Microsoft issued a new wizard to delete Office 365 accounts last week. It has the normal quota of cute graphics and some glitches to boot, but the wizard gets the job done in terms of converting a user mailbox into a shared mailbox and reassigning access to their OneDrive for Business account.

Scammers and spammers love having large databases of email addresses to use for their nefarious purposes. Your Exchange Online addresses might be in those databases, so here’s how to check the email addresses for your mailboxes against the Have I been pwned service (HIBP) using some PowerShell.

The month of July had quite a few Office 365 announcements, here’s a wrap-up of what was announced.

Office 365 content searches can find all sorts of information, but they cannot decrypt protected files in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business sites. This prompts the question of how to deal with protected files exported by a search. As it turns out, the combination of a rights management superuser and some PowerShell makes short work of unprotecting files so that they can be read by all.

Office 365 apps like Teams, Groups, Planner, and SharePoint support guest user access, so they create guest accounts. Those accounts are pretty bare-boned, but you can liven them up by adding details, including user photos – which you might just copy from LinkedIn.