Office

Some observers say that Teams will replace email. Well, Teams won’t because email still has so many advantages over what Teams offers. But Teams has its own capabilities that will lead it to take some of the traffic currently carried by email. Because of its internal focus, the traffic that moves to Teams is in-house chats, and Teams is a good place for those conversations to be.

Microsoft’s Compliance Manager is intended to help cloud tenants cope with regulations like ISO 27001 and GDPR. The Compliance Manager has a nice dashboard, but it is passive and offers very weak options in terms of organizing the work needed to achieve compliance. But Office 365 has Planner and Teams, and it is easy to create the necessary collaboration structure to allow people to work on GDPR controls.

The European SharePoint Conference took place in Dublin, Ireland this week. The SharePoint content was top-notch and the conference ran smoothly, but I was a little disappointed at the relative lack of Office 365 coverage despite the claim made in the conference moniker.

Microsoft has released a beta version of the Teams PowerShell module. The only problem is that the module is not very good. In fact, the module is very disappointing because it does not contain the cmdlets that an Office 365 administrator might except to automate operations around Teams. Maybe the 1.0 release will be better. We can only hope!

Office 365 includes supervision policies to allow tenants to monitor email traffic between selected groups to ensure that they comply with regulations. Supervision policies are easy to set up, but be careful about the workload involved in processing the captured email.

Exchange Online Protection now highlights unauthenticated users – or messages that come from people who cannot prove their identity. Instead of a nice picture (or avatar), you see a question mark for the user. Maybe this might make people think twice about the opportunity to send money to someone to liberate funds held in a bank. Just maybe.

A year ago, Microsoft said RPC over HTTP was dead from Oct 31, 2017 and that Outlook clients must use MAPI over HTTP to connect to Exchange Online. The protocol is still dead, but it will persist in a zombie-like unsupported mode. The question is for how long?

Because quarterly earnings are in the air, this edition of Short Takes focuses on Microsoft’s earnings announcement this week.

Office 365 has given its rights management capabilities a complete refresh. Clients deal with protected email better and it’s easy to send protected email to people inside and outside your organization, including coverage of consumer email systems like Gmail and Outlook.com. And protected email works on mobile devices too.

In today’s Ask the Admin, Russell Smith explains the different licensing options for G Suite and how they compare to Office 365 plans.