Office

OWA now boasts a useful mailbox option, which is helpful if you feel that you need to remove some old and lingering email. The funny thing is that Microsoft doesn’t seem to have told anyone about the feature – or my search-karma is failing me in finding any information about it.

Based on user feedback and a horrible year of change management missteps, Microsoft is changing the way it handles major updates for Office 365. The plan seems like it might work and let’s hope that it does. No one wants to experience the same kind of update surprises we have seen in 2017.

Office 365 continues to grow strongly but all the added users (and tenants) do not seem to have impacted the reliability of the service, at least not measured by performance against the guaranteed 99.9% SLA for availability. Incidents do steal minutes away from users, but not enough to make a difference.

Microsoft clarified what AAD features need premium licenses at Ignite. Tenants need many of those features to control Office 365 Groups and Teams, and some of the listed features are surprising. Did you know that the group creation policy is a premium feature? Or adding a default classification. The chosen set of features seems odd, but at least Microsoft is now clear about what you must license.

You can capture Exchange mailbox events in the Office 365 audit log, but only if you remember to enable auditing for target mailboxes. Exchange Online doesn’t enable new mailboxes for auditing by default, so administrators must remember to enable the mailboxes manually – and check for new mailboxes periodically. If you don’t, nothing is recorded and your audit log will be empty.

After returning from the Ignite conference, I have pages of notes to pour over. Here are some of the more interesting things i learned about Office 365, including who should be in my “inner loop” and “outer loop”, why Microsoft talks about Microsoft 365 when they really mean Office 365, and some Exchange Online cmdlets I had not heard about before.

Revealed at the Ignite conference, Microsoft plans to make some changes relatively soon to relieve the complexity and overhead of deploying and managing hybrid Exchange organizations. Microsoft also showed how to move mailboxes between tenants. It’s a small part of the tenant-to-tenant migration scenario, but it’s good to see it happening.

A UK-based leak revealed a plan to require Office 365 inactive mailboxes to have licenses. Storage costs, but because Microsoft told people to use inactive mailboxes for purposes such as keeping content for ex-employees, it wasn’t a good idea to suddenly demand licenses. Good sense prevailed and the plan isn’t going ahead.

Microsoft will release Office 365 multi-geo tenants to general availability in early 2018. You can then deploy Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and (later) SharePoint Online across multiple Office 365 datacenter regions. It’s good for data sovereignty, but won’t solve network problems.

Day 2 at Ignite featured news about SharePoint, Exchange, Office 365 Groups, and Teams, And on a personal note, I had the chance to speak twice. That was nice, but I’m exhausted and there’s still three days to go.