Office

Microsoft has announced that they have begun rolling out Guest access for Teams and that over 125,000 organizations are now using the platform.

Microsoft isn’t killing Skype for Business but the company will be changing up how it is serviced and is trying to move customers to Teams.

On September 7, Microsoft inflicted a PR fiasco on themselves by leaking the imminent replacement of Skype for Business by Teams. But what does this really mean? I think we will see a Teams-lite client replace the current SfB client with a formal announcement at Ignite. Although the leak was bad, some goodness does exist in what might happen.

Office 365 allows you to block a user when necessary, as when someone is leaving the organization. You can also initiate a forced sign-out, but the option to do so is buried in the user’s OneDrive for Business settings, which seems like a logical place to find it!

Microsoft has new tools to migrate public folders (the “cockroaches of Exchange”) to Office 365 Groups. Sounds good. The good news is that the tools work, even if they need a lot of manual oversight. ISVs offer tools to do the same job with more automation. The choice is yours!

If you use Office 365 and store documents in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business, the Office applications can autosave as you work to ensure that you never lose any content. It’s a good idea and the implementation works well. But I have a slight nagging doubt about the network impact for some tenants.

Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams are two of the collaboration offerings available within Office 365. Some get very vexed about the two applications. I don’t because I think the two serve different audiences and exist for different reasons.

Microsoft is shutting the doors on Gigjam, a service that was trying to align unstructured content to create new workflows.

Microsoft is working on ways to improve how tenants receive support for Office 365. The problem is that they haven’t told anyone what they or doing or why they are changing the support process. Some good things are happening, but it’s all cloaked in darkness.

The European Union will introduce the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in May 2018. The intention is to deliver better protection for personal data, which is laudable. Like with many regulations, the problems arise in implementation. Office 365 holds a lot of personal data, so Office 365 tenants must cope with GDPR.