Office

Microsoft must have been happy with the $18.9 billion run rate they achieved for commercial cloud products in fiscal 2017. But what segment makes the majority of this revenue? Microsoft is not saying, but given the number of Office 365 users, it seems like it is Office 365.

In this Ask the Admin, Russell Smith shows you what you can do with Office 365 Forms.

On August 9, Microsoft launched the Office 365 Groups expiration policy into preview. It expires groups after a set period and helps keep the spread of groups under control. All sounds good, but the new feature needs an Azure Active Directory Premium license, which isn’t so welcome.

The Azure AD team changed the sign-in experience used by services like Office 365 to improve and rationalize it. But things didn’t work out so well as tenants reacted badly to the way Microsoft communicated the change. Or rather, failed to communicate the change.

The Office 365 Admin Center experienced a problem on August 3 when it began to include data from other tenants in its usage reports. It seems like the problem arose in a flawed code change and Microsoft fixed the issue quickly. What’s worrying is what data leaks like this mean in the context of regulations like the EU GDPR.

Microsoft has launched a new external sharing policy for groups that allows tenants to set allow and block lists for domains. The new policy is due for use with Teams, Planner, and other applications that need to block external users from specific domains. It’s a set along the path to getting full external access for Office 365 apps.

Microsoft Teams now includes the ability to control whether team owners or members can remove items from conversations. It’s a useful feature. All of us have probably regretted something said electronically!

Surprisingly, Microsoft has never included a central method to manage user autosignatures within the cloud or on-premises versions of Exchange. Which means that you must let users manage their signatures, build your own tools, or deploy a commercial solution.

No one likes looking at a stream of audit events flowing by, especially when an Office 365 tenant generates so many events. Alert policies allow tenants to define patterns of activity that indicate suspicious or harmful behavior. There’s goodness here, as long as you have Office 365 E5 subscriptions.

It’s results time again and Microsoft released earnings for Q4 FY17 on July 20. As always, there are nuggets to be minded. The billions of revenues generated by Azure and Office 365 are the highlights for me, even if Microsoft did not update the number of Office 365 users.