Office

My transition to an iPhone is fine and I have mastered Outlook for iOS. That is, except for Contacts, which are a problem because Outlook must obey Apple’s rules. And I won’t even discuss searching.

The Microsoft Teams application is now generally available. Lots has been done to improve Teams since its preview release and Microsoft has made many good updates. Some edges remain for Microsoft to work on, but Teams is now more than a valid competitor for Slack in the chat-based collaboration market.

Find out how to set up a task-based project dashboard.

Backup vendors have been slow to move from an on-premises view of data. Office 365 applications form a software parts bin used to build new apps and backup and restore is more complex. AvePoint now supports backup and restore of Outlook Groups. One step forward…

Delve is the mega-search option for Office 365. In the past, Delve has been handicapped because of poor user tagging of documents. Apply some Office Graph intelligence, and now Delve gets better results. Magic!

Microsoft has introduced a new feature into public preview to allow Office 365 tenants to manage license allocations to users via membership of security or Office 365 Groups. It is not a full-blown license management system by any means, but it will help small to medium companies get more from their Office 365 licenses.

Changing from one mobile platform to another can be interesting. I went from Windows 10 Mobile to iOS and so far, no major damage is done. Some interesting differences exist in how Outlook for iOS and Outlook mobile synchronize email to devices. I wanted to learn more, so I poked and found out why the differences exist.

Learn to create a simple client web part using ReactJS and the SharePoint Framework.

Microsoft has moved 400 million Outlook.com mailboxes to an Office 365 infrastructure. Outlook.com mailboxes are now powered by Exchange Online and exploit other parts of the infrastructure like EOP. It’s a good change from a engineering and economic perspective.

Microsoft has intensified its competition with Slack by making the Teams platform more attractive for developers. New Bots and deep link capabilities are now available. Meantime, Microsoft also says that they will enable Teams for all Office 365 business tenants.