Office

Microsoft’s Q1 FY17 results contain the news that the annualized revenue run rate for commercial cloud products is now over $13 billion. Perhaps even more interesting is the news that the new official figure for Office 365 monthly active users is 85 million. At this rate, the 100 million barrier will be cracked in early 2017.

Some interesting announcements during the last week informed us about Yammer getting better at compliance and a new Office 365 connector. I’m not so hot on the bots, though. In other news, MyAnalytics has an unexplained love for Internet Explorer and the topic of password trimming and the Office 365 maximum password length caused some confusion – at least for one administrator! And some news about an interesting Exchange 20th anniversary video and a VDI collaboration project between VMware and Microsoft for Skype for Business rounds out the week.

Microsoft is hosting three separate events, all in New York City, during a three-week span with each event focusing on a different group of users; from consumer devices to updates for the developer community.

Microsoft Research says it’s made a major breakthrough in converting human speech to text. Recognising continuous, conversational speech is really hard to do accurately, but Redmond reports it can do it as well as actual people can. The researchers claim their technology makes far fewer mistakes. That’s a bold assertion, given the 40-odd-year history of…

It’s frustrating when a promised feature isn’t available. Microsoft announced auto-expanding archive mailboxes for Exchange Online in June 2016, but Office 365 customers have reported that their storage quota is limited to 170GB. That’s a lot of space, but hardly the “truly bottomless archive” that Microsoft promised. What’s going on?

Ignite is two weeks gone, but there’s still lots of work to reveal all the sessions that I missed. The OneDrive roadmap was one such session, and it included some interesting figures for OneDrive usage. The Grand Exchange on-premises or cloud debate is also online and I also listened to how the dedicated team at Microsoft has lovingly assembled a profanity list for you to use. Finally, some reflections on transforming distribution groups to Office 365 Groups and what this means for mail contacts.

The Focused Inbox is the keynote feature of the Outlook for iOS and Android mobile clients. All other clients in the Outlook family have used the Clutter feature, which processes mail on the server and removes unimportant items into the Clutter folder. Now Microsoft is dropping Clutter and introducing the Focused Inbox across the entire Outlook family. Rationalization and commonality is good, especially when features that really work are made available to all clients. Here’s how the changeover will occur.

Microsoft recognizes the real power of cloud services, such as Office 365, lies not necessarily in the client apps that we use to access and work with data, but in the ability to tap into data and use analytics and business intelligence (BI) to get insights for making business decisions. Often knowledge workers don’t need complex BI or analytics, but just access to company data that has already been presented in a document so that it can be reused somewhere else. Sounds like it ought to be a simple task, right?

A relaxed week between the bedlam of Ignite and the calmness of the IT/DEV Connections conference in Las Vegas gives me a chance to catch up with some of the less-important but still worthy things I learned about recently. The Exchange team celebrated the 20th anniversary of the product, another of its leaders joined the Microsoft SLT, email from Paul Robichaux caused some problems, and the new Office 365 Admin Center finally reached general availability.

Microsoft has made a big thing about the one-click option in the Exchange Online Administration Center (EAC) to convert a traditional email distribution group to an Office 365 Group. However, the option only works for groups that consist of Exchange Online mailboxes.