Outlook

Because the end is listless, this edition of Short Takes looks at a temporary Outlook problem that broke the Internet, Google’s Microsoft envy, a well-intentioned but ill-conceived plan to fix Edge and Chrome memory usage, Microsoft layoffs, and so much more.

Outlook for Windows is introducing an option to allow users to save some settings in the Microsoft 365 cloud.

A Forrester Research study sponsored by Microsoft concludes that the deployment of Outlook Mobile brings big benefits for organizations. Given the funding source, the outcome is hardly surprising. But like with all similar reports, the important thing is to view the findings through the lens of your organization to understand the good points and discard the marketing messages. In a nutshell, all your need to understand is that Outlook mobile is the best mobile email client for Exchange Online.

OneDrive for Business is responsible for how sharing works within Office 365. Big strides are being made to achieving consistency across all the Office 365 apps and new some tricks are coming along too, like being able to link to a PowerPoint slide, requesting people to upload files to a folder, or using the URL in a browser as a link. All good stuff.

Because this is the best reason to go to Florida, this special edition of Short Takes looks at the biggest announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2019.

OWA is the only Outlook client that supports “Likes.” This begs the question how OWA supports likes and where the information about likes is stored. Some probing using easily accessible tools reveals the answer. You might think that the answer only interests Office 365 Trivial Pursuit nerds, but it’s actually of real interest to eDiscovery investigators.

Microsoft introduced support for like reactions in OWA in 2015. Teams also supports likes, but it also supports other reactions to messages from sad to angry. Knowing how to use these reactions is a social minefield. On a serious notes, reactions are not currently stored in Teams compliance records in Exchange Online, which is a problem if people react to messages with likes.

The PST is now a very old file format. Originally introduced to give users the ability to store email moved from their Exchange mailbox, the need for PSTs disappeared years ago because Office 365 users have massive mailboxes. Despite this, some organizations persist in allowing people to use PSTs.

Microsoft has optimized the Click-to-Run version of Outlook for Office 365. There’s nothing startling about that, but the Outlook team didn’t communicate the change well and they weren’t very kind to people who asked them to reconsider the change in UserVoice. That’s not good.

Microsoft has simplified the synchronization architecture used to connect Outlook mobile clients to Exchange. The new approach sets the scene for some new functionality, like support for S/MIME and access to shared mailboxes. It’s all good and it marks the continued progress of Outlook mobile since the Acompli acquisition in 2014.