Everything You Need to Know About Office 365 – January 2021

It feels like the new year just rolled over, but we are now 1/12th of the way through 2021. As we have been doing for several years, this is a wrap-up of the important updates coming (or already arrived) to Microsoft’s productivity suite; as always you can find a complete list of everything we have published on this topic here.

Updates this month touched many different areas of Office 365 including increasing file size support in Microsoft 365 to 250GB and the Lists app for iOS starting to roll out. But to keep things a little more organized, on the security side of the equation, there were many updates that you should know about.

While building out your own policies for allowing IP ranges or email accounts to bypass specific rules is unavoidable, Microsoft is rolling out new alerts when a known malicious link or file enters a mailbox because of your policies. This feature will arrive in two phases sometime during the month of February for your tenant assuming it doesn’t get delayed.

While it’s not something you should be doing every week, if you need to take a broad approach to reviewing the access for guests in your groups, Tony has a post that can walk you through this process. This feature will likely be popular with larger organizations but for smaller environments, you can use PowerShell to find out if guests are active.

And if you find yourself in a situation where you need to hide sensitive documents stored in SharePoint online, here’s how you can accomplish that task.

There is no possible way to do a round-up of Microsft information without including Teams. The collaboration application continues to grow in weight and authority each month and January is no different, below is a list of new features coming soon or rolling out now:

But one of the more interesting updates this month for Teams is that you can now schedule meetings using Google Calendar. If you are in a shop that uses Google for email and Teams for productivity, this tutorial will be quite helpful in your quest of juggling calendars.

If technical guides and news are not your thing, Mary Jo recently had a chat with Jeffrey Snover that dives into ‘Modern Workplace Transformations’ and why that matters. Or if email is your first true love, taking a look at where Microsoft might be going with One Outlook is a good read too.