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Gartner’s recent SWOT analysis of Office 365 contains some interesting thoughts and observations. I do not agree with them all because I think some of their thinking is a little dated, but it is always interesting to read what Gartner is whispering into the ears of their customers.

Rebooting a host server containing virtual machines can be a big job, because the virtual machines also have to be rebooted. Thankfully, Brien Posey shows you how to minimize the amount of work involved in these types of reboots by setting some automatic startup options.

The latest version of the PowerShell module for Azure Active Directory contains the cmdlets to recover a deleted Office 365 Group (and a plan or a team). We have been waiting for this feature for two and a half years, but maybe the waiting makes the feature all the sweeter…

Microsoft Excel causes problems in genetic research. That’s the claim of three researchers from an Australian institute, who discovered almost 20% of data sets contained errors introduced by Excel. The problem is Excel being “clever”—guessing the type of data it’s being asked to import. Unfortunately…

Microsoft has released a beta version of the Teams PowerShell module. The only problem is that the module is not very good. In fact, the module is very disappointing because it does not contain the cmdlets that an Office 365 administrator might except to automate operations around Teams. Maybe the 1.0 release will be better. We can only hope!

Deploying performance and fault monitoring tools to monitor and configure your infrastructure adds layers of complexity; multiple products to log into & maintain, in addition to out of control alerts. Solve the issue of application management overload with a single application containing all your performance and alert data.

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.

This month sees Microsoft pull a standalone security update, release a Windows 10X emulator so that developers can start adapting apps to work with the upcoming dual-screen SKU, we get more details on the container architecture in Windows 10X, a public preview of FIDO2 support for hybrid Azure Active Directory deployments, and much more.

Microsoft plans to create an automatic policy to encrypt outbound email containing sensitive data for all Office 365 tenants. It sounds like a good idea until you begin looking at the operational consequences of such an action. For instance, how to insert a new transport rule into a complex set of existing rules. All in all, this is not a good plan.

Microsoft has a new Information Protection guide to help Office 365 tenants prepare for GDPR. The guide is incomplete because it focuses on SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, but it contains some good information that will help companies figure out what they need to do to prepare for the May 25, 2018 deadline. Expect more guides of this type to appear in the future.