Exchange Online

Exchange 2019 has been around for six months. It’s a good time to consider if on-premises organizations should upgrade or stick with the version of Exchange they run today. Exchange 2019 is a solid release, even if Microsoft’s engineering efforts are largely focused on the cloud these days. Of course, moving to Exchange Online is an option too, but perhaps not for the dedicated on-premises deployments.

Artificial intelligence is of major interest to Microsoft right now, so it really shouldn’t be a surprise that Jeffrey Snover, one of their technical chiefs, is now heading the charge to bring AI to the Office 365 substrate. Quite what this means for the internal operations of Office 365, applications and clients, and customers is to be seen, but some interesting times lie ahead in the evolution of Office 365.

Exchange Online transport (mail flow) rules are a powerful way to ensure that email from Office 365 tenants to specific recipients are encrypted in a consistent manner. Using rules relieves the need for users to become involved and makes sure that email is protected in a way that recipients can read messages. It’s a good way to use the protection features built into Office 365.

The signs are that Office 365 will store more encrypted content as time goes by. But ISV products might not be able to process that content because they cannot decrypt it. All of which creates the prospect that you might archive or move data somewhere only to discover later that it is inaccessible. And that’s a bad thing.

Exchange 2010 will become unsupported on January 14, 2020. It’s time to decide whether to move to Office 365 or Exchange 2016/2019. Exchange 2010 was a really big and important release in the 23-year history of the product, so it’s sad to see it heading to the software scrapyard.

Azure Conditional Access policies are pretty powerful, especially when applications accommodate their controls. OWA and SharePoint Online can co-operate with conditional access policies to block the ability of Office 365 users to download email attachments and documents. Although not a perfect solution, it’s a good start.

Microsoft is still building out the new OWA (for Exchange Online) interface. One new feature is the ability to make categories into Outlook favorites. This seems like a small thing, but it’s really quite useful if you make an effort to use categories. Some people will love it. Some will say “blah.”

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 announced that the MyAnalytics app is available to any Office 365 user with an Exchange Online license. Also, Teams and SharePoint signals are soon to be included in the MyAnalytics analysis and dashboard. Expanding the user base is a good idea, but the really big news is the expansion of MyAnalytics to cover a much wider breadth of Office 365 activity.

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.