Exchange Online

Microsoft says that Office 365 has 155 million monthly active users. That’s an interesting statistic, but how many people use Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, and Planner? Microsoft never gives firm numbers, only clues to what might be happening, so we have to do some analysis to tease out what might be happening behind the Office 365 curtain.

Given the increased ways to apply rights management protection (encryption) to Exchange Online messages, the volume of encrypted traffic should rise. That’s good for users because their email is protected, but it’s not so good for ISVs who must deal with encrypted email. One such example is autosignature products, where server-based components can’t touch protected email to add their text.

Microsoft plans to deliver new migration tools to move Google G Suite email, contact, and calendar data to Office 365 (which means Exchage Online) by Q2 2019. The new tools are likely to move from the existing implementation built around the antique IMAP4 protocol, which only covers email and is prone to throttling by Google.

Microsoft has made privileged access management (PAM) generally available for Office 365, but in reality it’s only Exchange Online that supports the new feature. This isn’t surprising because Exchange has a well-developed role-based access control system that the PAM developers can leverage, but it does pose a question about how they’ll extend PAM to other Office 365 workloads.

Teams borrows from many other Office 365 applications to build its functionality.The latest component taken is Exchange Online address book policies, used to segment the directory and stop users getting in touch with other people in the organization outside the scope of a policy. But it’s an imperfect and partial block, and if you really want to stop people talking, you’ll have to do a lot more work.

Do you need to backup Office 365 data? The question isn’t simple because technology changes all the time and it’s hard to backup some applications like Teams and Planner because APIs don’t exist. The important thing is for companies to review what data they use, the features available to them, and then figure out if any gaps exist.

Office 365 classification labels dictate how workloads like SharePoint and Exchange retain content. Now you can control retention based on events like a contract completing or an employee leaving the business. Events start the retention clock and it’s a way to make sure that you keep material needed for the business for a predetermined interval after the event occurs.

Microsoft has released a new version of Outlook Web Access (OWA) to preview. Office 365 targeted release tenants can check the new UI out to see how it works. It’s new and it’s early, so some glitches exist, but the new OWA is more attractive than the old, which might be all that’s important.

A recent survey revealed that 22% of executives in small to medium businesses continue to share email passwords. There’s no way this should happen inside Office 365 because many techniques exist to support more secure collaboration. Take your pick from mailbox delegation, shared mailboxes, Office 365 Groups, and Teams

You can create an Office 365 retention policy to process Teams channel conversations and personal chats, but how do you prove that the policy is working? As it turns out, the only way is by checking the mailboxes where Teams stores compliance items and the statistics generated by the Exchange Online Managed Folder Assistant.