Exchange Online

Microsoft has done a good job of helping Office 365 tenants prepare for GDPR, but the best intentions sometimes run into difficulties. Such as what you might find with the new GDPR Data Loss Prevention policy template, which does an excellent job of finding things like European tax numbers… but sometimes too good a job.

Microsoft issued a new wizard to delete Office 365 accounts last week. It has the normal quota of cute graphics and some glitches to boot, but the wizard gets the job done in terms of converting a user mailbox into a shared mailbox and reassigning access to their OneDrive for Business account.

Scammers and spammers love having large databases of email addresses to use for their nefarious purposes. Your Exchange Online addresses might be in those databases, so here’s how to check the email addresses for your mailboxes against the Have I been pwned service (HIBP) using some PowerShell.

The news that Microsoft will make mailbox auditing the default in Exchange Online is very welcome, as is the new mechanism they plan to use. Microsoft won’t get the new feature rolled out across Office 365 until the end of 2018, so there’s still a gap to fill to make sure that audit records are gathered for mailbox activity.

Microsoft made a mistake in their provisioning process for Exchange Online shared mailboxes, so lots of mailboxes have 100 GB quotas. Things are changing now and new shared mailboxes will have 50 GB quotas, unless you license them. Here’s how to check the status of your shared mailboxes.

I don’t consider backups to be a necessity for Office 365, but ISVs continue to offer these products and customers continue to buy, so I chatted with Spanning to find out what’s happening in the Office 365 market, who’s using cloud backups, and why. We also spoke about the challenges that backup vendors continue to have in coping with some of the unique aspects of Office 365.

Teams is now able to capture compliance records for contributions to private chats by guests or on-premises users in a hybrid Office 365 organization. The new mechanism uses “phantom mailboxes” in the cloud to hold the compliance records for on-premises users. You must register your tenant to be able to get an updated GUI for the Security and Compliance Center, but PowerShell can find these records now.

GDPR Article 17 allows individuals to request an organization to erase their personal data. Now that GDPR is in effect, what are the practical steps to take to process an erasure request against Office 365 data? As it turns out, the answer is not straightforward.

The venerable Exchange Get-MailboxStatistics has been around for over ten years, but now it’s telling lies about Office 365 users. Well, just the last login date to their mailbox. The problem is that the world is a very different place to when Microsoft first introduced PowerShell in Exchange 2007. Mailboxes didn’t get so many visits from mailbox assistants then…

PowerShell is a critical skill for Office 365 tenant administrators. A knowledge of PowerShell allows you to fix things that Microsoft leaves undone in apps like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams. Sure, black holes exist for PowerShell (like Planner) and it is slow to process thousands of objects, but there’s nothing like a little script for getting things done.