Exchange Online

After an extensive trial, Microsoft is preparing to release the Office 365 Adoption Content Pack to all enterprise tenants. Gaining insight into how people use the Office 365 applications will help tenants maximize their investment in the cloud. However, the content pack is not a silver bullet and won’t make your organization any more effective than it is today.

Exchange 2007 reaches end of life on April 11. The importance of this version cannot be overstated, especially in terms of its contribution to Exchange Online and Office 365. But it is time to let go and move to a more modern platform.

Changing from one mobile platform to another can be interesting. I went from Windows 10 Mobile to iOS and so far, no major damage is done. Some interesting differences exist in how Outlook for iOS and Outlook mobile synchronize email to devices. I wanted to learn more, so I poked and found out why the differences exist.

Microsoft has moved 400 million Outlook.com mailboxes to an Office 365 infrastructure. Outlook.com mailboxes are now powered by Exchange Online and exploit other parts of the infrastructure like EOP. It’s a good change from a engineering and economic perspective.

Microsoft has announced that they will block Office 365 tenants from creating workload-specific searches from July 2017. Instead of using Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, you have to create content searches and eDiscovery cases through the Security and Compliance Center. It’s a good change, even with the complication of keeping old searches until they expire.

Beginning in March 2017, SharePoint site owners will no longer be able to create new site mailboxes. Existing site mailboxes will function until they are replaced by something else.

Microsoft has long used OWA as the test-bed client for new features. After all, it’s easy to update a web client. Now they’ve added the ability to integrate content stored in Office 365 Groups in OWA searches. It’s a nice feature, as is the message digest for Office 365 updates that you can have sent to your mailbox.

Microsoft has finally provided an effective method to allow users to recall messages. Outlook’s Recall Message function usually doesn’t work, but OWA’s new Undo Send will stop messages that should never be sent. Five seconds might be too short to realize that you have made a mistake and should stop an outbound message, but ten seconds is about right. And if you are really indecisive, you can take up to 30 seconds to decide whether a message should go.

You might be familiar with the DLP policies available in Exchange or SharePoint. These policies work, but they are workload-specific. Microsoft has embarked on a journey to replace them with Unified DLP policies, which provide protection across multiple Office 365 workloads. The new policies are not yet as functional as those available for Exchange, but they will get there.

Microsoft is improving the way that people share calendars in Office 365 to make it easier and more straightforward. That’s nice, especially as the new mechanism extends to Outlook.com as well. However, no joy for on-premises servers…