This month sees significant changes in Exchange Server security and critical patches for Windows and SharePoint Server.
In what Microsoft says will be the last cumulative update in 2018 before the holiday season, there are patches for 38 CVEs, including a zero-day.
This month sees the Windows 10 October 2018 Update pulled from Windows Update, 49 vulnerabilities patched in Windows, and the usual round of security fixes for other Microsoft and Adobe products.
Microsoft has scheduled 1,500+ sessions for the Ignite 2018 conference in Orlando next week. What’s happening for Office 365? Well, there are many sessions to attend, but the interesting thing is the huge number of sessions assigned to Teams compared to other workloads. SharePoint does OK, but Exchange is low, and Yammer gets a surprising allocation.
This month’s updates cover some GDPR stuff, Teams reminding me that it is important, and some other fun tidbits. Good news for you? I kept the snark to a minimum. You are welcome.
Microsoft has updated the Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) to transfer some Exchange on-premises configuration settings. That’s nice, but possibly too little and too late to make any real difference. Office 365 has moved on, most people who wanted to configure hybrid connections are now in the cloud, and the settings aren’t all that exciting.
Companies that move to Office 365 have to decide what mobile email client to use. A native client that uses Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) or Outlook? In the past, the best choice was probably something like the iOS mail app. Now, Outlook is the focus of Microsoft’s mobile efforts and it’s where all the new functionality appears. EAS is still valuable, just less so than it was before.
The Meltdown vulnerability is clearly serious, especially if you run on-premises servers. But if you use Office 365, should you be worried? Well, maybe, but when you sign up for a cloud service, you transfer responsibility for understanding and responding to threat to the service provider. Over to Microsoft…
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.
Some observers say that Teams will replace email. Well, Teams won’t because email still has so many advantages over what Teams offers. But Teams has its own capabilities that will lead it to take some of the traffic currently carried by email. Because of its internal focus, the traffic that moves to Teams is in-house chats, and Teams is a good place for those conversations to be.