exchange

Microsoft Workplace Analytics is not a “Fitbit for the enterprise” that you can deploy off-the-shelf to get instantly usable information. Expect to invest considerable time or spend some consulting dollars to make sense of organization dynamics, office politics, and internal friction. All the stuff that makes working in large companies so worthwhile!

Recent developments show that a fully-populated Azure Active Directory is considered by Microsoft to be a core part of the overall Office 365 “experience.” Yet many tenants have partly-populated directories. Is that a problem? Or might it be a future problem?

In today’s Ask the Admin, Russell Smith shows you how to create and use conference rooms in Office 365.

Further signs of Microsoft discarding the on-premises roots of Office 365 in favor of consistent cross-workload functionality comes when the Security and Compliance Center takes center stage for eDiscovery from July 1.

The U.S. patent office granted IBM a patent in January that seems to cover email auto-reply. The only problem is that auto-replies existed a long time before IBM claimed to have invented them. But it’s all good now.

Microsoft set out to rename OWA as Outlook on the web last year. That effort never gained real acceptance in the Exchange community, but in fact the project isn’t to rebrand OWA. Instead, it’s all about preserving and building out the Outlook brand across multiple clients and different experiences. Microsoft is struggling against the weight of history here, so don’t expect any great success anytime soon.

This week’s snippets span the tenth anniversary of PowerShell, a survey indicating that Office 365 has a solid lead in deployments over G Suite, Windows 10 Mobile finally gets the new authenticator app, Outlook starts to look like mini-CRM, why dynamic groups don’t work for Teams and Planner, and an interesting document from Microsoft describing Office 365 tenant isolation.

In today’s Ask the Admin, I’ll explain how to use Retention Policies in Exchange Server, Exchange Online and Office 365. Hoarding information seems to be a hobby for many of us, and if you’ve ever been an Exchange administrator, you’ll be familiar with the problem of users who are determined to store every last email…

In today’s Ask the Admin, Russell Smith explains the difference between an in-place hold and a litigation hold in Exchange.

Dynamic Memory is not one-size-fits-all! Discover the many ways to use (or not use) Hyper-V Dynamic Memory in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.