Office 365 Groups

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.

In this how-to article I show you how easy it is to connect an existing Office 365 Group to a team within Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft StaffHub is a new Office 365 application built from bits of Office 365 Groups, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Azure, and Teams. The concept is simple – provide an application to allow the schedules of workers to be managed through a combination of browser and mobile interfaces. It’s an idea that will be popular with some Office 365 tenants, but it’s probably of limited interest to the majority.

Microsoft can’t be expected to code for every possible scenario within Office 365. That’s why PowerShell is so useful as it lets administrators come up with their own solution. Master the Shell!

If you examine the network connections opened by an Outlook 2016 client, you might find many connections established to the mailboxes belonging to Office 365 Groups. Using connections to grab data is fine, but why are the connections quite so persistent and what do they do anyway?

Microsoft is rolling out a new Files view for Office 365 Groups to First Release tenants. The new view includes files circulated as attachments to messages sent to the group and files shared from OneDrive for Business and other SharePoint document libraries.

Lots of news about moving things around in Office 365 this week — how to move items that have been archived by Exchange Online back to primary mailboxes, how to move tenants between data center regions, and finally, Microsoft plans to help public folders transform themselves into Office 365 Groups.

Some interesting announcements during the last week informed us about Yammer getting better at compliance and a new Office 365 connector. I’m not so hot on the bots, though. In other news, MyAnalytics has an unexplained love for Internet Explorer and the topic of password trimming and the Office 365 maximum password length caused some confusion – at least for one administrator! And some news about an interesting Exchange 20th anniversary video and a VDI collaboration project between VMware and Microsoft for Skype for Business rounds out the week.

Ignite is two weeks gone, but there’s still lots of work to reveal all the sessions that I missed. The OneDrive roadmap was one such session, and it included some interesting figures for OneDrive usage. The Grand Exchange on-premises or cloud debate is also online and I also listened to how the dedicated team at Microsoft has lovingly assembled a profanity list for you to use. Finally, some reflections on transforming distribution groups to Office 365 Groups and what this means for mail contacts.

Office 365 Groups occupy a special place in Microsoft’s collaboration strategy. The link-up between Yammer and Groups was the headline news for some, but a lot of other facts were revealed at the Ignite conference, mostly around operational improvements to help tenants manage groups better. Here’s some of what occurred.