Office 365

Office 365 audit logging generates a lot of data – sometimes too much. The trick is to know what events are recorded and what applications capture. Some pretty strange audit events turn up in the log, but everyone should relax because they are just traces of the system doing its own thing.

Apple released iOS 11 and found that the mail app cannot connect to Exchange Online or Exchange 2016. It’s all to do with HTTP2 connections. Apple tries to connect via ActiveSync but doesn’t do so the way that Exchange likes, or something like that. In any case, maybe now’s the time to consider Outlook for iOS.

Now that Microsoft has shipped external access for Teams, it is obvious that they have some work to do to smoothen access and increase functionality. Although access works as long as guest users have accounts in other Office 365 tenants, areas like switching, auditing what external users do, compliance, and blocking deserve some consideration. Here’s what we know from the last week.

In today’s Ask the Admin, Russell Smith shows you how to sign Microsoft Office VBA code and macros so that it can be distributed securely to business partners.

The new Office 365 data governance framework has been updated to allow content marked with classification labels to receive a manual review before being removed. It’s the kind of thing that makes data governance administrators happy.

Microsoft launched the long-awaited external access for Teams on Sept 11. The downside is that only Azure AD accounts are supported, but the functionality is sufficient to support interaction between Office 365 tenants. You can access a team in my tenant and I can access a team in yours. What’s not to like about that?

On September 7, Microsoft inflicted a PR fiasco on themselves by leaking the imminent replacement of Skype for Business by Teams. But what does this really mean? I think we will see a Teams-lite client replace the current SfB client with a formal announcement at Ignite. Although the leak was bad, some goodness does exist in what might happen.

Office 365 allows you to block a user when necessary, as when someone is leaving the organization. You can also initiate a forced sign-out, but the option to do so is buried in the user’s OneDrive for Business settings, which seems like a logical place to find it!

Microsoft has new tools to migrate public folders (the “cockroaches of Exchange”) to Office 365 Groups. Sounds good. The good news is that the tools work, even if they need a lot of manual oversight. ISVs offer tools to do the same job with more automation. The choice is yours!

In this Ask the Admin, Russell Smith looks at the benefits of cloud storage and why a combination of cloud and on-premises solutions is sometimes a happy medium.