Outlook

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.

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.

Outlook Tasks is a tool you can use to set reminders and track tasks in OneNote with Outlook. Learn how to use this dynamic feature.

Microsoft’s FY17 Q2 results posted on January 26 boasted a 49% year-over-year growth in commercial Office 365 revenues, contributing to an annualized run rate for commercial cloud products that now “exceeds” $14 billion. The number of cloud users has grown again, underlying the continuing movement of work to the Office 365 and Azure.

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.

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…

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.

Microsoft is introducing safety tips to Office 365 to highlight bad or suspicious email that might tempt users to do things that they shouldn’t. The initiative is good and valuable, but it rather loses some of its gloss because not all safety tips are exposed in Outlook. However, Microsoft is making sure that mobile and other clients see safety tips, even if not in the same interactive manner as is possible with OWA.

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.

Microsoft has announced the demise of RPC over HTTP (“Outlook Anywhere”) connections, which will be blocked for connections to Exchange Online from Outlook desktop clients from October 31, 2017. The year’s notice is intended to allow tenants to upgrade clients to the necessary versions.