Teams

I don’t consider backups to be a necessity for Office 365, but ISVs continue to offer these products and customers continue to buy, so I chatted with Spanning to find out what’s happening in the Office 365 market, who’s using cloud backups, and why. We also spoke about the challenges that backup vendors continue to have in coping with some of the unique aspects of Office 365.

Many Office 365 Groups and Teams have external guest members.Part 2 of our series about external access to documents in Office 365 explains how to use PowerShell to query groups about external guests so that we understand where the guests come from and what groups and teams they can access.

Teams is now able to capture compliance records for contributions to private chats by guests or on-premises users in a hybrid Office 365 organization. The new mechanism uses “phantom mailboxes” in the cloud to hold the compliance records for on-premises users. You must register your tenant to be able to get an updated GUI for the Security and Compliance Center, but PowerShell can find these records now.

It’s a good idea to understand whether any external people have access to documents in your Office 365 tenant. There’s no option on the Office 365 or SharePoint Online consoles to tell you what access external users enjoy to SharePoint sites, so we must use some PowerShell to interrogate SharePoint and see what that reveals.

GDPR Article 17 allows individuals to request an organization to erase their personal data. Now that GDPR is in effect, what are the practical steps to take to process an erasure request against Office 365 data? As it turns out, the answer is not straightforward.

Microsoft Teams now shows team owners when their team is going to expire – that if, if you use the Office 365 Groups expiration policy. But tenant administrators don’t have a report showing them when groups expire, so we wrote one in PowerShell for you to use (and improve).

At Build this week, Microsoft has announced a couple of new opportunities for developers to add additional value to Teams and Power BI.

Office 365 makes it easy to collaborate with external users through Office 365 Groups and Teams, both of which use Azure B2B Collaboration. In fact, collaboration is so easy that users might be carried away and share with all and sundry, including your competitors. Which is why it’s nice to have a policy to control sharing with certain domains that works for applications like Groups, Teams, and Planner.

Microsoft is switching the default access type for Office 365 Groups to be private. It’s a change that you can easily reverse, if you want it groups to be public. The change will be effective for Outlook endpoints first, meaning OWA, Outlook desktops, and the Outlook mobile apps. Later, the other Office 365 apps that create Office 365 Groups might fall into line. Or not, as the case might be.

Office 365 Groups are the reason why many SharePoint Online sites appear in tenants. If you’re on the Pacific coast of the U.S., the regional settings are OK. But anyone else in the rest of the world who uses the SharePoint browser interface will see times and dates in that instead of the local format. You can change the regional settings for a site, and now you can make sure that new sites have the right settings.