Teams

On August 9, Microsoft launched the Office 365 Groups expiration policy into preview. It expires groups after a set period and helps keep the spread of groups under control. All sounds good, but the new feature needs an Azure Active Directory Premium license, which isn’t so welcome.

Microsoft has launched a new external sharing policy for groups that allows tenants to set allow and block lists for domains. The new policy is due for use with Teams, Planner, and other applications that need to block external users from specific domains. It’s a set along the path to getting full external access for Office 365 apps.

Microsoft Teams now includes the ability to control whether team owners or members can remove items from conversations. It’s a useful feature. All of us have probably regretted something said electronically!

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?

Gartner’s recent SWOT analysis of Office 365 contains some interesting thoughts and observations. I do not agree with them all because I think some of their thinking is a little dated, but it is always interesting to read what Gartner is whispering into the ears of their customers.

Joseph Finney takes a look at how OneNote can fill in the IT gaps.

The news that Teams won’t support external access when they planned is not a shock. But what is needed is a common external access mechanism that can work for all of the Office 365 applications. Let’s not reinvent the wheel!

Backup solutions for Office 365 are available from many ISVs. However, six years after the Office 365 launch, no product exists that takes a comprehensive and integrated approach to Office 365 applications.

Microsoft has updated Yammer so that new groups use the Office 365 Groups service to manage the identity and membership of the groups. There are far too many “groups” in that last sentence, which kind of illustrates how a surplus of groups might be building up within Office 365.