Opinion

Office 365 Licensing Should be Part of Operational Reviews Many businesses are conducting operational reviews because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Previous standards, like the need for people to turn up in an office every day, have gone by the wayside as remote working becomes the new normal. Companies with Office 365 tenants should consider their… Read More

On this edition of the Enterprise Dish, Microsoft has new channels for Windows, a reader asks about inventory management, and there are a record number of patches this month. You can find Aaron on Twitter and learn more about SmartDeploy here.

Microsoft Forces More Artificial Intelligence onto Office 365 Tenants On May 13, Microsoft issued Office 365 notification MC212676 to inform tenants that a new Cortana daily briefing email was coming, saying: “The Briefing email from Cortana helps users start their day on track by surfacing information on upcoming meetings and outstanding tasks as well as… Read More

ISVs are sometimes criticized because their backup products don't do a great job of handling Office 365 data. That might be true, but the real issue is the lack of APIs delivered by Microsoft. The available APIs are rooted in an on-premises heritage and don't cover apps like Teams which knit together multiple cloud components. Future developments will increase the challenge.

Office 365 tenants often want to journal email from Exchange Online mailboxes. Things become a little more complicated when protected email is involved, but Exchange can decrypt protected messages and create journal reports with attachments containing the original encrypted message and a decrypted copy. That should be enough for journaling systems to process the journal reports and import messages into their repositories.

Should I Create a List or Some Tasks? Following Microsoft’s announcement about the new Lists application at the recent virtual Build conference, the thought might have crossed your mind that Microsoft 365 is accumulating too many ways to make lists. As in: Outlook tasks. To Do. Planner. OneNote. And that’s without counting Excel or Word,… Read More

On this edition of the Enterprise Dish, Brad and Aaron cover the highlights of the Windows announcements made at Build and how they will likely impact the direction of Windows. You can find Aaron on Twitter, learn more about SmartDeploy, and for educational customers, take advantage of the free SmartDeploy offer this summer. 

The new licensing guidance for Microsoft 365 security and compliance features is welcome, but as is probably inevitable, some inconsistencies exist that need to be probed and discussed, and hopefully resolved by Microsoft in the long run. Why do DLP policies for Teams need E5 licenses? Why does applying a default retention label to a SharePoint library need E5? There's lots to discuss about issues Microsoft should fix.

There's been a lot written in the press recently about video conferencing app Zoom. But how bad are Zoom's security issues?

Online meetings are becoming an even more regular part of daily work life as many of us move to 'work from home'. Whether you are a small business or large corporation, online meetings can enable teams to work remotely more effectively and maintain a sense of community and connectedness.

As we enter a time of crisis that will see a significant number of employees asked to work from home, organizations need to provide effective but secure remote access to corporate resources. The tried and tested virtual private network (VPN) might seem like the obvious choice. But so called 'zero trust' is gaining popularity and could surpass traditional VPN access.

On this latest edition of the Enterprise Dish, Microsoft issues a patch that is causing issues with drivers, Build is on the agenda, and Windows 10x gets a minor update.

The revelations that Exchange Server has had a vulnerability in the Exchange Control Panel since Exchange 2010 shocked some. Microsoft has patched CVE-2020-0688, but the problem gives on-premises administrators something to think about as they look to the long-term future of their email service. Staying on-premises is an option, but going to the cloud might be more secure.

A Microsoft employee commented that Exchange 2019 is the last on-premises version, something that would bring the era of Exchange to a close after 25 or so years. Perhaps that's the case, and certainly there's been a huge transition of email workload to Exchange Online. But is an opinion expressed by a single Microsoft employee enough to tell us what will happen over the next few years?

A Forrester Research study sponsored by Microsoft concludes that the deployment of Outlook Mobile brings big benefits for organizations. Given the funding source, the outcome is hardly surprising. But like with all similar reports, the important thing is to view the findings through the lens of your organization to understand the good points and discard the marketing messages. In a nutshell, all your need to understand is that Outlook mobile is the best mobile email client for Exchange Online.