Opinion

If you don’t use something often, then you might even forget it exists. When I read that reactions in Outlook are rolling out soon, I had to go and check that the like button, which launched in 2015, still existed in Outlook on the web. The like button still exists and was one of the… Read More

From a technology perspective, Microsoft’s announcement of Viva, their new employee experience platform (EXP) for Microsoft 365, contained a mixture of the good, not-so-good, and puzzling. I don’t plan to cover Microsoft positioning and launch messaging (see Brad’s article). Instead, I want to probe at the technology. To start, Viva is a great example of… Read More

Microsoft's battle for education, while not won, has certainly become much less of a worry for the company.

As we kick off 2021, these are the features we hope to see arriving in 2021 when it comes to Teams.

The Duo has a place in this world if you are looking for a modern-PDA and a device that embodies Microsoft 365 in a physical form, but it is far from a smartphone that is for everyone.

Big Files and Differential Sync Some excitement was generated, at least inside Microsoft, for the January 12 announcement that SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business now support uploads of files sized up to 250 GB. This is an increase from the previous 100 GB maximum announced in July 2020. The new capability is designed to… Read More

Last October, I wrote about One Outlook, Microsoft’s vision for the future of its family of email clients. The basis of the story was a collection of three technologies deemed critical for the long-term development of Outlook: OWA Powered Experiences (OPX), Microsoft synchronization technology, and the augmentation loop. Mary-Jo Foley’s recent story about the Monarch… Read More

Last November, Microsoft experienced a great deal of criticism from privacy campaigners following the introduction of the Productivity Score feature. The resulting hubbub evolved into a PR issue which caused Microsoft to abandon display of individual user details, even if the data is easily available and widely used elsewhere inside Microsoft 365. In a nutshell,… Read More

Removing Puzzlement Last month I reported my puzzlement about Microsoft’s announcement of priority accounts. I couldn’t figure out what value these accounts brought to the table, especially as they were targeted solely at tenants with more than 10,000 accounts with more than 50 active Exchange Online users. My report was based on details in a… Read More

On this episode of the Enterprise Dish, another month of big updates for Teams and SharePoint but also the perfect time to look at what could be coming down the pipeline for Microsoft 365.

As more employees work from home, Windows Update for Business provides a simpler way to update Windows endpoints with the latest patches.

Microsoft Graph and Audit Log Too Important to Lose Thinking about the fuss and bother which erupted over Microsoft Productivity Score, I concluded that the people concerned about management oversight of user activity within Microsoft 365 had very little knowledge about the topic. They looked at the pretty graphs and tables of user data and… Read More

Intrusive Usage Data Exposed in Microsoft 365 Admin Center Over the past few week or so, a bunch of news reports have emerged about the new Microsoft 365 Productivity Score feature (Figure 1), which was announced at the Ignite 2019 conference before achieving general availability in October 2020. In the Microsoft blog, CVP Brad Anderson… Read More

Refreshing the Substrate Last year, I wrote about the Office 365 substrate, a little understood but critical component of how Microsoft is developing their cloud services. That article followed a talk by Microsoft Fellow Jeffrey Snover at the Ignite 2019 conference. Now boasting the title of CTO for Modern Workforce Transformation, Snover recently explored the… Read More

On this edition of the Enterprise Dish, Teams has become the collaboration hub for Microsoft 365 but it doesn't include email...but should it? Dux and Brad dive into this topic as well as relevant news in the Microsoft 365 universe too. Links talked about: Diffusion of Innovation and Ulysses Relief Efforts in the Philippines