Opinion

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.

Microsoft has made a preview of the Fluid Foundation available for Office 365 users to try out. The preview demonstrates how components can work together to share information quickly. It is very focused on SharePoint Online at present, but Microsoft plans to make intelligent fluid components available in Teams, OWA, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Office apps. The preview raises some questions, but that's the nature of the beast.

Microsoft is working to address this market by adding functionality to its popular Teams application to enhance workflows for all types of workplace scenarios. The company is also building hardware, such as the Surface Go, to help bring low-cost, high quality, interactions to the Firstline worker.

The news that Microsoft is working on cloud signatures for Outlook for Windows is welcome. The venerable Outlook client has long stored its signature information in the system registry, which makes it hard to move signatures from PC to PC. On the other hand, OWA stores its signatures in mailboxes, so the same signature is used no matter where you log in. Of course, OWA is a simpler client (no profiles, for instance), but it should be eminently possible to store everything Outlook needs in the cloud. At least for Outlook clients connected to Exchange Online...

The fact that the Teams outage on 3 February was caused by an expired authentication certificate is enough to cause Office 365 tenants to ask why such a thing happened. Teams is built on top of a lot of Office 365 and Azure components, so it's not altogether surprising that issues happen in what is a very complex infrastructure spread around the world. But given Microsoft's hyped focus on DevOps, you would have thought that something as fundamental as an expired certificate would have been picked up and fixed before it caused customer disruption.

For the past half-decade or so, Google has been trying feverishly to crack the enterprise market with its cloud and productivity application. While the company has made some serious in-roads, with its cloud services growing and the adoption of its productivity suite, Google Apps, often becoming the preferred choice for small companies, Microsoft still rules the roost for the productivity market.

Microsoft fixed the copy-on-write bug in Outlook for Windows in Exchange Online. The fix stops users removing attachments from sent or received messages. A strong case can be made that the fix should have been present from the start to stop any possibility that clients could comprise Exchange Native Data Protection. Microsoft doesn't think many people were affected and they could be right, but that doesn't make the problem any easier to swallow.

On this edition of the Enterprise Dish, we dive into the new relationship between the NSA and Microsoft, serious tips for helping new graduates land their first job in IT, and it's wintertime which means the snow is back.

Everyone gets very excited about new Office 365 features, but how do we handle the dark side of change - deprecated features and functionality? The answer is that we probably don't do such a good job of managing features out of tenants. Maybe it's not the most exciting topic or work to do, but the simple fact is that deprecations happen and will continue to happen.

Office 365 has experienced great success since its launch in June 2011, but it's also had its share of failures as well. This article considers the most important technical advances in Office 365 and the most important parts of the ecosystem as well as some places where things didn't go quite so well as either Microsoft or tenants would have liked.