Exploring SharePoint Document Identifiers
It’s easy to be fearful when companies move work to the cloud. But the simple fact is that there’s more work than ever before to do to master all of Office 365. Just go looking!
Category: Office 365
New OWA Maturing in Different Ways
The new version of OWA is maturing and new features are turning up on a weekly basis. You can now schedule a Teams meeting from OWA and the prospect of joyful animations hang in the air. But only for Office 365 users as there’s no sign that the new OWA will come to Exchange on-premises servers.
Office 365 for IT Pros January 2019 Update Released
Updated Files Office 365 for IT Pros Now Available The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is thrilled to release the 10th update for the 2019 edition. Dated January 21, 2019, the updated files are now online and available on Gumroad.com (for subscribers who bought the EPUB and PDF versions) and Amazon (for those …
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Office 365 Network Performance (POC) Tool
Microsoft’s new Network Performance Tool is a proof of concept for Office 365 tenants to check network connections to Microsoft’s network and Office 365. The tool might help you understand more about your connection into Microsoft, but it won’t fix any last mile problems.
Office 365 Bits n’ Pieces January 2019
A collection of news snippets loosely connected to different bits of Office 365 that really don’t justify a separate article. But the factoids are interesting all the same…
Planner Now Available in U.S. Government Cloud
The Office 365 Planner app is now available for U.S. Government Cloud tenants. Only it’s not the full Planner because some bits still have to be tested to make sure that they meet government standards.
Using Exchange Session Identifiers in Audit Log Records
Exchange Online now captures session identifiers in its mailbox and admin audit records that are ingested in the Office 365 audit log. That’s interesting and useful, but how do you access and interpret this information on a practical level?
MyAnalytics Spreads Its Wings to Teams and SharePoint
Microsoft’s announcement that MyAnalytics is available to many more Office 365 users is welcome. The technology interest in the announcement is the spread of coverage to include SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams.
How to Create Global Contacts in an Office 365 Tenant
You can use a public folder to store and share global email contacts, but a better approach is to use Exchange mail contacts. These objects show up in the Exchange GAL and OAB and are available to all Outlook clients (and some third-party clients too).
How to Embed External Content in Modern SharePoint Online Pages
Embedding external content in modern SharePoint Online (SPO) pages is a really easy task using Microsoft’s out of the box Embed webpart. In the WebPart settings panel we can add the external content URL (such as a YouTube video) or by using the standard <iFrame> HTML tag: In the event we want to add a …
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How to Move a Personal Microsoft Form to Become a Group Forms
Microsoft has updated the Forms application with the ability for a form owner to move a a form from their personal space to an Office 365 Group. It’s a small but good improvement.
November Update Issued for Office 365 for IT Pros eBook
Roughly a month after our last update, we’ve issued update #8 for Office 365 for IT Pros (2019 Edition). It’s a big update with changes for 14 chapters. Please download the updated content soon!
Microsoft Working on G Suite to Office 365 Migration Tools
Microsoft is working on tools to move email, calendar, and contacts from G Suite to Exchange Online with availability in Q2 2019. It’s hardly a surprise.
Office 365 Privileged Access Management: Too Flawed and Too Exchange?
Microsoft has launched Privileged Access Management (PAM) for Office 365. The name’s incorrect because PAM only works for Exchange Online right now. PAM is based on RBAC, which is good, but is the implementation too Exchange-centric?
Office 365 Tenants to Microsoft: Send Training Tips to End Users – No Thanks!
Microsoft’s grand plan to send helpful emails to Office 365 users hit a roadblock when customers said “No thanks” to the idea. Microsoft has now taken the plan back for mature reflection. Does this kind of initiative reflect a certain arrogance on the part of Microsoft?
The Vexed Question of Microsoft 365 Backups
Backup vendors say you should definitely use their products to protect your valuable Microsoft 365 data. Backup products can do a good job, but the nature of Microsoft 365 creates many challenges at a technical level. A lack of APIs is the most fundamental issue, but the connected nature of Microsoft 365 apps is another.
Office 365 Now Has 155 Million Active Users
Office 365 continues to grow and has now reached the lofty heights of 155 million monthly active users. Just how long Microsoft can keep growing its cloud services is the question that no one can answer!
Network performance and connectivity evaluation with Network Testing Companion
Microsoft has released a nifty Network Testing Companion to help Office 365 admins validate that their network can support the deployment of Teams and Skype for Business Online.
Office 365 E5 Accounts Now Keep Audit Log Data for 365 Days
Microsoft has updated its retention period for Office audit records from 90 to 365 days, but only for accounts with Office 365 E5 licenses. On another front, the problem with truncated audit records for Azure Active Directory events still persists.
October 2018 Update Available for Office 365 for IT Pros eBook
The writing team is pleased to announce the availability of the seventh update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Sixteen of the 24 chapters are updated in this release, which is the most we have ever changed in a single update. Please be sure to download the new files at your earliest convenience.
A Primer for Microsoft Forms
Everyone’s got a question to ask, and if you have an Office 365 business subscription, you can use Forms to do the asking. It’s quick and easy to build a simple questionnaire and not much more trouble to build something more complex.
How Event-Based Retention Works in Office 365
Everyone knows how simple date-based retention works, but what happens when you want to tie retention to a specific event, like the signing of a contract or the completion of a project? That’s when you need event-based retention.
Teams and Slack By the Numbers
Slack is the most obvious competitor for Microsoft Teams. The question is how many users does each platform have? Here is our best guess.
Inside the Teams Wiki
A simple question asked where Teams stores its Wiki content. A search found that the Wiki is stored in a SharePoint document library, while some further investigation discovered some interesting facts about the Teams wiki.
Will Yammer Ever Get Anywhere Soon?
The “Yammer Vision” session at last week’s Ignite conference was interesting. At least, I thought it was because it showed signs of a new willingness and direction to make Yammer a better citizen of the Office 365 ecosystem. Time will tell whether the grand plans succeed.
How to Export Microsoft 365 Roadmap to a CSV File
The new Microsoft 365 roadmap features the ability to download items (filtered or the entire roadmap) to a CSV file. You can then open the file with Excel or pour its contents into Power BI to analyze the roadmap to your heart’s content. That seems like a good thing.
Ignite 2018 Finishes: Ignite 2019 Pre-Registration Opens
Ignite 2018 is over and the countdown to the 2019 event has begun. Ignite 2019 is back in Orlando again, but in November, so we have about 13 months to go. In that time you’ll want to catch up on what happened at Ignite 2018, which is exactly what the Office 365 for IT Pros team has started to do. Our next update is due on October 19 and we have lots to do.
Managing Microsoft Teams Through the Teams Admin Center
If you read yesterday’s article about the new team management functionality in the Teams and Skype for Business Online Admin Center, you might be interested to hear what Microsoft has to say on the topic. Head over to Ignite, in person or virtually, and you’ll find out.
New Search Experiences Coming to Office 365
In the same way Microsoft is introducing a new modern search experience in modern SharePoint Online (SPO) sites, the same strategy is being applied to search in Office 365. In this article we take a look at the modern search features you can find in Office 365. This article was published on Petri.com on September 27, 2018. …
The unified Microsoft 365 Roadmap is here
As expected, Microsoft has announced the unified Microsoft 365 Roadmap that includes all the technologies that are part of Microsoft 365: Office 365, Enterprise Mobility + Security and Windows 10. The new roadmap comes also with a new web site and a new URL (Note: the Old Office 365 Roadmap Url is still live, but …
How to Upgrade from Teams Free to Full Office 365
Microsoft has documented how organizations using the free version of Teams can upgrade to the full enterprise version (and Office 365). It all seems pretty easy, which is good. Paying those Office 365 licenses mightn’t be as nice.
Using Special Characters in Retention Labels and Sensitivity Labels
A little known fact is that you can use graphic symbols and characters in Office 365 labels. It might bring a splash of color to your compliance and retention efforts, especially in a world where emojis are everywhere. After all, the symbols are just character codes that computers can process and Office 365 is designed to be multilingual and cope with different character sets (like the way Teams deals with Hebrew and Arabic).
Looking Forward to Ignite 2018
The Microsoft Ignite 2018 conference takes place in Orlando next week. The Office 365 for IT Pros team will be there to keep an eye on the announcements Microsoft and other vendors make about new technology. We’ll have a blast, and then come back to update the book.
Microsoft Rolls Out Block for Calendar Forwarding
A new Exchange feature rolling out inside Office 365 allows meeting organizers to block people forwarding their meetings to all and sundry. The latest versions of OWA and Outlook 2016 click to run support the UI for the feature and blocks are built into Exchange Online and Exchange on-premises servers to stop blocked meetings sneaking through.